064: How To Craft Winning Marketing Plan w/Noah Kagan

One thing we ALL struggle with is too many options. Whether it’s the millions of song options I have on Spotify, the 100’s of flavors at an ice cream stand – or marketing.

The thing I love about today’s guest’s approach to marketing is it’s so … simple. Not easy, but simple. Noah provides a framework and importantly mindset approach to how to arrive at – and execute upon this simplicity.

THEN … about halfway through (around the 34 min mark) we turn the tables. Noah wanted to learn more about SEO. So I prepared some personal SEO advice for his site OK Dork.

Enjoy!

Don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes!

Slides

Here are the slides/visuals to go with my SEO tips for Noah:

12 SEO Strategies For OkDork – Slides from Podcast w/Noah Kagan from Evolving SEO

Video

Here are the slides in real time matched to the audio so you can follow along!

Links

People

Agenda

Background

“I was a corporate monkey.”
Facebook
Mint.com
AppSumo and Sumo.com
“We help the underdogs kick ass.”

Podcasting

“I was having amazing conversations that I wanted to hear again.”
“It’s giving me an excuse to meet people I want to meet.”
“I built my email list from day one.”
“Which channel drove results?”
“What is the activity you can double and what is the activity you can kill?”

Mint

“We went out and surveyed a bunch of people.”
“Create checklists and hire people you admire.”
“If you’re not available, who is your favorite person?”
“Every day of the week, the customer knows what to expect.”

Connections

“How do you give unique gifts that people will appreciate?”
Repurposing content
Build a relationship over time

Full Show Transcription – Provided courtesy Britney Muller

Dan: I’m super excited for today’s guest it is Noah Kagen of Sumo group which is sumo.com and appsumo.com and his blog Okay Dork. He’s worked for Mint, he worked for Facebook, he’s had a lot of successes in the marketing world. So, the first half of this interview he’s going to teach us his approach to marketing specifically how he promoted his recent launch of his podcast even though we’re talking about his podcast these tips blew my mind and they apply to everybody out there. Whether you’re promoting something with SEO or PPC, that’s what I love about Noah’s approaches, it’s so sort of elegant and really focuses on a singular goal to help you be successful with your marketing goals that you’re trying to achieve.

Then for the second half of this episode we actually turn the tables because Noah right before this interview he said dan I would love to learn a little bit about how I can improve the SEO on my blog okaydork.com. I’m trying to grow my traffic to get more people on my email list, to get people to listen to my podcasts, I have a goal I’m trying to reach with my podcast. So teach me some tips for how to do that. So we spent the second half of this show going through some SEO tactics and strategies for okaydork.com. With that let’s jump right into today’s interview with my guest Noah Kagen, Noah how are you?

Noah: What up Dan Shure! I’m in a great mood today thank you very much for having me.

Dan: Awesome, so we were just chatting about some battles with facebook ad so I’m not going to bring up facebook ads on today’s show, but we are going to talk a lot about SEO. We’re actually going to talk some SEO about your sight Okay Dork but before we get to that for some of the listeners that might not have heard your quick backstory can you just give us your quick background?

Noah: Yea man, was a corporate monkey worked at Intel didn’t do anything there ended up getting a job luckily it facebook as a product manager helped build mobile facebook ads facebook update the big status update that everyone uses now ah yes from there it was director marketing and got bought for two hundred million and then started a few companies and then the main product I work on now we have two major businesses AppSumo.com. Which is a groupon for geeks and then Sumo.com which is free marketing tools for websites so basically like our business Sumo group, the umbrella company we basically help the underdogs kickass so we help the little guys get things for free so you know it promotes free products we’re able to use and with sumo we give away all the tools that we’ve been using and building ourselves for free.

Dan: Yeah I would encourage all my listeners they’re perfect match for sumo if you haven’t tried it, I definitely encourage you go install it try for free. So you just launched a podcast I am coming up on the year anniversary of my podcast so now we have a kinship around podcast now I’m curious why you started yours. Was it for marketing? For fun? For any specific goal why did you start your podcast?

Noah: Yeah, now I have no clue I mean I guess I’m to the point where you could justify that everything is arbitrary. For me it was really like two things:

The first thing was that I was having so many amazing conversations with people and I got a chance to get access to certain people and I actually felt bad. I was like man, this conversation I want to hear again! For example, I was having dinner with the founder of a cafe named Cafe Medici in Austin and he’s you know, got five cafes and it’s a really great story, he used to work in a jail (like he wasn’t in jail but he worked at a jail) and then he opens a cafe it was his vision in life to open five coffee shops and a roastery. He talked about how he got there and he talked about you know, his vision around that and like things he thought of it in terms of his business approach and I was like, dude, this is the most interesting thing I’ve heard in a long time I wish I could’ve just recorded it. So, I decided to start recording these things so I’m actually interviewing him next week.

It’s giving me a chance to record and document for myself and then be able to share for others on then it’s actually giving me a really good excuse to meet people I want to meet. I got to meet like the jesse itzler who wrote a book called living with the seal. I’m just reaching out to people I’m curious I gotta meet the founder of Chipotle, there’s just like all these people that on if I had to break it down for myself I think everyone has a gift. And I know that’s so cheesy I’m not trying to sound like a new age self help guru, but I truly believe everyone has like one thing or one action that they generally always to go back to whether they realize it or not so my gift is promotion and so I want to go like do things and then promote what I’ve learned and I want to find other people who are doing things I admire and promote them. And my podcast is my lubricant for that it’s been agreed kind of excuse in vehicle for me to help get the word out about things I’m doing and other people that I’m interested

Dan: I love what you do in the show I mean you had like everybody in from like jason freed so far too then your cousin who’s a musician and I love that just broad range of guests that you seem to be bringing onto the show I love that so

I noticed when you launched you got into new a noteworthy right away like you were number one or top ten on itunes pretty quickly was that where their steps you took to do that or was that a result of the email list the audience that you have already that kind of help get you there when you launched?

Noah: Yes so i’d say one of the the first thing that’s been helpful is that I did build my garden like I built my email is from day one you know. I’ve been it sounds weird now but I’m doing the seventeen years right. Like I’m one of those guys that you sure that you’re like god he’s old let’s just like tune out but the point is I like I’ve been building an audience giving them free content which people I don’t think realize that like you know a blog post takes a lot of time or videos or podcasting a lot time so, I’ve been building and collecting emails so that when I did have some of the launch I was able to tell people about it. So if anybody’s ever starting a business, or starting a consultancy, or starting a product, build your audience ahead of time. We did that at Mint.com too so we had a mailing list of like thirty thousand people before we even launched content. I can share exactly how I did my launch?

Dan: Yeah, I would love that and I’m sure the audience would love that too.

Noah: So, I mean here’s the thing almost anything can be arbitrary about what your goal is, right it’s like why’d you choose vacation in hawaii? You’re like well, I don’t know I just heard it’s gonna be great.

So, I chose my podcast is my main goal for the year. So it’s actually pretty interesting we’re doing optimization on my thank you page the page after someone subscribes because that person’s got a lot of attention right there and one of the guys I work with who’s awesome, he’s working on the thank you page which is amazing. So, you have to optimize and give people things at their peak maximum attention and when someone finds out about you, they’re the most excited. Then every day, subsequently they lose interest.

So he said, “What should I change? like how do I optimize it?” and I just had one question for him, “What’s our goal?” He’s like, “Well our goal is one hundred thousand downloads an episode for the podcast.” and I’m like, “Does that give you an idea of what you should be doing for it?” and he’s like, “Yes.”. So it actually simplifies all of your decision making around everything you do and helps you with your prioritization.

Dan: Having one goal you mean?

Noah: Yea, having one goal and every decision is based on that one goal. A lot of times I’ll call it OKRs objective key results or KPI, key performance indicators, but what we do in our company at sumo.com, appsumo and my personal project is you choose one goal and generally that goal can continue. So even if you hit the goal early then you can choose a goal that continues it. So if it’s revenue then you could say well this year’s one million, maybe next year it’ll be three.

Meaning that we’ve had problems where we had a goal in like October instead of December and we’re like “What we do the rest of the year?” I was like, “I don’t know what you want to do?” :I don’t know”.

Dan: What did you do?

Noah: We didn’t do shit and we struggled. So what I’ve come to realize is that you have to have goals that continue. So, for me with the podcast goal it’s like so, next year I need to make sure i’ll have a bigger podcast goal. Or I might adjusted to do more YouTube, but the point is, you want to have continual goals. We actually created a twenty twenty vision so with sumo.com we were like where do we want to be in 2020? In 2019? 2018? 2017? And then for 2017, we broke it out by month. So let me be specific with the podcast: I said a hundred thousand downloads an episode, and I’m looking at the screen right now i’ll actually screenshot it for you, if you want to share with your audience. I basically asked what are the key metrics that matter? So if I want a hundred thousand downloads an episode, basically per month, how many downloads per episode do I need to be doing? Then you could make it linear. Meaning that you just divide two hundred thousand one by twelve or, you could make it ramp up. Whatever you actually think is appropriate. So, in January, Dan you can take a look at the screenshot, I wanted to get sixty five hundred downloads an episode. Then in february, it’s eighty three hundred.

And the good analogy for anyone doing marketing and this is for every marketing, is #1 you’ve gotta pick your destination. It’s just like going anywhere what’s your destination minus one hundred thousand. And then you gotta plan your route, so my route was like well I’m going to do sixty five hundred the first month, eighty three hundred the next month, ten thousand in march thirteen thousand april.

And I think most people kind of don’t either pick a destination where they want to go. Or just like do a bunch of different activities to get their?

Dan: Yes.

Noah: So, once you get that and one thing that’s actually important because your audience is SEO. I worked at mint and SEO was our God. SEO was like our savior for Mint and it was one of the biggest things we did to sell the business ultimately for almost half a billion. But at appsumo.com, we still have not, seven years later not gotten SEO to work at all.

Dan: Interesting!

Noah: Paid acquisition and then word of mouth or viral have been the only ways we’ve grown it. Those are the only ways we’ve grown appsumo. And I’ve tried SEO we’ve tried making much of product pages, we tried optimizing listings. But, it’s just not how people are trying to find us.

Dan: Right.

Noah: So, my point with that specifically, is for january; I say I want to sixty five hundred downloads. Make a list of all your different options and you’ll see that in the screenshot. Make a list of all the options of how you can hit that goal, and I have it for every single month.

So, for january I said all right I’m going to try to get:

5,000 downloads from my email list
0 from a newsletter sponsor
4500 from a contest
250 from cross promotion

Then, at the end of each month I see which channel actually drove the results. Then from there, I know this is a huge point for people listening, and it’s cliché and you’re going to think ‘I’m already doing it’ but you’re not!

The point is at the end of the month, or even sooner, ask:

What is the activity that you can double?
What is the activity that you can kill?

I think that’s probably one of the top problems with marketers these days where they just keep doing stuff even though it’s kind of working and what they need to be doing is killing that one completely. And the one that is working, how do you 2X it? So if SEO is working; How do you double amount of content? Or double amount of traffic to that continent?

Dan: So I have a few questions with this. I love where this is going by the way. You did an interview with Jamie Masters, I think, where you walk through some of these steps as well.

Just playing slightly devil’s advocate. A lot of this seems to depend upon things that works very quickly right ? So SEO is a very slow churned type of thing, so it seems like those longer channels may not work in this type of scenario? Or maybe maybe I’m wrong, maybe you plan ahead out two months, or six for something like that? So how do you deal with something where you can’t tell if it’s working quickly or not? Or do you just skip those channels and you go right to the things that you can tell that they’re working?

Noah: So, I literally thought about this yesterday. I spent a good amount of time thinking about it. Do you drink alcohol?

Dan: I do sometimes.

Noah: I’m not a big drinker, but the point is that I was thinking about distilling. There’s a company called Balconies and I love their whiskey, but a good whiskey can take three to five years to age. Or even a year, so what a lot of these guys do is they actually they create vodka, or cognac, or brandy because those are things you can sell after a month.

So I think what marketers need to do is kind of balance that. I was talking to a specific marketer yesterday and he was like, “Well I can’t do it SEO” but I’m like, “Look, you’ve got to do both!”. Meaning, sometimes you’ve got to make money to grow your business right? So, you’ve got to create some vodka. At the same time, you’ve got to build these big gardens that are going to produce like a bunch of returns (which is your whiskey) that’s going to take you one year. They completely neglected SEO completely when it was an opportunity for them to try it out.

My recommendation in general is that people do 3, maximum 5 marketing activities per month. But what you have to do is see if there’s some sign of success. So specifically let’s take advertising; with ads at AppSumo we were spending somewhere in the range of a few hundred thousand a month. And what we did is that after we spent on a specific ad, we could see like based on their email sign up (like if we got ten sign ups) if one of those bought, were like, “All right it’s a good channel!”.

So my point is, what can you figure out early on that you could extrapolated or project out for the future? And be like, “SEO seems like it has promise right?” It is working, so you don’t completely neglect kind of more of your longer term marketing activities.

Dan: And, how do you account for things that might be in a multi-channel scenario? So, often times SEO converts if you look at first touch conversions. But, it plays out that it might convert later through the email newsletter that you sent. Do you deal with that? Or, is that even getting too complicated?

Noah: I think it gets too complicated, man. I mean I think it at certain budgets and like at the enterprise level people are getting into that. Then you’re getting into multi-touch attribution. I can’t even say I’m an expert on that at all. Generally, we go back and forth on first such attribution or last such attribution. But the point is, you pick one and then just stick with that? I don’t have much to say like, oh yeah I worry about multi touch, I just think that gets very very complicated.

Dan: Yes. One of the things I liked about your approach because I did watch it in the video with Jamie is it’s very simple. It’s very straightforward. Do you feel that’s something a lot of marketers make mistakes on today? Is they try to get too fancy and too complicated without just sticking to a nice elegant plan like this?

Noah: I think a few of the problems I’ve seen most marketers make, because they keep doing things that don’t work. They read a blogger post and get too excited about some new activity. So they’re like, “oh I saw that this guy did ads and like this were creative retargeting thing” and it just over complicates it. And I don’t think frankly, they just really look back on what’s worked for them? So let’s say for your agency, for getting clients you’re like I really get my best clients from referrals?

Dan: That’s actually true, referrals and content marketing.

Noah: Okay, so if you had to double the amount of referrals what would you do?

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. I would map back to how I originally made relationships with those people that send the best referral. So, Pip Lodger is a great example, he runs a CRO company right, so it’s a perfect marriage of SEO and CRO. They don’t do a SEO but when they get that type of inquiry it’s a natural match for them to send it to a trusted resource. So, I would probably want to go out and network and make friends and engage with other CRO companies, other PPC companies, other Facebook ad companies that have complimentary services.

Noah: Exactly, and I think what other agencies would probably be doing is too broad of a customer, right? And not focusing on the exact marketing that’s working. So, for you you’re like well Peppe works, and Peppe runs a CRO agency, but he doesn’t do SEO. Let me go make a list like I call it, you know, Chut Holmes calls it the dream one hundred. So just make that list of like, Noah’s got a marketing blog and he seems to have a lot of people, he doesn’t do anything with SEO. Maybe I could be his referral of choice? And, maybe you pay him maybe you don’t. I don’t want any money but if you came in and we could talk about some Okay Dork stuff, I would refer you clients. The point being, go back to it works. See how you can double, triple, 10X it and that’s really unfortunately the simple answer that works all the time in marketing and business.

Dan: I get a lot of clients sending the newest hack or the newest you know, technique they see in an article and a lot client work is trying to just refocus them back to like the core things that always work, so I definitely resonate with that.

I want to make sure I don’t skip over anything in your process that you want to get to. Because I actually did want to bring up this process you talked about with Jamie and also I want to tie it into the fact that if you go to google and you just start typing your name Noah Kagen. There’s the auto suggest for Mint, and you hit enter, there’s a pdf that comes up. I don’t know if this is actually your actual old marketing plan? Maybe you could tell me if it is or isn’t?

Noah: Oh, someone actually still has the old.

Dan: Is this your actual plan?

Noah: Yeah, this is the original one.

Dan: When you planned the marketing for Mint, what I’m really curious about here is people can go read your plan online you’ve written the blog post you’ve talked about it. I’m curious about it from sort of an execution standpoint because at least this document here. It’s just like a plain word document. A lot of times you see marketers come up with these fancy slide decks, and these tools, and like screenshots. But, this just a couple pages in a word document. Is that basically how you drafted up this plan at that time and then if so how did you stay on track executing the things that you want to execute overtime?

Noah: Yes, so I can just tell you exactly. It’s interesting because I think most of us now as we get older we have we figured out our own formula and we kind of stick with it because it works.

Dan: Yes.

Noah: So, what I did with the Mint plan, what I’ve done with appsumo, and now what I’ve done with my Noah Kagen Presents podcast is basically, I had a goal. And then picked out different ways we could accomplish that goal.

With Mint, we specifically targeted very successful customers, so we went out and surveyed a bunch of people and learned who our customers are and how to serve those specific people better. We found out that like young professionals and then basically like people who are reading personal finance blogs are our target market. And, within that they just want to make a little bit more money. They either saying show me what’s happened with my money or I want to make a little more, and then everything became marketing around those types of messages.

So, for organizing that, i’ll show you some of it. I have basically three things that I do right so I have that the doc I showed you right which is like my destination’s one hundred thousand. And, I have my monthly different marketing activities. So, I basically can’t start seeing what’s working for my podcast. So what’s been working is getting on other shows and growing my email list. Because once you join my email list, my auto responder is set up to promote my main goal, the podcast! And then, advertising which is something I’m starting today that’s my like new test for the month.

So, I put that on my calendar right, I love Google Calendar! I have a shared calendar with the team so everyone can see at it like a higher level. I think it’s really important to be like, we know every Tuesday this is the one thing we’re marketing. I’ve done this now for probably about ten years and I think it’s undervalued, is just consistency of promotion. Meaning that every Tuesday people expect something and then they get excited that it’s going be dance Tuesday of love or whatever you wanna call it.

Dan: I definitely would not do that idea. Put me on something else.

Noah: Yeah so for my stuff I would like to share the two things. So we have an organization checklist for the articles we are working on, so here’s screenshot of that so you can actually see. The main thing that I would say were taking us to stay back. There are two things for people that are really trying to grow a business or have a small business or medium or large and want to get larger. Number one is you have to have systems in place and I hate when people say systems because I think that what is this system they’re using right? Everyone always says that but I think its bullshit. I’m exactly saying is that you need to just have a checklist or process that removes yourself and removes people or inconsistencies from your decisions and from your actions. So specifically let’s just take “okdork”. So I created a YouTube video and from that I want a checklist of like how does that “okdork video” turned to a podcast, turned into an article, turned into a guest post and get put into email and into social, all at a high quality level. So I’ve helped document and created a google spreadsheet that’s just a checklist of those things and then as things break we fix the system. We fix the checklist and then I’ve hired people. So, it’s a second part: create checklists of your things whatever you are trying to accomplish and then hire people that you’ve admired. Right! So I basically find people whom I like writing or I find people from referrals of the people I like. If they’re not available, then I ask if you’re not available then who’s your favorite and I just hire him as freelancers because hiring as freelancers is kind of a gateway drug. Some people suck to work with, which has happened. And then there are people you like working with. So I am like, I’ll listen to whatever it takes to do to hire you full time. So those are the two things that would really help me scale it out which is creating these checklists and in hiring people that I’ve admired and they’re the best. And then I have a calendar just at a high level so that I’m consistent with my marketing. I think that’s something which is undervalued. Like set a goal for yourself and let’s say you’re gonna grow your blog. Number one people spend too much time writing and not enough time promoting. And we could talk about that. But be consistent doesn’t mean you have to do a weekly or do a once a month post. In the first of the month you always post. So I created a thing called a vapor paid. What basically we do is posting twice a week. I wanted every day something for people to get engaged with me, if they wanted. And I do this full time. This is a profession. I am a professional but not really getting paid for this yet. I don’t sell coaching or consulting. I do because I love it. And so with this .com I made money. So Monday and Friday we do videos, Tuesday’s is a podcast day, Wednesday is an article day. So either from the podcast or from something else I create an article for the site. Thursday I send an email. So every day in the week people know what to expect. I think structure in marketing and repeatability makes it easier for the customer. It makes it easier for you to run your own business.

Dan: I absolutely agree. It’s something I quite transparently struggle with. It’s not my strong point and I am trying to get better at it. Is that something for you that just you have it or it just came to you or do you need structure because you might get off track otherwise.

Noah: I think when I feel ungrounded just like a few weeks ago. So two things that have really helped. One, I was like why do I feel ungrounded? I thought because I don’t know what’s coming. This is number one and two: I’m doing too many things, so I had all these side projects and I said, well what is your goal? And I said, well, my goal is this podcast. So this is the project and these other projects of which one was a recruiting software project and one is a chrome extension project. And I thought do these really help your goal right now? No. Alright. So dedicate less time to them. Ok, now I feel better.

Dan: Simple as this.

Noah: Yeah, but it’s one these things that everyone can do, listening in yourself. I also reminded myself that I’m doing this project it’s not my main thing, it’s distracting me. It doesn’t really help. Doesn’t have to give it up completely, but I need to be allocating time. I mean if twenty percent time is one day a week then do it about ten percent time so half day week.

Dan: Sorry to cut you off if you weren’t done down there.

Noah: No problem.

Dan: You mentioned that spending more time promoting content versus creating content and you mentioned that I do a lot of research. You mentioned that on twist with Jason but I want to ask you about that. You brought that up. So why do you feel people are spending too much time creating content and not promoting it and why should they be thinking about flipping that around.

Noah: Because the very simplest way is that it’s not a great article, it’s not a great product, it’s not a great service if no one knows about it. That is the bottom line. If no one knows about what you’ve created is amazing then there’s no point to it. So it’s safer and it’s easier and it’s less scary not to be judged because if you’re sitting at home not getting judged, no one is looking at you, no one is saying anything bad then it’s safe. Right? So I was building the software and I actually felt that. I was like man it’s so much easier for me to keep building this and I will just add more of this and I will do more of that than actually going out and telling people to use it, because it is more fun. And it’s playing around and it is easier. But your actual growth is when you get that feedback. And so I think that’s probably a huge problem for every business. Because they want it easier for them to keep working on the product but I think you need to do it in parallel. I don’t know what’s the exact percentage is but you need to have some goal for yourself and allocate and commit the amount of time. You can even just give one day a week. So that’s kind of what I’m working on. It’s a work in progress on structuring my week. So I would like two days for creation, one day for promotion and two days are just open. And I found so forth that’s working but maybe next time when we will be talking, six months or twelve months later, I will be like yeah it’s all screwed. So I think the point just at a high level and why we have been successful with our companies is that you have to look at what’s working and be able to generate from what’s working and do more things and again killing things that aren’t working. And so yeah in terms of promotion the things that I’ve thought about for the podcast is like what can I control and what can I scale or get more people. What can I repeat because generally it’s not really useful and even better than how do I set this stuff up so I don’t have to do anything. Meaning that once I set it up I have to keep going back and working on it. Those are the most beautiful things. They just keeps growing for you. So for me setting up my auto responder has been huge. Like once you join my mailing list you are gonna get a bunch of emails that are great emails and I’m proud of him but it’s going like podcast, podcast . And it’s the same thing like my thank you page. Once you join it shows that “hey the podcast is now there”. Same thing is with advertising. Once you kind of get this ad set up, it’s great. I don’t generally have to touch it. That’s why I’m spending a lot of time in this week setting those things up. Like for SEO and stuff too, a great way of looking at it from for your audience perspective is that take your top articles and then just optimize those for email collection or whatever your goal is. So let’s say your goal is sign up or your goal is getting a product’s offer. You don’t have to do all of them just go take your top pages, remove all the calls to action that aren’t towards a goal, focus on the goal and then you never have to touch it again. That’s why I like email in general. It’s why surprisingly my whole career in the past ten years, No, hold! The recent ten years has been around growing in emails. Because once you get that stuff set up like goal goes in traffic during the email list, educate them, trust them. Then they trust you and then they will make purchases or do actions that you want.

Dan: You probably see me smiling on this and because that’s actually like one of the first things I was going to bring up but with a little bit of a twist on it when we get to your SEO. I want to get to that one moment. I had a bunch of other questions but I just want to jump to two of these which I was super interested in.

Noah: Yeah sure go ahead. Hit it.

Dan: So everyone knows you for tacos. You love tacos. In fact I sent you a taco gift card maybe about a year and a half ago. But I’ve just always wondered how many of these gift cards do you have stockpiled there? How many of these you get?

Noah: Dude, I have a ton and it’s actually funny I spent yesterday about three hours talking about how to connect with people. Like how do you connect with people? Like how do I connect with the founder of chipotle or how do I connect with anyone that I’m interested in. Just like you’re trying to connect with anyone. So I think there’s two pieces to it. I think one what you do which is really interesting is that how do you give unique gifts that people will appreciate. So I think that’s one thing and that’s super undervalued. Like you could give someone a twenty dollar thoughtful really creative gift. I saw this product called Felt where it actually is a really nice hand written letter or going on amazon and there’s like a cola canned I will find it for you. But there’s this hand written a brain teaser thing that’s really cool. But the point is: number one, if you work with anyone and you want to continue working them, sending a gift that they always keep in their life like an amazon echo or something that’s not your own company logo that they will never wear, don’t send on that but send them something that they like and say Oh cool! I will have it next to my desk all the time. And I’ve actually found that a great way to build better relationships and create partnerships for the future that will keep you on top of mind. Second thing is, for connecting you have to do things that they actually want and have no expectation. So I’ve noticed that a lot of people including myself I will go ask people for things. I will give you a specific example. I wanted to get on people’s podcast so I wanted to get on social media examiner and I email one of them like here’s an idea can I just get on your show? And I call the whiff theory, called so what’s in it for them? And I thought that there’s nothing in it for them. I’m totally being a selfish dick. I thought you should put me on your podcast and give me all your listeners and do everything I want. And I thought why the hell would he do that? Obviously there is literally no point for him doing that. So I rethought about it and I was like oh well you haven’t talked about this what I call a content multiplication. Which means you basically take one video and I turned my one video into a podcast, into a blog post, into a guest posts and then into social. So instead of having always work on new ideas just take your one eye, just have less ideas and then magnify the impact of them like I did in Tony Robin’s article. And I’m going to turn that into YouTube video, I’m going to turn that into a podcast and I am going to make guess post about that. And I emailed them that and told them that this is something I haven’t talked about and I’m going to promote you to my audience, to all of my listeners and people who follow my stuff. So you will get more exposure for your audience and that’s actually good for him. And I thought that yes it’s not going to be always about yourself. The second thing, I think when people are doing nice things or giving things and hope for a relationship with them, you gotta follow up. I’ve noticed people send me gift cards and then I don’t ever hear from them again which is great. It’s great and I appreciate it but at the same time they would say “Hey! I give you the gift card. I really love your work and then in about a month I would be like hey I read your blog post. I did this thing, can I show you the results of it? I say yeah sure. I remember who you are and then over time that builds a relationship. There is a specific story about it. A guy randomly said hi to me at the Arnold Bodybuilding Classic. This kid who was just twenty year old said, hey what’s up Noah?? I just love your videos and I know who you are. That was so cool. I said dude this is awesome and he said I live in Austin too, where I live. And he said well next time when you are in Austin maybe we could do work out. I said okay. I’m gonna work out anyways and if you’re not a weirdo then yeah, why not. We worked out and then a few days later he said hey you know I’m really into photography, can I come and take head shots for free for your company as you guys don’t really have good headshots. Then I said yeah sure. So he take head shots and then they were really great. He brought the lights and these green screen and all this stuff and I said what can I pay you for? He said no, I just want to do it for free. He said I just like you guys and anything could be cool and we could work together in the future. And then like two months later he heard I was growing my podcast and he said well, why don’t we grow YouTube to drive people to your podcast and I love doing film and stuff. He said I will just come record a video for you and so we started doing my YouTube videos and he’s amazing at it. I was watching and I was like who’s that guy on screen because he just did such a good job at editing that.

Dan: That’s the guy who is doing your videos? That’s how you found him?

Noah: Yes! And then now I’m paying him two thousand dollars a month.

Dan: He does an amazing job by the way. I love a lot of videos. They’re so well done.

Noah: It’s Brandon Wells and so now I’m like, dude, I will pay you two thousand a month and I want to keep working with you to make videos. And we work together. And for him just offering a few free things up without any expectation and without like oh well I want this from you. Some guy today literally emailed me; hey, can I take you out for tacos? So I’m like alright for ten dollars of tacos you want me to spend thirty minutes there and back to travel plus in award I give you free advice and I get a lunch where I get annoyed the whole time. It’s not that I’m so great or better than anyone. It’s just that we all get the same amount of time a day I think we have to be more protective of our time. So with SEO or with your marketing, the most important thing is that all the activities are out there but prioritizing the one’s that gives you the highest leverage or the maximum return is the most important thing because you don’t have so much time to do all this stuff. So which marketing activities can really grow your business the fastest because you don’t have so much time versus kind of little things, which I think people get distracted with. People go and post in a bunch of little Facebook groups. I think that’s good but you can’t do that forever and it’s not as repeatable to keep growing a larger business. You have to figure out more creative solutions.

Dan: So one more quick question, then we’re getting to OkDork.

Noah: I’ve got a lot of tips for you.

Dan: I had other questions, but that’s, okay.

Noah: No, no. Why don’t you to do it a fire round, and I will just give off quick answers.

Dan: Yeah, let’s do a quick fire round. So you just tweeted today “Would you rather have public recognition or private success?” I’m wondering, where did that tweet came from? And what would your answer be to that?

Noah: I would rather have the private success. I think you have to feel how to feel good about yourself and it came from something happened in the company. And I thought I should have gotten credit for it but another person at company got it. I think if you want to grow business there’s no company that gets large or larger by one person. That’s just not possible. Like you can’t build cars or rocket ships or internet websites just by one person, there is no certain science. So I think as a leader as you are growing a business you have to let go of that ego and I wanted to remind myself that let go of your ego and let go of the expectation that it’s all about you. No, it’s everybody else. And your goal should actually be to give everyone else even more credit and then have your own kind of internal barometer and I am working on it. Loving myself and liking the things I do. I thought it’s a good reminder for me and for anyone else out there.

Dan: All right, everyone, let us know with some questions about his recent health journey. It is interesting but it’s not marketing. So I am going to put that at the very end as a little bonus segment after the closing music. So definitely stick around and check that out. But now we’re going to get into SEO tips for OkDork.com. By the way these tips apply to everybody so even though they’re just for Noah, they do apply to you too so definitely check them out. And you can go to evolvingSEO.com/Noah where you can see a full slide deck of all of the visuals and images and tools and screen shots that go along with what I am teaching him because we were on live screen share with skype recording it. So it is a little bit of a visual tutorial. And at evolvingSEO.com/Noah you can also link to a YouTube video that will be the audio of this lesson in real time with those screenshots. So plenty of ways to take in all of the SEO goodness in this segment coming up here. Finally the folks at sem rush heard that I love the tool that I’ve been mentioning on the show and they gave me a link that will give you fifteen free days to try out a pro account and that is at evolvingSEO.com/semrushtrial, no hyphens no spaces. So fifteen free days. Now let’s jump right to SEO tips for OkDork.com. Your number one goal is email sign ups on OkDork. Is that correct?

Noah: The podcast is my number one goal. On OkDork I believe getting them to joining email list is easier to convert them to a podcast access library than just trying to go to the podcast right away.

Dan: I see. Okay that’s your conversion. And the first thing and what you’ve talked about is in my notes but I think the SEO component is just connecting some of these dots together. Some of these things are strategic, some are a little technical but I’m just going to get right into it. One of the first things I would do is to take and you’ve mentioned doing this already but I think you want to apply SEO approach to this, so you’re going to take videos and repurpose those into blog post.

Noah: Yeah I’ve sort of doing that.

Dan: So what I would do is take all the topics of those videos and basically so one of them is “Gino shortcuts”, you did a video about that.

Noah: Yes.

Dan: Those of your key words just simply grab search volume off of those and then grab a difficulty score whether that’s for MAS difficulty or sem rush or maybe you just look at the search results and we could talk about analyzing that. but I think the layer of SEO is going to be helpful for you to do the prioritization that you like to do with topics. So now you have a prioritized list of the video topics that are the ones you should first be creating into blogpost because they have higher search volume and you are going to sort by highest search volume and then look for the ones that have maybe lower difficulties. You are looking for that sweet spot. Those are going to be the ones that you would want to translate into blogpost. That would be step number one. Then from there what you can do is that you can use a tool like sem rush and I think what I’m going to do you know that. I will share my screen very quickly here.

Noah: Yeah please do. This is super interesting. Are you recording the screen share?

Dan: I’m not recording the screen but the listeners are probably familiar with sem rush as a tool.

Noah: Let’s not make assumptions.

Dan: I have a smart audience that’s what I’m trying to say.

Noah: Let’s get a compliment to those people.

Dan: Yeah. So the next step is what you want to do is to find sites that are like yours. Not necessarily like your personal blogs you find other personal blogs but find sites that have similar topics and maybe even higher domain authority or bigger than yours. So strategically you’re not just a personal blog you want to be up there with Zapier or life hacker. So when you find these similar sites you’re going to use a tool like sem rush and I am going to talk through it for the listeners. The first thing that you want to do is plugin zapier.com, go to the pages report and here’s a list of Zapier’s top traffics organic content. And the strategy here is that you are going to look at their top traffic content and you can do things like you can dig into the keywords that are ranking for that piece of content. So they are best calendar apps and by the way they’re getting five thousand nine hundred visits a month to this one page. It’s probably more like ten thousand because sem rush doesn’t have a long tail stuff. So then what you want to do is dig into their keywords and maybe reverse engineer is this a topic or does this post represent a topic that I would be interested in writing about.

Noah: So how do you look at or take this keywords? Like best school calendar something like that and one thing I’ve been trying to figure out in general is like how do I prioritize the list of content to create, to maximize my return of time.

Dan: Assuming all your content takes the same amount of time roughly to create, what I would do is take this exact report in sem rush. So in your “toothbrush” episode with Tim Fares you talked about pre wetting products. This is all we are doing with SEO; we are pre wetting content. It’s the same thing it’s just applied to content. So you are taking zapier who has already created a best calendar a piece of content. They are showing you that they are getting six thousand visits or more a month. So what you would do is take all of the topics that you’re interested in whether you find them on zapier or lifehacker or four hour work week or any of them, you put them in the list and then you grab this number from sem rush and you grab the estimated traffic potential number. That’s assuming that they are ranking in these positions and that’s assuming that you could potentially rank in those positions as well. And then that’s your number which you sorted by that and you say okay this topic, because of all the search demand for all of the synonyms and various key words for this, this is the potential traffic that I could get from this one topic and that’s how you prioritize. You might find another topic like Microsoft outlook tricks to know who’s searching for that probably. So you might find topics that are just not as popular and existing content ranking for that shows that because sem rush might have less traffic for that. So does that answer that part of your question that how to prioritize?

Noah: Yeah do you have any example sheet so I could see that you have done it for someone else. I have done this and basically what I did and may be this is helpful or not but I went through all of OkDork’s articles over seven hundred and I removed anything that got less than ten page views in the last thirty days. I just killed it completely. And I ended up removing I think around six hundred articles. So I have one hundred thirty or hundred and forty one articles right now. Then from there I sorted it based on traffic and then I went and optimized those. Then the second thing I did was optimizing meaning I took the top ones and optimized them for email collection just to make sure they are updated for evergreen. That’s one thing about some of my articles, it’s nice to make them everything so I don’t have to worry about checking if they are updated for today. Second thing was to actually categorize like which groups of topics I have written about and then try to see if there’s a way I can prioritize those topics category wise for at least myself. Like I noticed I write about marketing, personal improvement, starting a business, productivity tips and then growing a business. So what I did and I can show it to you is just that I categorize, so tell me if you think this is good or not. So from there I took marketing as something I talk about a lot and then I went through major topics around that and then how does it look on YouTube and Google and then on google side what’s the competitiveness. Then from here I am looking for basically where there is a lot of volume and not a lot of competition. So marketing is actually pretty crappy even though that’s something I specialize in and I have more knowledge about that. And about productivity tips it’s really low, I love talking about that. It’s more of how do I find words where there’s opportunity and less competition so that I can prioritize my time.

Dan: Yeah I can show you that. So one thing, for YouTube you might need to go with search form because there’s no sem rush of YouTube where you can get the traffic but for google search if you can I don’t know if you have sem rush account but I would go with the sem rush traffic number. And here’s why? Because the search volume is only for that one keyword. Now Google AdWords is like combining them and rounding them and you are only getting ranges so that’s a tricky metric to go on. So I would definitely use the sem rush estimated traffic number instead of search volume. Here I’m gonna show you a spreadsheet. Now this is for company and I think you know these people. We did research for twenty of their topics for their blog.

Noah: It’s so hard not to say.

Dan: Yeah. You know this site right?

Noah: Yeah I know them pretty well.

Dan: So what we did when we first started. We did what you did, we were refining the topics like marketing, YouTube tips, productivity tips and then we did a quick assessment of could this particular site potentially rank for that and I simply do a High, Medium, Low of a ready…

Noah: How did you turn that ranking opportunity?

Dan: Yeah so that’s a little bit of an art but very roughly if I take this keyword that is “leaky gut foods to eat”.

Noah: So you picked this out by looking at competitive site or by looking at word.

Dan: Yeah the topic ideas can come from brainstorming, they can come from competitors, and they can come from keyword tools, so that’s kind of a mix of all of the brainstorming that was done. But then we arrive at a list that we think make good targets for this particular site. So you have asked how to tell if you can potentially rank for something? There’s several factors to the potentially ranking but a few of them are like relevance of the topic, quality of the existing results, the domain authority of the existing results and maybe things like how old the existing results are and what’s ranking there. So I can break that down. So this query that you can see on my screen here is “leaky guts food to eat”. It gets three hundred and twenty searches a month.

Noah: What kind of extension you are using for that?

Dan: This is Keywords Everywhere. It is a free plugin and it gives you literally keywords everywhere you go. It gives you keyword data.

Noah: Is that MAS or which one is that below the results?

Dan: Below the results is the MAS plugin and the MAS bar overlay so all the listeners, if you don’t have that then definitely stall the MAS bar and Keywords Everywhere. And I think this particular client had a domain authority of thirty nine which is great. So a lot of this is just practice. One thing I like to teach people is to get good at reading search result pages just like you are reading the stock market or something that you become accustomed to understand quickly that what’s going on. In this particular result here, if the client has a domain authority of forty, just by the fact that many other sites are ranking with similar or lower domain authority that’s the clue number one that probably the client can rank there. Because if similar or lower domain authority is in ranking then that’s a good signal that this particular topic is not overly crowded yet and it’s not overly competitive. If you contrast that with if we saw domain authorities of seventy, eighty, ninety, one hundred, all ranking on here then it will be super hard to rank for that unless you yourself have a website that is a high authority. Now the one place that you can counteract that is if you have a very niche website. Let’s say you have a website about dieting and let’s say all the other sites ranking have a high domain authority but they have a low relevance match relative to the domain. So maybe you have got men’s fitness ranking, maybe you’ve got a random paleo website ranking, maybe you’ve got websites that are broader in topic but your company or your website is very specific and your niche, maybe you exclusively write about the ketogenic diet then you might have a chance of actually ranking above higher authority sites because your niche is more specific. So really what we are looking for is we are looking for gaps what I call ranking opportunity gaps. Another type of gap is if you look at the results and the current results do not answer the question that the user is trying to ask about the problem that they are trying to solve. So if I would ever reverse engineer this search “leaky gut foods to eat”, I would click on every single result and I would look to see does that result actually answer that question to a high quality or maybe like you as the topic expert have done this before and you click on a result or you are doing a search and you think this article sucks. I could do way better than that. Maybe just have a visceral reaction to that. That’s your chance to rank from a relevance of qualitative standpoint as well. That’s how we assess where this ranking opportunity come when you are looking at a spreadsheet. That is the hardest part about learning SEO in my opinion. It’s just knowing how to tell if you could possibly rank for something however you can shortcut that with a tool like SEMRush where they have a competition metric.

Noah: Oh interesting so you’re looking for the lowest difficulty in most of them basically?

Dan: Yes. So if I was just to plan out trying to find the opportunity off of all of zapier.com, what I might do is type in one of your keywords like “productivity” and then I would exclude anything ranking beyond page maybe page two to exclude anything greater than twenty and then what I would do is include any difficulty that maybe is below seventy. Here you go. Here is some keyword opportunities right here. If they are irrelevant match so obviously some of these might not make sense but “productivity timer” I don’t know what that is exactly, I don’t know what “can bin productivity” is but…

So we are just playing with the filters to find something lower competition but it’s got some search and then what I would do from here is I would actually look at the metrics of this page. So whatever is ranking for “productivity timer” now you are going to get the true traffic estimate. And on this you’re going to go to the URL report for that.

Noah: Oh you can take in that article and look at that specific and you can see the keywords they have for it.

Dan: Yeah. so they get over two thousand visits a month for that one article and here’s all the keywords and some of them are higher difficulty but you know if you are ranking for some lower difficulty ones you might be able to siphon of similar traffic. So that makes sense.

Noah: I guess one thing that made me jump too, is like, how could I review what words I am ranking for and see where I can have opportunity what’s already happening on my site.

Dan: Yeah, so you can use your internal analytics in Google search console.

Noah: Can we walk through how to do it?

Dan: Absolutely. You would need to share your account with me, or I can show you on one of my accounts.

Noah: I can just show my account.

Dan: Okay.

Noah: You don’t edit out the parts. I am now loading this stuff.

Dan: I can add it up. Yeah so there’s a few things you can do here and it depends upon the opportunity and the exact scenario but what I would do is just load up your search analytics reports. You go to search traffic, search analytics and then basically here is your top trafficked content via organic search and I would just start, maybe scan it and look for something that has a slightly higher average position maybe 23.3.

Noah: Isn’t that low?

Dan: Well that’s an average so what might happen is if there’s something very high volume but not super relevant that could screw your whole average. So that might be what is happening there. But you can find opportunities. So now I load up this report and I see that actually you’re getting fifty three thousand impressions but you’re only getting a thousand four hundred clicks on that piece of content with an average position in twenty three. So what I would do now you can export this to a spreadsheet to actually you know run filters and stuff but just scanning it and by the way this is the keywords everywhere plugin monthly volume in the CPC that’s not normally native within this tool. This is AdWords search volume and then cost per click.

It is so funny how this happened. This is an example of one out of a thousand outreach emails that was actually valuable to me. So I know about this too because they reached out to me on email, after I wrote a post on the next web and it was a great outreach email on their part because I have since like tweeted it and emailed it, I am showing it to you and I have shown it to people in pips conversion excel class so they really did a good job with that. So here is an opportunity. How to advertise on Facebook six thousand six hundred searches a month and you are ranking on average position twenty four. So the process from here would be that does this post that is getting an impression for “how to advertise on Facebook”, is that a topic match for the post or is that just a random kind of semi match keyword? So you know that post better than I do.

Noah: Yeah that post is exactly “how to advertise on Facebook”.

Dan: So what you would want to do is that there are a few options from there and this gets into some of the other tips that I was going to give you but now what I would do is that I would keep a short list of the top ten or fifteen post that have a high opportunity from upside for you to promote them or for you to improve them. So I mean in short, there are so many things you could do with the post like you could update it, you could you could re-promote it, you could run Facebook adds to it ironically enough because I have seen sometimes correlations with Facebook ads are in rankings because google may actually look for just traffic like are you getting traffic to your content as a sign for popularity of that content or that can push maybe some organic sharing or organic link acquisition. Once you identify content like this, and so you could see right here that you can list this out by topper opportunity of ranking, but I actually might list it out by top opportunity for your most converting pages.

Noah: How do you track it? What do you use to track or to find which pages are ranked the highest?

Dan: So in google analytics, you go to a landing pages and I can show this in analytics, but the report is landing pages. And then you run a segment on organic search or google organic search and then as long as you are tracking goal completions, every landing page will have a conversion rate for that goal completion attached to it. So I would sort by conversion rate. And here is your list of landing pages but by default there sorted by sessions. So if you email sign up… Which one do you want to do? Email signup from joining page or from YouTube page?

Noah: Is that what you did or are those…

Dan: Those are existing in your account.

Noah: Can we show how to build those just for anyone who is watching and is curious.

Dan: Yeah. So to build a goal, you go to the admin and you go to goals and then here’s all your goals. Here I don’t know if I have access to create a goal but I can show you on an existing goals. So if you want to know what is this email signup from Join page, I am clicking on that and then this is a destination goal. So this is the best type of goal to create if you can. It is a destination URL goal. Because it’s a little bit more trustworthy than what is called an event triggered goal which is somebody clicking a button. So if you have a destination page that’s the goal set up here. So assuming that that goal is in fact what you want to be tracking, I will go back to the landing pages here. Now there is some cool stuff I can show you that we can do but what you would want to do is actually sort this out by that goal conversion rate, number one. So now we know the pages that are converting at the highest percentage. There is going to be some junk in here and you can filter that out or you can export this and filter it that way. But what we want to scan and look for is something reasonable that has let’s say a higher or more than one hundred sessions because anything less than a hundred conversion rate is going to be screwed. And I could see why I got fired from Facebook, one hundred million dollars lesson, two hundred sessions, three percent conversion rate.

Noah: Oh that’s hell interesting. So this is why people have joined something and send it to the bonus page.

Dan: Yes. They have landed on this post from google, not from anywhere else and there it was a last click inversion.

Noah: It is so interesting to do.

Dan: So yeah that’s the report that you want to look at right here and so you could filter for high or like more than five hundred visits but it was a more trustworthy metric that you could do. You could expand the date range back to get a bigger sample size like whatever you need to do to get a comfortable sample size. This is where I would say in theory if we promote this content and get more traffic to it now it should convert very well based upon this conversion rate but it maybe not. As there is that inverse relationship that the more traffic you get, it could convert at a lower rate. Maybe this is an outline number here but it is something that maybe you have tested with your Facebook ads although it’s a slightly different track.

Noah: Oh interesting so that’s actually a good technique. So you could take your ads and figure out highest converting pages and send it to those.

Dan: Yeah it’s a slightly different channel because social media ad versus a Google search to the piece of content could be slightly different but it’s worth considering that. Some people might even test PPC to get a conversion rate after that as well. I don’t probably don’t recommend it in your case. But yeah this is your priority of pages that you would want to promote and try to increase your organic traffic from. So what you might want to do is marry this post, for example the Facebook post with your search console data. Now we could do this but you could do something like combined this with a tool or with a VLOOKUP and you could see if there’s actually organic search opportunity to increase traffic from that. So now I am going to search analytics. I am looking at the keywords that you are ranking for, for this Facebook post, and what you do is that you can look for any gaps in where you could get potential traffic from and there is not always an upside to that but there could be. So now this is where we might be doing analysis about something that maybe you are not ranking. So Facebook firing, who knows with the intent of people searching, that is, but you rank average position ten. It has two hundred ten searches a month. So little by little, you are kind of going through the content and trying to find keywords that have upside to potentially increasing traffic via that keyword. Now, here’s something cool if you do want to run Facebook ads to something that maybe converts, what you might want to do is actually look at your audience demographics report, go to interests, go to affinity category you don’t have it turned on.

Noah: How do I enable it? Must do it.

Dan: Yeah I think you would have to go into your analytics account.

Noah: Yeah I’ll do it. So in affinity categories, Enable. Alright! So I had enabled it but it is going to take some time. So do you have a screenshot example? We will see from that.

Dan: Sure I will show you. I will just click on a random website that I know has some interesting stuff. So the goal here is to find the demographics according to affinity categories that convert the highest and the theory is that, that might potentially give you the insight to some of targeting that you could do on Facebook.

Noah: Oh that’s so interesting so you basically figure out the affinity and then which ones actually have high and you can see which ones convert.

Dan: Yes so music lovers, tv lovers, news junkie, shopaholics, home décor, technophiles, unfortunately this random site that I clicked on does not have a goal set up so I can’t show the final thing but you would do the same thing, you would sort by conversion rate and then maybe filter for low traffic affinities and then that would give you some insight to maybe some potential targeting to play around with. So I talked a little bit about finding other websites that have similar content that you could get content ideas from. Zapier for example led me to to-do-list which led me to this keyword here “productivity podcasts”. I know you have a podcast now and you are interested in productivity. I think there is an opportunity for you if you wanted to create a piece of content on your favorite productivity podcasts or the ones that help you with productivity, you could potentially rank here for that topic. It’s simple.

Noah: Where do you think that is?

Dan: I’ve noticed that Ok Dork ranks fairly easily for some things it’s because you have a high domain authority, the sites been around for a very long time, you do a great job with content, the design is good so the quality is there. So you have the leverage of being able to choose a little bit more strategically slightly higher competition keywords because of your domain authority and your site authority. Where if somebody is just starting out with a business blog they’re not gonna be able to compete here. But because you have a podcast because you like productivity because a lot of the results here are not a great match in my opinion. Like they just got the “player.fm” featured list, they’ve got some older content, they’ve got an actual productivity’s show not a list of podcast. Now the second opportunity here is you may have seen what we call featured snippets in the search results. Can you see that on my screen?

Noah: Yeah.

Dan: So, the featured snippet is your opportunity as all SEO’s are calling it rank zero, so you’re just going to skip above position number one and there are some theories for how to do this. So the way this sites potentially doing it here is they basically have just a list. So the piece of content is structured in a way that Google’s algorithm can pick up on the fact that this is a list and that’s all Google is doing. They’re saying Oh great! There’s a piece of content, it’s well written, it’s high authority and they have a list of the best productivity podcast. So if you structure your content in that way, using actual numbers or bullets or subheadings H3’s, H4’s whatever they are, you can potentially also get the second benefit of having a featured snippet result and these fifty percent of search results now have these featured snippets. So it’s a huge potential opportunity.

Noah: Do you have to set up any like Meta tags or do they just figure it out?

Dan: They just figure it out. So the best way to do it is to try to structure the content with html. So if your Ok Dork has html structure and using heading three or use a bullet point or use a number. That’s going to put the html structure into your content for you. And the way you can tell if you’re eligible to get this snippet but you’re just not showing up at the top. See this result here “the1thing.com” they have a longer snippet that means that text is what would actually show up at the top.

Noah: If they made it to the top.

Dan: If they made it. But see this result here “player.fm” they don’t have the snippet text at all.

Noah: That’s interesting. So for one thing like what’s your thought on promoting it so that they have a chance to get up there, assuming that the domain rank of the above sites is easier.

Dan: Oh! How would “player.fm” get there?

Noah: Or like these other guys.

Dan: Yeah they would want to try to structure the content. So in this in this instance people are looking for a list. So that means you probably want to structure the content to have a numbered list or use headers. It’s basically just good structure to the content and the underlying html. And so if I go to “player.fm” chances are they’re not getting the potential features snippet because just the content is not structured well enough. So, that’s exactly what’s going on here. So their content is laid out, kind of in a grid. There’s no numbers here, who knows if these are even h tags or what the structure is to this. This list is not a concise list with an ending. This list just goes on and almost infinitely. Where the other list is like these are the top ten productivity podcast. So it has like it’s enclosed in a specific amount. We talked about identifying the top converting pages by looking in analytics. So and I know earlier you were talking about wanting to do things that you don’t have to like go out there and talk to people and like that’s why the Facebook ads. So some of these pointers might not apply to the path that you’re going to take but if you were willing to provide a piece of guest content or maybe appear on somebody’s podcast. Take your top ten pieces of content by conversion rate or by organic opportunity, match those with high authority, high traffic, and high audience sites that have a good topical match. Where is if you were a guest again on Tim Ferriss’s podcast.

Noah: Can you show me the content that acquire the most links? That one’s kind.

Dan: Oh! Sure, yeah.

Noah: You’re still going through it.

Dan: Yeah.

Noah: So basically go get guest links from top sites.

Dan: Yes, but strategically marry that with your top converting pieces of content that’s the dots I was talking about earlier about connecting is you’re not just you’re not just being a guest anywhere for any reason you’re strategically tying that to actually place the content that has a topical match to that site.

If you are social media examiner if you have your talk about linked in on your blog so you would want to find a way to work that into your interview if they talk to you and that way they’re going to link you from their site. The one you asked about this is super interesting. So what I would do to find this is I do eighty twenty principal with in most of my analysis, you might have noticed that. I know you like the eighty twenty rule as well.

Noah: I think we all do like it in theory. I think no one actually does it.

Dan: Take at least the theoretical approach to eighty twenty with your existing link portfolio. So in open side explorer, if you put it “okaydork.com” go to top pages. Now I can see of your past content what has acquired the most linked domains. I don’t know if you’ve done any intentional link building to this or if it’s been mostly organic but what you can do here is reverse engineer what type of content.

Noah: Oh this is this cool.

Dan: Yeah. I knew I was going to find this but I want to show it to you so why content goes viral analyzing one hundred millions articles topics so analyzing one million headlines.

Noah: So is it like analyzing articles for me?

Dan: Yes. Studies, surveys, data, statistics all of those get going through like crazy and so the point there being is to leverage that content type as something you can create again. Get your first hundred email subscribers as ways that you can build new links to new pieces of content. So this way you’re strategically coming up with types of content that you know naturally even if you don’t do link building, should acquire links naturally because of past content.

Noah: Ok. That’s cool.

Dan: Couple of other quick things and I have to go in a second. Some of these were a little tactical but they do work. So would you want to update your old 30 or your old URL?

Noah: Did I not do that?

Dan: Not on all of them. And I could dig into the specifics but essentially what I’m saying here is your 301 redirected the content but you want to go back to the old link sources where you got the links and ask them to update their link. I think you have one of your assistants or employees do this for you. It’s basically a tactic not a strategy. But it’s something where if you’re updating those, Google is now going to prioritize the new URL and they’re more going to easily crawl that new URL source and pass the full value to that. So it’s a great tactic. There are other tactical things some technical things so for example if I crawl Ok Dork, this is super important from a crawl efficiency standpoint. So when I crawl okdork.com I’m getting a lot of internal 301’s meaning that you’re linking to URL’s that then passed through a 301 to take people to their final page. Go through and clean that up, have a developer somebody clean that up for you can install plug and call the broken link checker in the WordPress it finds all these three o ones and it gives them to you in a nice dashboard and you can just update them.

Noah: So because like they’re finding that one that has the reduction so I just get the people linking to it make sure the links are updated?

Dan: Yeah. Internally on Ok Dork, you control all your internal links. So instead of linking to the old URL version of hit one hit the amazon bestseller that has the day in the URL all of the in links which appear on your resources page on this blog post on that blog post, update those links to point to the new URL. Because if I go to load this old URL that’s going to redirect to the version without the date in it.

Noah: So you just do all the internal ones first I mean that those are easy.

Dan: Yes and like I’m saying you can use a plugin called the broken link checker plugin for WordPress, I assume this site is on WordPress so you can install a plugin. It will find all these for you and you can update them in it in one dashboard without going to the individual post to update all them. So it’s super easy to do that way. And then that plugin will find internal broken links as well good to fix those. But this way you’re starting with your own site updating all the internal links and then what I would do is go to the highest authority sites like Tim Ferriss’s site or Ramed or whoever is linking to you and at least update those external links to your new your URL’s versus the old ones.

Noah: Okay.

Dan: I have many other tips.

Noah: Yeah why don’t you hit it on and I’d hear. Just run through them all. I just want to hear it.

Dan: All right.

Noah: What’s claimed unlinked mentions?

Dan: This is another tactic. It’s not like a strategy but this tool in MAS link opportunities if I go to unlinked mentions and I say okay show me all the recent websites that have mentioned your name but don’t link to Ok Dork or sumo.co. So there might be a few of these a month it’s not like you’re going to get hundreds of links out of these but maybe you have somebody on your team that’s a super good one and so they just reach out to the site and they say hey, you mentioned us! You used our logo why don’t you give us a link and the tribute.

Noah: Yeah, I can ask them actually that’s a great one. I really like that one. Back in the day I thought our website listed this pretty neat.

Dan: There’s so many link tactics and strategies like that. Another one would be find every website that mentions Tim Ferriss and Ramed but not the one of you. Find every podcast list that mentions Tim Ferriss’s podcast maybe Derek Halpern’s podcast but doesn’t mention you that’s an opportunity reach out to them and say hey, you’ve got a great podcast list. I have a new podcast reach out to them and say can you add me to your list if it’s appropriate of course. Or the other thing you can do is find old podcast that are like yours. Like I know Derek hasn’t done anything with his podcast for a long time, maybe reach out and say hey like Derek’s podcast is old, it’s outdated as he doesn’t update it. Maybe it’s better to link to mine because it’s actually active and it’s new. So with these link tools you can find those opportunities that way. That’s what this link intersect tool is here so this is where you would plug in for ourworkwe.com iwillteachyoutoberich.com but not linking to Ok Dork.

Noah: Oh that’s interesting. The other idea that I thought was creative potentially is like people who haven’t really updated their shows or update their blog’s and go update it for them. Like ask them that Hey I have created some new content, I’m gonna mention you in my own stuff, something kind of interesting with that.

Dan: Yeah I did that. so upcity.com had a list of ten marketing and SEO podcast. The last one on the list was old he was broken. I wrote them the summary of mine. I gave him the link. I told him exactly what to put on their site and they swapped mine out with the old ones. I know you talk about trying to scale things so scaling these activities is where it gets a little tricky with these one off things but that’s where if you have somebody helping you with the each part of it, that’s where you can start to scale it. So you’ve already killed all pages right that don’t get traffic?

Noah: Yeah I did that one.

Dan: Yeah another thing is think a little bit about, I know you have an archive page where then you linked to archive by date and by category, think a little bit about maybe offering even a little bit better navigation, may be at the bottom of post, maybe in your foot or maybe you link to an html site map or maybe you link to the categories. I think what happens is that your old content gets push down after time and then of course Google’s not crawling that as frequently and users aren’t finding it as easily.

Noah: I’m re updating I think what’s wrong with blog’s these days is that it’s chronological when it’s really should be just about user experience, reader experience and topical. So if I’m looking for marketing let me get my marketing stuff and so we’re redoing the blog page and I think that’s what we should do.

Dan: All right, you’re gonna love this one. So the small downside in this if somebody lands in a pdf it’s not as guarantee they’re going to click anything and get to your website but check this out. I know you like to write book reviews and you love to read books.

Noah: I have read a ton of book reviews.

Dan: Yeah create a pdf summary because if you look at this creativity Inc. pdf, almost two thousand searches a month and I’m sure there’s more with long tail on everything. There’s a couple random summaries that rank, they are little bit lower. I’m going to guess they might be lower domain authority potentially maybe I’m going to be proven wrong here in a second. But I think if you create a pdf summary of the book reviews, it could just even be a pdf version of your blog post. I think you capture a lot of traffic opportunity because people want book information in pdf format. they want to download it, they wanted to save it for later, on what you do linked to the pdf from your actual regular book review, and maybe people collect email addresses to do in that way. But at least then you’re providing a pdf version where you can drive. So I’ll look at it like this it’s, low effort, high opportunity, because you have the content already. Issues that matter, creating a pdf sticking a link to it, and then getting on your site and then as you can see here but it’s high opportunity, because not much content like that exists.

Noah: Oh I like that. I think your point there in general, is really good is like, how do you take something and then re purpose it from that already doing, as a byproduct that would increase your overall traffic and how do you repurpose things or get more byproduct with products?

Dan: Exactly one thing I want to make sure is that helpful for you? Is that gives you something to do?

Noah: Yeah, I think part of it. You know what interesting about people in general is that we all have our own plans of like, here’s everything I’m gonna do and someone gives you a different thing and you think that’s not part of my plan but my thought is more between this and other activities. What’s the best use and so I think there’s two parts. I think number one is how do I approach the content I create to maximize my leverage of it. I think productivity or marketing which one’s going to be the biggest one. So going and having more of a system in place. It’s not hard but all science to actually decide that number one and number two I think is the tactic kind of getting links and stuff like that is a little bit more secondary that I can put. I think what I can do is to keep an intern for checklist so like hey, you just do this once a month that made me sure that I can always look for like unlinked mentions. I think that one’s good or if there’s lists and things like that that I should be on.

Dan: I think that’s exactly it is because there’s no way that you personally were going to be able to scale doing that kind of activity but you have the benefit of having help to help you with that.

Noah: Okay, well, I got your rocking. Don’t you have any final questions or anything like that?

Dan: No, I appreciate you coming on the show.

Noah: Thanks for having me, man.

Dan: Yeah, it’s been tons of fun. It’s been really enjoyable catching up, talking to you and everything. So but I guess we’ll quickly tell people where obviously they confined you in all that kind of stuff online.

Noah: Yes. Number one. If you are looking to grow your website specifically your email lists or need marketing tools that free go to sima.com, group on for deals if you want to get like, great deals on products at sima.com. And for me, if you like this podcast and you want more marketing and business related stories, no occasion presents podcast. You can find it on your mobile world.

Dan: Awesome. Noah thank you so much. I’m gonna let you go to your happy hour and we’ll talk soon.

Noah: Every hour should be happy, Dan.

Dan: I agree

Noah: Alright. Thank you. Thanks everyone.

Dan: So as promised here’s a little bonus segment at the end where Noah and I chat about his recent health journey. Once again and you can go to evolvingseo.com/Noah for all the links, show notes, slides and everything from this episode and it’s evolvingseo.com/semrush, trial for fifteen free days of sem rush. An year or two ago you gained a lot of weight on purpose and then you cut that weight and it obviously shows visually but I’m curious did that have any emotional or psychological effects as you were going through that process? I’ve always just been super curious of that.

Noah: Oh do you know the answer that’s why you asked?

Dan: I don’t know the answer but I’m curious because I know that the mind body connection it must be in emotion connection, it probably has a lot of connections. So I’m just curious what that was like for you.

Noah: Dude! it was the worst. Just to give context I went from one sixty to two hundred pounds. Two hundred pounds down to one sixty. I got a six pack and then now I’m in around one sixty eight point five. I spent a lot of time to know about the health which is very important and it’s changed a lot. Most of you will get into health because they get dumped and I got dumped. And so the six pack was more of an experiment. I wanted to see what it’s like to get really big and buff and get two hundred pounds. One eating food at that point becomes less interesting which is a little surprising. You’re like I can eat everything, you’re like dude I’m tired of nachos. I love nachos but I was like no more nachos. Done. That was number one. Right? You get kind of surprising. But with the six pack and cutting back down I think a few things we’re really fascinating by that experience. Number one, you have to actually just like your body, it’s not about how your body looks, it’s like how do you feel with your body. I had a six pack that looked great but I was miserable. I didn’t have libido. I was a very moody. I was very tired. Why? Because I’m working out all the time and that’s where my body’s energy is used on this and I’m not eating enough because I want to keep the tight body. And so that was really surprising. The thing that was actually beneficial is I think having physical goals or challenges makes life better. So for example these months now I’m doing by challenges. About last one I did four hundred miles in thirty days. In this month I’m doing two hundred miles in thirty days and I just find that having like some physical goal like I want to be able to walk this many steps over a period of time. It actually has a halo effect so that your personal life and your business life are actually tighter. Because you think that I am organizing my health, let me get organized in my business, let me get organized my personal and that really help with the six packs. But where I’ve come to know is I think that everyone has their own goal or what they want. I really like I like having a body that looks good in the mirror for myself but I don’t want to like get hit by a car and die and be like man I really wish I would’ve had that chocolate chip cookie and so I think you have to figure out what kind of body you want and then what activities and diet will help you get there. So for me, I tried everything single thing I eat. I have been doing it for two years now and that’s my personality and I like that. It’s not for everyone to show you it on screen you could see it but the body I want you know I want kind of bigger arms a bigger chest and kind of a small stomach or flatter stomach. So I target nineteen hundred calories a day. Like you can see like things I’ve eaten today.

Dan: Sure, yeah. What app is that that, for anyone listening.

Noah: This is myfitnesspal.com

Dan: Okay, yeah.

Noah: I think the great way to live an amazing life is just go back and live as elementary school kid with responsibilities. Meaning so you don’t do in your school you don’t do now. You didn’t drink in elementary school that gives you a lot of calories and it gives you a lot of disclarity and problems. You don’t really ever wake up like hungover without drinking. And then like what else you do, you biked around a lot and you ran around the woods and you did fun things and you ever stayed in shape that way. You did hobbies and activities like oh this is cool, just play baseball or books. For me main is the physical aspect specifically. I don’t think I haven’t been drinking as much and I’ve realized I’m happier without that it’s also less calories I don’t want to just do cardio like stand on a treadmill and I just think about the caveman like standing on a treadmill and just seems very silly to me. But like what’s fun for me is biking somewhere. And putting on a podcast or playing basketball. So figuring out how can I do our mountain biking is one of them in one of my big jams lately. So how do I do cardio, like physical activity that I enjoy not just like going sitting on sitting master and then for the physical body what activities will give me the body I want and I think the secret is that you have to sustain it. Meaning that a lot of people read some books so they go to Amazon the top twenty books are always like at least a third of our romance. A third of coloring books and a third are health books. And it blows my mind as the secret is out there, you have to eat and exercise sustainably.

Dan: Yes.

Noah: Right because my mom does a watermelon diet, where she literally will eat watermelon for a month and she lose a bunch of weight. And in the next month she always goes- Noah I cheated, oh my God you cheated mom actually? I had a pizza and I’m like yeah, of course you did because you’re hungry. And so I think you have to figure out that the exercise and dieting, they’d get you the results you want and you can sustain it. So for me like you know I eat my nineteen hundred calories I love dark chocolate and because I’m not drinking as much, I can eat more desserts and then on weekends gently Saturday Sunday sometime Friday like yeah pizza or nachos but it’s within balance from the rest of week and then I do like exercising physically, cardio and then weights that I’m enjoying. I was doing weights for like a long time and I’m rambling by ensuring my journey because I think it’s interesting but I was doing weights in gym and I’m bench pressing and I was feeling like you’re in a gym on a bench with a bunch of other guys and its like you’re in jail and like you’re getting buff. For what? And I was like this is just not useful and so I’ve kind of moved my exercises mortar like CrossFit cardio, high intensity circuit work out. So I’ll do three exercises in row and i’ll do two circuits two sets, about four sets of two different circuits and then I felt like I’m getting better results and I’ll keep it a little more engaging.

Dan: Yeah I’ve been doing high intensity interval training, the less moves program for a couple of years and absolutely love it. May be you’ve seen the studies lately about how that’s the best type of exercise to do for your heart and so forth. It’s super interesting. So you just a tie bow on that whether any emotional or did you go through a parallel journey when you were doing that emotionally, psychologically along with the physical.

Noah: Yeah emotionally what’s funny is you think you get a six pack because you’ll get be more attracted to the opposite sex right and then what actually turns out is because you’re working out all the time because you’re not eating enough because you’re gonna have a certain style of body you actually become grumpier and you’re tired and then your libido goes away. Which it’s actually counterintuitive to the whole point. The whole point is to be sexy for yourself to feel good but also sexy to attract others and then you turn out not to actually want any of that and you’re like well that defeats actually the purpose. So one of the things I’m trying to encourage everyone to do is just be more self-aware, meaning that in the morning or during your day just evaluate things going on I call a self-diagnostic right, literally just think about the check engine light for years of your life right and just go through like if this workouts really making my life in the direction I want to go. Is this work? Are these people? I had a podcast interview earlier to there’s two of them actually and it’s not an insult but I was like man I only get today once in my life and I have let’s see eight to ten hours of good quality or let’s say four quality hours of real thinking and good work and of all this I want to spend time with Dan because I know your stuff’s going to be good but I didn’t think they had big enough audiences for me to literally repeat the same messages and I was like no, I actually rather just work on my Facebook ads. And it comes off as a bad thing. People like do know you said you’d do it and like I’m like at the end of the day I don’t owe anyone anything, no one does. Right? And all they have is time that is my only and even most important asset. MIA. Right? And my most important asset is my time and I think we need to be more protective of that. I don’t want to spend three hours in the gym collecting that shit, you used my time. And so, anyway, this was something from earlier today, related all this. Yeah, emotionally was definitely straining and even recently, like I started taking some testosterone pills to see how it affected. I took it for a week, and then I was honestly like an emotional wreck. And I was like, I don’t care if I have a low testosterone or I did, I don’t know, and it was so impactful of my emotional state, then I was like I don’t care if it makes my testosterone or sperm count different at all. I just want to be part of that. So I think I have to do self-diagnostic on your business on yourself and so forth and that’s really how you’re gonna get growth in a lot of success.

Dan: I agree. All right, let’s get to Ok Dork and some SEO.

Noah: You sure?

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a bunch of stuff here. I did some research. If I have to, I’ll share my screen if it makes it easier, but I’m trying to do all your change is alive, you know, just doing what we’re talking about.

About Dan Shure

Hi! I'm Dan Shure. I write all of the posts and host all of the podcast episodes you'll find on the Evolving SEO blog. Say hello on Twitter @dan_shure!

4 Comments

April 25, 2017 Reply

Daniel

Dan, this was an amazing podcast!

The interview was on point, Noah seems like an awesome guest and I’m so glad you got together to collaborate on this. I took a lot of stuff from it (even just on audio). I’m looking forward to digging into the videos and other materials.
- April 26, 2017 Reply
  
  Dan Shure
  
  Thanks Daniel! Yes it was definitely a treat to have Noah on the show. I’ve been a fan of his for a long time!
April 25, 2017 Reply

Raphael

Enjoyed the show. Next time you help guest with SEO, we all would appreciate a screen-cast, your probably already on it. Liking this multi-media approach.

Will check out Noah’s podcast, seems like a honest guy.

Thanks.
- April 26, 2017 Reply
  
  Dan Shure
  
  Hi Raphael – thanks! Yes I should have captured the screen, it’s silly but I simply didn’t confidently have enough disk space. Will plan ahead next time! Although not full screencast, I think the video helps a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9NTBl0cS0M