Clay Clark | Search Engine Optimization | The Best-Selling Author of Search Engine for Dummies, BRUCE CLAY Teaches Search Engine Optimization 101 + Join Tim Tebow At Clay Clark’s 2-Day Interactive Business Workshop (Dec 5 – 6)

Audio Transcription

Two men, 13 multi-million dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrivetime Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show. That’s it. Arms away. 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 the show, when possible, I try to interview people that really are the world’s best at what they do. We’ve had the world’s best public relations expert of all time. This isn’t an arguable thing. This is Michael Levine. I mean, he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan, for pizza, for Charlton Heston, for Bush’s and the Clintons. The Prince, we mentioned Prince. I mean, 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 for, he writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization. This is the world’s number one search engine expert. Most consider him to be the father of search engine optimization. When Larry and Sergey built Google as a way to help people find information more quickly, they developed an algorithm that determines what websites get to be the top of search engine results. And when you, as a company, get to the top when you navigate through that algorithm and you find your way at the top of search results. As an example, if you train dogs and you came up top in Google when you type in Tulsa dog training, or if you were a pizzeria in Florida and your company’s name was Papa Gallo’s and you typed in pizzeria and your company came up top, if you had an automotive repair shop and you typed in Tulsa automotive repair and you came up top, it would change your life. If you were teaching basketball lessons and you came up top in search engine results, it changed your life. If you were typing in any specific phrase and you came up top, like if you were typing in carpet cleaning quotes into Google today and you were top in search results, it would change your life. That’s worth a little bit of money. 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, great vision. They have a very affordable franchise model. They have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning technology. But it wouldn’t matter if people couldn’t find them. And marketing is about getting in front of your ideal and likely buyers, and sales is about charging them money in exchange for solving their problem. But if you’re out there and you can solve a problem for the world, but you can’t get in front of your ideal and likely buyers. It’s like having a billboard hidden in the woods. So this particular podcast could be worth millions for anybody out there. We’re giving it away for free for anybody out there who’s willing to take notes, listen in and understand what is being said. In our Thrive Time Show business coaching program, we will help you execute the system, but Bruce Clay here is teaching you how to optimize your website and how to get to the top of search engine results. This is the Million Dollar Show. It’s going to change somebody’s life, 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, Search Engine for Dummies, took me, and I’m not exaggerating, about seven to eight weeks to read it. I have the highlighter to prove it, and then I had to read it again and again to fully understand it. The last version I read was 760-something pages long. How long did it take you to write Search Engine for Dummies? So Wiley approached us and it took a while to actually end up with the agreements that we were going to write it. The Dummies series is pretty specific, so it’s worth it to understand that, that the difference between a Dummies book and a normal book is that dummies will not allow you to use a term that’s not defined in the book. So we wrote it, we sent it to the editors, and they totally tore it apart because we’re used to the jargon of the book took over a year. Wow. I think for a lot of listeners, a year working on a book can seem like a long time. I know my Start Here book took me a couple years from start to finish. How long did it take you to go from total start to finish? Well, we were lucky. We do a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course for people who really need to know how it works. So we already had an outline for the entire book. All we had to do is actually go through our course materials and write it down for everybody else. The job wasn’t that hard. It was the actual writing. And when I say a year, I’m not talking about part-time for 52 weeks. I’m talking about one year of tracked time for us to actually full-time work on that book. You know, Wiley approached you to write the book. I know about you because I’m big into the franchise world. I work 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 and 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 1996 on my dining room table, I was deciding I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I had had large corporate positions, but I wanted to consult. I thought it was going to be somewhat easy. My bachelor’s is in math and computer science. I have an MBA. I thought, hey, this marketing thing and programming and algorithms is right up my alley. So I started doing it. Then it took off. It just grew. I hired a couple people, kept growing, hired a couple more. I’m now located in Southern California in a suite of 12 offices with offices around the world. So it has certainly grown over 22 years. You’re right, I’ve been given credit for basically being one of the founders of the entire industry. And in fact, if you do a Google search for who is the father of SEO, I show up. Oh, hey, real quick, real quick. I have an audio clip from somebody. 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 a scene in that movie where Darth Vader was claiming to be Luke’s father and you just claimed to be the potential father of the search engine industry so Bruce, if it’s okay I want to play a little audio excerpt. One of our listeners called in and wanted to leave this for you. Bruce, are you ready for this, Bruce? I’m ready. Here we go. La la la Luke, Luke, I am your father. That’s from the movie Tommy Boy there, Bruce. So hopefully that tribute did you justice, my friend. So your credit is being the father of search engines. I know this because I feel like I’m a… I feel like search engine is like nerd meets practical, you know, because you’re helping grow companies. Can you please explain to me, when you say it took off, were you cold calling businesses? Were you emailing businesses? Were you… How did you get your businesses? Because you have so many clients today. You have probably a waiting list for everything you do. How did you start? Were you starting out of an apartment? How did you start your business? 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 think my reputation is sort of preceding me, but I’m known as the company you go to when nothing else works. People cannot figure out how to get ranked. They’ve gone through one or two or three agencies that are mediocre, and they finally decide they just have to do it right and I’m the guy. So I’ve not had to call companies. They basically call us. They go to the website, fill in the form, we touch base. I’m the gatekeeper here. So if you were to go to the form and fill it out, I’d be the guy that said, sorry, we can’t help you. Or that looks like an interesting opportunity let’s take no names. What’s your website for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with your website and how to get in touch with you? Well my site is of course BruceClay.com. I have several sites but BruceClay.com is the main site. It is all about search engine optimization. We’ve got a fantastic blog where we give away free information. In fact, the site is over 5,000 pages and not a bit of it takes ads and not a bit of it is in any way generating money. I don’t charge a subscription fee. The site is just there for people to learn about SEO, they recognize they just don’t want to do it themselves. Okay, okay. So here we go. Now you’re hitting on a hot button, and 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. 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 Drop Time Show on your radio. Stay tuned. Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to The Conversation. It is the Thrive Time show on your radio. On today’s show, we are interviewing Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert, the best-selling author of the book Search Engine for Dummies, a guy who’s worked with some of the largest brands in the country. And 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. But I will tell you, there are projects, Chuck, that he’s worked with where he’s charging clients over a million dollars a year for search engine optimization. And that just shows you how valuable that is. Most of the clients are $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 a month clients for him. I mean, he has big accounts. Chuck, why can you really not find a legitimate search engine optimization company that’s going to do it for $200 a month? Why does it never work? Because it takes more time than that. It’s the simple math. You can only get a few hours of work for $200 from somebody that knows what they’re doing. And so ultimately they’re going to end up outsourcing it to another country or somewhere with shady business practices that Google will end up penalizing you for. And so if you’re out there and you have an awesome company, you do an awesome product or service, but nobody can find you, well, what are you doing? So you’ve got to be where people are, and that’s on the Internet. So, Thrive Nation, I would encourage you to listen in and take notes as Bruce Clay, 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, you know, if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it, but you can bet that’s more than $199 a month. If you want it cheap, well, the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. And I agree with you. If you go overseas, it is entirely possible to find somebody that can make changes, but unless you know what kind of changes are being made, you’re just losing out. They’re taking your money. What I want to do is if it’s possible, I want to kind of get into the weeds with you and I want to kind of get into some of the details so that’s all right with you and kind of go through them in a linear fashion and if you feel like the way that I’m organizing it isn’t the best way, feel free to interrupt me and lead the way here. But Google compliance, just overall, I have seen so many people with a beautiful website. Bruce, you’ve seen it too, where it looks great. The site itself, visually, you go, wow, that is nice. The problem is, it’s like a billboard in the woods and no one can find it. And then you go to Wikipedia that doesn’t look that beautiful, but it indexes and comes up top for everything. Can you talk to me about what it means to build a website that is crawlable or searchable by Google? And what kind of website is absolutely not findable by search engines and by Google? I can certainly address that. Understanding that Google is changing all the time, the technology is changing as well, the process of getting into the index is simple. Google will send out a spider, it’s a piece of software that reads your website and attempts to figure out what you’re about. Many of the really pretty websites have been built by designers who do not know anything about SEO. They don’t understand how to connect things, they don’t understand how to word things, they’re not authors and not writers, they’re people who can build pretty things. And a big part of the problem when you do that is you don’t dot the I and cross the 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. Then you will get links, and then you will have RankBrain like you, and then you’re pretty well entrenched over time. All those things have to play together. You can’t just do one and expect it to be there. But pretty sites, everybody loves a pretty site. Oh, we love it. Oh. Google loves it. Yeah. Because the prettier your site, the more likely you are to have to buy pay-per-click in order to get your traffic. Right. Now, here’s the thing about it. I hear a lot of people say, this is what people say a lot of times, they’ll say, gosh, you know, but Nike, Nike doesn’t have a lot of content, Bruce. They have a lot of pictures, Adidas, and I would say, well, it’s because Nike and Adidas are spending millions and billions on advertising, driving, and by the way, people are typing in Nike.com every day. But if you’re the average plumber, dentist, doctor, lawyer, whoever you are, the chances of people typing in your name, like a household name, is probably not going to be there. I mean, Bruce, have you ever heard people tell you that kind of objection? They say, well, the reason why I want my site to look like that is because I want it to look like Nike. Well, yeah, and that happens a lot more often than you would think. People have this perception that if you build it, they will come. And therefore, if you build it prettier, more will come. When in fact, if you build it prettier, they won’t come until you buy the ads on Google. So if you’re out there and you have a business that is trying to generate more traffic, you have to learn. You just can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. Search engines, search engines, and how to get to the top of search engines. When we return, it’s our exclusive interview with Bruce Slay. 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 during the interview, but $200 minimum per article. Minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking six thousand a month, seven thousand. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to him. Right. And they got to reoptimize and rewrite and everything. This is this big deal. Bruce is Bruce, a search engine optimization on the next level. And so I try to do on this show is I try to break down big concepts and actionable steps that our listeners can take to make the money that they want to make so they can have the time freedom that they deserve and desire. And so now, without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the Internet does not exist. According to Forbes right now, 88% of consumers, according to Forbes, and we’ll put a link on the show notes, 88% of consumers read reviews online before buying something, right? But they’re not gonna read a review unless they find you online. And I don’t know the stats in there, Bruce, you probably know the stats more than I do, and I’m not certainly trying to paint you into a corner about knowing the stats, but I don’t even know the percentage. I know the last studies that I looked at from Forbes, I do write for Forbes, I’m a contributing writer for Forbes, I’ve looked at some of the stats. Will over 9 out of 10 people start any product or service, they start their search for any product or service online? Do you have any data that would argue that 9 out of 10 consumers don’t start looking for things online? Or is it higher, do you think? I mean, I think I’ve read it shows about nine 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 a 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. Yeah, you’ve got to be there. Now, we talk about, you kind of get it, that’s high level. We’ve got to have a website that Google can crawl, that the spiders can index. I want to get a little more into the details of this. There’s this stuff called meta-content, which you write so eloquently about in your book, Search Engine for Dummies, that only took you a couple of years to finish because it’s so detailed. I’m telling you, that book, Bruce, I’m not sure if you make any money every time you buy a copy of that book, but that book is awesome. Search Engine for Dummies with Bruce Clay. Talk to me about meta data, meta content, things like the title tag and the description and the keywords. I think, I’d say the vast majority of our listeners have no idea what a meta title is, a meta description is, what keywords are. They just have no concept of these things. Could you kind of explain it in a way that a simple mind like me might grasp? Most of our listeners, Bruce, are very intelligent people, but if you’re just talking to me, break it down, make it simple for my cranium. So you want it to be at your level? Right, because I am a shallow Hal. Okay. So metadata, actually, metadata is data about data. So in a portion of your web page, commonly referred to as the head section, the top of the source code, you have a section which has data, these content fields, that describe what your page is supposed to 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. 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 Thrivetime Show. That’s it. Arms away. We started from the bottom and so you gotta 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 isn’t an arguable thing. This is Michael Levine. I mean, he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan, for Pizza Hut, for Charlton Heston, for… The Bushes and the Clintons. The Bushes and the Clintons. The Prince, we mentioned Prince. I mean, 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 for, he writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization. This is the world’s number one search engine expert. Most consider him to be the father of search engine optimization. When Larry and Sergey built Google as a way to help people find information more quickly, they developed an algorithm that determines what websites get to be the top of search engine results. And when you as a company get to the top when you navigate through that algorithm and you find your way at the top of search results. As an example, if you train dogs and you came up top in Google when you type in Tulsa dog training, or if you were a pizzeria in Florida and your company’s name was Papa Gallo’s and you typed in pizzeria and your company came up top, if you had an automotive repair shop and you typed in Tulsa automotive repair and you came up top in search engine results, it changed your life. If you were typing in any specific phrase and you came up top, like if you were typing in carpet cleaning quotes into Google today, and you were top in search results, it would change your life. That’s worth a little bit of money. 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 a very affordable franchise model. They have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning technology. But it wouldn’t matter if people couldn’t find them. And marketing is about getting in front of your ideal and likely buyers. And sales is about charging them money in exchange for solving their problem. But if you’re out there and you can solve a problem for the world But you can’t get in front of your ideal and likely buyers It’s like having a billboard hidden in the woods so this particular podcast Could be worth millions For anybody out there. We’re giving it away for free for anybody out there. Who’s willing to take notes listen in and Understand what is being said. In our Thrive Time Show business coaching program, we will help you execute the system, but Bruce Clay here is teaching you how to optimize your website and how to get to the top of search engine results. This is the Million Dollar Show. It’s gonna change somebody’s life, and I’m excited to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Bruce Clay, the author of Search Engine for Dummies, the world’s number one search engine expert in the house. Bruce, how are you? I am doing great, thank you. Bruce, your book Search Engine for Dummies took me, and I’m not exaggerating, about seven to eight weeks to read it. I have the highlighter to prove it, and then I had to read it again and again to fully understand it. The last version I read was 760 something pages long. How long did it take you to write Search Engine for Dummies? So Wiley approached us and it took a while to actually end up with the agreements that we were going to write it. The dummy series is pretty specific so it’s worth it to understand that that the difference between a dummies book and a normal book is That dummies will not allow you to define it use a term. That’s not defined in the book so We wrote it We sent it to the editors and they totally tore it apart Because we’re used to the jargon of the industry. Right. And they weren’t. So mechanically, the first version of the book took over a year. Wow. I think for a lot of listeners, a year working on a book can seem like a long time. I know my Start Here book took me a couple years from start to finish. How long did it take you to go from total start to finish? Well we were lucky we do a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course for people who really need to know how it works. So we already had an outline for the entire book. All we had to do is actually go through our course materials and write it down for everybody else. The job wasn’t that hard. It was the actual writing and when I say a year. I’m not talking about part-time For 52 weeks. I’m talking about one year of tracked time For us to actually full-time work on that book You know Wiley approached you to write the book. I know about you because I I’m big into the friend big in the franchise world work a lot of franchisees, a lot of franchisors. I work with a lot of business owners. Your name comes up in conversations a lot. For the listeners out there who don’t know your name, but who will undoubtedly search you on Google, in the search engines, and find the book, Search Engine for Dummies, and find your website, can you explain how you became the search engine guru that you are today? Absolutely. This was back in January of 1996. For those of you who remember that far back, I think that’s when Al Gore invented the internet. Thank you, Al. But, yeah, January 96 on my dining room table, I was deciding I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I had had, you know, large corporate positions, but I wanted to consult. I thought it was going to be somewhat easy. My bachelor’s is in math and computer science. I have an MBA. I thought, hey, this marketing thing and programming and algorithms is right up my alley. So I started doing it. Then it took off and it just grew. I hired a couple people, kept growing, hired a couple more. I’m now located in Southern California in a suite of 12 offices with offices around the world. So it has certainly grown over 22 years. You’re right. I’ve been given credit for basically being one of the founders of the entire industry. In fact, if you do a Google search for who is the father of SEO, I show up. Hey, real quick, real quick. I have an audio clip from somebody. We’re talking about fathers and father-related conversations. Perhaps the listeners out there aren’t as familiar with Star Wars as I am, but there was a scene in that movie where Darth Vader was claiming to be Luke’s father, and you just claimed to be the potential father of the search engine industry. So Bruce, if it’s okay, I want to play a little audio excerpt. One of our listeners called in and wanted to leave this for you, Bruce. Are you ready for this, Bruce? I’m ready. Here we go. La la la Luke, Luke, I am your father. That’s from the movie Tommy Boy there, Bruce. So hopefully that tribute did you justice, my friend. So your credit as being the father of search engines, I know this, because I feel like 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. You have thousands. You have probably a waiting list for everything you do. How did you start? Were you starting out of an apartment? How did you start your business? 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 and nothing else works. People cannot figure out how to get ranked. They’ve gone through one or two or three agencies that are mediocre, and they finally decide they just have to do it right, and I’m the guy. So I’ve not had to call companies. They basically call us. They go to the website, fill in the form. We touch base. I’m the gatekeeper here. So if you were to go to a forum and fill it out, I’d be the guy that said, sorry we can’t help you. Or, that looks like an interesting opportunity, let’s take no names. What’s your website for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with your website and how to get in touch with you? Well my site is of course bruceclay.com. I have several sites but bruceclay.com is the main site. It is all about search engine optimization. We’ve got a fantastic blog where we give away free information. In fact, the site is over 5,000 pages and not a bit of it takes ads and not a bit of it is in any way generating money. I don’t charge a subscription 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. 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. It’s 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. And 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. And 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. Chuck, why can you really not find a legitimate search engine optimization company that’s going to do it for $200 a month? Why does it never work? Because it takes more time than that. Like, it’s the simple math. Like you can only get a few hours of work for 200 bucks from somebody that knows what they’re doing. And so ultimately they’re going to end up outsourcing it to another country or somewhere with shady business practices that Google will end up penalizing you for. And so if you’re out there and you have an awesome company, you do an awesome product or service, but nobody can find you, well what are you doing? You’ve got to be where people are and that’s on the internet. So Thrive Nation, I would encourage you to listen in and take notes as Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, breaks down how search engine optimization really works. Would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200? Or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer, same for a brain surgeon. 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 you know, if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it, but you can bet that’s more than $199 a month. If you want it cheap, well, the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. And I agree with you. If you go overseas, it is entirely possible to find somebody that can make changes, but unless you know what kind of changes are being made, you’re just losing out. They’re taking your money. What I want to do is, if it’s possible, I want to kind of get into the weeds with you, and I want to kind of get into some of the details, if that’s all right with you, and kind of go through them in a linear fashion. And if you feel like the way that I’m organizing it isn’t the best way, feel free to interrupt me and lead the way here. But Google compliance, just overall. I have seen so many people with a beautiful website. Bruce, you’ve seen it too, where it looks great. The site itself visually, you go, wow, that is nice. The problem is it’s like a billboard in the woods and no one can find it. And then you go to Wikipedia that doesn’t look that beautiful, but it indexes and comes up top for everything. Can you talk to me about what it means to build a website that is crawlable or searchable by Google and what kind of website is absolutely not findable by search engines and by Google? I can certainly address that. Understanding that Google is changing all the time, the technology is changing as well. The process of getting into the index is simple. Google will send out a spider, it’s a piece of software that reads your website and attempts to figure out what you’re about. Many of the really pretty websites have been built by designers who do not know anything about SEO. They don’t understand how to connect things. They don’t understand how to word things. They’re not authors, they’re not writers, they’re people who can build pretty things. And a big part of the problem when you do that is you don’t dot the I and cross the Ts to make it appropriate for a piece of software to figure out what you’re about. It’s highly visual, which doesn’t help a search engine. The search engine basically is blind, deaf, and dumb. It reads your site. There’s three ways they influence ranking, but one of them is it will read your site and it will attempt to determine what you’re about by looking at your content and by looking at how page A is connected to page B, and the infrastructure and nature of your words really determines what the search engine thinks you’re about. Now a lot of people in a very visual environment, they have very few words and a lot of really pretty pictures, and the search engine cannot understand what that is. Now there’s two other things that fit, and I’ll just go into them briefly. One is what’s referred to as backlinks, where other sites link to you. Well, if your content is pretty, you might be able to get some links, and a great many offshore SEO companies, that’s what they focus on, but that is not going to make you an expert. It’s just going to be a bunch of people linked to you. The third part is something called RankBrain, which is the Google algorithm, and it’s based on click-throughs. So if you don’t rank, you don’t get clicked. If you don’t get clicked, there’s no dwell time or perception of your quality, and so it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that the best-ranked sites perform the best. 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, driving. And by the way, people are typing in Nike.com every day. But if you’re the average plumber, dentist, doctor, lawyer, whoever you are, the chances of people typing in your name, like a household name, is probably not going to be there. I mean, Bruce, have you ever heard people tell you that kind of objection? They say, well, the reason why I want my site to look like that is because I want it to look like Nike. Well, yeah, and 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, they won’t come until you buy the ads on Google. So if you’re out there and you have a business that is trying to generate more traffic, you have to learn. You just can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the Internet does not exist. Search engines, search engines, and how to get to the top of search engines. And we return to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay. Stay tuned. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, who many consider, who everyone considers, to be the father of search engine optimization. Each year he releases an edition of Search Engine for Dummies and his firm, which you can find out more about at BruceClay.com, is the world’s authority on big budget search engine optimization. Now I’ve hired his firm in the past and if you have a big company I would advise you to check him out as well, but I’m telling you, you are definitely going to be spending, he talks about during the interview, but $200 minimum per article. Minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking $6,000 a month, $7,000. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to them. Right. And they’ve got to reoptimize and rewrite and everything. This is a big deal. Bruce is search engine optimization on the next level. And so I try to do on this show is I try to break down big concepts and actionable steps that our listeners can take to make the money that they want to make so they can have the time freedom that they deserve and desire. And so now, without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. According to Forbes right now, 88% of consumers, according to Forbes, and we’ll put a link on the show notes, 88% of consumers read reviews online before buying something. Right? But they’re not going to read a review unless they find you online. And I don’t know the stats are there. 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 nine 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 got to have a website that Google can crawl that the spiders can index. I want to get a little more into the details of this. There’s a stuff called meta content which you write so eloquently about in your book, Search Engine for Dummies, that only took you a couple 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 we 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. Okay, so metadata, actually metadata is data about data. So in a portion of your web page, commonly referred to as the head section, the top of the source code, you have a section which has data, these content fields, that describe what your page is supposed to be about. And in that area there’s typically 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 hair stylist, and I’m in Boise. Talk to me about keywords. If I’m cutting hair, I’m in Boise. I think some people are just unfamiliar with that term at all. We have hundreds of thousands of people that download this podcast. I want to make sure nobody gets left behind. If I cut hair for women in Boise, what kind of keywords would you be talking about? I would think hair cutting, certainly Boise. These are things that somebody might string together in a query. Like a search? Like a search. So, an interesting statistic is 70 percent of all searches have not been searched on in the last six months. Yes, repeat it again please. That right there is a knowledge bomb for somebody. Please repeat. 70% of all searches have not been searched for in the last six months. What does that mean? So, if I am in Boise and I need to find a dentist because at 2 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. That is a string of keywords that most often are not on any websites. So when you come up with keywords and content and things for your webpage, you need to think about how somebody might actually try to find you and use those words on your webpage. Oh, 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. Thrive Nation, stay tuned. We come back. We’re going to learn why content matters for your website. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All Thrive Nation, you are in for a powerful training today. We have Bruce, the truth, Clay on the show. Bruce Clay, this guy is the father of search engine optimization, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. His search engine optimization firm is the number one search engine firm on the planet. His firm represents massive companies that have over a million pages of content that are making billions of dollars. And he’s here to teach you the principles and the fundamentals of search engine optimization 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 had 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 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. 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. You know, 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, a bridal store. And she says, how did you find the time to write hundreds of pages of content on djconnection.com? And I said, well, I didn’t find the time to write a hundred pages, or hundreds, I actually wrote thousands. And I did it myself. I usually, Bruce, did it between the hours of 5 a.m. or 4 a.m. Usually 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. About five hours a day, I’d write content every day. And, Bruce, I’d do it in the bathtub, which I know is a disturbing visual, but I’d sit there in the bathtub and I’m just writing content. I mean, 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 that 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? 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 gonna put that on a t-shirt, I’m gonna put that on a hat, I wanna 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, are you going to charge them $6, $12, 7 cents? I mean, because a lot of companies in India right now, and you’re aware of this, Mr. Bruce. I mean, there’s companies in India, companies based in China right now, companies in the Middle East will say, I will write you an article right now for $9. 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. So they make assumptions about your target persona person. They assume things about what it is that you do for a living and what your product should do and why people should use it, and it hardly ever matches reality in a different country. So we believe that every country has to write their own product content. So in our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think, $200? Is that 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. And we’ll teach you everything you need to know. Stay tuned. Attend the world’s best business workshop, led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at thrive timeshow.com. Hey Chuck. Hey there man. 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. There’s people out there starting to use this thing called Google. Oh, I don’t know if they have it. Or they’re on them Facebooks. And I’ve heard that people are going on there to buy products and search for goods and services on that Google. Now, we boys from Oklahoma. And we, I know, there’s three things I know about search engines, Chubb. One is the word search is the first word. That’s right. The second word is optimization. And the third is I ain’t knowing nothing about it. You know what I’m saying? You want a V8, I know that about engines. Chup, 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 in the side of my mullet, Chup? 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, you know what we say? What is that? You know what they say, see you abroad to get that booty, yackle. Leg it down and smack on the 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 you, bro, to get that booty, yackle. Leg it down, and smack them, yackle. If that’s all you know about search engine, if somebody put a gun to your head and said, teach me how to get to the top of Google, and you immediately said, la, la, la, Luke, Luke, then you need to listen in. Because Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, is going to be dropping knowledge bombs on you like your name is Saddam. Thrive Nature, without any further ado, back to my conversation with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Mr. Bruce Kleck. In our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think, $200? Is that a low average, you think, maybe? It takes longer. Now, when you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below them. Pages. Bruce, I want you to help me 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 10 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 who is not aware of Tony Robbins, welcome to the planet Earth. But Tony Robbins, I mean this guy, Bruce, he has tons of backlinks from news and media agencies. The guy has a team of bloggers writing content every day and he’s a beautiful man too I’m sure. But it’s taken a long time to be, and I know it’s just, so every week we add content at a rate that exceeds his rate of adding content. And I’ve kind of timed it out, and I believe in probably January of this year we’re going to beat him finally. But I mean, is it normal where you go into an industry and you go, wow, this industry, I mean, because Tony Robbins, when we decided to do it, I knew it would take years and years and years. Do you often sit down with a client and explain to them like, hey, to be top of Google for your term, my friend, that’s going to cost you a lot of money and a lot of time. And many times that’s the case. And it depends upon what is missing. And I want to make sure everybody understands how it works. It isn’t also whoever dies with the most backlinks wins. It’s who has the best backlinks. And are the backlinks appropriate for that one keyword? And am I spamming the backlinks? Am I buying them? Am I getting backlinks from garbage sites? Those are the kinds of things that matter the most. Many brands, by the time you become a brand, you’re going to get backlinks to you by your brand name, not particularly what your brand does. That contributes a lot of power to your homepage and then your homepage distributes that power to your sub pages. So when you think about a Tony Robbins you’re competing and a Wikipedia you’re competing against a brand that over time has acquired a lot of link value. That doesn’t mean that you need to publish more content than them, it just means your content has to be better than them and it has to be more of a solution to that user than them. We have a blog and at one point I felt that we have to publish a lot of blog posts. And when I did the analysis, I decided it isn’t how many you publish, it’s how good it is. And so we focus more on is this blog post solving somebody’s problem and then how do I tell that person I have the blog post. That is far more important than just publishing things. You have to kind of advertise that you’ve published it, and you have to advertise to the people that matter. But it isn’t an issue so much of quantity. It is far more an interest in quality that’s going to cause the search engines to perform well with you on your content. Now, having said that, I do believe that if you have too little content, you’re not going to succeed. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much content. We do projects large and small, hundreds of thousands of dollars at the high end and $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 the 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? Well, you can get away with almost none. We’ve seen well-performing pages that have fewer than 100 words. They have like 80 words. The issue with words is you need a sufficient quantity compared to your competition to prove to Search Engine that you are a subject matter expert. In some industries where all your competitors have 400 words, 400 might be a really good number. But if I am competing for an information source against Wikipedia, Google, government.gov’s government pages, university pages that are writing about it, and they all have 2,000 words, my 400-word page isn’t going to stand a chance. You have to be equal and then better, and just showing up to the party is not sufficient. Bruce, whenever I have spoken at big conferences, I’ve spoken for Maytag, Hewlett-Packard, O’Reilly’s Auto Parts, UPS, a lot of big companies. And I’ll get an attendee that will come up to me. I’m sure you’ve never run into this, Bruce, but someone will come up to you and say, they’ll say, hey, here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. Honestly, I’m willing to pay you guys up front quite a bit. And I just want to know, how do I get to the top of Google in like two weeks? I know you guys all preach that it’s a process, like growing a tree, and that you can’t get to the top of Google immediately because you’ve all kind of agreed to the secret society of preaching a process. But unlike planning a garden and unlike raising a child and unlike growing a successful business, I want it to be a microwave thing. And I’m willing to pay you, Bruce, right now. Forty 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. 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. Okay, so this leads me into a bigger question. I tell people all the time this, and Bruce, you run a… Can I ask you, I mean, how many people, maybe not employees, but how many people work in your organization? How many people? Because you said you occupy nine floors, am I correct, nine floors of a building? No, I actually have 12 suites. 12 suites, I’m sorry. So 12 suites. How many folks are working with you? I mean, do you have a couple dozen guys? Do you have hundreds of people? How many people are working with you? No, I want to make sure I say this correctly. 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. and a Thrive Time show. Two men, 13 multi-million dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrive Time Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. That’s it, arms away. I’m sure you had a good year, started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to another exciting edition of the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year for the great state of Oklahoma, where we’re broadcasting right here from the center of the universe. And Chup, on today’s show, we are interviewing the, this is part two of our interview with the center of the search engine optimization universe. So good. The father of the search engine optimization industry, the bestselling author of Search Engine for Dummies. Wow. Ladies and gentlemen, we have Bruce Clay on today’s show. And it was weird how you kept calling him dad and father and papa and all those things. It was cool. I liked it. It was kind of a whole Darth Vader thing. It was a rapport building. I feel like he is my father. This guy really, really does know what he’s talking about as it relates to search engine optimization. Absolutely. And so as we jump into part two of this interview with Bruce Clay, he’s now breaking down how to simplify search engine. can be very complicated and very overwhelming. And he explains his processes for simplifying the dark art of search engine optimization. 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 ask you a question. He says, in the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them. Those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and that can never focus enough to learn. My friend, the complexity of search engine optimization for many people, myself included, can be overwhelming, which is why at the Thrive Time Show, our team uses checklists for everything. We have checklists to help us manage the complexity of and the diligence required and the focus required to optimize our own websites. Can you talk to me about why the complexity of search engine optimization can be overwhelming for most people? Well, the entire environment is overwhelming before you even get to search engine optimization usually. You can have your website built on any number of technology platforms, WordPress being an example. You can build it in, it could be e-commerce, it could be informational, it could be I’m just designing it to be a business card versus this is my living. You have the complexity of that environment. Then on top of that, when you get into the complexity of SEO, SEO is so many things. I think I mentioned to you before I teach a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course. I think it’s rated as the top classroom course out there, it’s four and a half days. And I know darn well every time I start people are curious about what you could possibly talk about for four and a half days, and then at the end of it they want to know if there’s a follow-on course. And it’s because it’s so complex that it has so many moving parts that it’s overwhelming. When we do our projects, going to your checklist item, we have 300 items on our proprietary checklist. We keep them to ourselves, don’t get me wrong, but that’s how we end up getting people in the top three. How many items are on your checklist? How many? Over 300. I want to make sure listeners get this. I wrote a book called Start Here. It’s an Amazon bestseller, and with my partner, Jonathan Kelly, we put together a part of it called the SEO Manifesto. It is a very simplified version of how to optimize your website for small business owners. Our checklist is not 300 points. I’ll tell you why it’s not 300 points. Because, Bruce, there’s very few organizations or companies like yours that can handle a 300-point checklist. But you guys do. I mean, that’s what you guys do. You’re known for… If you’ve got a website out there… I mean, Bruce, who’s the ideal client for you? What kind of person out there is the perfect fit to be a Bruce Clay search engine optimization client? Under normal circumstances, it would be any industry, mid-sized or larger, and mid-sized is a matter of interpretation. If you can afford a few thousand dollars a month to a million, and in fact, we’ve had both. Chuck, I just want to make sure that we do a quick time out here to make sure that everybody’s grasping two big things he just explained. One, Bruce Clay, his internal search engine optimization checklist that he uses for his clients has 300 points on it. 300. I have hired his company before. I have invested thousands upon thousands of dollars paying Mr. Bruce Clay and it was well worth it. Now if you want to attend his course We put a link to it on the show notes. It’s $2,495 to attend the course and Chuck Do you know why his course does not cost more money you would speculate as to why he does not charge more for his course He’s not a hog Well, I don’t know Anybody else what do you Steve you wanna guess? I think that’s part of it, yes. What else? There’s one more reason why he doesn’t charge more. Why he doesn’t charge more? Because nobody can do it! Once he teaches you how to do it, there’s nobody that can do it, which is why he just said point number two. He said that he charges clients thousands of dollars a month, or it’s up to a million dollars a month. Seven figures, yeah. So, I’m just trying to explain this to you. My company is, let’s say, elephant in the room. You say, Clay, what is it really worth to you to be top in Google? Well, let me just give you an example. When I grew DJConnection.com, no exaggeration, we, many weekends, would do 80 weddings. 80 weddings. Now, Chuck, let’s look at this conservatively, because we had about 35% of our events that came from the internet. Alright, so I’m going to take 80 times 0.35 and that would be 28 and my profit per show was about a hundred and sixty seven dollars in my performance. Okay, so that means it was worth four thousand six hundred and seventy six dollars for me a week to be top in Google. That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. So if you’re out there listening, I encourage you to ask yourself this before you get back into the interview. What would it be worth for you to be top in internet search results? What would it be worth for you? What is the value of that? You know, I actually got paid to speak for Maytag University multiple years to the International Community Bankers Association event. We’ll put links, Chip, let’s put links to Maytag University to where I’m speaking there so people can verify that it did in fact happen. And let’s also put a link to me speaking in Las Vegas so people can see that one. They would, Steve, groups will pay me and have paid me, you know, 20 grand, 15 grand to go speak and to teach an all-day workshop on how search engines work. Steve, why is it so imperative for all the small business owners, for all the organizations, for all the churches, for anybody out there to be top in Google for the internet search terms that your ideal and likely buyers are looking for. Well if you want to win, then you need to be at the top of Google when people search for what you’re selling. So if you’re not at the top of Google, then you’re probably on page 3 and page 4 or maybe page 20. How would you process this idea, Steve? This is one that, this is something I hear all the time. Not from our listeners. This is from I talked about on yesterday’s show But I really feel like I should talk about it one more time because I think somebody might have missed yesterday’s show and I Or maybe somebody heard it yesterday, but it didn’t really fully sink in. This is why I hear a lot Well, Clay, I’ll tell you what We get all our business from word of mouth And so we don’t need to know the Internet because we all we get all of our business here Chip from from the internet this here, Chip, from Word of Mouth. Well, you know, that’s how we always did it. And I know I sound like a redneck for this particular segment, but I’ll tell you this. I’m a surgeon. I’m a Nero surgeon. By God. I’m a Nero surgeon. And one of the things people don’t do is they don’t go on the internet to find Nero surgeons. No, they don’t go on the internet to find cosmetic surgeons because what they do is they do Word of Mouth. And that’s just how it’s always been. And Chip, I’m an orthodontist as well, because I got the time, I was carrying out time on my hands, I became a neurosurgeon, and now I’m also an orthodontist. In fact, I’m kind of a professional, therefore I only operate off of word of mouth. I mean, I entirely, I’ll tell you this, I mean, Chip, I ask all my customers, I say, how do you hear about it? Have I ever had someone say the internet? No. And that’s why I don’t optimize my website. Because you see, Chip, if people were to put a spot on me on the internet, then I would definitely invest the money in the internet operation. Oh, I am a realist. Because no one ever finds me on the internet. And I pulled an AdWords report, one of them Google things. You added some words to it? And what I found is that nobody had actually found me on the internet, so I’m not going to invest money in my website. I agree with you. Now, Chip, I’ve got another thing I’m working on. This is a little bit more controversial, but witches, if you burn a witch, you know, because how do you know if he’s a witch? Well, the float. Well, she’s made out of wood. Yeah. So what you do is you burn people and you just say, and then if they burn, uh, then they’re a witch. That’s right. And if they burn kind of slowly, then they weren’t a witch. I mean, this is the kind of stupid logic I hear all the time. Serious. This is the lack of law. I hear this all the time. I was way into that conversation. I was zoned out. You had a client that said they burned witches? I am not exaggerating. I had a neurosurgeon I worked with in Denver, and this is what the guy says. He goes, Clay, none of my clients, we have a lot of patients, and I’ve never had a patient find us on the internet. Because you’re not on the internet! Right! That’s why they didn’t find you there! No, and then they pull their AdWords report, because they feel like they know, but it’s been about four minutes of going on to AdWords on Google, and they’ve done a report and they realize that none of their business comes from search engine optimization. So then they say, therefore I should not invest in search engine optimization. I was trying to think of it like a parallel, but I can’t even think of it. No, and here’s the deal. We, as a company, we only take on 160 clients, okay? So we can’t possibly work with any more because there’s so much work that goes into search engine optimization. And if you have a $500,000 a year business up to probably a $3 million to $5 million a year business, we’re a great fit for you. But if you have a company like Oxifresh or a huge brand, and you want to take it to the top of it, if you type in carpet cleaning quotes, Oxifresh is now number one in the world. Yeah. So if you want to be top, and you want to spend some real money to get your real national brand top in Google. Bruce Clay and his team are absolutely the best. They’re the best and they’re gonna have a 300 point checklist but he said this, I want to make sure we’re getting this, he’s gonna charge you thousands of dollars per month up to a million dollars a month. So if you’re out there you’re saying to yourself, you know what, I want to be top in the Google search engine results. I would highly recommend without reservation that you start by getting the book Search Engine for Dummies by Bruce Clay. Get that book. Or if you’re somebody who you learn more kind of a hands-on, you like to interact and ask questions, I would encourage you to book your tickets for our Thrive Time Show in-person two-day workshop. It takes place on the left coast of the Arkansas River here in beautiful Tulsa, Oklahoma at our 20,000 square foot facility. And if you want to get your tickets for free, all you have to do is subscribe to the Thrive Time Show on iTunes and then leave us an objective review. So subscribe to the Thrive Time Show on iTunes, leave us an objective review, and then email us your review to info at thrive timeshow.com. So you subscribe on iTunes, leave us an objective review, email us proof you did it to info at thrivetimeshow.com and we will give you those free tickets. So when we get back from the break, more with our exclusive interview with the father of search engine optimization and the best selling author of Search Engine for Demons, it’s Bruce Clay. 3, 2, 1, boom! You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. Thrive Time Show on the microphone, what is this? Top of the iTunes charts in the category of business. Drilling down on business topics like we are a dentist. Providing you with internship like you are an apprentice. And we go so fast that you might get motion sickness. Grab a pen and pad to the lab, let’s get in this. Time to best some fruit like some Florida oranges. 3, 2, 1, here come the business ninjas. Sonic Boom! Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. We are interviewing Bruce Clay, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies and arguably the father of search engine optimization. Again, his name is Mr. Bruce Clay, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. And as we hop back into the interview, this is where Bruce is explaining what kind of client would be ideal to work with him or what kind of clients he prefers to work with and what kind of clients he will not work. Search engine optimization is not an event. It is an ongoing process and so Bruce explains the right kind of people that are the right fit for the search engine optimization process that he does because his process has been proven to work and He’s just kind of explain the criteria for who would be an ideal and likely buyer for both he and his organization If you can afford a few thousand dollars a month to a million, and in fact we’ve had both, then it’s something that we would be able to handle. We don’t really say that we only deal with large companies and get snobbish about it. That isn’t what we do. are able to realize their life is changing if this is able to be done for them. And we get a lot of reward for that. We’ve had clients for 15 years. They’re just totally enamored with the fact that they’re being taken care of. One of the brands I work with, with a coaching relationship, and I’m a partner with the founder of Oxifresh, but we’re topping Google for the phrase, carpet cleaning quotes. We have 137,000 Google reviews and we have 400 locations and I can tell you the vast majority of the business comes in from the internet for that company. It’s a game changing thing, but I just want to make sure I’m understanding what you just said. You’re saying if someone’s willing to spend a few thousand dollars, let’s say someone’s willing to spend like $3,000 or $2,000 a month on just search engine, that might be a good fit, but you had companies that have invested millions of dollars in search engine optimization? Yeah, I have people writing six-digit checks monthly. Six-digit checks monthly. So Thrive Nation, you might say, what kind of sick freak would do that? I don’t know. I mean, there’s a company called Blinds.com that is top when you type in blinds. And Bruce, I mean, these are big companies that make a ton of money as a result of being top in Google. Because back in the day, if you had a question, you used to go, dear God, could you help me think of the answer to this question? If you lived in a field in, like, Des Moines, you know, Iowa, you’d say, dear God, could you help me? Or you’d ask your mom or your dad. Now, people, they go to Google to search for everything. I mean, being top in Google is unbelievably important. Being top in all the search engines is very important. And so, Bruce, I have a list of questions, kind of a rapid fire. I’m gonna fire off just a bunch of questions for you. This will be kind of our lightning round, okay? So here we go. What makes it hard to get to the top of Google search results for one keyword, but easy to rank for another? Well, that’s mostly your competition. If the competition for this keyword is less aggressive, it’s a lot easier. That’s an easy answer. The second part has probably got a lot to do with whether or not you understand what Google is expecting for that keyword, and it may be that your site is more what Google expects already, whereas for other terms it may be some work. If I want to rank for a term that is information, but I’m an e-commerce site, that’s going to be more work. So it’s a match between your content and what Google thinks everybody wants, and it’s a different match elsewhere as to whether or not you have competitors that are asleep at the wheel or not. I want to ask you this, Bruce, because this next question to me is one that I see people ask me all the time, personally. And I want to get your take on this, because you are the father of search engine optimization. Everybody wants to be to the top of Google. I mean, I think every business owner wants to be top of Google. I have yet to meet people that say, well, you know, overall, I want to be at the bottom of Google because I don’t want anybody to find me. I’m trying to bury my secrets, my company on page four. Now, people want to be at the top of Google, but very few people want to invest the work or the finances to get to the top of Google. Can you explain where your money goes? Let’s say that I hire a search engine optimization company. Where does the money go when you’re paying? I mean, what kind of stuff are the people doing to optimize a website? If you’re paying your firm $10,000 a month to optimize a website, I mean, where does that money go? I mean, what is your team doing with their time to optimize a website? Well, in my environment, the team is multi-layer. We actually have a service layer and then an engineering layer. So the service layer are people who are called program managers and they’re the primary point of contact for the clients because when you’re being aggressive in SEO you’re going to have frequent customer contact. They’re going to send you emails often. You’re going to be doing an awful lot more. When they have a project, then what we do is we build an Agile team behind them. And the Agile team is probably well over 80% of the effort that we put into a project. And they are doing deep research. They’re analyzing your site. They’re determining what Google has changed. They’re looking at your competitors. They are evaluating your competition to determine if they have content you don’t have, maybe that’s why they’re ranking. We look at the speed and performance of your servers. We determine whether or not the search engine spiders are able to get to your pages and spider you, because if you can’t get spidered, you’re not in the index. We’re looking at, as I said, 300 items. That takes time. Most people don’t understand. They think that, okay, out on the web there’s some of these quickie little utilities where you put in your URL and it tells you everything that’s wrong with it. If it were that easy, everybody would be fixed. And it isn’t that easy because going the final step, it’s like the 80-20 rule, that final 20% takes 80% of your effort. So logically we have retainer programs and we determine what is an optimal speed based upon what the client has asked for and we just spend the time where the squeaky wheel is, where there is something that’s going to give them the best bang for their buck and the best traffic and conversion and basically search mileage. And that is the way we spend our time. So the people aren’t just sitting around saying, I wanna be top of Google. We want our client to be top of Google. We need them to be top of Google. There’s actually a recipe. There’s a system. There’s a strategy. It’s not just luck. Are you saying it’s not just luck, Mr. Bruce Clay? Oh, it’s absolutely not just luck. When we return, Bruce Clay breaks down how to get to the top of the Internet search results. How do you get to the top of the Google search engine results? The father of the search engine optimization industry breaks it down when we get back. Thrivetimeshow.com In a world where not being top in Google is like not wearing pants to work there’s only one father of search engine optimization In a world where not being top in Google is like going to work without pants. There is only one father of search engine optimization. And when you host an iTunes Top Ten podcast and you have no discernible talent, and when you get an opportunity to interview the father of search engine optimization, you get strangely nervous and you begin to sweat and cry a lot. Probably opened up too much there but now ladies and gentlemen without any further ado back to my exclusive game-changing premium platinum edition and super humble interview with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of search engine for dummies the man I call daddy but that’s just he’s the father he’s the father I’m the little boy. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome back. We’re going to go back. I guess I’ve already welcomed him, but we’re going to go back. I’m really bubbling this, but the point is, ladies and gentlemen, I’m so nervous to interview my dear friend, Mr. Bruce Clayton. So, the people aren’t just sitting around saying, I want to be top of Google. We want our client to be top of Google. We need them to be top of Google. There’s actually a recipe. There’s a system. There’s a strategy. It’s not just luck. Are you saying it’s not just luck, Mr. Bruce Kline? Oh, it’s absolutely not just luck. It is definitely a methodology. That’s what we refer to it as. And we have a pretty much a way of analyzing sites, determining what’s wrong, architecting repairs, getting them fixed. And we actually saw that as an audit project that’s just a couple months long, where we tear your site apart and tell you all the stuff that needs to be fixed. We do that on our own projects. We do it on our own sites. We rank for a reason and our clients rank for a reason. If we’re actually operating on word of mouth, which we typically do, and people come to us because they’ve heard about what we can do, we can’t afford really to not achieve, so we’re paying attention all the time. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t sit around also going, we really want this. But it’s one thing to want it, it’s another thing to do it. So our teams are focused on results. You, Bruce, in your book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, the 560-page-plus book. I mean, that book is so detailed. But why? I mean, why does it even matter? Well, search engine optimization can change a business owner’s life. Can you explain, and I’m not asking you to divulge a client’s personal information, or if there’s a story you’re at liberty to share, I’d love to hear, but how has search engine optimization absolutely changed the lives of people that have decided to invest in it and to become top or in the top three of search engine results for certain keywords? Well as a couple of examples and I’m talking like many examples, in our case we have gotten sites to rank at the top sometimes in six months, sometimes a year, sometimes longer. And usually what actually happens is they sell the company. So obviously that money is life changing. They get it to the top and somebody wants it. And so they sell it, move on and call us again. I’m not asking for a client that you’ve actually helped that has sold the company, but can you think of some examples of people that you know, or organizations you’ve heard of that have sold their company from the results of search engine ops? I mean, I know business.com is a famous example, but could you think of it? Because you’re in this every single day. Right. And it really matters a lot. We had one client, client. They were rather big. They were in the automotive space. They had 1.7 million visitors a month to our website. That’s pretty big. Wow. They brought us in. We did a year and a half restructuring of their entire 12 million page website. It took a while. It was very nice for us. But at the end of it, when they flipped the switch and the site went live, they jumped to 16.4 million uniques a month. That’s a lot of visitors. It is. And 16 million visitors changed their lives. They were originally in a lead gen business where they would get visitors and sell them to auto industries, they switched it entirely to an ad network where people would buy ads on their website and they made so much more money doing that and then about four months later, they sold it for a fortune. But they were one of the top-ranked sites in that automotive space. So that’s an example. A 900% increase in traffic on most websites, that would change anybody’s life. So what do you enjoy doing when you’re not optimizing websites? A lot of our listeners are going, okay, Bruce Clay, this guy is the father of search engine optimization, the author of Search Engine for Dummies, the guy who arguably invented the search engine optimization industry. Can you share with the listeners a look into your personal life and something that most people maybe don’t know about you or things you enjoy doing when you’re not changing people’s lives by optimizing their websites? Well, yes and no. The one problem with search engine optimization is it’s almost impossible to look at anybody’s website without mentally dissecting it. Right. So it becomes really difficult to spend much time on the internet. I’m recently married. Oh wow. So I spend a lot of time with my amazingly beautiful wife. Congratulations there, Mr. Bruce. Yay! I’ll tell you, this is something I’m really enjoying. Watch a lot of movies or we were kind of into crossword puzzles. Oh wow. And then she has her kids and I have mine, so family’s important. And it’s actually sort of a strange thing. I have become somewhat disconnected. When I get home on Friday nights, I set my computer down, it’s in a backpack, and I don’t take it out until Sunday. Amen. That is different. I never used to do that. So I think there’s multiple layers. You can just really enjoy disconnecting. You don’t have to do a whole lot else. You’re just enjoying it. So what entrepreneurs do you look up to Bruce Clay. All right Thrive Nation, when we return we’re going to go back into the mind of Mr. Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of the incredible book Search Engine for Dummies. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. If you’ve not yet purchased your copy, I encourage you to buy one today. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. Bruce Clay actually wrote that book for me, Steve. I think he dedicated Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. For both of us. I think it was dedicated to dummies. I feel like I’m the lead inspiration, the true dummy he wrote the book for. Stay tuned. Time show. All right, Thread Nation, welcome back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. During this portion of the interview, I’m asking Bruce about new projects he’s working on and kind of a deeper look into the personal life of the founder of the search engine optimization industry. In my industry, there’s certainly some that have really performed well, but they have had a specific exit strategy from day one. I enjoy people who have built two successful businesses or one business built twice. One of the things I’m doing for instance is I built a successful business. I got in early. I’m one of the founders of a billion dollar multinational digital movement. I feel that way. And having succeeded at that, the next thing I am doing is I’m really developing a lot of software, almost like I’m building a new business within my business. And that software is very, very close to release, it’s going to be great. But it’s sort of a reinvention. And I like that. So when I look at others, I look at people that have succeeded and then reinvented it and succeeded again. And they’ve done it without being rude or angry all the time in the process. They’ve succeeded because they deserve to succeed. And those are the kind of people I like. I read books all the time and you know that it’s all about what you’re doing. Right now I’m spending a moderate amount of time on business books. So let me ask you this. Business books. I want to get into, I want to make sure you have time to get into your new product you’re developing and get into the details of that. And I also want to ask you, I want to tap into your wisdom. What are a few books that you’ve read? You’re an avid reader. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re the father of search engine optimization. What are a few books you’ve read where you think to yourself, gosh, everybody should read this book? The three that I will recommend, I read Scaling Up. That’s a Vern Harnish book. I think that if you’re looking for a way to be more organized as a business, you should do that. That’s important. Our organization, because we’re an agile team business, I read the book Mastering the Matrix. Mastering the Matrix. Master the Matrix. It’s by Susan Finnerty, I think. Trying to remember. And then one of the best, easiest reading books that I’ve read is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And it is really about team building. So between scaling up, which is organization, daily huddles, KPI management, having the big rock, if you will, then understanding how to manage in a matrix environment, and then team building. Those three books, I think, together are ideal for almost any business of any size. And those are the ones that I would say are probably the best that I’ve read. And then I have this little… Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt you. I did a little Skype delay there, my friend. Back to you. Then I have this other area where I get into actually practicing this stuff. We have a business consultant and I have, I do a lot of consultants. I have a lot of consultants in to help me and mostly because it’s just a lot of work to manage five international offices. So I use help. And I think that that is a change for a lot of small businessmen. And in a larger environment, you really have to look for your peers that will help you the most. But anyhow, that’s where I’m at. So tell us about this new SEO product you’re developing, or what you can tell. I know it’s going to be something you’ve spent a lot of time on. I’m certainly not asking for you to divulge your secrets of this new search engine product. But for anybody who’s ever read your book, Search Engine for Dummies, or who’s familiar with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry, we’re all excited to know about this new product. What are you making? Well, we have developed some technology, patent pending, really advanced and we have made a product which is an API layer that will work with any content management system. This is the primary concept. For as many people out there that are doing SEOs, there’s a hundred people doing content. There’s a hundred writers for every one competent SEO. And so what we did is we built a tool that helps people do SEO as writers. One of our first releases for the tool, first flavors if you will, is that it integrates as a plug-in right into WordPress because there’s 56 million blogs. So while you’re writing content for your website, you can see while you’re writing content, you could kind of maybe see whether it’s compliant or not, or whether you’re doing a good job or not, or kind of give you tips along the way. How does that work? Well, there’s a lot of businesses that have plug-ins. And a lot of the plug-ins just run on your desktop. They’re not really analyzing anything. Ours is software as a service. And therefore, we can actually spider websites. We can spider your competition, we can see that you don’t have enough words based upon your competition and the number of words they have. So we have taken logically what would be black and white television and made it color. We have taken the information available at the fingertips of the author of content and we have given them the power to see it as it is closer to the real internet once it’s published, which is really remarkable. And then we pull in all the analytics data so that you can actually see how well your content is performing on a writer-by-writer basis, blog post-by-blog post, page by page basis. And that particular product, I know I’m a little insane here, but we’re offering it at under $25 a month for each domain, which means that every blogger in the world is probably going to use it. And then if you’re really caring that you could publish a blog post and it goes right to the top, this is a mandatory kind of a tool. So I’m just anxious to get it out. It is imminent. We’re in final test right now. Bruce, you’re messing with me, Bruce. Bruce, I’m a huge fan of your stuff, man. I’m buying what Bruce Clay is selling. I’m a customer of yours. I’ve used you guys. Very happy with the services and the results that you’ve generated. I’m honored to have the father of search engine optimization on today’s podcast. Sir, when can I buy it? Where can I buy it? When can you buy it? Yes, when and where? Come on, give to me. Okay, here’s what we’re doing. It’s $25 a month. Yep. We’re offering a 40% discount pre-sale. Oh Bruce where can I get it? Don’t tease me. Go to my website bruceclay.com slash WP slash sorry slash SEO slash WP Bruceclay.com slash SEO slash WP and it’ll take you to not only will it take you to a form that you can fill out, it’ll actually show you a seven-minute video about what the product can do. Ah, Bruce, Bruce, you’re blowing my mind. I have three final questions for you, then I’m going to let you get back to dominating the world and to doing what it is that you do that has allowed you to become the father of search engine optimization. So these are my final three questions for you. How many keywords can you optimize for on one page of a website? Well that falls into two categories unique Keywords you really should operate on one theme Right around one topic you can have multiple variants They’re called variants different ways of saying the same word like smiling and smiles. So you can have multiple variants and you typically would have several. If you only had one, you look like a spammer. We have some of our pages optimized and ranking in the top 10 for up to 16 keywords. So I’m not sure that the average site will ever have a problem getting ranked for, you know, half a dozen. We typically recommend that more than a half dozen, you’re going to need a bunch of content and a whole lot of structure. We return more with our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry. To claim your tickets to the Thrivetime Show two-day interactive business workshop for free, all you have to do is to subscribe to The Thrive Time Show on iTunes, leave an objective review and send us confirmation at info at thrivetimeshow.com. To claim your star in the National Star Registry, we can’t help you. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to The Conversation. It is The Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. Now on today’s show what we’re doing is we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry, and we’re asking him now why it would be better for a local small business to focus on local search engine optimization keywords as opposed to national keywords. Chup, can you explain on a very basic level for the listeners out there who are maybe not as familiar with what search engine optimization is, what a keyword is all about. We say keywords. What does that mean? Talk to us about local keywords and national keywords. So a keyword is going to be one of the words that people are literally typing into Google to find you or what you do or your product. So like Tulsa mortgages. Tulsa mortgages would be something somebody would type in to find Steve Carrington and total lending. That’s all you’d find. That’s all. That’s all you’d find. Unless you type the word mortgages, and you’re going for it. You’re going to win it, but you’re not quite top in the nation yet. So you’d want to have people searching for Tulsa mortgages. Well, I’m top in the nation, but people just don’t know it yet. Right, yeah, well yeah, the billboard in the woods. But same thing with like Luke Owens and the Hub Jam, Broken Arrow, Jim’s, the keyword Jim is going to be a lot harder to win, so you want to optimize for that local version first. So as an example, if you’re out there trying to be top for the word mortgage right now, the number one website that comes up top in search engines pretty consistently is a mortgage calculator and bank rate and Wikipedia. So you might say to yourself, well, what would I have to do if I wanted to beat bank rate? Well, to beat bank rate right now, you would need 34,300 pages of content. And so if you were going to hire Bruce Clay to do that, on the low end, his articles are about $200 a piece. So if you took… Is it $600,000? Something like that? No, no, no, no. You would need… Seven. No, you would need… Let me pull this up here. Did I catch a niner in there? We’ll do it in math on a radio show. It’s not advised, but I’m doing it. So here we go. Oh, yeah. I’m doing the math here. It would cost you $6,860,000… Oh, yeah….to be competitive, but to actually win, you would actually be spending close to $13 million. There you go. So $13 million. Now, if you wanted to beat Steve Currington, and you can’t because we only work with one company in each niche, but if you did want to, right now, let me pull this up real quick here, $1,206. You need $1,206. I don’t know. I’m just guessing how many pages I have right now. Let’s see how many I have left. I’m just trying to give an example. You would need right now, you would need 2,300 articles to beat Steve right now. And Chip, I want to put this on the show notes so the listeners get that. Again, if you wanted to beat Steve Currington right now, again, you would need to have, let’s see here. And again, this is if you were to hire Bruce Clay’s team to do it at $200 an article, you would have, and this is something, Steve, I’m sure you can share this with the team here at Total Lending Concepts so they can see kind of the, what it would cost here. So to beat Steve right now on Google, if you were to hire Bruce Clay, it would be $472,000. That’s what he would charge you. Yeah. It’s per article, his team, if they’re writing content for you, they charge about $700. On a previous segment of today’s interview, Bruce Clay explained that his team, if they were going to write articles for you, they would charge you approximately $200 per article on the low end. Right. And so to beat Steve Currington in the Google search engine results, if you were to hire a search engine optimization firm at the going rate of $200 per article minimum, conservatively you would spend $472,000. That not dull hairs. Paying a search engine optimization firm to beat you. And that would just be to beat me in Tulsa. Right. So you can see where search engine optimization can be expensive if you’re not willing to produce your own content internally. That’s just something to think about. Let it swirl around in your cranium before we get back into this interview with Bruce Clay about why you’d want to focus on local terms versus national terms. Steve, do you have a hot take there? Well, I was going to say I’d like to point out that I think I paid you a lot less to get to the same place. I think that’s one of the benefits of working with Thrive is most search engine companies do charge you a lot a lot of money To get to the top of Google and I know we didn’t spend 472, but we’re there because you guys definitely were able to tap into our team’s ability to write content and You also did a lot of your own podcasts which were able to transcribe and that produced content for you as well So Thrive Nation with any further ado back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. Okay, I have two final questions. Why is it better, I work with a lot of small businesses, why is it better for the average small business, small business owner to go after local search engine optimization as opposed to national search engine optimization? Well in general, national is competing more against brands, whereas local, the brand typically doesn’t have the bandwidth to penetrate every local market. So there’s a competitive advantage if you are able to be local. A great many businesses are not national. There’s no reason to pretend like you are because you’re not going to want to deliver nationally. And so you’re going to want to understand what your service region is and just focus on that. And you can focus on that in a great many ways. If you’re a local business right now, you should write this down, Google Home Services. Check it out. It’s a new service. It’s not available everywhere, coming from Google, and it’s an amazing opportunity to get your site premierly presented in Google. So all those things make sense on a local level. If you’re trying to be national, just understand this is going to be a battle. You’re against brands. You’re against everybody everywhere, and that’s just the way it is. I want to explain this to the listeners real quick. I worked with a business years ago, a bakery, and she wanted to be top of the world for the phrase cakes, specifically, Bruce. She wanted to be top of the world for the term wedding cakes. I pulled it up and I showed her what the competition looked like and I said, listen, let’s focus on optimizing for Tulsa wedding cakes. Well, we got her to the top of Google in probably six months working with her and she really wanted, her partner just didn’t want to pay attention and didn’t want to understand how search engines work. And Bruce, they are currently still spending just hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to be top for Google. They’re almost out of money now for the phrase wedding cakes. They’re not even close. They’re like on page four or something. The thing is they can’t even service. They got an online order for from New York or something. They couldn’t even do it. They couldn’t mail a wedding cake. Can you explain what kind of businesses cannot actually be national and which ones can be? A good example that I commonly use is a plumber. Yeah. A plumber of course can visit your house but he’s not going to travel to New York to fix anything. Things that are inexpensive, those are more difficult because national is a more expensive proposition, takes longer to rank, so you really have to be careful about the value and return on investment for your product. If it has virtually no delivery problem, then you’re fine. We had a client that sold chocolate. Not fountains, just chocolate. Oh, okay, here we go. And it was great, and it was beautiful, and they had local contracts at hotels, and they were really, really cooking. And they decided they wanted to go national. So one of the first things they did is they sent me a sample and when it got to me it was a box of molten chocolate because it was summer. So it is clear that sometimes you just don’t have a product that should be sold nationally. Now, having said that, I think that it’s always prudent to dominate your area and then expand unless it is clear that you have some form of recognition already nationally. I just want to make sure that nobody just wastes money doing it. I think that local is and there’s more tools for local. Google prefers local. In my local area, I rank at the top, even though I don’t sell locally, just because I have paid attention to how to do that. I can probably get anybody to rank locally. It’s a little bit longer process to rank nationally. Now, Bruce, my final question for you today is talk to me about the difference between long tail keywords and short tail keywords and why long tail keywords are easier to win than short tail keywords. Okay, there is what you’re calling short tail keywords is commonly also known as a head term. Head term, got it. They’re used interchangeably. A head term is usually a one or two-word phrase that describes simply a topic, like chocolate fountain or a specific use for a chocolate fountain, where the number of competitors for those longer-term phrases are far fewer. I think that many times people will say, oh, there’s all these searches for this particular term without recognizing that people search and then they don’t go there. I’m going to give you an example, if I can, the word hammer. I think everybody knows what a hammer is, but here I am in L.A. and I do a search for hammer, and the number one result is the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. The number two item is a vitamin. The number three item is a bowling ball. And the number four item is MC Hammer. Not a single one of them are what you were probably looking for. So when there’s ambiguity in there, the ambiguity is far more rampant on what’s called a head term, because Google doesn’t necessarily know what hammer you’re talking about. Whereas, if I said hammer or claw hammer or ball peen hammer or hammer with long handle that weighs over five pounds, those are long tail keywords. They are more specific to the mission of the visitor, they have a higher probability of being closer to the conversion point, and you can write about those a lot easier because you know exactly what that product is instead of having to guess as to what I would put for hammer. And I think that it’s easier to rank for a long tail. I think it’s faster to get rankings, show up in Google for a long tail. I also have many years of experience where if you can rank for many long tail keywords, then it’s easier to rank for the head terms. We always are constantly have head terms where we’ll get you ranked for a one term phrase. It’ll take you maybe a year and a half, but we can do it. But the way we do it is we focus on the long tail first and then build expertise, and then you can rank for the short term. Thrive Nation, obviously today we’re talking about how to do more effective marketing and how to generate more customers through search engine optimization. But another way to save both time and money is to have an accountant staying on top of your books. If you’re looking for a proactive accounting firm, I encourage you to check out hoodcpas.com today. One of our great show sponsors. Hoodcpas.com. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry. Bruce, you are arguably the father of search engine optimization. You are factually, for sure, not my opinion. You are the best-selling author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. You are a man who’s worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet. My friend, I cannot express to you how much we appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to come on to the Thrive Time Show. So my friend, on behalf of the Thrive Nation and everybody out there, the small business owners and mid-level companies and all the hundreds of thousands of people that download this podcast, thank you for coming on to the show. Well, thank you very much for having me. And Bruce, good luck with your incredible new wife there. We’re excited for you. And if you ever want to be on the show again, especially when the product comes out. I know you’re pre-selling your search engine optimization product right now, but when it comes out, if you want to do an update or tell us how it’s going, please feel free to not be a stranger. You have just been a pleasure to interview, as I knew you would be. Well, thank you very much. Hey, take care and have a great day. All right, Thrive Nation, that was Bruce Clay. Check out his book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. What I want to do now is I want to spend the rest of the show making sure that every single listener that you leave today’s show knowing how search engine optimization works. And so I want to give you some tools, I want to give you a lot of free stuff and help you. So action step number one, Chuck, I want to put this on the show notes, is all the listeners out there, I would encourage you today to go to Thrivetimeshow.com and to download the Start Here book we have for free. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com, you can download my Amazon bestselling book, Start Here. In that book, I have a thing called the Search Engine Manifesto, the Search Engine Optimization Manifesto. I would encourage you to download, again, the Start Here book for free from thrivetimeshow.com. Download that book. That way you have a Cliff Notes version of how to optimize a website. But I would recommend that everybody invest the $15, the $20. I’m sure you can find one right now on Amazon.com. We’ll put a link to it on the show notes. Buy search engine optimization for dummies. Buy search engine optimization for dummies and have it on your desk. I mean, keep it there because you’re going to run into search engine charlatans all the time. I mean, how many people, Steve, how often do you get an email from some company, usually based in India or the Middle East or China, that is reaching out to you to say that they can do search engine optimization for as little as $199 a month. Multiple times a day. It happens all the time. Every day. Oh, every single day, multiple times a day. Right. And so I want to make sure all the listeners get this. Once you begin to move up in search engine optimization ranks, you’ll get more emails from companies who are targeting companies that are on the first two pages of Google search engine results. And they’re going to have very compelling arguments. A lot of them use fear to sell. A lot of them will reach out to you and try to scare you. Oh, if Google sees this on your website, whew. Woof. You could be in trouble. I noticed that you had an error on one of your pages. I’m like, well, I have thousands of pages. So it’s not surprising to think that one of them might have an error. So let’s focus on the big four variables that you need to have optimized to get to the top of the search engine results. Variable number one, your website must be a Google canonically compliant website. You might say what does that mean? We would recommend that you would build your website in WordPress. Why would you want to build your website in WordPress? WordPress is a site that is the best out of the box search engine friendly format. It would be kind of like building a car, let’s say. And let’s say the car, Chip, what kind of vehicle, what kind of truck do you drive these days? A Ford F-150. King Ranch. Okay, so there you go. So it’s a Ford F-150. It’s got a lot of stickers on it, too. It looks really great. Thanks. Do you haul a lot of stuff in that vehicle? I mean, do you haul all things from A to B with that thing? Only when I have to. Okay, well, if you, let’s say that the chassis of that vehicle, I’m just kind of trying to compare Ford vehicles, but I used to drive a 1989, not so dent resistant Ford Escort and it was a hatchback. And that thing, the chassis of that vehicle is not built to carry the weight that an F-150 is. Right. So in the event that we put too much weight into the Ford Escort, it just simply could not handle the weight. And when you build a website, you want to build it on the right foundation. It would be like putting rebar in the concrete on your, let’s say, if you’re building a home, you want to put rebar in the concrete. Chup, you did concrete. That’s right. Why do you put rebar in the concrete? To hold everything together. The concrete has a very strong compression strength, but it doesn’t hold together well if it cracks. And the rebar inside it holds it. It’s like the skeleton of the concrete. So you want to build the proper skeleton for your website and that would be using WordPress. You want to start off with a good foundation. Now after you build your site, and by the way, if you’re saying, I don’t know where are you getting all this information from? Well, one, I wrote a book on it. It’s called Start Here. And in that book, we write the search engine optimization manifesto. But if you don’t believe me, if you don’t want me to cite myself, fine, I’ll give you five books I’d recommend for you. You go do the work. Read these books. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. Oh, who’s that? This would be Bruce Clay. Also the Retargeting Playbook by Adam Burke is a great book. How Google Works by the CEO, written by the CEO of Google itself, Eric Schmidt. And then Get Rich Click by Mark Ostrofsky. And that’s the only book that I know of that’s endorsed by the co-founder of Apple himself, Mr. Wozniak. And The Honest Seduction. So again, search engine optimization for dummies. We’ll put this all in the show notes. Retargeting Playbook, How Google Works, The Honest Seduction, and Get Rich Click. Those are the books I’d recommend that you read to understand that. But just build your site from the very beginning with the right format, the right chassis. Make your website Google canonical compliant. If your site’s built on a different platform, heaven help you. And heaven’s gonna need to help you because Google doesn’t like it. And that’s what we do as part of our business coaching program. We can help you fix your website right away. Now the second variable that you wanna be very aware of, if you wanna get to the top of Google search engine results, is you have to have the most mobile compliance. The most mobile compliance. When we come back from the break we’re gonna get more into mobile compliance and what that looks like. We’d actually be happy to do a mobile compliance test or a checkup for you. So if you just email us to info at Thrivetimeshow.com. Email us your contact information and your website to info at Thrivetimeshow.com. We’d be happy to do a free diagnostic exam on your website to tell you what you’re doing well and what’s wrong with it. Right? We’ll be happy to do that for you. Also, Chuck, we’re giving away a lot of free stuff today. What if you’re listening right now, Chuck, and you’re saying to yourself, you know, I want a free printer. I would like a free laser copier. By the way, we have multiple of these copiers in our Thrive Time Show offices. Yeah. And I want to save both time and money on getting my office and printer supplies. Chuck, how can our listeners benefit not only one of our show sponsors, but themselves, my friend? So, it’s also owned business by the name of Onyx Imaging. They’re your one-stop business shop for all your business needs, Steve Currington. You can check them out at onyximaging.com. But right now, if you buy your printer supplies and office supplies and use them for printer service, they’re going to give you a free copier printer at no charge, okay? What is it, Chubb? Did you just say… Surely you can’t be serious. Wait, does that print? I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley. And copy. And copy? Print your copier for free. All you gotta do is buy it. They price match, they have online ordering. Where can I get this? Same and next day delivery. Go to onyximaging.com or call them at 918-627-6611. 918-627-6611. Onyximaging.com. Uh, Chump, you know, hooked on Onyx works for me and you know they fight see a broad to get a boody active at the leg down a smack on the actual not exhibiting that that is not their slogan that’s not what they say but check it out on its imaging dot com once again it’s onyx imaging dot com and money today make sure you never miss a broadcast by signing up for the Thrive Time Show podcast. And back to a show that’s cooler than the other side of the pillow. It’s the Thrive Time Business Coach Show. Instead of hoping, we should be getting ready to start. Time to face the rising tide. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. All right, Drive Nation, you have started from the bottom of the Google Search Engine ranks. And you want to get your website to the top of these search engine results. I’d encourage you to get out a pen and a pad and get ready as we enter into the Search Engine Optimization Lab. On the first part of today’s show, we had the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of search engine optimization for dummies on the show. And now we’re breaking down what he’s been teaching into very actionable steps for all the listeners out there. So step number one, you’ve got to convert your website to WordPress. You just have to do it. Quit screwing around, not doing it. I don’t care how much money you…Chubb, how often do you hear people say, I just finished building a site and I’ve spent a ton of money and I built it on this particular platform and I don’t want to switch it to WordPress? All the time. But Clay, I just built this awesome triple-sized billboard in the middle of the woods behind your house out here. It’s right…I gotta keep it. I’ve got to… No one can see it. Yeah, that’s the problem. So it’s unfortunate and it happens but that’s just part of doing business. You’ve got to build a search engine compliant website now. Right now. You’ve got to start now. Build it in WordPress. If you want our team to help you. We don’t do just one-off projects. We have 160 clients. That’s all we do. We work with a client and with business coaching, we also tackle their search engine, their web, their graphic design, their print pieces, their videography. We do it all. It’s a turnkey system. We don’t do just stand-alone websites. Hey, Clay, did I tell you about my new hot rod? No. It’s custom. It has no wheels. Nice. It’s beautiful, though. It’s beautiful. It looks great. It just doesn’t have wheels. I just had them on purpose, not put wheels on it so nobody can see it. That’s kind of like having a website that can’t be found. It might look nice, but it won’t go anywhere. Okay, so now what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to have the most mobile compliance. Now your site has to work well in mobile because this just in from our home office. Steve are you aware of this? Most people today are using smartphones. Shut it. No I’ve actually been out and to the airport I went to the park to the mall and in all instances I’ve noticed that people are carrying these smartphone devices. Every single person. And they’re on them all the time. What? Even people going out to eat. People walk into a fountain or something because they’re on their phone. I wouldn’t doubt it. They’re using a smartphone. That’s what I do the other day. I walk into the door. It’s so funny. Bam, right into the… That’s one of my favorite things. Yeah, so I would just say this is people are always using their smartphones and they’re always on Google and they’re always searching for the products and services that they are looking to buy. They’re looking for the answers to the problems they have. And so I just want to give you some examples there, Thrive Nation, of people you could check out there. If you type in Tulsa Mortgages, you’re going to find Steve Currington. He’s obviously on today’s show, but you’re going to find his website there in the search results. If you type in Tulsa Cookies, you’re going to find Barbie Cookies. So again, this is a real system that works, and you’re going to generate a ton of business doing it. But I don’t think a lot of people take the time to realize how much of a game-changing thing this could be in your life if you do get to the top of search engine results. And so we had one of our thrivers, we like to have them on the show when possible, stop by the studio. And I asked them if they’d be willing to hop on the show and share about how much they’ve grown as a result of implementing the proven systems that we teach. Ladies and gentlemen, this is our interview with Aaron Antus, the marketing director for Oklahoma’s now largest home building business. Hi, I’m Aaron Antus with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them. And I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes. And then I met Clay, and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing $800 million in sales over a 15-year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of salespeople for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. And, I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually in a four-month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us, and it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I’ve found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town, and so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35-year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us and I know if you give them a shot I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1800% increase in our internet leads going from 10 a month to a hundred and eighty a month. That would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it because we sure have it. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show on Talk Radio 1170. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the special edition, the Bruce Clay edition, of the Search Engine Optimization Conversation. Bruce Clay is the father of the search engine optimization industry. He was on the earlier part of today’s show. If you’re just tuning in on the radio and you missed the earlier segments, go to thrivetimeshow.com, click on the podcast button and look for this interview with Bruce Clay. Bruce Clay is the father of the search engine optimization industry, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, and we are now, as we wrap up today’s show, we’re breaking down the big four variables, the big action steps that every single listener, and that includes you. You need to take, if you want to make the amount of money that you want to make. And then also to provide more and more proof this is not a a charlatan thing. We’re providing facts so you know this is not fiction. We’re giving you examples, testimonials, I mean everything is cited. You can find all of this at Thrivetimeshow.com. Click on the podcast button. So we’re talking about variable number one. You’ve got to fix today. You’ve got to convert your website to a Google canonically compliant website. You have to switch your website today over to WordPress. Stop not switching over to WordPress. What the crap is going on? Why would you listen to a show about growing your business and then not take the action steps? I don’t understand it. The other thing that’s crazy to me whenever we get pushback on this idea is that a lot of people out there are always looking for that automated solution. This is actually it. It normally doesn’t exist, but WordPress, they automatically update. You don’t have to have a custom coder. You don’t have to have somebody just working on your website 24-7. WordPress does a lot of that for you, and that’s kind of the point. So step number one, switch to a WordPress-based website and use the Yoast plugin. Y-O-A-S-T. Y-O-A-S-T. Use the Yoast plugin for WordPress. Two, make sure your website is mobile compliant. How do I know if my website is mobile compliant? Just email us to info at thrive timeshow.com. Send us a link to your website and your contact info and my team will run an exhaustive diagnostic test on your website to see what’s going on and we can help you. Now the third, the third variable. Steve, you’ve got to get verifiable Google reviews? Why do you have to do that if you want to optimize your website, your local small business? Why do you have to do it? Well, it’s part of the components of what Google looks at when you’re ranking in the local search results. And so if you’re trying to rank locally for any term, the more reviews you have coupled with the canonical compliance of your website, coupled with the content on your website, will help you rank. Furthermore, recently, just like in two of our different markets, I got phone calls from people who said they found us and read our reviews. And that’s why they called us. For mortgages? Yeah. I had a realtor call me that said… It was for pet puppies. It was… I mean, Total Lending Concepts, you’re a mortgage company. Those people aren’t familiar. You have a location in Tulsa, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Alamosa, Missouri. What’s the website, Steve? What’s your website? SteveCurrington.com. So they can go there to learn more about you. Our Tulsa listeners out there looking for a mortgage. It’s a real company. And you’ve got real clients as a result of them really finding you in Google, Chuck. Yeah, and the importance of the Google reviews is that the map shows up above the organic listings. Like, it’s at the top of the page. You want to get more reviews in your competition, just show up on that map. Can I continue piling on? Please, pile on. According to Forbes, 88% of people read Google reviews before attending your church service. What? Before attending your seminar. What? Before buying something. Before 88% of consumers trust online reviews more than a personal recommendation now. Mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. Absolutely mind-blowing. So another another deep thought is Google wants to make sure that only sites that are relevant come up top. So it’s their way to vet to make sure that you’re not a scammer. Right. Because they’re very hard to get Google reviews. So you need to get Google reviews, objective Google reviews, from your ideal and likely buyers. And last thing, since we’re piling on here, this is like the thing as the business owner, you literally have the most control over. You can work with us at the Thrive Time Show to optimize your website and everything, but you and your team can go get Google reviews and it will absolutely move the needle. You know what I want to do? I want to brag on one of our listeners out there, and I want to play a testimonial from Keith, who proudly served our country in the United States military, and who now owns a company called Witness Security. Yeah, Can I Get a Witness? He and his son Tyler have diligently been asking for objective reviews. They’ve been writing content. They’ve reached out to us after a workshop. They asked us to convert their site to WordPress. And they’re now bringing in more deals than they’ve ever brought in before in their entire life. So without any further ado, back to our interview, our testimonial here from Can I Get a Witness, Witness Security, Keith and Tyler. My name is Keith Schultz and my company is Witness Security here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For the past 18 months that we’ve been working with Clay, our growth was averaging pretty close to 10,000 a month on a regular basis. Shortly thereafter, we doubled that to close to 20,000, and now we’re close to 40,000 on a regular basis every month. Clay has helped us increase our sales in every aspect when it comes to the calls that come in to our business, helping us to hire people to be able to do that and follow a good script, setting up the appointments and how we do them when we go into the appointment, the sales pitch and how we do it, you know, and then from then on forth, just the SEO and everything he’s done has increased our sales exponentially. Clay has helped us grow our business in the aspects of individuals, you know, how to hire people, how to manage people, how to necessarily organize our business, how to structure, you know, the functioning of our business. Though we’ve been in business for close to nine years at that time. Clay has revamped everything we do, you know, to a much more better operational business than what it ever was before. Working with Clay is a little bit different than what you would find in most. You know, Clay pushes you to the point you get out of your comfort zone. And as long as you continue to do what he asks you to do, you will continue to grow. But if you don’t, then you won’t. We heard about Clay Clark on the radio. My son heard it on the radio and had been listening to it for a couple of weeks and said I ought to listen to it. Gave him a call and within a day or so, Clay gave me a call and we came in for an interview. He’s helped us in our search engine optimization by helping us with the actual Google ratings when it comes to being placed on the map as well as organically so that when people are searching in a variety of different words, we always pop up on multiple locations on the first page. That of which he did, it’s a long process, but it works very well. Google how their algorithms work, it doesn’t change in what he does. We’re always on top. Clay has restructured everything we did when it comes to selling the security systems. You know, being a local company, we do things quite a bit different. And by doing so and restructuring everything he did in the nine years that I was in business, you know, trying to do it on my own, he came up with a package deal and within less than ten minutes and revamped everything we do. If you’re looking for coming to Clay Clark for asking them to help you grow your business, I can guarantee it’ll be a success if you follow through with what he says. You know you have to follow through with what he says in order to make it work. And so you have to come to the table making sure that you’re going to do what he said. Be teachable and you will be successful. But Chuck what if I sell pizzas and I live in Florida. Will search engine optimization work for me too? Absolutely. And so now, without any further ado, yet another testimonial coming in hot from beautiful and sunny Florida. Hi, this is David Trisha Rich coming to you from Sallie Beach, Florida. I’m about to list a few of the wins we’ve had since we started with Pry 50. We’ve completed group interviews, we’re fully staffed, we’ve received over 100 Google reviews to increase our Google rating, and we now have more money in the bank than we have ever had. Thanks to the thrive coaches. Thank you, good night. Now Chuck, what happens though if I’m a person who makes fresh baked cookies? Will search engine optimization work for me? Freshly baked will work for you. Well, without any further ado, back to a testimonial video from Barbie Cookies. This year’s sales for this week. So this is the same week last year. Do you see the difference? What is that? I can’t really tell. One is… Michael, can you… Jason, can you kind of pull this end maybe? Just so you can see it. Kind of pull it that way. Let’s get the length. I can’t tell without the length. It’s hard to tell. Look at that. Okay. So that was last year’s sales. And the total is a mere $4,711.73. Same week, this year, 2015. The total is, read it Michael. $11,313.50. Oh, boom! There it is! What? Awesome! Unbelievable! Thrive Nation, search engine optimization works, but to quote the incredible Maya Angelou, nothing works unless you do. So if you have a functional mind, now is the time to become aggressive and proactive about your search engine optimization. You can begin the conversation by going to thrivetimeshow.com today and booking your tickets to the next in-person Thrivetimeshow workshop or you can continue hanging out at the bottom of the internet where you go to bury things Oh, if you kill somebody hide them at the bottom of page two on the internet search results because nobody nobody will find the body Thrive Nation, that’s my encouraging word. And without any further ado, let’s wrap this show up my friends three two one Three, two, one, boom! Matt Klein, according to the U.S. Debt Clock, I’ll pull it up real quick here. I don’t tell people about the U.S. Debt Clock to depress anybody, but if you go to usdebtclock.org, they track the U.S. debt. They also track how many people are self-employed. So they track how many people are self-employed. And in a country of 330 million Americans approximately, you only have about 9.5 million people, 9.5 million Americans that choose to become self-employed, which is not a lot. So if there’s 330 million people watching today’s show, that’s like 3.5% of the viewing population that would become an entrepreneur. Think about it, in a country of 330 million Americans, only 9.5 million are self-employed. Now, of those who do become self-employed, according to Inc. Magazine, 96% of those people will fail. What? Yeah, according to Inc. Magazine, I’m not trying to depress anybody, according to Inc. Magazine, 96% of businesses will fail, and you only have 3.5% or so that even try to become self-employed anyway. So the question I have is, why do virtually all small businesses fail by default when most franchisees succeed? Why is it that franchisees succeed by default, more franchisees succeed, exponentially more franchisees succeed than the person who starts the average small business? Matt Klein, welcome to the Threat Time Show. How are you, sir? I am doing awesome. How are you? Matt, what is… I’m doing great, man. I want to ask you, why do small businesses fail by default so much more than a franchisee? Because the infrastructure that they run their business on moves too fast for them to actually keep up, right? It could be technological advances when it comes to marketing. It’ll fly right by them by the time they realize that all their competitors have leapfrogged them. Or it could be that they grew a little bit as a small business, but they didn’t get any of their systems in place to be able to handle their growth. So as they grow, they start getting less and less efficient. They start seeing that their employees are not as capable. They start seeing that they’re missing the ball. Maybe their accounts receivable goes through the roof, right, and their costs go. So if you look at like an Oxifresh, the moment you step into the life of a franchise, the infrastructure is set, the marketing is in place, the cleaning system’s already there. You’re actually utilizing tools that are already set and that have history of proven success. If you’re a small business owner and you’re the one responsible, you do have to try to create that while trying to grow your business. And most people, when they start a business, they’re good at something. They’re either good at sales or they’re good at management or they might have a really unique product, but they’re typically never good at all three of those things. You know, I talked to a guy this weekend, great guy, great guy, and he’s talking about scaling his business. And I was using you guys as an example. I mean, you guys at this point, if you go to Google and you type in carpet cleaning quotes, Oxifresh, I mean, folks, this is not my opinion. If you go to Google and you type in carpet cleaning quotes, not just in Tulsa, not just in your particular state, Oxifresh is one of the highest rated and most reviewed carpet cleaning businesses on the planet. In fact, you are the highest reviewed and most reviewed carpet cleaning business on the planet with 298,731 reviews. Could you imagine folks what it would be like to try to compete with Oxifresh in a local market where the local Oxyfresh owner already has a proven system and process in place. And meanwhile, you’re trying to grapple with and nail down your marketing, your processes, your systems. Matt, talk about just the competitive advantage it gives you to start off with the Oxyfresh brand systems ready to go from the very beginning. Yeah, a lot of people call, not a lot. There’s some people that will call me and say, well, I listen to what you say and it all sounds good, but why wouldn’t I do this on my own? And my answer to that is, I think you should if you’re confident. And once you’ve got your business name established, you’ve got your color scheme for your logo, and you know what you’re actually going to provide for the industry that’s going to be different than what everybody else is doing, call me. Because that could take three to six months, right? So it seems simple when you have a fully functioning scheduling center answering the calls. But what people don’t think about is the fact that each one of those reps have been trained for two to three weeks on the language of the industry, how to actually use the software. And then you think about the software, the software took 15 years to build, right? It’s completely customized to what we’re doing, right? You think about the cleaning system, it’s been evolving for 20 years, right? So the benefit of this business is that we’ve gone through all of the hard times, there’s still gonna be some, but we’ve gone through all the trials and tribulations and failed attempts at running a good business. We didn’t just wake up one day and say, we need to have it this way. We went through a lot of different processes, a lot of different trial and error to figure out that this is the way to do this, and that’s the way to do that. Because there’s no small business, I don’t think, that when they start the company, they have it all figured out. They have to have enough runway and enough money to go through enough problems to figure out what they’re doing wrong so they can fix it. Every problem comes with an actual cost associated to it, whether it’s time or actual money. Now, Matt, on part one of today’s show, we talked about optimizing your website. That’s something you don’t have to do if you’re in an Oxifresh. If you’re in an Oxifresh business, you don’t have to optimize your website. But on part one of today’s show, we talked about how to optimize a website for all of our listeners out there that don’t have a franchise. I mean, Matt, just that right there could take you, I’m not kidding, if you’re a startup, that could take you 40 to 80 hours a week just of you, your personal time optimizing a website. But yet at Oxifresh, you have a team. I mean, you have web developers, you have brand developers. So A, you already have the systems in place, but B, you have a whole team. If you’re a small business owner trying to reinvent the wheel, you got to become a website expert. You got to build a website, optimize the website. You got to stay on top of the Google search engine domination strategies. Talk about how much turnkey search engine optimization strategy is included with the purchase of an Oxifresh franchise. Yeah, the entire environment, right? I mean, it’s not just that when I became a franchise I had a website. It’s that I had a website that was connected to my Google pages, and then my Google pages and my website were connected to all my directories, which are like Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, all these things that I need to be involved in so I don’t get dinged by these referral companies. But then also, without any of that, I still have what’s called search engine optimization where if you type in certain things about our industry my business still shows up right so I get to go to the front of line I get to skip over all of those things that are going to take me a long time and money and I just get us to I just get to start getting reviews right we always talk about reviews on this show and how important they are what people don’t think about is you can’t even begin to get reviews if you don’t have all your stuff set up in the first place right have a Google page tied to an actual address it’s tied to a website, right? These things are overlooked. You can get a thousand reviews and still not show up anywhere in your area that you’re trying to do business in, right? And so it truly is a business out of a box. I mean, you’re saying that these folks should spend 40, 60 hours a week. How many people do you know, Clay, that can build a website appropriately? Yeah, it’s almost nobody. That’s why the, again, I could spend an entire show talking about each aspect of the business. The branding you guys have is tight. The marketing is tight. The search engine optimization is tight. The online ads are tight. The whole thing has been thought through. And it really is at this point turnkey. And my final question I have here for you, Matt, with the limited time we have, and I appreciate you working with my crazy schedule. If somebody goes to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash oxyfresh, and they do request information. If they do go to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash oxyfresh, they do, they click on the button to request info. What happens next? Yeah, so we’re gonna get that information, who you are, where you’re from, any notes that you decide to fill out. We’re gonna get an email, a text, and a phone call from us, just introducing you to OxyPresh. We’re gonna set up a 20 minute intro call, discuss who you are, what you’re trying to accomplish, if there’s some synergy with OxyPresh, try to answer some kind of top of mind questions for you. That first call is to build enough synergy where it makes sense for us to go in a way more in-depth screen share, to go through territory marketing, go through competition, all the things that are going to be important for you to understand what the value is to this business, where you live, and if that was something that might make sense to you. Again, Matt, this is an incredible opportunity. Oxifresh, there’s over 500 locations. How many more territories do you have? I mean, you’re in 550 territories. Do you have 100 territories left? Do you have 500 left? How many territories? We have about 300 territories in the US and probably another 150 or so in Canada. Got it. And again, how much money are we talking about to buy an Oxifresh? So upfront investments, 47,000. That gets your equipments, products, territory, seven-year agreement and training in Colorado. And then I want you to have about 25K in operating capital just available to you so you can start running your business without pinching pennies. That’s gonna cover things like insurance, local marketing, monthly vehicle costs, payroll, gasoline, miscellaneous expenses. So I want you to have somewhere around like the 75, 80,000 all in, knowing that the upfront to us is 47. How much time does it require to learn to own an Oxifresh? If somebody does buy one from you, do they have to go to a year of training, six months of training? Are they going to boot camp? Are you shipping them off to a foreign country to learn the systems? What are you doing? We go in office training here in Colorado and then followed by 30 to 45 days of kind of screen shares, working with our team. You’re back home and you’re just working with our team, getting your business up, getting your vendors set up, getting all the marketing ready to launch. So in-person five days or so, about 30 to 45 days of just things that need to get done before we can actually launch your business when you get back home. Matt Klein thank you so much for your time brother I really do appreciate you and I’ll harass you next week. All right thank you. See you guys. Bye bye. JT do you know what time it is? 410. It’s it’s Tebow time in Tulsa, Russia baby. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma during the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th, 2024. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 2-Day Interactive Thrive Time Show Business Growth Workshop. Yes, folks, put it in your calendar this December, the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the Thrive Time Show 2-Day Interactive Business Growth Workshop. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. What year were you born? 1995. Dude, I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old. And a lot of people have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field. And off the field, the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now, the big question is, JT, how does he do it? Well, they’re going to have to come and find out, because I don’t know. Well, I’m just saying, Tip Teeva is going to teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Folks, I’m telling you, if you want to learn branding, you want to learn marketing, you want to learn search engine optimization, you want to learn social media marketing. That’s what we teach at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive workshop. If you want to learn accounting, you want to learn sales systems, you want to learn how to build a linear workflow, you want to learn how to franchise your business, that is what we teach at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop. You know, over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to feature Michael Levine, the PR consultant of choice for Nike, for Prince, for Michael Jackson. The top PR consultant in the history of the planet has spoken at the Thrive Time Show workshops. We’ve had Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, a company that creates apparel worn by celebrities all throughout the world. Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, has spoken at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshops. We have the guy, we’ve had the man who’s responsible for turning around Harley Davidson, a man by the name of Ken Schmidt. He has spoken at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshops. Folks, I’m telling you, these events are going to teach you what you need to know to start and grow a successful business. And the way we price the events, the way we do these events, is you can pay $250 for a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. Yes! We’ve designed these events to be affordable for you and we want to see you live and in person at the two-day interactive December 5th and 6th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop. Everything that you need to succeed will be taught at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Workshop December 5th and 6th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And the way we do these events is we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a question and answer session. So that wonderful people like you can have your questions answered. Yes, we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a 15 minute question and answer session. It’s interactive, it’s two days, it’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ve been doing these events since 2005 and I’m telling you folks, it’s going to blow your mind. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Thrive Time Show two day interactive business workshop is America’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshop See the thousands of video testimonials from real people just like you who’ve been able to build multi-million dollar companies watch those Testimonials today at thrive time show calm simply by clicking on the testimonials button right there at thrive time show calm You’re gonna see thousands of people just like you who’ve been able to go from just surviving to thriving. Each and every day we’re going to add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup, but I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? What do I do? How does it work? You just go to thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the business conferences button, and you click on the request tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you could afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that. I had to work for it. And I’m super grateful I came to a business conference. That’s actually how I met you, met Peter Taunton. I met all these people. So if you’re out there today and you want to come to our workshop, again, you just got to go to thrivetimeshow.com. You might say, well, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where is it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russia, Oklahoma. It’s supposed to be Tulsa, Russia. It’s, I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russia. I’m sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show and Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office and so it’s going to be packed. Who? You! You’re going to come. I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford. And we do have some select VIP tickets which give you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things. And those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop over 20 hours a business training we’re gonna give you a copy of my newest book the millionaires guide to becoming sustainably rich you can leave with a workbook you can leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company it’s practical it’s actionable and it’s T-Bow time right here in Tulsa, Russia get those tickets today at thrive timeshow.com again that’s thrive timeshow dot com. Hello I’m Michael Levine and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars and I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now, why would a man living in Hollywood, California, in the beautiful, sunny weather of L.A., come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put together an exceptional presentation, really life-changing. And I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine, I’ll see you in Tulsa. Thrive Time Show two day interactive business workshops are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops because we teach you what you need to know to grow. You can learn the proven 13 point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re gonna leave energized, motivated, but you’re also gonna leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge and they’re like, oh but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some 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 gonna be the best business workshop ever and we’re gonna give you your money back If you don’t love it We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see you And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you got to do is go to thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy in Kings Point, New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And of a special guest today, a definition of intelligence is if you agree with me, you’re intelligent. And so this gentleman is very intelligent. I’ve done this show before also, but very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts. And so Mr. Clay Clark is a friend of a good friend, Eric Trump. But we’re also talking about money, bricks, and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hour. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man, and there’s so many ways we could take this thing. But I thought, since you and Eric are close, Trump. What were you saying about what Donald, who is my age, and I can say or cannot say? Well, first of all, I have to honor you, sir. I want to show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorne, who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. He said, �Have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad?� I said, �No.� My father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. And I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner, to the investor. And I owe a lot of that to you. And I just wanted to take a moment to tell you, thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. And then I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump. But I just wanna tell you, thank you, sir, for changing my life. Well, not only that, Clay, you know, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. More than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say.