James Schramko Podcast

Video highlights:

02:06 - Why email writing?

03:35 - Using follow-up sequences

05:08 - Why storytelling is better

07:53 - What are soap-opera sequences?

09:49 - Once people self select…

11:02 - When you do the broadcast...

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Transcription:

James: Another superstar guest from overseas – not just one country but I think he’s lived in many. At least, South Africa, London and Spain and now he’s in Australia. So, super rockstar guru, email, Autoresponder Madness, legendary storyteller and the benchmark of the Internet marketing industry. I’d like to welcome Andre Chaperon on the stage. Hello, buddy. Now, please have a seat. We’re going to…

Now, we’re going to do this together. You do smell nice.

Andre: Do I?

James: Yeah. That’s good. Basically, how did you get into this position of being the authority of autoresponders?

The super introvert

Andre: Before we start, I just want to create a context for everybody. So, I’ve never done any webinars. I’ve never done a video. I’ve never done any audio. I’m super introvert, which is why I’m having… we’re talking about that. So, that’s the context. I haven’t prepared any presentation today. There’s no slides. We’re just going to wing it.

James: We’ll do that since we did preps.

Andre: Yeah. I mean. Well, there’s an image.

James: Technically, it is.

Andre: So, it could be over for five minutes which means we’ll have a 15-minute Q and A.

James: Yeah. That’s good. I remember many years ago I asked you if we could do a podcast and you said, "No." And then recently, we did do a podcast and it was OK.

Andre: It was OK.

James: Good reaction. I think what would be interesting is just to talk about what you’re really passionate about. I think from the previous prep work that we’ve done, we’ve established that you got into email writing because you don’t like to make videos or do other formats and I think you also revealed at some point that you can’t spell that well. You’re dyslexic or whatever. You didn’t do so well in English at school. So none of these things matter if you want to be the world’s greatest autoresponder writer. What sort of tips or advice do you think would be worth sharing today? Do you want to go to your mind map and talk us through that process?

Going over the email system

Andre: I’m going to briefly just go the whole system basically. And the system, there’s two parts. So, we’ll go over the first part which is kind of that there,

that’s all the slides by the way. And the next element of the system is actually watch me email. And I’ve got three emails that I’m going to read. Two from somebody else. One is from me. So, that will create the context on how to write the emails I guess. If there’s time, I’m just going to…

James: Go for it.

Andre: So, I’m going to draw here as well…

James: By the way, I’m happy to email you these two pictures. If you’re happy for me to send them over in case you can’t read them. But it will be as discreet as possible.

Andre: So, the way that I figured out how to write what… fi...

10 things you need to know about content marketing.

What's in the video:

02:05 - What is Darren’s story?

09:25 - What is it that you do?

09:36 - 3 ways to define what you do

13:00 - Understanding your reader

16:00 - How will you change your readers?

18:47 - 3 phases of creating content

22:07 - Generating ideas

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Transcription:

James: OK. So our next guest is a super power in the blogosphere. In fact, I remember going to an event, my first event in the United States several years ago, and I'd found out he'd been to one before that, one of the early ones, and I found a transcript of what he'd been doing and what he talked about, and I read through it, 'This is great.' It’s probably one of the seeds to my original sort of direction towards content marketing. And then I recently saw him in the Philippines presenting, and I thought, 'This information is very in line with what we do. His version of what I talk about with OTR, but he's been doing it a lot longer than I have. He can do things like write, and spell, he's prolific, and he's really, really good at it. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Darren Rowse. Come on up.

Darren: Wow thank you. It's really good. Who's feeling like they've already got enough value from this and they could go home almost like I (raising hand). Literally in the lunch break, I had to rewrite the opening story of my talk. Thanks to an earlier presentation. I put all my content onto an app. Thanks Jarrod. I've killed my idea for the ProBlogger album and T-shirt range. I actually did. I have been considering doing a pajama range, ProBlogger work wear for bloggers. I've had to call the team and tell them to put all the content behind the subscription. I've deleted all the apps on my phone and I just took a hot and cold shower. It's been a busy lunch break. I hope you've had as a productive one.

I want to talk about content marketing and to help you to kind of understand the perspective that I come to this topic from. I want to tell you a very brief version of my story.

Darren's story

I got an email a couple of days ago basically saying with guidelines for speakers and it was basically, "Cut out all your story because people just want the tips." I'm like, "But that was the first 20 minutes of my talk gone." So I'm going to tell it to you in two minutes, and it does skip over some of the stages of the format for storytelling before.

But for me it all started in 2002 with an email from a friend. I was sitting at a desk at one of the part-time jobs that I had, and this email pinged in. A voice said, "Vat master, you've got mail." Did anyone else install that? I was the only one. OK.

It was 2002, and I got this email and it had four words in it and a link. The four words were, 'Check out this blog.'

I had no idea what a blog was, so I clicked the link out of curiosity. I ended up on this site that changed the course of my life. Not because of the content, although that was interesting, but because it was my first discovery of blogging and of this amazing tool called a blog. What I found on this blog was this tool that enabled this guy on the other side of the world living in Prague to talk to me in a really powerful, personal way. It amplified his voice in a way I'd never seen a voice amplified be...

Discover how to turn your stories into hugely effective marketing platforms.

Podcast highlights:

01:55 - The key to storytelling

02:35 - Why tell a story

05:08 - How I met my wife

09:05 - Breaking down the story

14:10 - Clint’s inspirational TED talk

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Transcription:

Clint: Thanks very much. It's good to be amongst like-minded folks here at the SFB. It's pretty exciting you know because we have to put up a lot of crap don't we sometimes when you work from home, when you tell people you work from home. Some people I'd say, I'm on a plane, or something, I say to someone, "I work from home," and they're like, "Oh. I know. You just sit around your undies." And this is what a work from home will tell you, you don't need undies. They're just a security measure in case you're on Skype. So it's great to see the turnout here. I love the different interpretations of what you wear to the function today.

To some people it means we're in $100 shirt and to other people it means wearing deodorant. So thanks very much. Good on you Walter. Green shirt man. It's a pleasure. Pleasure to be here today. We're going to be talking about storytelling. That's my job today. Talk about storytelling.

I just want to tell you first of all, I've never given this talk before. This is an original for you guys, for James. This is me cutting open everything I do behind the scenes with what I do for my various jobs. I'm setting the time at 2 because I haven't given the talk before so I just want to keep an eye on the time. I got 30 minutes.

James wanted to give me 45, and I said let's make it 30 because like Pascal, the great French philosopher once wrote in an email to a friend, he said, yeah email, whatever you want to call it, he said, "Sorry for the long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one."

So the thing is, brevity is key when it comes to storytelling. You want to get the message across, no fat, but it also needs to follow through the process that we're going to look at today. Alright. So I want to give you a framework. I tell stories for a living. That's my whole job across everything as I'll explain in a minute. Over the years, 15 years of doing standup comedy, online business, it's all about my story. So this is my whole thing.

I'm going to give you the exact framework that I use, that Joel and I, another professional comedian who I've talked about many times in the past and use in our stand up, and I use it in my online work to do everything, to have a business and have a career.

Why tell a story

Now why story? We know story is critical. We don't need to spend too long talking about the importance of story. I mean how stupid would your kids be if you never read them a story each night before they go to bed and how they'd learned about the world. Civilizations have evolved and learned by telling stories since the beginning of time. Our religious leaders with their stories, we remember the stories and the lessons that they tell, and we hear about them each day every Sunday at 10 a.m. if you go to church. The same stories. They are memorable. They move you. They're educational and they include lessons.

In a business, it's so important because they can take you out of just a competition state with another cold blank name of a business and br...

More SEO experiments with surprising results that you can apply to improve your own site ranking.

Podcast highlights:

01:14 - Can you damage your competitor’s site?

03:31 - What experiments showed

06:52 - Some action steps

10:50 - Pagerank defined

11:45 - Outbound links - good or bad?

15:20 - Action steps

17:16 - The concept of the fishbone post

19:23 - Do links have an effect even after they are removed?

23:41 - Quick recap

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Part 1 of the series

Part 2 of the series

Transcription:

James S.: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is part three of a three-part series called Counterintuitive SEO Experiments Tune-Up Series. The whole point of this series is to find out what SEO experiments have been effective and then you can adjust your website so that you can gain better rankings in Google, and to do that, I brought along my special guest, James Reynolds from SEOPartner.com. Welcome back.

James R.: Hey James, good to be back.

James S.: So we've covered six experiments already in this series. If you haven’t listened to those, go back to part one and part two. You'll find them on SuperFastBusiness.com. Look for Counterintuitive SEO Experiments Tune-Up Series or check out the podcast in iTunes or Stitcher.

For now though, let's talk about negative SEO. This is a big, bad wolf, this one. There's a lot of scaremongering going on. The whole point of course about negative SEO is that some people believe you could take down a competitor with malicious intent by sending them nasty links and sinking their ship. So does it actually work or is it something we don't need to worry about?

Negative SEO

James R.: Well, let's dive in and discuss this, shall we? I think we've covered a little bit about sort of spam tactics in the previous episodes and talked about it from the point of view that if you do something dodgy yourself, then you could land yourself in trouble. The same applies to then doing something dodgy to competitors’ websites.

It has been talked about a lot. Is it possible to take down a competitor's website by sending them dodgy links or doing something that's not completely above board? This has been fueled I guess by testing also, but also by Google’s stance. They changed their positioning on a statement on one of their sites to say back in 2003, I think was when they first announced it. They said there's nothing that you can do to harm the rankings of a competitor's site. And then they updated that statement several years later to say there's almost nothing you can do to harm your competitor's website.

Obviously that fueled the fire that maybe if you were to send some dodgy links or do something like that,

Discover how anchor texts, proximity and PR links can affect the ranking of your site.

In the podcast:

01:38 - Can this harm your rankings?

05:00 - Here's the SEO experiment

06:06 - Is it a good idea?

09:22 - Some takeaways

10:56 - What is proximity?

11:48 - The test and result

13:22 - Big takeaways

14:02 - On image linking

19:10 - PR links - do they help?

23:59 - Recap and action steps

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Part 1 of the series

Part 3 of the series

Trancription:

James S.: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. You are actually listening to part two of a three-part series called Counterintuitive SEO Experiments Tune-Up Series, where James Reynolds from SEOPartner.com and I have been looking at some of the tests that have been run regarding SEO results and seeing some of the surprising results.

If you haven't listened to part one, please go and listen to part one before you listen to this because it'll set you up nicely for where we're at. In that episode, we looked at if click through rate affects rankings. We had a look at Mobilegeddon and how that impacted search results. And we were seeing if Google displays more rich answers in search results.

But in this episode, we've got a few more theories to test. And the first one is exact match anchor text and if it harms rankings. So welcome my guest, James Reynolds, to discuss this very topic.

James R.: Hey James, how are you doing?

James S.: Doing well. So, interesting feedback from our previous episode. A few myths exposed. I'm sure that there's been some new mobile-ready websites and some better calls to action being put up on the internet of late.

James R.: Let's hope so. Yeah, let's hope so.

James S.: Alright. So exact match anchor text. Can it harm rankings? First off.

Exact match anchor text

James R.: What is it?

James S.: You know what I’m going to ask you, right?

James R.: What is it. OK. So exact match anchor text. I guess first, determine what anchor text is. Anchor text is the text, clickable text element that's in a link that points to your website. An example, if you have a third-party website mentioning you within that content and there's a hyperlink from that content through to your website, the actual text component of that is what's called the anchor text.

James S.: Yes.

James R.: So an exact match anchor text is when you have, in the text itself, the exact keyword that you're trying to rank for, let's say pest control Sydney was the keyword that we were wanting to rank for. The actual text, the clickable text, which our website would say “pest control Sydney”. Does that make sense?

James S.: That makes perfect sense. I've heard it described before as it’s like a voting system back in the early days of SEO. It was pretty easy to manipulate the search results by literal...

Discover SEO experiments that deliver surprising results, and how you can improve your page rankings.