Business Podcasts | Celebrating the Ruben Durand Success Story & the 100% Growth of TopLawnsPros.com!!! + How Implementing Clay Clark’s Proven Business Growth System Has Changed His Business & His Life + The Godfather of SEO, Bruce Clay

Audio Transcription

All right, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, you’re going to get a chance to hear from an actual, real entrepreneur. Now, he may look like a male model, but no, he is not a male model. He may look too good to be true, but no, he’s a real person. He’s a wonderful client, a great guy to serve, a great guy to work with. He’s having a lot of success with his company, and he’s here to share his story. Reuben Durand, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? Oh, I’m doing excellent. Thank you for having me. Okay, so tell us, where are you located, sir? And I’m going to take notes here so people can, you know, verify you have a real company, a real website. Where are you located? Okay, we are in Riverview, Florida, and that’s about 30 minutes out of Tampa. Okay, so Riverview, Florida. And I’m taking notes here. This is a real thing, folks. Now, what’s the web address people can go to right now if they want to prove that your website is real. Yes, we have toplawnprose.com. Toplawnprose.com. I’m going to pull up the website right now. I’m going to pull it up on the screen so everyone can follow along here. This is toplawnprose.com. This is the website here. And how did you originally hear about us there, sir? How did you come in contact with us? All right, well, I’ll give you the long story short. I was following a YouTube person and they mentioned the podcast. And I decided to give the podcast a try, so I went ahead and started listening to the podcast, binged listened to about, I don’t know, 100, 150 episodes before I decided to check out the conference. So I was, last year in March, I went to the conference in Oklahoma, went over there and checked out the conference. After that, I decided to start implementing a few of the things that you suggested during the conference. And then I reached out, decided to see if I could have an opportunity for coaching. So that’s how I learned about you guys. Now, you know, I’ve been doing this since 2005. So I mean, at this point, what, 18 years doing the same thing and helping people grow companies. And I love it because we meet wonderful people like you. And I talked to a guy the other day, true story, and he told me, he said, Clay, I’ve been listening to your show for like, it had to be at least seven or eight years. I said, well, you’ve been listening. I’ve been doing my show for over 10 years. He said, bro, I listen like every day. And for whatever reason, I just never thought that I could grow my company. And then he said, it’s a crazy story. I run into some guy at church, at my church, who uses you guys. And I was like, oh, well, I’m gonna reach out then. And he’s like, you know, this guy’s grown his business dramatically. What kind of growth have you had since you started working with our team there? Well, it’s been a 100% growth. So to this point this year, we’ve generated as much revenue as we did all of last year. So let’s be clear. So you’re saying right now in July of 2022, so you’re seven months into the year, we’ll call it eight months into the year. So you still have four more months of the year left and you’ve already exceeded last year’s sales totals? Absolutely, absolutely. Well, and if you keep it growing at this pace, where do you think you’ll be in terms of a growth over last year? Do you think you’ll be more than double? Or do you think it’ll be about double? Or what do you think? It’ll be slightly over double if we keep up the pace of what we had last year. Now, I want to get into some stuff, some kind of the stuff behind the stuff, because a lot of times you hop on a wonderful show and there’s great podcasts out there where they talk about the, you know, stuff like, you got to work on your business and not work in your business. And you’re going, that’s awesome. I appreciate that. Or you’ll hear people with a different kind of tone. They’ll say, you need to work on your business and not in your business. Or you’ll hear a kind of a funny guy. Well, you want to work on your business and not in your business. But you’re like, what? Yeah, but what does that mean? So I’m going to get into the stuff behind this stuff. 10 things that you’re doing to grow your company. There’s a lot of things we’re doing, but I just want to focus on the big 10 here. You have to gather objective reviews from clients. You have to gather objective reviews from real clients. You know, from real clients. Why do you have to gather objective reviews from real clients? Well, the reviews are, you know, you can’t put a price to the reviews because I get calls every single day of customers or potential customers saying, hey, I found you on Google and you guys had the most reviews. You guys had the best reviews. You guys had the best ratings. And that’s why we decided to call. Half of the time when they call, they’re already sold. There’s no selling. They’re already sold because they looked at your reviews, they looked at our website, and everything matches up, it looks great, and they’re already sold. So Google reviews are valuable. We made it part of our process, our system with employees to gather Google reviews, objective reviews from the customer. So when they’re at the customer property, they can knock on the customer’s door. Once they’re done with the work, show the customer the work. And they got the opportunity of doing not just the Google review, they can also do a video review. And we’ve got about 60 video reviews. You can go on our website and check out all those 60 video reviews. We’re doing a great job with those. Now, again, this is the stuff behind the stuff. Somebody says, I don’t wanna talk about the stuff on the stuff. I wanna talk about the emotional stuff. OK, we can get excited. We can get emotional. We can get fired up here. We can do that. But I just want to make sure we’re clear. You got to gather real reviews from real customers. Second is you got to get real video reviews from real customers. And everybody says, I don’t know what you mean by that. I’m talking about you asking a real person, hey, how happy are you with my service, with the service that we provided you? And then that customer is going to give you their feedback. And you record that. And then we upload it to your website. And that’s the problem. And it just has to happen. You say, well, how many do I need? You’re never done, folks. You’re never done. This just in. You’re never done. It’s like grass. It’s like cutting grass. You can’t stop cutting grass. You got to keep mowing that grass. That’s a great thing for people like today’s guest, Ruben. The grass keeps growing. And I mean this. You got to keep cutting that grass. Activity number three. I don’t know if you’ve started this yet with your coach who’s helping you down the path because I make a path and a plan for every single client that we work with and a big part of that, after we get the marketing and the branding and the website optimization going, now we gotta start to hire people. Have you started the process of doing the weekly group interview? Has that began happening for you yet? You know what, before I did any interviews or group interviews, we had some employees that were terrorists. So they were holding us hostage and trying to get us to do things their way and paying them whatever they wanted to get paid and work the days that they wanted to get paid. After I started working with the coaching program, we were able to get into these weekly interviews. And not only doing the weekly interviews, we’re also doing a day of shadowing. So that gives the employee the opportunity to see our culture here at Top Lawn Pros and see if this is good for them. But it also gives us the opportunity to see if this person is gonna be a diligent doer. So one of the things that we do is we do that weekly interview at the same day, same exact time, every single week. And so what happens when we do that is that we get to see who’s going to be on time, who’s showing up on time. This guy didn’t show up on time or he’s not even allowed into the interview. Number two, we invite them for the day of shadowing. When they come and do the shadowing, are they showing up on time? Are they following the uniform that we asked them to wear for that day? Are they diligent? Are they going to be a team player? And we get to filter through employees really quickly. And we’ve created a great working culture due to this weekly interview. So I love the weekly interviews. Now, this is a big thing because I see people that tell me they’re beaten from years of doing business the wrong way. The other day I was talking to a guy, true story, and I’ll be kind of vague so as to not give away too much details, but I am always flipping a house or investing in a property and I have kind of a method to that. That’s a whole separate show. But I’m meeting this guy, and this guy was a professional baseball player. He played professional baseball over a dozen seasons, pro baseball. And he actually teamed up to throw a no-hitter years ago. I’ll give you that much information. But he’s a professional baseball player. And he looked beat up. And I said, you good? He looked like he had gone through just a heck of a life. And he said, well, you know, baseball, I’d get up there, I’d pitch. I had a plan, you know, with a catcher, call the pitch, I’d throw the pitch. I had a workout routine. I had the whole thing. It was like, you know, eat this food, follow this workout, play in this game. It was very, for me, it was like a routine and it was great. And I didn’t know when I bought rental properties that my life would become a personal hell. And I said, a personal hell? He says it was terrible. I said, why was it terrible? He said, you can’t find any good people. And my staff, they’re holding me hostage. These people don’t want to clean their rental houses. And I’m going, dude, you got to do the group interview. He’s going, what’s the group interview? I said, bro, every single Wednesday night at 530, I interview all potential job candidates. So whenever you apply for a job with me, I say, we want to interview you this Wednesday at 530. And I might interview 40 people. I might interview 50 people. I might interview four people, but I’m going to interview them all every single Wednesday. And he goes, why do you do that? I said, because the people that are late, like you were saying, if they’re late, they’re always going to be late. And if they’re late to the interview, they’re never going to start to be on time. And he says, really? You do. I said, yeah. And he goes, wow, I’m doing like one-on-one interviews, man. You just gave me back my day, my week. He was so fired up, but he said, what else are you doing? I said, well, this is the guy I’m talking about his property. I’m trying to get him to show me his property. He says, well, what else do you do? I said, well, you want to get objective reviews on your rental properties, because you’re renting these properties. You’re doing that whole vacation rental thing, you know, the Airbnb, the VRBO, the vacation rental thing. I’m like, bro, you got to get reviews from the people that are staying at your vacation property. You have a beautiful property here. You need to get reviews. He goes, I don’t know why I haven’t been getting reviews. Let me look at my reviews. And he had like a one. I mean, he had like a one star, Ruben. This guy’s written out his property for years. He had under a two star. So I mean, these are practical moves. Now, the next thing is your website. We have got to optimize your real website. And a lot of people, they find these Tai Lopez videos, not to call out Tai Lopez, but come on, Tai Lopez, come on. And they go to these Tai Lopez videos. Have you seen these, Ruben? Have you seen the Tai Lopez videos? I have. I’m gonna pull this up, just so people can get an example of what I’m talking about. This is Tai Lopez on a jet, okay, and then books. So this is a real commercial. This is a real thing. I’m not making this up. So this is Tai Lopez. He’s on a jet reading books. Let me pull it up here. Where’s Tai Lopez? Come on, Tai Lopez. Okay, let me go ahead. Tai Lopez on a jet. Let me get it. I’m gonna get it. Here he is. Oh yeah, here he goes. You know what I like more than flying in a private jet like this? My books. Oh, yeah, okay Actually not but I do bring books with me because and he believe he wants us to believe that he’s on this private jet with This woman this woman and this woman and this dude reading books I was just talking a little bit earlier on The question was how to figure out what you should do with your life, like your destiny, what you’re meant to do, what your purpose is. And I find that’s the most common question and I was just thinking about it when I was here. We’re flying to the biggest investor conference in the world. Get out of here. So a lot of people, they watch videos like that, how to get rich quick, no money down, and they’re trying to get rich in like seven minutes. And I’m trying to teach people how to build massive success over time. Okay, I’m not trying to teach you how to get rich quick. And so we have to optimize your real website. We have entire shows about that. And on part two of today’s show, folks, I’m going to introduce you to the godfather of search engine optimization. His name is Bruce Clay. He actually has written many books on search engine optimization. I have paid him $8,000 per multiple contracts to teach me what I now know years ago. I paid this guy eight grand a month. It’s a contract to teach me stuff. It’s phenomenal. So we’re gonna do an interview with Bruce Clay. That’s Bruce Clay from the Godfather of search engine optimization. So we’ve optimized your website, but we have to write content every single week to make that website rank in the search engine. So after we optimize it, we’ve got to write content every single week. Also on your website, you have to have a no-brainer. Your no-brainer you have right now is schedule your first mow for $5. You have a thing where you can read the reviews. You have to create a conversion video on the website. There’s a lot of details. We’ll get into that on part two of today’s show. Next, we have to pull the weekly stats. Why do we have to pull the stats? For anybody out there that’s going, Reuben, I don’t pull the weekly stats. Why do I have to pull the weekly statistics and look at them every single week, sir? Well, I didn’t see the value at first in doing weekly statistics. I was kind of annoyed at my coach when they wanted to do this every single week. I was like, what’s, you’re making me do more work. So I was kind of annoyed of that, but I started doing that. I, at first, the way I was tracking it was, let me look at the bank account. Is there more money than was there last week? Okay, great, then we’re doing great, we’re profitable. But doing this has given us some structure so we can see every week how much money is coming in, how much are we spending, how much is the profit, what is our customer acquisition cost, how much are we spending on ads, how much, how many ads are we converting, where are we converting those ads from? Are they coming from Google, are they coming from any other search engines? Out of the people that call us, how many do we convert into members? Because we do have a membership for our customers, so we know exactly how much money is coming in every month. And we know if we’re gonna make enough money to be able to pay our bills. So this has been great. We also track here our video reviews, we track our Google reviews, we track our competitors reviews to see how we’re doing against them. The number of customers being added, if we’re losing any customers, we track that. Conversion rate, there’s a lot of things that we’re tracking on this tracking sheet. And this thing has, I think this has taken us to the next level for sure. And I’ll tell you folks, if you’re out there today and you think that Ruben is a male model, yeah, he could be a male model, but he’s a real person. The company’s toplawnpros.com, real guy, okay? The only difference between him, he and you, is he took the time to schedule a three, a free 13 point assessment. He took the time to schedule a free 13 point assessment. I’ll tell you this. I do free 13 point assessments. I did one. That’s why I was about five minutes behind for our interview today. And I was talking to a knucklehead, a complete knucklehead, a guy who is not a good fit, and I’ll tell you why he’s not a good fit. He wants something for nothing. He wants a get rich quick strategy and he wants to have his business grow without putting in the work. And you’ve got to be willing to put in the work. I believe it’s about five hours a week of homework that you have to do every week to make the system work. How long per week does it take you to implement? We’ve got a 28-page business plan, and we’re working through it, but how long does it take per week for you to implement the systems that we’re teaching you to grow? We are probably anywhere between five and 10 hours every week of time outside of business hours doing this. So putting numbers into the tracking sheet, doing our 30 minute interviews, looking at our ads, different things that we’re doing. My coach is working with me on systems right now. So optimizing systems, having checklists, adding those for our team members. So yeah, I think we put a good five to 10 hours a week. How would you describe the business coaching for you as being slightly effective, life-changing, moderately effective, good? How would you describe what the business coaching has done for your business? Here’s why I reached out and I decided that this was worth my time and the money. I listened to the podcast. I knew what Clay was saying, he was like, okay, go get reviews. So that’s one of the first things that I started doing. I said, okay, I started listening to the podcast. Before I listened to the podcast, I probably had like 13 reviews. Then I went to the business conference and listened to how valuable it was to get those reviews. So by the time I went to the conference and started the coaching program, I was already at 60 reviews. So I started, you know, working at this. It was about three months between the conference time and when I started the coaching. So I got 60 reviews or about 60 during that time. And then after that, I just started implementing this go get reviews from every single customer. So the coaching has just been invaluable for me. Holding me accountable has been one of the best things that… So if nothing else, if we didn’t track anything, just holding me accountable to do what I said I was going to do has been one of the biggest things that I can, and then challenging me. I’ve got that coach that just challenges me every week. Hey, did you do the group interviews? Hey, did you get more reviews? Hey, did you call back this customer? So just holding me accountable to doing the things that I said I was going to do is probably one of the biggest things there. You know, one of our clients, we’re gonna interview him next, I believe he’ll be on today’s show. And then we’ll have Bruce Clay on a part three of today’s show. His name is Gabe Salinas. His company is called Window Ninjas. And Gabe was a startup when we met him and I think he now has, I don’t want to exaggerate, I think he has, we’ll say, more than five locations of his window cleaning company. I want to, I don’t want to get the number wrong, we’ll let Gabe tell you on today’s show, but he’s a normal guy, but the one thing that you do and that Gabe does and that all of our wonderful clients, I mean, we’ve worked with Oxifresh for over a decade. They don’t have over 500 locations. Oh, XI fresh.com. We’ve worked with tip top canine to help them grow from one location now to I think 17 locations. I mean, it’s just incredible growth. All of you have in common, two traits. Two, there’s a lot of other traits, but there’s two in particular. You’re diligent, meaning that you are willing to sow the seeds needed to reap the harvest. You’re willing to consistently, you’re diligent doers, you put in the work. Diligent means you’re treating people the way that you would want to be treated while you’re sowing the seeds. And the second thing I have found is coachability. And I find that if you’re willing to have somebody who knows the way to teach you what to do, success is absolutely possible. Ruben, I’ll give you the final word. For anybody out there that’s thinking about attending a workshop or thinking about scheduling a one-on-one consultation, what would you say to them, sir? If you’re willing to put in the work and you’re willing to do the work and the nitty-gritty behind the scenes, then definitely reach out for this coaching program. If you want somebody that’ll do everything for you and you want the magic to happen, then don’t reach out. I don’t think this will be a good fit for you. But definitely if you want to grow your business and the sky’s the limit when you’ve got a business coach for sure. You know, and we only work with 160 clients and people always ask me, why don’t you work with a thousand then? Because I’m going to have a, I’m going to a birthday party today for my twin daughters. I’m gonna have a great time at that today. I’m gonna spend a, take my wife on a date tonight. And I, there’s a lot of things I enjoy to my life beyond just business growth. And I built a schedule that allows me to have time freedom and financial freedom and that’s what it’s all about there. Reuben, thank you so much for being so diligent and so coachable. It’s a pleasure to work with you guys and again folks if you happen to be in the Riverview Florida area check out toplawnprose.com. That’s toplawnprose.com. Reuben, take care and have a great day. All right, you too, Clay. Thanks. Take care. Bye bye. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you. And they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show, starring the former U.S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zunder. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Get ready to enter the Bribetime Show. We started from the bottom, now we hit it. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get it. We started from the bottom, now we hit it. We started from the bottom, now we hit it. We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top. Teaching you the systems to get what we got. Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books. He’s bringing some wisdom. And the good look as the father of five, that’s what I’mma dive. So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi. It’s C and Z up on your radio. And now three, two, one, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Well, Thrive Nation, on part one of today’s show, we did an interview here with a Thriver, an actual listener, a long-time listener, who we’ve helped him to grow his company dramatically. And we’ve worked with him and you just heard from him that you heard about his success. And again, folks, you can verify he’s a real person. That’s toplawnprose.com and his name is Ruben Durand. Now could you imagine, folks, imagine that we’ve worked with Ruben Durand for years and years and years, so three years or more, and imagine that every single aspect of his business was perfect. All the marketing, all the branding, all the pre-written emails, all the call scripts, all the processes, all the frequently asked questions for the call center, all the pricing, all the accounting, all the legal, all the logos, all the marketing, all the online ads. What if every single aspect of his business was perfect? And if it was perfect, what if it was now time to scale the company. So imagine that Ruben opened up a second location, then a third location, and a fourth location, and imagine that he was to a place where he had a business opportunity that was now so perfectly refined that he could offer it to you in what is called a franchise, where you’re paying for a proven system. Well, that’s what today’s guest brings to the table. His name is Gabe Salinas. He’s the founder of Window Ninjas. He’s a long-time client, and he’s here to share with you about the Window Ninjas opportunity. Gabe Salinas, welcome on to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? I am doing well, Clay. What about yourself? Gabe, I’m fired up to be here with you. For anybody out there that’s hearing your voice for the first time, how long have we worked with you there, sir? We have been together for right around three years. How many locations do you have now? We currently have 12 different locations throughout four states. So somebody out there is going, man, you have 12 locations, you must be doing something right. I’m gonna switch gears here. You know, if you’re out there and you have a business model that’s jacked up and you need help growing it, that’s one way to grow a business. But there’s really three ways, Gabe, that we can get rich that I wanna focus on today’s show. One is you can buy a proven system. A good friend of mine owns a lot of Domino’s franchises. And you can do that. So you buy a Domino’s pizza franchise. Let’s look it up here, buy a Domino’s franchise. And to buy a Domino’s franchise right now, it looks like the startup costs for a Domino’s franchise. And again, we’re just gonna type it in here. We’re gonna type in startup costs and we’ll see what we can find here. There’s a document called a franchise disclosure document that will declare to you, it’s regulated by the federal government, what it would cost to open a franchise for every business, for every franchise. And for Domino’s, they’re saying the range is between $119,000 and $461,000 to open up a Domino’s. And a friend of mine happens to own a lot of those, and that’s a lot of money. So Gabe, how much money does it cost to open up a Window Ninjas franchise? Our initial franchise fee, Clay, is a whopping $49,500. And then you got your cost of expenses for like purchasing your trucks and your vehicles and your equipment and things of that nature. So your initial investment is going to be anywhere between $90,000 and right around $150,000. That’s OK. Now let’s talk about buying a McDonald’s franchise. Someone says I don’t want to buy a McDonald’s franchise, they’re talking about $1.3 million to $2.3 million to open up a McDonald’s, and you get to smell like McDonald’s at all times. What kind of equipment does somebody need to open up a Window Ninjas? At McDonald’s, you need a physical location, you need quite a bit of overhead to get started, you need a big staff. What kind of infrastructure does one need to have in place to buy a Window Ninjas? Well most of our people can actually run their business right out of their home. If they have a small garage attached to their home or you can have a storage facility to keep some equipment. But there’s really not a big footprint. You need to buy a truck. We all, you know, we service residential and commercial property so you got to have a vehicle. A truck preferably is pretty much what we mandate. Truck with a ladder rack, we have some pressure washing equipment, we have various types of window cleaning equipment, the tools of the trade for us to be able to serve our clients. And we have all of those, all those equipment packages for each and every one of our franchisees. So as they come on board, we just say, hey, pick option one, two, three, window cleaning, boom, option one, two, three, pressure washing, boom, one, two, three, if you want to do high rise, boom, here you go. So it’s pretty turnkey, pretty easy and cost effective. Now, in terms of the costs, there’s the financial cost, but there’s also the time cost. And I’m going to pull this up here, because if you said today, folks, I want to become a welder. I’m going to go, OK, that’s cool. OK, let’s look it up here. So how long does it take to become a welder? You look it up and you go, well, a welder, I mean, if you go to welding school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or wherever you go, it might take between 7 and 14 months. You go, okay, well, I want to open a McDonald’s. Well, okay, it takes 6 to 18 months. McDonald’s is saying right now, generally the training is anywhere from 6 to 18 months. Wow. To become a McDonald’s franchise owner, to become a dentist, a lot of my clients are dentists, they’re doctors, they’re lawyers. These things take years. How long does it take to become a Window Ninjas franchise owner? How much training does it require? It takes between 7 and 14 days for any of our franchisees to get up and running. And I know two weeks is such a long time, but that pretty much depends on if they want to utilize our high-rise addendum services. If they’re really willing to jump off the side of a building with ropes and harnesses, it normally takes them about two full weeks to learn the window cleaning skill and how to operate that type of equipment. Now, my final question I have for you, now this is going to feel like I’m painting you into a corner, so I apologize, but I have to do it here. If I’m out there today and I’m thinking about it, we’ve got a lot of great brands we work with and you know that. I mean, I don’t hide that on our show. We’ve worked with Tip Top K9 to help them grow from one location to 18 locations. They really are a great opportunity if you like dogs. If I repeat, if you like dogs, I don’t like dogs. Okay, well, you probably don’t want to buy a Tip Top. I mean, I think I could like dogs. I mean, you’re gonna be with dogs all the time. So you gotta feed these dogs 24 seven dog training. So if you like dogs, you would love to have a Tip Top K9 franchise or someone says, well, I’m thinking about that or an Oxifresh, you know, I’m thinking about a carpet cleaning franchise. And most often what I find is people go to Oxifresh.com and they find that we don’t even have a franchise territory available for them because there’s over 500 locations open now. And so very few times, if you go to Oxifresh.com and you look today, I would encourage you to look. We might not have even a territory open for you. So to me, tip top canine, you gotta like dogs. Oxifresh, you gotta have a territory that’s open. But you go back to Window Ninjas, and by the way, McDonald’s, you gotta have $2 million to come up with. Why should everybody, that’s my question for you, why should everybody out there fill out that form today and request additional information about buying a windowninjas.com franchise? Well, because that’s the first step, Clay. I mean, just like anything else, if you are seriously interested in joining our team and being part of this growing home services industry that we’re in right now. You can literally go to our website, fill out the form, we’ll get an email and we will set up a one-on-one consultation, kind of like initial meet and greet, to make sure that, hey, we’re the right fit for you and that you’re the right fit for us, and if we can work harmoniously together. And if we can figure out that we can work well together, then we can continue on that path of going down franchise ownership, finding out what location you want to open up a franchise in, is the location even available, and then all the following steps to get you up and running to be a super successful member of our Window Ninjas community. Now, folks, I’ve worked with Gabe for the past three years. I know him very well. He’s a diligent person, a hard worker, but you ultimately have to schedule that consultation and take that first step. That’s windowninjas.com. Gabe, I know you’re a busy guy. Thank you for carving out time for me this week and I can’t wait to harass you next week, sir. I look forward to it, Clay. Hope you have a great week. You too, take care, bye-bye. Two men, 13 multimillion dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrivetime Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. That’s it. Arms away. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year. I’m the father of five kids, and I feel like it’s my mission to help you create both time and financial freedom by teaching you the practical skills that will help you to 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 is an arguable thing. This is Michael Levine. I mean, he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, Nike, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan, Pizza Hut, for pizza, for Charlton Heston, for… The Bushes and the Clintons. The Bushes and the Clintons. The Prince, we mentioned Prince. There’s just so many, I mean, he’s huge. Well, on today’s show, we have the number one expert in the history of the world, ever, in the field of search engine optimization. They might call him the Godfather. This guy writes the search engine for dummies each year. He writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization. Yeah. This is the world’s number one search engine expert. Most consider him to be the father of search engine optimization. When Larry and Sergey built Google as a way to help people find information more quickly, they developed an algorithm that determines what websites get to be the top, 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 in search engine results, it’d change 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 why for the brands I work with, like Oxifresh, I mean, Oxifresh, let me tell you, these guys are so successful for a lot of reasons. They have great systems, processes, wonderful people, a great vision. They have leadership, a very affordable franchise model. They have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning technology. But it wouldn’t matter if people couldn’t find them. And marketing is about getting in front of your ideal and likely buyers and sales is about charging them money in exchange for solving their problem. But if you’re out there and you can solve a problem for the world but you can’t get in front of your ideal and likely buyers, it’s like having a billboard hidden in the woods. So this particular podcast could be worth millions for anybody out there. We’re giving it away for free for anybody out there who’s willing to take notes, listen in and understand what is being said. In our Thrivetime Show business coaching program, we will help you execute the system, but Bruce Clay here is teaching you how to optimize your website and how to get to the top of search engine results. This is the million dollar show. It’s going to change somebody’s life 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 760-something pages long. How long did it take you to write Surge Engine for Dummies? So Wiley approached us, and it took a while to actually end up with the agreements that we were going to write it. The dummy series is pretty specific, so it’s worth it to understand that the difference between a dummy’s 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. Right. And they weren’t. So mechanically, the first version of the book took over a year. Wow. I think for a lot of listeners, a year working on a book can seem like a long time. I know my Start Here book took me a couple 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 into the franchise world. I work with a lot of franchisees, a lot of franchisors, I work with a lot of business owners, and your name comes up in conversations a lot. And for the listeners out there who don’t know your name, but who will undoubtedly search you on Google, in the search engines, and find the book Search Engine for Dummies, and find your website. Can you explain how you became the search engine guru that you are today? Absolutely. This was back in January of 1996. For those of you who remember that far back, I think that’s when Al Gore invented the internet. Thank you, Al. But yeah, January 96 on my dining room table, I was deciding I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I had had, 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. 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 is 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 the father of the search engine industry So Bruce if it’s okay, I want to play a little audio excerpt. One of our listeners called in and wanted to leave this for you. Bruce, are you ready for this, Bruce? I’m ready. Here we go. La la la Luke. Luke, I am your father. La la la Luke. 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… I feel like search engine is like nerd meets practical, you know, because you’re helping grow companies. Can you please explain to me, when you say it took off, were you cold calling businesses? Were you emailing businesses? 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. Amen it’s I’m 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. 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? 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. And 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. I want to see if you can unpack this for us. I know you can, but you know, 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. You know, we help companies with marketing, and I always want to stay, I believe in coaching. I believe in hiring mentors who really know the path and you are, I mean seriously, you are in a good way. You’re kind of like the Darth Vader of search engine optimization. I mean, you are the Obi-Wan, you’re the Yoda, you know search engine optimization. You are the father of the industry. And so, you know, we’ve hired you, but it wasn’t free and it wasn’t cheap, but it was effective. Why can the listeners out there not hire a search, why is it not possible to hire a search engine optimization company to help your business for $199 a month? Because every listener gets a call from somebody from some foreign country calling, emailing, saying that they can do your search engine for as little as $99 a month. Why is it just not possible? Well, the fact is that the industry is changing. Google changes the algorithm approximately five times a day. So it takes time to stay current on technology. There’s not much you can do about it. You just have to pay to be current. Well, if you’re not current, I can sell you whatever I want. You can give me a check, then when I don’t deliver it, you go away and I ended up with a free check. So, I think that a great many people take shortcuts, they don’t care if you get in trouble, they don’t care if you get penalized. The flip side of that is would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200? Or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer. Same for a brain surgeon. This is the Thrive 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 have paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars, and I don’t regret it. He is the world’s best for big companies. I will tell you there are projects, Chuck, that he’s worked with where he’s charging clients over a million dollars a year for search engine optimization. And that just shows you how valuable that is. Most of the clients are $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 a month clients for him. I mean, he has big accounts. 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. It’s a simple math. You can only get a few hours of work for $200 from somebody that knows what they’re doing. 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. 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 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 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. You know, if you wanted 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, so that’s all right with you, and kind of go through them in a linear fashion. And if you feel like the way that I’m organizing it isn’t the best way, feel free to interrupt me and lead the way here. But Google compliance, just overall, I have seen so many people with a beautiful website. Bruce, you’ve seen it too, where it looks great. The site itself, visually, you go, wow, that is nice. The problem is, it’s like a billboard in the woods and no one can find it. And then you go to Wikipedia that doesn’t look that beautiful but it indexes and comes up top for everything. Can you talk to me about what it means to build a website that is crawlable or searchable by Google and what kind of website is absolutely not findable by search engines and by Google? 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 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. And a big part of the problem when you do that is you don’t dot the I and cross the T’s to make it appropriate for a piece of software to figure out what you’re about. It’s highly visual, which doesn’t help a search engine. The search engine basically is blind, deaf, and dumb. It reads your site. There’s three ways they influence ranking, but one of them is it will read your site and it will attempt to determine what you’re about by looking at your content and by looking at how page A is connected to page B and the infrastructure and nature of your words really determines what the search engine thinks you’re about. Now a lot of people in a very visual environment, they have very few words and a lot of really pretty pictures. And the search engine cannot understand what that is. Now, there’s two other things that fit, and I’ll just go into them briefly. One is what’s referred to as backlinks, where other sites link to you. Well, if your content is pretty, you might be able to get some links. And a great many offshore SEO companies, that’s what they focus on, but that is not going to make you an expert. It’s just going to be a bunch of people linked to you. The third part is something called RankBrain, which is the Google algorithm, and it’s based on click-throughs. So if you don’t rank, you don’t get clicked. If you don’t get clicked, there’s no dwell time or perception of your quality. And so it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that the best ranked sites perform the best. So the only way a website can really get to the top is to build something that a search engine can perceive to be authoritative information, quality information. And then the search engine can put you at the top, and then you will get links, and then you will have RankBrain like you, and then you’re pretty well entrenched over time. So all those things have to play together. You can’t just do one and expect it to be there. But pretty sites, everybody loves a pretty site. Oh, we love it, oh. Google loves it. Yeah. Because the prettier your site, the more likely you are to have to buy pay-per-click in order to get your traffic. Right. 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. And I would say, well, it’s because Nike and Adidas are spending millions and billions on advertising. By the way, people are typing in Nike.com every day. But if you’re the average plumber, dentist, doctor, lawyer, whoever you are, the chances of people typing in your name, like a household name, is probably not going to be there. I mean, Bruce, have you ever heard people tell you that kind of objection? They say, well, the reason why I want my site to look like that is because I want it to look like Nike. Well, yeah, and 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, you 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 can find out more about at bruceclay.com, is the world’s authority on big-budget search engine optimization. Now I’ve hired his firm in the past and if you have a big company I would advise you to check him out as well. But I’m telling you, you are definitely going to be spending he talks about it in the interview, but $200 minimum per article. Minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking six thousand a month, seven thousand. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to him. Right. And they’ve got to re-optimize and re-write 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 want to make so they can have the time freedom that they deserve and desire. And so now without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. According to Forbes right now, 88% of consumers 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. 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. Well 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-to’s and things like that, online. Digital is the way of the world now. And, yeah, you 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. Now I want to get a little more into the details of this. There’s this stuff called meta content, which you write so eloquently about in your book Search Engine for Dummies, that only took you a couple years to finish because it’s so detailed. I’m telling you, that book, Bruce, I’m not sure if you make any money every time you buy a copy of that book, but that book is awesome. Search Engine for Dummies with Bruce Clay. Talk to me about meta data, meta content, things like the title tag and the description and the keywords. I think 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. Okay. 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. There’s a keyword tag, which is logically used as sort of a, just a list of words that should be on the page. Can I ask you a question about that for the listeners out there that might have a question about keywords there? Let’s say I cut hair. I’m a haircut, I’m a hairstylist, and I’m in Boise. Talk to me about keywords. If I’m cutting hair, I’m in Boise, I think some people are just unfamiliar with that term at all. We have hundreds of thousands of people 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. 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. Seventy percent 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 a.m. I broke my tooth, you’re not going to just search for dentist. You’re going to search for emergency dental repair, Boise, right now I’m in pain. And you know, that is a string of keywords that most often are not on any websites. So So, when you come up with keywords and content and things for your webpage, you need to think about how somebody might actually try to find you and use those words on your webpage. You’re making me cry. This is so good. This is so good. Oh, you’re preaching the good news. Yes. I’ll tell you right now, most people, I’ve had cases where people come to me and they don’t understand why they don’t have a better ranking for a particular keyword and when I do the analysis, they’re not even using the keyword in their content. Google isn’t going to believe you’re about anything if you don’t use it. So it’s a self-defeating action 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 like 2004, 2005. It was 2003. I owned a company called DJConnection.com. And for the listeners out there, if you go to DJConnection.com, you can see it’s still a company that’s thriving today. I sold it and moved on to open different ventures. But DJConnection.com, one of the things with that company was that I was starting to figure out how search engines work. And this was early stuff. I mean, Yahoo was huge at that point. Yahoo was like a dominant player. Tribe Nation, stay tuned. We come back. We’re going to learn why content matters for your website. 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. Without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay. And I didn’t realize just how much content mattered. So I decided to write the most amount of high quality content in the world about the phrase chocolate fountains, Bruce. So I wrote an insane amount of content. Because I owned a company called Chocolate Elegance, and we owned chocolate fountains. It’s like the fondue, you know, weddings, that kind of thing. You dip fruit in it. And lo and behold, Bruce, I got chocolate elegance to the top of search engine results as a result of writing something like 80 pages about the origins of chocolate, chocolate fountains, how chocolate fountains work. It was all really well done. It was almost disturbing. Can you talk to me about why the volume of quality content really does matter? Sure, and this should be pretty clear if you understand what you would want when you do a search. There’s a concept called siloing. We invented it 18 years ago. And what siloing does is it says that you should have organized the content on your website in a clear hierarchy. That’s actually one of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. So in a clear hierarchy, what Google is looking for is a bunch of interconnected pages that are on the same theme. So what you did is you created a large group of pages that were clearly different. They had different purposes, but they’re all about the same topic, the same theme. And so what Google does is it looks at your website and sees that you have these connected pages and therefore they assume that you are more of an expert than somebody that doesn’t. So if your site is poorly structured, you’re not going to rank as well as somebody that has a properly structured website. The architecture and the way your pages are tied together make a lot of difference. So we’ll go and use that as an example. If I wanted to find a site about chocolate fountains, if there was a site that had one page about them or another site that has 20 pages about them, that user would prefer the 20 pages. It’s more content, more information, better able to satisfy them. And we all have to believe that Google knows that. So Google is looking at how much content that is quality, it has to be quality, how much quality content is interconnected to build a theme that matches what people are searching for. And if you build that correctly, in a nice hierarchy, connected correctly, then you can perform very well in search. And that’s what you had done. You know, Bruce, I actually was the head of a group called the Tulsa Bridal Association, which was the group that threw the wedding shows in Tulsa. We started the Tulsa Wedding Show, where brides would go and gather at these banquet halls. You get maybe a thousand brides in one banquet hall at one time at the Renaissance Hotel and 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 100 pages. I actually, for hundreds, I actually wrote thousands. And I did it myself. I usually, Bruce, did it between the hours of 5 AM or 4 AM, usually 4 AM to 9 AM, about five hours a day. I’d write content every day. And Bruce, I’d do it in the bathtub, which I know is a disturbing visual. But I’d sit there in the bathtub, and I’m just writing content, just writing, about how to throw a bouquet, how to catch the garter, when the first dance was, when the father-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 Shuffle, 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. But I don’t know, I have very few clients I’ve ever worked with who want to write the content. What percentage of your clients prefer to have your team write the content versus the ones that want to write it themselves? Well we have large projects where they don’t have the team to do it. Under normal circumstances I would look at you in that particular case and think of you as the subject matter expert. So we would partner with you and we could write the draft, you can finish it, we can editorialize it and make it ready for SEO and then as a partnership we publish it. That’s the way most of our writing projects are actually structured because when you’re doing that for a technical business at all, then you’re not going to be the subject matter expert. If you went to somebody, and this is my opinion, but if you went to somebody and said, hi, I want 200 pages on this topic, you’re gonna get 200 pages of absolute garbage. Oh yeah, total garbage, complete and total garbage. And that really annoys me. You have to spend the time to do the page right, to do the research. The average 1,000 word page is supposed to take about three hours. And it isn’t just writing, it’s editing. And it’s making sure that you have sources and which image do you put on the page. And it’s far more complex. 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. And it is unfortunate, but that is the case. And 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 going to write a thousand words for somebody, I mean, you’re going to charge them $6, $12, 7 cents. I mean, there’s a lot of companies in India right now, and you’re aware of this, Mr. Bruce. I mean, there are companies in India, companies based in China right now, companies in the Middle East that will say, I will write you an article right now for $9. I mean, what would you charge somebody to write a thousand-word page of content? Well, we’re back to the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. I think that one of the problems that you run into internationally is they do not have a shared experience with you as the author. And so they make assumptions about your target persona person. They assume things about what it is that you do for a living and what your product should do and why people should use it. And it hardly ever matches reality in a different country. So we believe that every country has to write So, in our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So two hundred dollars for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think, two hundred dollars? Is that like a low average, you think, maybe? That’s a low average. If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now I’m going to go out on a tangent here and give you some additional data. And I know you hate it when I do that. No, it’s good. This is good. This is going to blow someone’s mind here. 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. Thrive Nation, do not get overwhelmed by search engine optimization. Just leave us an objective review on iTunes. Just subscribe to the Thrive Time Show podcast on iTunes. Leave us an objective review and email us proof you did it and we’ll send you free tickets to our next in-person Thrive Time Show two-day, 15-hour workshop. We’ll teach you everything you need to know 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 dot com Hey Chuck, are you familiar with that thing called the internet? Enter in the net, that’s when you catch fish in a net, right? Chuck, I’ll tell you this man, most people out there are starting to use this thing called Google. Oh, I don’t know if they do. Or they’re on the 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. The second word is optimization. And the third is I ain’t knowing nothing about it. You want a V8, I know that about engines. Chuck, you think I should grow out my perm or just kind of let it be? Yeah, you’ll 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, Chup, you know, Chup, you know, Chup, I don’t know if you’ve thought about this very much, but one thing that we like to say in Oklahoma, Chup, Chup, Chup, 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, lay her down, smack em, yak em. If that’s all you know about search engine, if somebody put a gun to your head and said teach me how to get how to get to the top of Google and you immediately said 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. So two hundred dollars for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think, $200? Is that, is that, is that like a low average, you think, maybe? That’s a low average. If it is more technical, uh, it takes longer. Now, when you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below that pages. Bruce, I want you to help me 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 everybody 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 gonna beat him finally. But I mean, is it normal where you go into an industry and you go, wow, this industry, I mean, because Tony Robbins, when we decided to do it, I knew it would take years and years and years. Do you often sit down with a client and explain to them, like, hey, to be top of Google for your term, my friend, that’s going to cost you a lot of money and a lot of time? And many times that’s the case. And it depends upon what is missing. 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 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 sub pages. So when you think about a Tony Robbins and Wikipedia, you’re competing against a brand that over time has acquired a lot of link value. That doesn’t mean that you need to publish more content than them. It just means your content has to be better than them. It has to be more of a solution to that user than them. We have a blog. And at one point, I felt that we have to publish a lot of blog posts. And when I did the analysis, I decided it isn’t how many you publish, it’s how good it is. And so we focus more on is this blog post solving somebody’s problem? And then how do I tell that person I have the blog post? That is far more important than just publishing things. You have to kind of advertise that you’ve published it, and you have to advertise to the people that matter. But it isn’t an issue so much of quantity. It is far more an interest in quality that’s going to cause the search engines to perform well with you on your content. Now having said that, I do believe that if you have too little content, you’re not going to succeed. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much content. We do projects large and small, hundreds of thousands of dollars at the high end and 500 a month at the low end. So it really will vary, but we do them all over the board. Now, Bruce, this is a concept that I would like to see if you can share with listeners. In your book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, you discuss the amount of content that needs to be on a page in order for Google to count it or for Google to really care about it or to index it or to think it’s not a waste of time. You can’t have two words on every page. And you talked about certain industries, and you alluded to it earlier. Certain industries you might have to have 1,500 words of content to be relevant. In certain industries you might have to have 350 words of content on a page for it to be relevant. Why do you have to have a minimum amount of words on a page for Google to care enough to index it? I know the Google algorithm doesn’t care, but in order for Google to index it, why do you have to have a certain minimum number of words per page? You can get away with almost none. We’ve seen well-performing pages that have fewer than 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 being 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’ll come up to me. I’m sure you’ve never run into this, Bruce, but someone will come up to you and say, they’ll say, hey, here’s the deal, here’s the deal. Honestly, I’m willing to pay you guys up front quite a bit. And I just want to know, how do I get to the top of Google in like two weeks? I know you guys all preach that it’s a process like growing a tree and that you can’t get to the top of Google immediately because you’ve all kind of agreed to the secret society of preaching a process. But unlike planning a garden and unlike raising a child and unlike growing a successful business, I want it to be a microwave thing. And I’m willing to pay you, Bruce, right now, 40 grand up front, make me top in Google in two weeks, let’s go, boom. Why, Bruce, is it not possible? Can you explain to somebody that I’ve run into, people you’ve never run into, but people that I’ve run into at my conferences that want to be top in Google in two weeks, why can you not be top in Google in two weeks? Many reasons one We don’t know what’s wrong with your site. We have to open the hood and look under it and see where things are broken See if everything was working correctly then theoretically everybody would be number one hmm, but in fact most sites are their own worst enemy and Sometimes I could take a site and change their life in a few weeks. I don’t think two is a realistic number, but let’s say four. I can change your life in four weeks provided the reason you don’t rank is you did something wrong. It’s when you did everything right that it takes longer. I view reviewing websites and fixing websites to be a little bit like a hospital. The very first thing you do is you cart the website into the emergency room and stop the bleeding. You make them so that they’re not their worst enemy anymore. Then you take them into surgery. 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, 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. OK, OK. 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 connected with you? No, no. I want to make sure I say this correctly. Sure. We are extremely focused on basically taking no prisoners. Got it. We’re the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three. That’s what we do. And as a result, we don’t take every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. One of the sayings I use is, it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you didn’t do. Jeff, I want to save both time and money, and one way to do it is by having your office and printer supplies shipped directly to you, my man. That’s right, and you can do that with our awesome show sponsor, onyximaging.com. In fact, if you get your office supplies, your printer supplies, and printer service through these guys, they’re going to give you a free printer copier, free of charge. So get a hold of them at onyximaging.com. That’s onyximaging.com or call them at 918-627-6611. 918-627-6611. Stay tuned. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back. Today we are interviewing the founder, the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Bruce Clay. You want to get to the top of the internet search results? You have something you can sell, a product you can make, or a service you can deliver? Do you feel like you can really deliver to millions of people? Well maybe, not maybe, but for sure, if you want to reach your ideal and likely buyers, you have to get to the top of search engine results. And who better to teach you and I how to do it than the father of search engine optimization as an industry. The guy who literally has written the book on search engine optimization, the yearly edition of Search Engine for Dummies. My friends, I introduce you to my friend, Bruce Klett. And that’s when you’re gonna do the heavy lifting, deep thinking SEO that an average person could not even come close to being able to accomplish. So it’s multiple steps, you have to go through them all, and you know 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, 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 connected with you? No, no. I want to make sure I say this correctly. Sure. We are extremely focused on basically taking no prisoners. Got it. We’re the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three. That’s what we do. And as a result, we don’t take every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. One of the sayings I use is, it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you didn’t do. And we run into that all the time. Their eyes are bigger than their stomach. They have the ability to write a check, but they’re not willing to do the work to get there and That is a problem that we run into often, but top and overall do any work. It’s a tough thing This is something that I I want to I want to get your take on because you have you have a big a big team I mean 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, content writers, search engine experts. I mean, you have a whole team there. And I think a lot of- 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 You know 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 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. 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. Remember back in the day, Bruce, people could just buy backlinks from a foreign country and they could be top in 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 engines. 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. Alright 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 the virus on it, it actually helps your website. If a site that’s related to you or 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 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. than 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. And so what it was supposed to be is I have somebody linking to me that I don’t want. I don’t control their site. I don’t want it to count against me. So there’s a process in place, supported by the search engines, where I can actually get rid of the bad links pointing to me. I disavow them. What you’re going to run into is you’re always going to see negative SEO guys out there that are trying to poison your backlink profile or you have people who are naive and don’t know anything about your product but they think that you’re a cool site and they steal your site or do they somehow scrape Google or something that actually hurts your overall ranking. At one point, I had about 900,000 links to my website, which is a ridiculous number of links, in my opinion, and it 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? 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 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 this next question here. As far as these are these are the scamming, the spamming, and you don’t want to poison your website. My partner Jonathan and I were the renowned business coach Eric Chupp who initially greeted you when we called you We see this all of the time. Where you’ll see a client, Eric, I’m sure you’ve seen this, where a client will just literally copy the content from another website and paste it on their site. Other people, other people’s clients. I’m sure none of your clients are doing this, Eric. No, it definitely happens. Especially if they decide to delegate something like this to a member of their team that they don’t know that well. Yeah, I’ll get it done. And then you go look at this. So we use Copyscape and SEMrush to check. And it’s obvious, Bruce, when someone copies on your, you know. But an owner of a company will say, hey, you know, John, the front desk guy, Karen, the front desk lady, could you please write the content for my homepage because I’m too busy? And then this person, let’s say the Karen or the Kelly or the Al or the Marvin, whoever it is that works for you, they’ll copy the content from your direct competitor and just paste it and go, all done Bruce, I’ve written the content. It’s beautiful. But our team will discover that the content was in fact plagiarized and copied. Why is that absolutely lethal to your search engine ranking? Well, there’s multiple layers of that. The first is, you’re absolutely right, people do that all the time. They still do it to me. The part I really like is when they paste my content on their site, it still contains my phone number. That’s downright ignorant. I periodically get, you mentioned Copyscape and others, I periodically get notifications that other people have my content. Used to be that I was stolen often because I rank 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 we’re not going to guess. And the search engine can actually diminish your ranking, but they don’t refer to it as a penalty. We’ve had cases where content was syndicated, where sites actually allowed other sites to use their content through a syndication contract. It turns out that a couple of our clients, being big clients, actually had syndication agreements with even bigger clients. 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. Alright 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’re 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 an automobile. I got a horse. I’m good. I track every single thing I kill, and all of it comes from hunting. So I don’t need a grocery store. So screw off. I’m happy. You’re an idiot. And I don’t do search engines either, because 100% of my business comes word of mouth. You see, what happens is, the other people who live in the forest with me, they’re all extras from the movie Robin Hood, the one with Kevin Costner, all of us, we all know word of mouth, I kill more deer than anybody else out there. But if you do go to whatever that grocery store is, I would like to know if they sell beer. Because currently it takes me like a half a year to make any. It takes a long time out here. Like one barrel. It takes me forever. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes me to crush the grapes, to make the wine, let it ferment, the whole thing. And I need a drink because hunting is boring. Wait a minute, so you’re saying that there is a grocery store? Yes. Are you saying that my ideal and likely buyers, 80 to 90% of them, are using search engines to find the products and search… What? Yes. Do you know what this means? According to Forbes. Chuck, Chuck. Do you know what this means? It means that this thing doesn’t work at all. All right, now back to our interview with Bruce Clay, the search engine guru. But if you spin it out to a bunch of other sites, or if people on other sites steal your content, that will actually impact your perception as being a quality site for that particular article. Google doesn’t like the same article on multiple sites. They don’t like your content on other sites. One more thing, if what you did is you took the content and you randomly change a few of the words. Oh, 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 issue with high schools or college papers, but that’s what they were designed to do. They were designed for an instructor to be able to say, here’s my paper, is it on the web? And if it is, then that’s plagiarism. Well, the search engines own their own index. And you have to believe that they know and have software to detect duplicate content or manipulated content or even re-sequenced content. So all of that is bad. Your spinners, they did something a little bit different. What they would do is you would be able to hire a company, give them some keywords and a topic and here’s my website and they would write 50 pages for you and all 50 pages were 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 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. 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’ll accept anything and probably aren’t catering to your persona and your target market, and the links don’t count. That is just poisoning yourself. And so Google has indicated that’s a serious problem and nobody does it anymore, unless you’re overseas and that’s all you know how to do to make money. Now Bruce, I want to talk to you now about simplifying the complexity of search engine optimization. You are arguably the father of search engine optimization. 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 and the diligence required and the focus required to optimize our own websites. Can you talk to me about why the complexity of search engine optimization can be overwhelming for most people. Thrive Nation on tomorrow’s show Bruce Clay continues to break down how search engines work. The father of search engine optimization Bruce Clay will be back on tomorrow’s show to break down how search engines and search engine optimization works. But before we wrap up today’s show, let me tell you about one of our great show sponsors and Tulsa’s number one Ford automotive repair shop. With over 80 years of combined experience, that’s RC Auto Specialist, Jupp. 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 rcautospecialist.com. ThriveNation, 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! 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 2 to 3 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 what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, asking our customers for reviews, and now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pest and Lawn company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. So 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now our closing rate is about 85% and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy, but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one and done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process, and that has obviously, the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah, so here’s a big one for you. So last week alone, our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals, more new customers last year than we did the first five months, or I’m sorry, we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year from before we worked with Thrive. So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. 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 contributed to our success. But that, like I said, the diligence and consistency in doing those and that system has really, really been a big blessing in our lives. And also, it’s really shown that we’ve gotten the success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut. The last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. 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. Clay has 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 like Lee Crocker, or Head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with like 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. So in the weekly he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every six to eight 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. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So, 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. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends. My most impressive thing was 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. They were super excited about working with him. And 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. And 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 gotten 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 wanna 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. Here you go. 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 ten 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 system that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise cap? 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 skate and work on your business and build these proven systems, so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, 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. We wouldn’t give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey with Tip Top K9 and I’m the founder. I’m Rachel Wimpey and I am a co-founder. So we’ve been running Tip Top for about the last 14 years, franchising for the last 3-4 years. So someone that would be a good fit for Tip Top loves dogs, they’re high energy, they want to be able to own their own job but they don’t want to worry about, you know, that high failure rate. They want to do that like bowling with bumper lanes. So you give us a call, reach out to us, we’ll call you, and then we’ll send you an FDD, look over that, read it, fall asleep to it, it’s very boring, and then we’ll book a discovery day, and you come and you can spend a day or two with us, make sure that you actually like it, make sure your community dogs do something that you want to do. So an FDD is a franchise disclosure document. It’s a federally regulated document that goes into all the nitty-gritty details of what the franchise agreement entails. So who would be a good fit to buy a TikTok K9 would be somebody who loves dogs, who wants to work with dogs all day as their profession. You’ll make a lot of money, you’ll have a lot of fun, it’s very rewarding. And who would not be a good fit is a cat person. So the upfront cost for TikTok is $43,000. And a lot of people say they’re generating doctor money, but on our disclosure, the numbers are anywhere from over a million dollars a year in dog training, what our Oklahoma City location did last year, to 25, 35 grand a month. To train and get trained by us for Tip Top K9, to run your own Tip Top K9, you would be with us for six weeks here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So we’ve been married for seven years. Eight years. Eight years. So if you’re watching this video, you’re like, hey maybe I want to be a dog trainer, that one sounds super amazing. Go to our website, tiptopcanada.com, click on the yellow franchising tab, fill out the form and Rachel and I will give you a call. Our Oklahoma City location last year, they did over a million dollars. He’s been running that shop for three years before he was a youth pastor with zero sales experience, zero dog training experience before he ever met with us. So just call us, come spend a day with us, spend a couple days with us, make sure you like training dogs and own your own business. Well the biggest reason to buy a Tip Top K9 is so you own your own job and you own your own future and you don’t hate your life. You get an enjoyable job that brings a lot of income but it’s really rewarding. My name is Seth Flint and I had originally heard about Tip Top K9 through my old pastors who I worked for. They trained their great Pyrenees with Ryan and Tip Top K9. They did a phenomenal job and became really good friends with Ryan and Rachel. I was working at a local church and it was a great experience. I ended up leaving there and working with Ryan and Tip Top K9. The biggest thing that I really, really enjoy about being self-employed is that I can create my own schedule. I have the ability to spend more time with my family, my wife and my daughter. So my very favorite thing about training dogs with Tip Top K9 is that I get to work with the people. Obviously, I love working with dogs, but it’s just so rewarding to be able to train a dog that had serious issues, whether it’s behavioral or whatever, and seeing a transformation, taking that dog home, and mom and dad are literally in tears because of how happy they are with the training. If somebody is interested I’d say don’t hesitate make sure you like dogs make sure that you enjoy working with people because we’re not just dog trainers we are customer service people that help dogs and so definitely definitely don’t hesitate just just come in and ask questions ask Just come in and ask questions. Ask all the questions you have.