Ty Belknap's Blog

https://youtu.be/immcqo2ca-IListen to the PodcastThere’s one thing that’s probably about the last thing that we think about when we consider search engine optimization (SEO) for our web sites.

But it is no longer the last thing that we should be doing. As a matter of fact, it’s becoming more and more important, every day. That one thing is exactly what I’m talking about today, on Episode 67, of the SEO and more podcast.

Thank You! for being a part of this podcast. Do me a favor, give me a rating and a review on whichever podcast player you’re on, I appreciate it a great deal. The more ratings and reviews I get, the higher I get in the podcast search engines, the more people can find this. And that way you’re doing your part to help your fellow business owners.

There’s one thing, like I mentioned, that we really don’t think about when it comes to marketing and doing SEO on our websites and that one thing is hosting. Seriously, hosting.

Think about the last time you hosted a party, what did you wear? Was it business-formal or business casual? What kind of food did you have?

Of course, I’m not talking about hosting a party. What I’m talking about is web hosting. Where is your website located? Do you have a Wix website? Maybe it’s Square Pages. Maybe you have a custom website on custom hosting.

And what’s the difference between them? That’s exactly what I’m going to talk about today and why. I’ve talked about this before. Go back 10-15 years, I would have told my clients never in 10 years would you want a WordPress website. Because 10 years ago, WordPress did not work well with search engines; It just didn’t.

I could do a custom HTML website and get it on top of Google, Yahoo, Bing, whichever 110 times faster than a WordPress website and 100 times easier. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t any WordPress websites on page one of Google for keywords, but they were very few and far between. And the people who were trying to get WordPress site onto page one spent a huge amount of time doing it. It simply wasn’t worth it.

Things have changed a great deal from a few years ago. WordPress made some major changes. WordPress and most of the major themes are extremely SEO friendly now. I’d say it’s 90 to 95% as effective as custom HTML. So why do people do WordPress versus custom HTML? Custom HTML is so much more difficult to do. You might spend $1,500, doing a WordPress website. And at the same time, you’d be spending $8000-$9000 to do the same website using custom HTML. It’s just not worth it to do custom HTML sites anymore. That’s why 70% of the internet is WordPress. But maybe you don’t have WordPress, maybe you have a Wix website, or Square Pages. See Wix and Square Pages are like WordPress was about 10 years ago. The websites can look amazing.

I’ve seen Square Pages websites that I didn’t think Square Pages could do. They were amazing websites, but they still would have a very difficult time of getting very high in the search engines, simply because the back end Square Pages code; and Wix is like this as well. You can’t change that, you can’t manipulate it. So there’s errors in that coding that you can’t fix. And if you can’t fix it, the search engines are going to have a much more difficult time indexing that site.

That’s why we recommend WordPress so much.

No, I don’t recommend you going to wordpress.com and hosting it there. And again, this might change but right now wordpress.com has some pretty slow servers. That’s where the real question about hosting comes in because Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, all of the major search engines are starting to rank how high a website gets into search engines by how fast it loads.

That’s right, if your website looks beautiful, and people love it, but it loads slow, you could rank lower than your competitors. It’s that important. I’ve been doing a lot of research the last couple of months on this, and I’ve actually found out that I’m going to guess 60 to 85% of the websites let’s let’s use a scale of one to 1 to 100, meaning 1 is slower than a slug, 100 is faster than a rabbit, or a cheetah, whichever you choose.

The average website right now ranks about 45, unless you have a video on your website. If you have a video on the front page, you’re going to drop down to about 19 or 20. That’s terrible, which means the websites that even ranked 60 to 80 are going to be higher in the search engines than the average.

If you can get your web page speed to 90 – 100, you’re going to blow people away.

Yes, that does mean sacrificing some imagery, or maybe just some quality to the imagery. But a large part of that could simply be the company that you’re hosting with. Wix servers may be old. Square Pages servers may be old also, they may be hosting on an old server simply because it’s free. There’s no incentive for them to put your free website onto a faster server, which is why I recommend going to Koolwebhosting.com. Yes, that’s our hosting, that is fast hosting. You can go with one of the options that has higher monthly fees, which is around $15 a month. It’s not expensive.

I mean, that’s some seriously cheap SEO, isn’t it?

But if that makes your website faster, that’s worth it right there. You can do WordPress hosting there, but I highly recommend at koolwebhosting.com to do the cPanel hosting. There are a lot of places that do cPanel hosting, but you want places that have the faster servers and the faster connections. Koolwebhosting.com has very fast connections,

I have websites that rank 90 to 100 that are on those servers. My own websites are on those servers, I wouldn’t be doing this hosting if I didn’t trust it like that. But it doesn’t matter whether you go to koolwebhstong.com or somewhere else, you want to find out how fast your website is loading.

And if it’s not loading fast, there are two main steps that you can fix possibly yourself.

One, change your hosting. That’s going to be very important to look at how many images or if there’s a video on the site, and if there is lower the quality of the images. Yeah, they’re not going to look as good, but your site’s going to load a lot faster. Or get rid of that video and put an image there instead. Those are the two biggest things that you can do to fix that. But step one, of course, find out if your website is loading slow, go to Tysfreebook.com and download the workbook “Is your website search engine friendly?” One of the things in the workbook is to find out how fast your website is loading, you can find out yourself and it’s not going to cost you a penny to do so.

The post #67 – Hosting Your Web Site appeared first on Port Bell SEO.

Listen to the Podcast

Dr. Ty  00:00

Welcome to this episode of Easy SEO and More. I have another very special guest for you, Michael Buzinski, president and CMO of Buzzworthy Website Marketing. That’s right, he’s a competitor  and I’ve got him on my podcast.

He convinced me of this by sending me a copy of his awesome book, which I’m sure he’ll talk to you more about as well. He’s a lifelong entrepreneur, a digital marketer, thought leader, and best selling author. Dubbed a visionary marketer by the American Marketing Association.

Michael’s sole mission is to help entrepreneurs avoid the time drain and frustration of managing profitable digital marketing campaigns (I hate that too!). He has simplified digital marketing success with The Rule of 26, which happens to be the title of his book too. He is on a mission to double the website revenue of service-centric businesses across America.

Michael, thanks for being on SEO more. I appreciate it.

Buzz  01:00

Hey, thank you for having me. You know, it’s funny, because people are always asking, “why would you go on an other marketers show?” But there’s so much business out there, that even if you took all the people who actually do the services that we have, there would still be more than we can do. So yeah, I think the competition is always great.

Dr. Ty  01:19

I’ve tried to get a consortium of web and marketing people in the county where I live, and no one will do it, because they are afraid of the competition. Well, there’s only 60,000 businesses just in my county, right? So, I’ll just take 10%. Give me six 6000 of them, you can have the rest.

Buzz  01:43

If I have to take on 6000 clients I’d be like, Oh, my gosh.

Dr. Ty  01:47

exactly. I don’t know if I could do 600.

Buzz  01:51

Yeah, no, I had I had a creative agency that I broke up a few years ago. And we had 300 clients. And that was a lot.

Dr. Ty  02:00

Oh, yeah. For every for every four businesses that I take on, I have to hire someone anyway. So if I had 600 businesses, I don’t know if I could even manage the people.

Dr. Ty  02:19

Michael, the big thing about Easy SEO and More, as my listeners know, is I like to find the one thing that you think is most important for businesses to grow their marketing in today’s market. What would that one thing be for you?

Buzz  02:39

Right now, I think we are swinging into the age of the consumer. And no longer can businesses sit around and tout their benefits and features at people and talk at people. There’s so much choice now with the internet, that we really, as business owners have to take a look at our websites and start talking to our perfect clients, rather than trying to talk at anybody and everybody who will listen.

Dr. Ty  03:12

That sounds really interesting. How do you do that?

Buzz  03:15

Well, first, you got to identify who you want to do business with

(go to Port Bell Digital Academy, click on “Local SEO 101,” and do the first week’s training for free to learn more about identifying your perfect target market).

 Okay. So I, I focus on service based businesses. If you’re me, and you were a service based business like doctors, lawyers, dentists, medical… that kind of stuff,

You have a type of client that you enjoy working with the most, you really look forward to when they call you, you look forward to when you have meetings with them. And therefore, the process of you giving your service is actually more profitable.

And that’s what we call your profitable avatar, if you want to call it that. I just call it your most profitable clients. And if you could just work with those people, how happy of a business owner would you be?

But the problem is that a lot of us are so worried about losing business, that we’re willing to take on the nickel and dimers and shut down our bandwidth dealing with people who are going to suck the living energy out of us, and close the door, which basically closes the door on all the other people that we want to do business with. So if we get our marketing and our website, only talking to and attracting our perfect clients, our most profitable opportunities, we will get a lot more of those than the pitas that a lot of is just take at the beginning because what’s what pays the bills.

Dr. Ty  04:53

I like that a lot. In fact, it was probably about 10 years ago now, we had one client that dominated our income. They, they alone were almost 70%. And they were one of the biggest pitas I’ve known.

And we decided to fire them, but we did it what I call the polite way. We didn’t say we’re firing you, we just doubled our fee. And it wasn’t too long before they said, “we’re not paying this anymore,” which did not bother me at all. It was a very stressful environment, they would contact us like every week and just yell at us about things that even had nothing to do with us.

I needed to free up my stress level. And our business has actually grown a huge amount since we did that. And we more than filled that gap was when it initially happened.

Buzz  05:59

Well, I think you learned a lesson. Don’t have any one client be more than 1/12 of your income, that way you get you have some runway to make those decisions a lot faster.

I do a fractional CMO service, which gets pretty personal. I had a urologist sign up, and he wasn’t willing to give up his marketing. I had no idea why he hired me. I ended up firing him in eight weeks in. I had not known this before. We had talked like for a year, just getting to know him, but I couldn’t tell.

I have clients that I’ve had for 15 years that have been through three iterations of what my business is with me, because they know that I’m always improving my business, and I’m always improving my services.

So they get better every time. I get personal with some of my concierge clients, my “done for you” clients, but that one client, I would get this gut feeling right here in my sternum every time, every Friday at noon, when I had to talk to this guy. And he didn’t respect me as a marketer, or an expert.

He didn’t want to let go of anything. And then he would complain that everything was wrong. And I’m like, we haven’t even had this. He was complaining two weeks in, and I’m like, wait a second, we’re just onboarding.

It wasn’t long. And it was easy, you know, because he was so used to getting to pushing people around, that it was it was kind of weird, because it silenced him when I said, “Well, I’m done. I’m sorry, this is not working out. I won’t be servicing this this contract anymore.” And I never heard back from him, which was great; I’m good with that.

And onto your point, you have more energy, you can actually take on more clients, when you have the right clients. I again, if we can just bring it back full circle. If you have your website only talking in the language of the right client, the qualified prospect, if you will, then you will only attract those, so you will spend less time on the phone talking to tire kickers and plate lickers. And you will spend more time and have more time to talk to the people who will appreciate your service and appreciate your expertise and pay you what you’re worth.

Dr. Ty  08:40

I like that. It Real quick before we go. What do you think, if there were one, the one quick way of deciding how to make that change. This is just a normal website, normal company, been there for let’s say five years, or four years or so there. The website itself is newer. It’s got the newer stuff, but maybe still just talk about the benefits and the features a little bit more. What do you think could be one way for them to see to change; that one quick change that they could make?

Buzz  09:15

Okay, the quickest change is to take all of the “we’s,” “me’s” and “I’s” and turn them into “you.”

If you just started doing that, it will rewrite itself.

Dr. Ty  09:30

I like that a lot. Yeah. So turn it from what I’m about to what I could do for you.

Buzz  09:38

Or what is your situation? As a service-based business, you are doing one or two things; you are solving problems or achieving dreams for your clients. Period. End of story.

Okay, so only two things you’re going to do. So you start with their pain or their dream. “How wonderful would it be if you could have…” “Are you struggling with…” Okay, here at…, we help you so you can do this.

Or you don’t have to worry about this, right? A lot of you do that. Well, we work with you to do this for your… Right? Like, that’s fantastic.

You’re going to use we every once a while but use “yours” has to outnumber them like three to one. And if you if you write it, and it’s like you get the “we’s,” just rewrite it until you don’t have to have the “we’s.”

Buzz’s book, The Rule of 26, is available at Amazon. Click the link for more information.

You can contact Buzz by going to his web site, http://www.buzzworthy.biz.

The post #66 Michael “Buzz” Buzinski Interview appeared first on Port Bell SEO.

Listen to the PodcastGoogle, my business is gone. It’s Kaput, it is no more. That’s right businesses cannot be on Google anymore.

Welcome this special update from the Easy SEO and More podcast.

And no, of course, that’s not true. Of course, businesses are going to be on Google. But you may have gotten the email recently from Google that the Google My Business area is gone.

Well, that’s not exactly true either.

In fact, it’s easier than ever to edit and update your business listing on Google.

Just go to your Google Maps, type in your business name and location of your business (if you need to), just like you always used to.

There is one catch, you want to be sure to be logged into Google with the Gmail account you used when you created your business (just like you needed to do in the Google My Business area before). Once you find your business, all the information will be on the left side And right down below that it says “manage your business profile.”

So rather than going to Google my Business, or whatever they were going to call it because as some of you know, Google My Business has changed its name, what, seven times in the last five or six years?

This way, there’s no more trying to figure out where to go, what to do, what the current name is. You just go to Google Maps and edit your business listing.

This is just a quick update, I’ll do a full update here really soon. But for now, go to manage your business profile, which you’ll find on the left hand side, once you found your business. Everything else is exactly the same as it used to be with Google My Business.

You can upload videos and photos, you can change your hours of operation, your address, whatever you need to do to edit your business is right there.

Which means Yeah, it’s all just simpler than it was. Thanks, Google. There are some times where they make things a little bit more difficult, but this is actually simpler.

So special update from the Easy SEO and More podcast: Google My Business is gone. But again, Google’s just made it even simpler to be able to get to the information. I’m really glad they did that.

Stay tuned for a full update coming soon!

The post Special Update: Google My Business is Gone! appeared first on Port Bell SEO.

Hey, it’s spring update time here at Port Bell. And no, that doesn’t mean that we’re going around and kicking out all the dusty old stuff.Listen to Podcast

Don’t you hate when people have old marketing things sitting around, and they say we’re going to start giving this stuff away for free. They don’t tell you that it’s for free because it’s old.

As a matter of fact, our spring update is full of several for free brand new things right now.

In February, we launched an SEO 101 hybrid training that I’m really excited about. And we’re getting great feedback on it so far. If you go to Port bell.com, under the Services section, click on SEO Made Easy.

Now it doesn’t matter whether your company sells local, national or international, you always want to do local SEO first. If you do local, you’ll automatically do national and international and I’ve talked about that before, click here to read or listen to it.

SEO Made Easy is a hybrid training. Over a 90 day period of time, we go in and we do the really technical stuff, the stuff that you’d never want to do yourself. And you don’t have to. There’s a lot of technical stuff that only has to be done one time.

Then we teach you how to do the SEO parts that aren’t quite as technical. And we even show you how to set up your Google business listings, Bing business listings the whole nine yards.

We do this over a 90 day period of time, and it’s all for one flat fee. So click here to find out more about that. And yeah, that one does have a price to it.

But the next two things I’m going to talk to you about are absolutely 100% free. And the first one I am so excited about. We, meaning Mitch gray and myself, (Mitch Gray is the awesome author of the book, How To Hire and Keep Great People). Well, for the past two years, people have been almost storming down my door, asking me how to effectively hire remote workers. That’s been a tough thing, hasn’t it? It’s tough to figure out how to do that when all you’ve ever done is local hiring before.

I started hiring remote workers back in 2004, so I’ve been doing this for quite a while.

And I partnered with Mitch Gray because he wrote that book, How To Hire and keep great people. He has some really fantastic insights about how to do that.

Together, we did a brand new, completely 100% free seven-module training on how to hire remote workers, go to portbelldigitalacademy.com. Click on the How To Hire remote workers and you can get started today for free, seven full modules. It’s not module one and two are free, then you’ve got to pay all seven modules; the complete series completely free to you and just published in March of this year, so it’s all brand new stuff.

You may have downloaded my workbook Is Your Website SEO or Search Engine Friendly.

And click that link if you haven’t. Several hundred people have downloaded this workbook and I’ve gotten a lot of comments back that some of the information is a bit technical. They find the information very useful to see that there are problems with their website, but they don’t know what to do with those problems.

So I’m creating a five day email sequence for everybody that’s on my email list. And it will automatically happen for anybody that downloads a workbook after that day. I’m going to teach you what areas you can do when you have problems, what areas you may have to hire someone with, and what areas you may need to yell at someone with.

Since some of the areas could be a problem in the initial design of your website, you may have to have a conversation with your web designer. Some of the areas may not be your web designers fault, it’s just something that happened, or might even be something that they weren’t paid to do. And I teach you about what the different areas are.

And again, how to work in those areas to help your website get more search engine friendly. As soon as you sign up for that you’ll be put into the five day email sequence. This is all free again, download the workbook for free, you get the emails for free. I just want to give something to you to help you see what you might do. And if it is still too technical for you, click here to give me a holler. Contact us and I will see what I can do to help you out. Usually we can get it done within an hour or two at the most. If the errors aren’t too bad.

There are some errors that are so bad that you have to redesign your website. But isn’t it better to know that your website is having these problems then just sitting there and wondering why is nobody calling me? Why is nobody emailing me? Why is nobody coming to my website?

This way you can find out for yourself. So those three things are our spring update for Port Bell. The launch of the SEO one on one training, we’ve got companies going through it and they are loving it.

The post #65 Port Bell Spring Update appeared first on Port Bell SEO.

https://youtu.be/cdn0qbY_a4YListen to the PodcastI have been hearing something a lot lately and I just I have to get this off my chest. Do you mind if I rant for a minute?

As many of you know, I listen to other podcasts quite often, And I’ve been hearing more and more lately about how the new web 3.0 is now out.

You don’t have web 3.0? I’ll tell you what, send me a check to… actually, there’s no way to buy it (but a lot of people are trying to make you think that there is).

I’d like to know what smart person, what government official, who decided the day and the time that web 3.0 came into being?

Because, as far as I know, it’s still just the same web. It’s always been, hasn’t it? Yeah, there have been a lot of changes.

Let’s go back to web 2.0 when they were all about social media. You know what, let’s go back to web 1.0 In 1995. Oh, wait… No, web 1.0 was actually in the 1970s, maybe even the 60s when ARPANET was out. ARPANET was the first iteration of what we now know as the Internet. Government agencies would talk to each other (and some colleges got in on this) over this internet, which wasn’t even called the internet at that time. They’d have these bulletin board systems, and they would do log posts to each other. And that was how they would communicate back and forth; they would type log posts.

And then web 2.0 comes out in the early 2000s. And now we have social media.

And with social media, there’s all these bulletin board things where they’re doing log posts to each other.

(BTW, did you see it? In the 70’s they did bulletin board log posts. Today we do blog posts – Bulletinboard LOG posts. Yep, it’s exactly the same concept as it was 50 years ago).

Wait a minute. So in the 2000s, web 2.0 comes out with this social media stuff. And it’s really the same thing they were doing in the 70s. But now it’s web 2.0. Yeah, we could upload images, videos and audio in those blog posts; I’m doing my podcast on a blog post for you.

These log posts came out in the 70s, it’s nothing new in the 2000s. but they were saying that social media was new.

No, it’s not. Social media came out with Prodigy and America Online in the 90s.

So Web 3.0. This is this is a big thing that gets me. They say that web 3.0 is all about cryptocurrency, and it’s all about minting coins. And you can have coins that you can buy from different businesses.

So the coins purchase you interest in a business.  Wait a minute, isn’t that what the stock market’s been doing since the 1900s?

So basically, web 3.0 means that you can buy these coins in a business that’s not a C-Corp, it’s not a business that actually has real stocks in the stock market so there’s no accountability, there’s no SEC overlooking it to make sure that everything goes right.

You can just buy these coins in this business, hoping that maybe it’ll do something and hoping they’ll even do what they say that they’re going to do.

Let’s back this up a bit; Let’s go back to Bitcoin. Now, y’all know that nobody knows who started Bitcoin, right? There’s a group of people they’re guessing in what it was Iceland or New Zealand or something like that. I’m not even sure if we even know the country of origin right now.

But there’s a group of people that started it, and now it’s worth what, $40,000 per coin?

You know that these people, at any given time, could just take all that money and shut it down. There’s no government oversight in Bitcoin, and all these companies that are minting these “coins,” they’re digital coins of course, they’re not real but they’re they call it minting.

All these companies that are minting their coins bring in all this money because people are buying the coins.

And at any time the company could say, “we don’t want to do this anymore; Let’s just shut the coins off and keep the money,” because there’s no government oversight on all this “coin minting.”

Welcome to web 3.0 everybody.

Thanks for listening to my rant. I’m Dr. Ty. Of course, as always, click here to contact me if you want to tell me how stupid I’m being in saying this. Or even if you agree with me, I’d love to hear from you. Either way, Y’all have a great day. I’ll see you next time.

The post #64 Welcome to Web 3.0 appeared first on Port Bell SEO.

https://youtu.be/USc1uywLd1YListen to the PodcastIt’s time to stare at that blank page and figure out what you’re going to write, because today is the number one way to do content marketing for 2022.

Today is number one, and this one really is the most important, so we’re going to get right into it.

I have talked about five ways to do content marketing in 2022.

Several weeks ago, I started with webinars and videos.

Number four was ebooks, blogs and emails and today is going to be a little bit about that as well.

Number three was all about infographics, how to use infographics to not only engage your customers but how they can work with SEO and marketing as well.

Last week, I talked about podcasts, either doing your own podcast or interviewing on someone else’s.

And this week, it’s all about writing. Yes, that dreaded writing; writing content, looking at that blank page and not being able to figure out what you’re going to put on it.

It is the most important thing because, if you think about it, let’s say the internet becomes perfect and Google, Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, and all the search engines, when you do a video, they automatically transcribe it, and they know exactly what the video is saying.

What are they transcribing that to? Text.

Let’s say they automatically transcribe all the podcasts and they do it automatically, and it works fantastic. What are they transcribing those podcasts to? Text.

Text runs the internet. I’ve been on the Messages and Methods podcast three times now. Toby and Shelly run that podcast and I really liked them.

Toby mentioned something that I really think is so true. I usually say that content is king. And he happened to mention that he thinks that content isn’t just king, content is necessary. I say content is king meaning that content is at the top, it’s the most important, it’s the ruling authority.

But when you say content is necessary, that means it’s one of the building blocks, one of the cornerstones that you have to rely on to build everything else up from and I agree with him.

Today content isn’t King, content is necessary; it has to be done.

Let’s talk about some ways to get that content done. The first thing you need to do is to figure out what keywords your potential clients are using to find your business; that is extremely important. I’ve done several episodes on keywords (#44, Using Low-Volume Keywords, and #19, The Stingray and other Long-Tail Keywords are two of them). Keywords are very important. However, keywords aren’t going to help if you don’t know who your target audience is.

And I also have a free training on how to find your target audience. Click here to go to Port Bell Digital Academy. Click on “Local SEO 101” training, the first lesson, Finding Your IG (your target audience) is free.

 So listen to the podcasts on doing your keywords and watch the free training on how to find your ideal target audience.

Once you have those two down, the keywords, think of them as almost as bullet points for your content. You can take those bullet points if you’re not a writer… First off, if you’re not a writer, become one, at least a little bit of one, write once a week; sit down once a week and just write something (if nothing else, write about what you learned that day and what obstacles you overcame).

If you have your list of keywords, write content about each of those keywords, whether or not you ever use it. Practice makes better. I know the saying is practice makes perfect, but there’s nothing perfect in this world. Practice makes better though.

So the more you write, the more you get used to writing, the more comfortable you are with writing, the better you’re going to be. But here’s the trick at the beginning. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you probably know what I’m going to say; jump onto Upwork or fiverr.com. Jump onto either one of those, hire a freelancer and get them to write the content for you (or contact us to help you with that. We will work with the freelancers for you).

What they give you will not be perfect, and is not going to be in your words. In fact, I would go with one of the least expensive freelancers. Go to Fiverr, give them $5 or $10 to write 1500 words and find one that does not do the best job because you don’t want one that does the best job.

 It’s a lot easier to edit and change words that are already there and put it into your own words than it is to look at a blank screen and try to figure out what to write.

So hire an inexpensive freelancer and then rewrite it yourself from there. That’s my big tip for today. But like I said, content is necessary: It is one of the building blocks of your marketing strategy.

In fact, I think I just might do a series of episodes on building blocks, because there’s another one that’s come up that I want to talk about in a future episode about hosting.

People don’t ever think about hosting, they just grab whatever hosting they can find, usually the cheapest we can find, right?

It’s just hosting. But hosting is becoming extremely important. It’s another one of those building blocks that is absolutely necessary for your marketing strategy. But I’ll talk about that in another episode soon. business person that you know, that could benefit from this content and send this to them right away today.

This is Dr. Ty. Thanks a lot, y’all. Take care

The post #63 Content Marketing for 2022 #1 – All About Words appeared first on Port Bell SEO.

Port Bell is CELEBRATING 20 YEARS IN BUSINESS!! And part of that celebration is a month of prize drawings,

OVER 61 prizes available!

April marks us being in business for 20 years! and we are randomly doing prize drawings almost every day throughout the month of April! You may get free access to our DIY SEO training (a $498 value!), a free autographed copy of Dr. Ty’s book, Timeless SEO Secrets, a free 8gb flash drive, or other things!

Our first set of drawings will be on April 1 (no joke!), so don’t wait to join the club!

https://www.portbell.com/join-the-club/

The post Win One of Over 60 Prizes! appeared first on Port Bell SEO.

https://youtu.be/gFgLQNQdNlUListen to the PodcastPodcasts.That’s right, today on the Easy SEO and More podcast, I’m to talk to you about podcasts.

I’ve been going over the five ways to do content marketing in 2022.

We took a break last week and had an interview with Toby Younis of the Messages and Methods podcast (another podcast!). And I’m glad that I did that, because in the talk that we had, he talked a lot about what businesses need to do to grow in 2022.

Click here to listen to, watch or read that podcast, or listen to it on your favorite podcast player, or even click here to to to YouTube and watch it.

#2 in my five ways of doing content marketing in 2022 is all about podcasts.

Remember, these aren’t in order of importance, although number one next week is the most important, this isn’t the second most important; it’s just another great way to do content marketing in 2022.

And there are two ways of doing podcasts. You can do a podcast yourself, just like I do the easy SEO and more podcast, or you can interview on other people’s podcasts.

Whichever way you do it though, you want to get a transcript of the podcast and use it.

Of course, if you are being interviewed on someone else’s podcast, you will want to get permission to get a transcript of their podcasts. Ask if either they have a transcript or do it yourself (with permission).

And of course, link to them, because you’ll link to their podcast with your transcript, and their podcast will link to you, so you’ve got that crosslinking going on. Search engines love that kind of thing.

But whether you interview with someone else or you do your own podcast, you still want to make sure to try to find the right keywords to use. And those keywords are the keywords for your target audience.

That’s going to be huge.

I’ll talk more about keywords next week, But I’ve also done episodes specifically on keywords in the past (#44, Using Low-Volume Keywords, and #19, The Stingray and other Long-Tail Keywords are two of them).

But here’s the big thing: Let’s say the internet works 10 times better than it does today, and every video that’s out there actually gets transcribed perfectly by Google or Bing or Yahoo or whoever it might be. And every podcast out there gets transcribed perfectly. When they’re transcribing those podcasts, what are they doing? They’re turning them into text. When you search on your cell phone, mobile phone, whatever you want to call it, and you speak into it and you say, “give me directions to 123, or give me directions to home from here,” or whatever it might be. That phone is transcribing what you say to text.

Everything on the internet gets transcribed to text. The thing is, currently it’s not perfect, so search engines don’t rely on transcriptions. But even when they do use it, they’re transcribing everything to text. So, when you do your podcasts, transcribe them. Each of my podcast is transcribed to my website, and it helps with our search engine rankings. You don’t have to do your own podcast. You can start interviewing on other people’s podcasts if you want, but try to get a transcription of the text of that podcast so that you can use it on your website as well.

I’ll talk to you next week with the number one way to do content marketing in 2022.

The post #62 Content Marketing for 2022 #2: Podcasts appeared first on Port Bell SEO.

Listen to Podcast

Dr. Ty  00:05

Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode number 61 of the Easy SEO and More podcast. I today have Toby Younis of the Messages and Methods podcast, they actually do a live cast every week. Now you probably know, I don’t do a live cast, I record these. But they do a live cast every week on YouTube. And they turn that into a podcast. But not only that, they teach people how to do that themselves, which is pretty awesome, I think. Hey, Toby, welcome to Easy SEO and More. How are you doing today?

Toby Younis  00:39

I’m doing great. And thanks for the invitation. I look forward to being here with you, Ty.

Dr. Ty  00:43

I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, ever since I was on your podcast, what about a month ago, I’d say. That was a great time. In fact, if I’m not mistaken in another week we’re recording a kind of a round table as well. So I guess I’ll be joining you again in another week or so.

Toby Younis  01:01

January 19, we are having a panel that we’ve invited six guests to we divided it up since Shelley and I are male and female partners. We divided out between three males, three females and they’re all experts in various areas. You of course, we rely for your expertise we rely upon for your expertise in SEO. And we’re going to talk about digital marketing in 2022. Because none of us expected to be in this position in this year. And distance; conversations distance, selling distance, producing, it’s really an amazing time in that sense. And we want to see what they think about it. That’s January 19. And we look forward to you being on the panel.

Dr. Ty  01:45

I definitely agree with you about what’s going on in 2022. We did this two week lockdown in March of 2020. That extended almost through half of 2021. Coming back, it’s almost a wild west again, especially the internet. The internet seems to be redefining itself every couple of months right now, which is I agree with you is very exciting. For some people, it’s very stressful. I love it. I love change like that.

Toby Younis  02:15

We have always been very good at pivoting and adopting whatever the changes are to our benefit. And we’ve been live streaming since 2014. So conceptually speaking, the idea of interacting with people and now our guests, our customers, etc, via this medium is something that that we’re completely comfortable with. And we’ve built a studio around that, that was the expectation when we built the studio.

Dr. Ty  02:47

That’s fantastic. And before we started recording, we were talking about a couple of things. But as you know, on the Easy SEO and More podcast we’re trying to give my listeners one really good actionable thing to go away with, what would you like to tell them about?

Toby Younis  03:06

Wow, I suppose there’s two angles that I can take on it because they both produce revenue for us.

So the first, of course, these are messages and methods.
We have a strategy that starts with a live stream.
Then we leverage that live stream into podcast.
That podcast is distributed to 10 Different podcasting platforms, including anchor, Spotify, Apple, Google, etc, all the big ones.
In addition to that, we transcribe every one of our live streams, and we turn that into a blog post
Then we turn it into short form products that are called Video grams and audio grams, messages that are under 60 seconds that are posted to things like Instagram and Tik Tok. And now Twitter, we’re now live streaming to Twitter. So Twitter is accepting a live stream now.
So what we’re doing is leveraging that one live stream into a broad variety of content types so that we can, my partner calls it “have a social media storm.” It’s an increase in your presence on social media that generates activity. And we always follow up with some sort of freebie, as you recommend, that collects email information.

And the email is our way of staying interactive with our clients. And what we’re trying to do is create as much activity, as much distributed content, as much leveraged content as we possibly can without spending 80 hours a week doing it, and we think we’ve mastered that.

So that’s one stream of revenue because that results in clients that either go to one of our classes or boot camps, or we actually end up producing their shows for them.

And we produce for other people’s shows every week. And they pay us for that.

And then the second one is residual income that comes from a relationship with Amazon. And, like everyone, I started with an Amazon account that was just a personal account.

Eventually, like everyone, I started paying for the prime because I was ordering enough things, especially in the past three years, that the Amazon Prime freedom from shipping expenses was an investment, and it’s repaid itself dozens of times.

But along the way, Amazon started paying me and said, What about a shop, you do a lot of shopping, why don’t you have a shop. So we were able to start a shop that has not only some of the items we use and recommend.

Part of the shop is called Toby’s favorites, things that I buy that I like, and then there’s one called Shelley’s favorites, things that she buys that she likes. And then there’s the podcasting shop, the live streaming shop, the photography shop, the video production shop, and a video shooting shop.

That produces revenue that doesn’t cost anyone anything extra to buy from our store, they pay the same price.

We were talking about you buying another chair before we started recording. If you buy it from our store, you pay exactly the same price and we get a small commission from Amazon. Every month, we get a little check from Amazon that shows up in our business account from things that people have bought from our store.

About two weeks ago, Amazon invited us to Amazon live. That means you can do a live stream that they support on their own channel. It’s at amazon.com/live, though visited, and it’s people like us that are selling products that they’re familiar with.

And while you’re talking about the product, down at the bottom of the screen, you can see all the things that they’re selling. Well, you pick that list of things that are being sold at the bottom.

For instance, if you’re talking about some of the photo equipment you bought recently, that’s down at the bottom. If somebody clicks on that, it takes them to the shop, and you get a commission on that sale. And you get a commission every time that video is replayed and somebody buys from it.

We waited a long time for the invitation. We’re not even sure what the criteria is because we’ve been applying for about a year and we weren’t getting any response, then suddenly, we get an email from them that says, how’d you like to start an Amazon live? And we thought, Yeah, another way to generate again, revenue not related to our business.

Dr. Ty  07:44

That’s going to be interesting to see how that unfolds, because Amazon live really is not very old itself. It’s only been around what, maybe two, three years, I think,

Toby Younis  07:54

I don’t know, if it’s even been that long, maybe I would have said more like a year, a year and a half.

Dr. Ty  07:58

I was going say, I think I first heard about it about a year ago. I’ve always loved the idea of residual income. And you and I were talking before the show about how we both feel that it’s important for any business to figure out some way of doing residual income just as a part of their business. And I like how Amazon is doing that. Because you can live stream, you can talk about your business and your stuff. And you could be getting paid getting paid basically from Amazon to do that. Because you’re talking about Amazon products at the same time. That’s kind of cool.

Toby Younis  08:35

Especially because you’re talking about products, not only that you’ve purchased, but you have an interest in. I can bore you to death, about the Godox 860 Flash. I’ve owned them for years, I love them, I use them in all of my photographic work.

And like I said, I can talk your ear off about it. Now I get to do that in front of a lens, in front of my camera to people who are listening and going, Okay, well, he’s convinced of this. Let me order one. And I get a commission for that sale. And right now, just our shop has produced between $100-$200 every month in residual income, and it’s a nice little unexpected check. We hope that now it’ll produce more because the shop will be supported by the Amazon live stream.

And we’re hoping it generates a little more interest now. I was watching one user on Amazon live stream just the other day and she had 1100 viewers watching. You know that’s got to be producing some sort of revenue as they buy things.

As she was talking, her thumbnail image looked very oriented towards makeup. But she was selling Canon cameras and Canon lenses and big dollar items that if somebody buys is a big commission for you as well.

We’ll have to see, our first show is Monday at 1pm. Mountain Standard Time. And we’ll just have to see how it works. We have a very specific niche when it comes to video, audio, photographic technologies, so we’ll have to see how it works out for us.

Dr. Ty  10:39

It seems that Amazon live seems to be geared towards a slightly more advanced, I’ll say podcast, or people that are more comfortable with video, what would you say would be the best thing for the average business person? What do you think could be a good thing in your wheelhouse that an average businessperson could use in their business?

Toby Younis  11:04

So you mean in terms of communicating with the outside world with their perspective? I think I think any business has to get used to the idea that the new normal, whether you can blame it on the pandemic or not, is going to be communications over the internet.

And the sooner you can get comfortable with an iPhone or any other smartphone as your camera, and your means of communications through one of these streaming applications, the better.

You and I right now, although we’re only recording audio, we’re looking at each other on Zoom The sooner you can get comfortable with the idea of sitting in front of a camera and communicating, inviting your clients, your prospective customers to talk with you, the sooner you can get comfortable with that the better, the more likely it is that you’re going to survive through this period.

I have a friend and he is so good a friend that I don’t charge him for any of this. But he owns a used photo equipment supply store. And it’s a little dusty store in the center of Albuquerque that he’s had for 30 years. I told him. you need to move on, you need to move this. And I helped him set up his little office in the back, I helped him set up a way to communicate, had him set up a YouTube channel to show the products that have just come in.

People still buy these cameras that use film. He still sells film and processing equipment. So it’s a cool little niche that he needs to get comfortable with. And he kept saying oh Toby, I’m just not that technical. And I said the technology issues have been taken away. All you have to do is click a couple of buttons..

Dr. Ty  12:44

And that’s one advantage to me of this pandemic is that so many of the issues that used to be so difficult are becoming easier and easier.

Toby Younis  12:52

Yeah. And we teach a course called the creative campaign framework boot camp. And we commit to you that in one week, with about two to three hours a day worth of effort, you will have a live stream channel, a podcasting channel, a blog, and you will have your first product, your first piece of content on each of those. Your YouTube channel, your anchor FM podcast, and your WordPress blog.

Our ideal client is what we refer to as an encore entrepreneur, a senior citizen who’s moving on to the second career in their life.

They’re not the most adapted to this kind of technology. But they learn in a week, and they get comfortable with it. And even our most challenging clients that we’ve had, we’re able to do it in a week. And we also in addition offer 60 days’ worth of free follow up consulting to make sure that if they have any problems, they can check in with us and we can walk them through.

Dr. Ty  13:58

Hey, Toby, you have to tell me, how do I get more information about that boot camp, I may want to go through it.

Toby Younis  14:03

The best way to do it is of course, you can go to our website at AGK Media Studio. And there are several buttons on there that will enable you to either sign up to become a guest on one of our podcasts or live casts, or to enter a page that explains what the bootcamp is all about. And then you can make a decision from there.

The post #61 Toby Younis on The Way Business Should Be Done in 2022 appeared first on Port Bell SEO.

Listen to the PodcastInfographics.

 If you go to any of the major search engines and type “infographics” and look at the images, you’re going to see a whole bunch of, well, infographics.

But the fact is, infographics are not used very often. And the reason being is because it’s custom imagery.

This is the number three of the top five things you can do in 2022 for content marketing. Number five, we talked about videos and webinars. That was two weeks ago. Last week, we got into more of writing, blogging, emails and things like that.

This week, we’re talking about infographics.

Next week, we’re shifting gears for a minute, because I have a special interview with Toby Younis of the Methods and Messages podcast. He’s the producer of the podcast, so he doesn’t always talk as much as Shelly does. But he’s got some great information for us. I’m really looking forward to that interview.

Today, I want to talk to you about infographics because they’re not used very often. And the reason being, is because it has to do with artwork. When we design our website, we usually hire graphic artists, and it’s usually expensive. So we think that infographics are going to be expensive as well.

They don’t have to be, though. Hire a freelancer to do the infographics if you don’t have your own graphic designer and you’re not an artist yourself.

If you are an artist, hey, you’ve already got the rest of us beat. I’m not an artist, I can’t even do a decent stick figure, so I don’t do infographics on my own. And as a matter of fact, I don’t utilize infographics as well as I should. I have some on my website, but not too many.

Basically, an infographic is a visual representation of how to do something in your business or a visual representation of why somebody should hire your company.

Again, if you type “infographics” into any search engine, click on the images area, you’ll see infographics about everything. When I did it, there was even an infographic on how to do infographics.

But when you hire a freelancer, here’s the thing: Give them the creativity to work on the imagery, but give them the title of the infographic and your main paragraph at the top what the infographic is about. And remember, a graphic needs to be something about  what’s the benefit to the customer that they’re going to get out of this.

Then you want a series of maybe 10 to 12 bullet points of maybe 10 words per bullet point (at the most. Less is more here).

And for the freelancer you want to give them information on what feeling you want people to have for those bullet points. That way the Freelancer or the artist can do that feeling in a visual representation in the infographic, if it’s done right.

An infographic is usually a giveaway that you give to people. But it’s also a good marketing tool if it’s done as a PDF. At the same time that you’re giving it away to people, it’s also searchable by the search engines because search engines can search PDFs.

Infographics are a great way to engage both people and for search engines because each of those bullet points is usually going to have some great keywords for your company.

Dr. Ty Belknap, CEO, Port Bell SEO

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