Nile Nickel interviews Lolly Daskal, Inc. magazine's most popular writer, executive coach Lolly Daskal. In the interview Lolly explains how anyone can recognize and leverage the leadership gaps that stand in the way of greatness. The Leadership Gap: What Gets Between You and Your Greatness

Largo, Florida - April 4, 2016- In this show Nile Nickel talks with Jason Falls the award-winning social media strategist and widely read industry pundit, Jason is known as a top influencer in the social technology and marketing space by Forbes, Entrepreneur, Advertising Age and others. His strategies and ideas have touched iconic brands like General Motors, AT&T, Makers Mark, Humana and CafePress, among others. Jason leads strategy for Elasticity, an innovative agency that blends public relations, social media, mobile and SEO to help brands adjust and excel in an ever-changing marketing landscape. He is the co-author of two books: No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing (Que 2011), and The Rebels Guide To Email Marketing (Que 2012). Falls is also noted for founding SocialMediaExplorer.com, one of the industry’s most widely read blogs.

Jason is the co-author of two books: No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing (Que 2011), and The Rebels Guide To Email Marketing (Que 2012). Falls is also noted for founding SocialMediaExplorer.com, one of the industry’s most widely read blogs.  

The In-Your-Face, Results-Focused, No-“Kumbaya” Guide to Social Media for Business!  

Stop hiding from social media--or treating it as if it’s a playground. Start using it strategically. Identify specific, actionable goals. Apply business discipline and proven best practices. Stop fearing risks. Start mitigating them. Measure performance. Get results. You can. This book shows you how. Jason Falls and Erik Deckers serve up practical social media techniques and metrics for building brands, strengthening awareness, improving service, optimizing R&D, driving better leads--and closing more sales. “Conversations” and “communities” are wonderful, but they’re not enough. Get this book and get what you really want from social media: profits. Think social media’s a passing fad? Too risky? Just a toy? Too soft and fuzzy? Not for your business? Wake up! It’s where your customers are. And it ain’t going away. Does that suck? No. It doesn’t. Do social media right, and all those great business buzzwords come true. Actionable. Measurable.And...wait for it...here comes the big one. Profitable. Damn profitable. Want to know how to do it right? We’ll show you. And, yeah, we know how because we’ve done it. This is the bullshit-free, lie-free, fluff-free, blessedly non-New-Age real deal. You’re going to learn how to use social media to deliver absolutely killer customer service. How to R&D stuff people actually want. Develop scads of seriously qualified leads. You’ll figure out what you want. You know, the little things like profits, market share, loyalty, and brand power. You’ll figure out how to measure it. And then you’ll go get it. One more thing. We know what scares you about social media. Screwing up (a.k.a., your mug on the front page of The Wall Street Journal). So we’ll tell you what to do so that won’t happen. Ever. No B.S. in this book. Just facts. Metrics. Best practices. Stuff to warm the hearts of your CFO, CEO, all your C-whatevers. And, yeah, you. So get your head out from under the pillow. Get your butt in gear. Let’s go make some money.

A No-Nonsense, Take-No-Prisoners Plan for Earning Positive Return on Your Email Marketing! “They” say email is dead. Baloney! 94% of Americans use email. Passionate social networkers use email more, not less. Mobile email is huge. Email offers marketers more opportunities than ever...opportunities to guide customers from consideration and trial to repeat purchase, loyalty, even advocacy! But email has changed. Email users have changed. To get breakthrough results, you must break the rules! Whether you’re B2B or B2C, Fortune 500 or startup, this is a complete no-nonsense plan for transforming your email marketing. Discover radically better ways to handle every facet of your campaign: lists, From names, Subject lines, calls to action, social network integration...everything! Learn how to

Email Address: [email protected] Twitter Handle: @JasonFalls Facebook Profile: http://facebook.com/jasonfalls LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonfalls Websites: http://goelastic.com, http://jasonfalls.com

Nile:    Hey, I’d like to welcome you to the social media business hour tonight. We’ve got Jason Falls on. You heard a tease upfront so you’re going to learn some great things about social listening and I’m sort of fascinated to hear that topic myself. And Jason, by the way, is a leading digital strategist, author, speaker and thinker in the digital and social media marketing industry. His strategies and ideas have touched iconic brands probably you’ve never heard of like General Motors, AT&T, my personal favorite Makers Mark, Humanic, FA Press and many others. Jason:  Everyone likes that one. Nile:    Yeah, it’s -- that’s always a good one to warm us up in these cold winter times. Jason:  Exactly. Nile:    Well, you know, one of the things that you talk about and you’ve got a sort of a really innovative agency. Elasticity, correct? Jason:  That’s right. Elasticity. We’re about, you know, we’re a boutique agency. We’ve got about 30, 35 people headquartered in Saint Louis. It was founded by three former Omnicom executives and I actually was -- when I was the vice president for digital strategy at Café Press a few years ago I brought Elasticity to Café Press to be our sort of marketing, digital marketing and PR firm. And, you know, just absolutely loved them so much that -- I mean, there was a little bit of an executive change over at Café Press and I was sort of looking for a different opportunity. I just kind of gave them a call and said hey, is -- would it be possible for us to work together? And it sort of worked out. So, I’ve been there a little over a year. I run a Louisville office and we continued to grow and create content strategies and stuff for clients that we just have a lot of fun doing it. Nile:    I was going to say the size of it sounds like you are. I mean, that doesn’t sound so boutique anymore. Jason:  Well, I mean, I guess, you know, I guess it’s all relative. I mean, when I think of a boutique agency I think of anything under 50 people. You know, once you get over 50 you’re starting to get pretty big and layered but we’re small enough as an agency that we are still very flat and by that I mean there’s not a great hierarchy. We bring the right subject matter experts to the table for each client so it’s not just an account executive who is the liaison between the client and everybody else in the agency. When we have a client call or a meeting, you know, the media planning and buying, you know, person on that particular account is at the table, the creative director’s at the table, the account executive’s at the table, the strategist is at the table, the guy doing the SEO and pay per click stuff, the guy doing the community management or the gal doing community management is sitting there as well. So, we have a very flat organization which makes for a great collaborative environment. Nile:    Sounds like it does and I know that you guys have won a number of awards. You personally have as well. You’re widely read in the industry. Considered a pundit. You’re also noted as the top -- go ahead. Jason:  I was just going to say it’s great that I’m considered a pundit because I don’t know how to spell it but that’s okay. Nile:    You know, to me that always sounds like the guy on the football team that, you know, kicks the football. But that’s just me. Jason:  Exactly. Nile:    That’s just me. Well, and you also coauthored two books. I like your first book title. You probably listen to the show and you know that we have a segment in part of the social media business hour. It’s called weird ass news. So, you’ve got the no bullshit social media the all business no hype guide to social media marketing. And then you’ve got the rebel’s guide to email marketing. So, I like both of those titles. I think it says a lot about you. Jason:  It does. I’ve got a little bit of a non-conformist personality. I typically -- I’m the guy in -- that you sat next to in class growing up who always had a problem with authority and was probably continually sent to the principal’s office. That’s kind of me and it’s not necessarily that I’m, you know, that I _____04:16 at rules and all that. But I just have a disruptive personality which, you know, in the marketing world these days is what you’re looking for. You’re looking for people who can -- especially with content marketing online you’re looking at people who can help you disrupt, you know, the status quo of way too much signal or way too much noise and not enough signal. And so disruption is something that, you know, we pride ourselves on at Elasticity creating ideas that make people perk up and take notice and so, you know, no bullshit social media was where I first pitched the idea for the book to Pierson and Q, my publisher. I said if you won’t use the title I’m not going to write this book for you because the title is absolutely the essence of the book. It has to be the title. And they came back and said if Barnes and Noble likes it, we like it. And Barnes and Noble was like thumbs up man. We’ll put that on the in cap. Those are great -- that’s a great title. So, it worked out really well. Nile:    That is absolutely super. And, you know, I’ve never heard that I’m a rebel or a non-conformist ever. Well, at least in the last five minutes so -- listen, I know where you’re coming from and I appreciate that. Well, you know, one of the things that you talked about -- you talked about this in the tease before we got started. You’ve even mentioned it here. As we’ve just got -- we’ve allowed people to get to know you a bit. You mentioned social listening and, you know, I’m going to understand that concept. I talk to people a lot about engagement with their audience and I’m curious how engagement and social listening relate to each other. Jason:  Well, they’re certainly intertwined but I think to define social listening let’s first define social monitoring because there’s a difference. In, you know, in 2007, 2008 as companies started to really look at social marketing as a viable avenue to reach consumers lots of software vendors started to pop up to try to make sense of this social media mess out there for brands and one of the popular sort of verticals of software that popped up was social media monitoring software. And so if you’ve heard of brands like [?] and Radiant Six and, you know, some of those types of software. There’s even a free one out there called socialmention.com where you type in a keyword or a phrase and just like Google these softwares go out to all the social networks and blogs and even beyond that. Forums and message boards. And find mentions of that particular keyword, term or phrase and sort of quantify it for you. How many people are talking about it, what are they saying, is it positive, is it negative? Etcetera, etcetera. So, social media monitoring in my mind or kind of the definition of it is just that monitoring. Watching what’s going on on the social web so that you can quantify the conversation about you. Social listening takes that concept one step further where you’re not just quantifying, you’re not just measuring but you’re actually doing something with the data. You’re doing something with the information. You are extrapolating insights. So, you might be doing what many brands do with social listening which is social customer service. They find people complaining about a product or service. They reach out proactively and try to -- or actually it’s reactively because they wait for someone to say something negative. They react to that and reach out and try to conduct a little customer service on social media but there’s so much more there and real, true social listening is when you say I’m going to monitor the conversation. Not necessarily about my company but about the whole category. The whole category of the industry I’m in and I’m going to look for what people are saying about the types of products they like. The types they dislike. So, you’re trying to get consumer insights out of the social conversation just like you would try to get them out of consumers through a focus group or a survey. The data here is unstructured, there’s a lot more of it and it’s a lot harder to sift through but if you are practicing social listening very well you can actually get the same type of insights for your product, for your consumer experience or even for your content marketing out of just the conversations that are happening every day on the web. Nile:    You know, I want to do something that, you know, when I was in marriage counseling way back when the therapist told me it was a good thing to do. So, I’m going to parrot back what you’ve said based on my perspective and what I heard and I’d like to get your comments on it because I think it might help the listeners as well. What I heard you talk about was social monitoring is sort of the analytics and the keyword analysis to find out what people are talking about on the social platform. Whatever that might be. Social listening is where you start listening for specific keywords, specific topics that you want to engage with if you will. And then we talk just a tiny bit about engagement. I’m going to put engagement on top of this. Engagement is where now you start engaging in some sort of conversation based on the listening that you did as discovered by the monitoring that you -- that lead you there. Is that fair? Jason:  That’s -- yeah. that’s absolutely fair. That’s right in there. What I would say about -- to extend the conversation into engagement is when you’re doing a really good job at social listening you are understanding more about your audience and what it is that they are looking for not just in your product or your service but in the experience they have with companies like yours and the types of content that companies like yours can provide to intrigue them. And I’ll give you a quick example. Vespa, the really fancy scooters that you can buy. You know, it’s kind of like, you know, today’s version of the Moped only they’re really nice and, you know, well designed. So, Vespa had this, you know, standard blog on their website where they blogged all about scooters and driving scooters and what driving a Vespa was like. And they started looking at -- they actually started the practice of social listening to say okay. We want to find out what our customers -- and we want to try to identify our customers online, on social networks and we want to listen to what they talk about besides scooters. We want to know what else intrigues them so that we can understand them more. And what they found when they did that was that Vespa customers, when they are talking online about anything and everything have a much higher tendency -- they index higher than the normal, average person talking online in the categories of art and fashion and design and, you know, sort of that sort of genre of the world. So, you’ve got a higher cultured consumer that is a Vespa customer compared to customers of other scooter companies or just the general web. Well, that insight lead them to say you know what? We need to change our blog and stop talking about -- yeah, yeah. Nile:    We’re going to carry what they learned and what they did about it over into the next segment. Does that sound fair? Jason:  Okay. That sounds great. We’ll talk about what they learned in a second. Nile:    Yeah. so, make sure you join us. Nile Nickel and Jason Falls on social media business hour in our next segment.

Hey, welcome back and if you listened to the first segment, man, we’re into some fascinating conversations. This is Nile Nickel with the social media business hour. You hear me all the time but we’ve got Jason Falls, just a fascinating gentleman and as we talked about in the first segment a pundit. You could go back and listen to that conversation. But in our first segment we got into social listening and you started to describe -- and they’ll have to go back to figure out what we’re talking about, social listening, into that first segment. But we were talking about Vespa and Vespa had done some listening and that listening allowed them to gain insights into other interests, you know, basically the what else their consumers were interested in and then you were given an example of what they did with that. Jason:  Right. And I got so excited about telling the story I forgot we needed to break for a segment so I apologize. But so they discovered obviously that the Vespa customer was a -- has a higher tendency to talk about art and fashion and design. So, what they decided to do with that information was they said we’re going to stop just writing about scooters and transportation and getting around and whatnot on our blog and we’re going to turn our blog into an online magazine and again, the mechanism doesn’t change. It’s still a blog. But they changed the name of it from blog to magazine because again, they’re going after a higher brow consumer, someone who’s much more into design, fashion, art, etcetera. And they changed the content to be really focused on art, interior design, fashion, so on and so forth. And so what they did was they changed their content on their website. They started calling it a magazine instead of a blog and that attracted more people like their customers to come to Vespa, to read articles, to share content, so on and so forth. Over the course of -- I think it was a three-month period. They measured 50000 I think it was new, unique visitors to their website. And from those 50000 new visitors they were able to gain -- I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1400 new leads of people who wanted to buy Vespas. Because again they were creating the type of content that a person who might want to buy a Vespa wanted to consume. So, it was listening to the conversation to try and gain insights about their customers that they could then turn into something actionable which would drive more customers, more leads and more transactions. So, that’s the type of thing you can do if you’re doing social listening well. Nile:    Now, what I took away from that because I’m an analytical guy is I was looking -- and I said well that’s about 2.8 percent conversion from followers to leads. That’s huge. Jason:  It’s -- it is. It’s fantastic. And when you talk to people in the digital marketing space about conversion, you know, click through rates, things of that nature you have to remember the average pay per click advertisement -- just average is a .2 percent click through rate, right. That’s basically one in 10000 visitors to a search page is going to click on that pay per click ad. And that’s kind of the standard that you work from when you’re trying to look at how efficient you are in digital conversions. When you’re talking two, three, four percent -- and there’s some digital marketing case studies I’ve seen where you get 30 and 40 percent click through rates. Those are obviously rare and crazy, insatiable things. But when you’re talking two, three, four percent you’re talking significant jump in visits --

  Liz O’Donnell is the General Manager of Double Forte, a marketing firm expert at connecting companies to the people who matter to them via digital, marketing, and content strategies. She is also the co-founder of SheStarts, which supports the growing pipeline of women founders in Boston through networking, coaching and events. Liz is the author of Mogul, Mom & Maid: The Balancing Act of the Modern Woman, a book that picks up where other business books leave off understanding the impact women’s personal lives have on their careers and the ways business can support working women. She is a frequent speaker and consultant to women who want to thrive and the organizations that want to reach and mobilize women. Interesting Facts and Sound Bites: Her first blog, Hello Ladies, was named one of the top 100 websites for women by Forbes, a Best of the Net by Working Mother Magazine and a Voice of the Year by BlogHer. Today you can find her blogging at WorkingDaughter.com, a resource for women balancing career and caring for their aging parents. She is passionate about helping women thrive and helping companies reach and mobilize this powerful resource. Liz has been also named as the "Voice of the Year" and a "must read" political blogger by BlogHer. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, MomsRising and SheKnows.

  Guest Bio: Stephan Spencer is an internationally recognized SEO expert and bestselling author. He is the author of “Google Power Search”, co-author of “Social eCommerce”, and co-author of the “The Art of SEO”, now in its 3rd edition and considered THE bible on SEO. Stephan founded Netconcepts in 1995 and grew it into a multi-national SEO agency before selling it in 2010 to Covario. Stephan continued as a sought-after SEO and digital strategy consultant. His clients post-acquisition have included Zappos, Sony Store, Quicksilver, Best Buy Canada, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Chanel. Stephan speaks at many Internet marketing events, including SES, SMX, PubCon, Internet Retailer, Shop.org, etc. He’s contributed to Huffington Post, Search Engine Land, DM News and MarketingProfs, among others. Stephan is the creator of Traffic Control, a 3-day seminar on SEO, co-creator of the 3-day professional development seminar Passions into Profits with Kris Jones, and the host of 2 podcasts, The Optimized Geek and Marketing Speak. Interesting Facts and Sound Bites:  

Nile:              Hey, welcome back to the social media business hour. We’re talking with Stephan Spencer and Stephan is a true SEO expert. He’s really written the bible on SEO. Go back in the first segment if you’d like and listen to the details regarding that. But without getting into the details we were talking about some SEO strategies and one of the things that we happened to talk about was an SEO audit and in that audit finding duplicate content. Now, one of the questions I get asked a lot Stephan is about duplicate content. What’s considered duplicate content? What’s not? You know, what would get you slapped by Google if you will. And so rather than me speculating on it let me just ask you about that. Stephan:          Yeah, great question. So, let me first dispel a big myth about duplicate content. It doesn’t create a penalty situation. It is a filter. Not a penalty. So, when you get filtered because you have duplicate content that another more authoritative site also has it’s not like you are being slapped. It’s just basically that you’re not being favored over a more authoritative site. And this can happen if you’re even the originator of the content. So, let’s say that you have created unique valuable content about cruises and cruise lines and various, you know, just each cruise line, princess cruises and so forth. And this is an actual real world case. A company, cruises.com created all these different write ups about each cruise and each cruise line and so forth and then they would syndicate it to various sites that -- like airline partners and travel partners like Orbits. And guess who would end up winning the duplicate content filter war in Google. It wasn’t cruises.com. it wasn’t even any of the airlines. It was Orbits. Because when you think about how much authority Orbits has with all of these links and really powerful, important links pointing to their site. So, cruises.orbits.com was the site that would win out and then everything else would get filtered. So, you don’t want to get filtered out. Even if you’re the originator of the content that can happen so there’s some strategies and tactics you can use to ensure that doesn’t happen. Like for example, any partners you’re syndicating to asking them to link back to the -- your original article from their article. Like if you’re syndicating an article to various business sites then you could have in the byline or the bio where you specify, you know, just your company and so forth. You can include a link to the original article on your site. Not just to your home page because we want to link directly to the article in question so that Google can see that oh, this is the originator. And also when you’re the first one to show that article on the web and then later your syndication partners start to show it on their websites that’s also a signal. And then there’s another thing that -- I’ll geek out for just a moment here and then we’ll get back to normal talk. And that’s called a canonical tag. So, you add this into the HTML code. It’s not really difficult to do. It’s just one line of HTML and it just specifies what the definitive source URL of that piece of content is and so if you get permission, you get buy in from this syndicating partner that they’ll put a canonical tag in your HTML on the page that points to your URL, your article on your site then that will be a very definitive signal to Google that you’re the originator of that content.   Nile:                You know, if you happen to share content or get it syndicated and the syndication partner -- obviously, you might want. But they are not going to do anything related to linking back to you or allowing this conical tag. Did I get that right?   Stephan:          Canonical tag.   Nile:                Canonical. See? I told you I’d mispronounce it. What -- or how much of the content do you have to change on your page to make it unique?   Stephan:          Substantial. It would have to be very substantial. Because if you just move your paragraphs around or you add an extra paragraph -- think of it like if you had this imaginary five or six-word long window that you ran across both pages to compare and contrast them and see how many of those -- these are called shingles. These five or six word long windows are in common between the two documents. Shuffling paragraphs around is going to still leave most of those shingles in common between the two documents. Adding an extra paragraph or reducing a paragraph, that’s still going to keep -- leave most of the shingles in common between the two documents. You’d have to do a substantial rewrite. Paraphrase most everything. Or significantly augment the content with tons of like user generated content, lots of customer reviews or discussion forum posts and things like that to really differentiate your content from the other site. And that’s also -- we didn’t even go into the issue of duplicate content that you’re causing to your own site just by misconfiguring all the -- like the URL structure or having superfluous parameters in the URL. And I’m getting geeky again. Sorry. I just -- I’m a geek.   Nile:                That’s okay. Keep getting geeky. You know, we get some technical people on here so we want to know this.   Stephan:          Yeah, yeah. and actually I’m a podcaster as well so -- when I say I’m a geek I actually have a show that has geek in its name. optimized geek.   Nile:                I like it.   Stephan:          So, yeah. I’m a real geek. So, anyways, if you have duplicate content on your own site -- so, you are competing with yourself. Now it’s like you are creating not only duplicate content but you’re creating page rank dilution. So, think of it this way. Like if the leading candidate for president -- whoever that is. I’m not going to get into Trump and all that sort of stuff. But let’s say whoever your favorite candidate is had a twin brother or a sister, whatever. And they both ran and they had similar platforms and they didn’t really have any differentiating, you know, their level of experience was pretty much the same and so forth. You’d have a hard time picking one of them, right? So, it would split the vote and neither would win. So, imagine doing that on your website. You have five different variants of the same exact product page at different URLs. You know, flags or parameters in the URL, tracking parameters and things and they’re all picked up by Google. It’s like having four twin brothers and you both, you know, all of you running for president and none of you are going to win.   Nile:                You know, so people get into article spinners and then they’re looking to change words out in the article and they get the percentage of words and all that type stuff. It sounds like that’s sort of a game that they’re probably not going to win. Is that a fair statement?   Stephan:          Oh, are they not going to win? In fact, they are going to lose very badly because most of Google’s future algorithm is going to be based on machine learning and you can bet that with artificial intelligence they’re going to be able to sniff out any of that nonsense and if it does not read like it was written by a human and it like reads like poetry -- you can't make an article spinner right like Shakespeare or, you know, whatever. Pick your favorite poet or a writer, right. So, you cannot fool the search engines going forward. You might be able to fool them today or a couple of years ago. But even today I’d say you probably aren’t fooling them. Maybe a few years ago possibly. So, you are down a path that is not going to bode well for -- it’s not going to -- you’re not going to win. You are going to in fact lose. Certainly get penalized for it. And when you do something that you think okay. I’m going to kind of skate the edge here and see how far I can get away with this and I know it’s not cool, I know it’s against Google’s guidelines but it works. And other people are having success with it. So, I’m going to keep writing this out until I think it’s too dangerous and then I’ll stop. That’s a terrible idea because what will happen is Google will be able to retroactively look back on all your bad behavior because they’re keeping a rap sheet on you for certain. And they’re going to be able to figure out -- hey, wait a second. You have a pattern of, you know, skating on the edge here, doing stuff that’s against Google’s guidelines until you suddenly think you’re about to get caught and then you stop. We’re sick of that and we’re going to slap you like you’ve never been slapped before. And rightly so. You know, you had it coming to you.   Nile:                Yeah, and that’s what everybody, you know, has heard about the Google slap that happened to a lot of people and they went from respectable or high rankings to being invisible.   Stephan:          Yeah, but they think in terms of like okay. I did this thing and then I got caught or I did this and then I got caught or I do this thing and I don’t -- did I get caught? I’m not sure but suddenly my rankings are not what they used to be and so forth. So, they can't pinpoint it to a particular algorithmic update. What they’re not thinking about is they’ve created a pattern of bad behavior. Google’s been keeping that rap sheet on them and they can retroactively go back and reassess, reanalyze the data, figure out that you were doing something that was not okay and you have this pattern of stuff and something that probably wouldn’t on its own have gotten you in trouble; with that pattern of bad behavior you’re slapped.   Nile:                That makes perfect sense and I know a lot of people won’t like that but let’s go back to where you were talking about duplicate content on your own site. And it’s not there for any other reason than you’re trying to create, you know, different pages on your site that address specific issues and you might have people look at content on those pages.   Stephan:          Yeah. it’s totally inadvertent. It’s not like you said well, let’s create five different copies of every product in my catalogue or, you know, whatever. It’s just that whoever built the site didn’t know what they didn’t know.   Nile:                If you encounter that problem, is there any way to basically say this is my main page, these other pages, you know, ignore because -- it’s something like that if you will.   Stephan:          Yeah, absolutely. That’s what the canonical tag was built for. So that really reduces the duplicate content. The thing is it’s only a hint. It’s not an absolute directive so Google may or may not obey that canonical tag but the -- before the canonical tag was cross domain meaning it covered multiple websites -- you could go, you know, like let’s say you get syndicated onto -- I don’t know. Businessinsider.com or something, right. And they agree to do a canonical tag back to your site, to your original article on your blog. Well, back in the day when canonical tags were brand new that was not supported. You only could use canonical tags within your own site and that was to reduce the duplicate content that was inadvertent created because of tracking parameters and things like that. Because if you have like added to the end of your URLs source=blog to track when people are coming into your home page from your blog or source=email if you’re tracking people coming in from your email newsletter and then you also have that email newsletter archive down the web and, you know, have all these different pathways into the home page and they all are different URLs with that source= whatever tracking parameter. Now you’ve created umpteen number of duplicates of your home page and that’s not -- that creates that duplicate content situation we’ve been talking about.   Nile:                Okay, okay. It makes sense. Well, listen, we’ve got a lot to talk about. I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface but we’re at the end of another segment. So, join us in the next segment. You definitely don’t want to miss what’s coming up next. And we’ll be right back. Hey, welcome back to the social media business hour. This has been so exciting. We’re in segment three of a three segment interview with Stephan Spencer who is -- I’m going to change your title. I was saying that you wrote the bible on SEO. I’m now going to make you the SEO god so -- you might argue that Google really is in that position because they’re the guys that are making the rules but listen. I’ve learned so much. I appreciate it. Thank so much Stephan.   Stephan:          It’s great being here. Thanks for having me.   Nile:                So, you know, if somebody wants to learn some more about some of the SEO there’s a lot of tools out there. Are there any tools that are really worth your time?   Stephan:          There’s so many. That’s a great question because there are a lot of time wasting tools out there but there are some great tools and it depends on what you’re trying to do. Like some people will buy a big, expensive enterprise level tool and then they don’t have anybody to run the tool which is absolutely ridiculous. It’s like buying a really expensive car and nobody has time to drive it. What a waste of resource. So, if you instead buy lower priced tools and you spend your money on internal resources, staffing and outside consultants and so forth that’s way more effective use of your money. So, my favorite tools -- and I’m using these for all my clients, right. So, every engagement where I’m dealing with the three pillars of SEO which is, you know, every engagement I’m dealing with all three pillars so architecture, content and links if you recall. So, for links I’m using link analysis tools such as AH _____16:28 majestic.com, open site explorer which is part of MOZ. Of course Google has their free tools inside of Google search console. It used to be called Google web master tools. Doing link analysis with those. And linkresearchtools.com. these are all fantastic tools and I recommend having at least a couple of them so that you can compare and contrast the data that’s coming out of them and the reporting because they’re all different. They’re using different algorithms, different data sets, they crawl the web differently and to varying degrees. So, that’s just link analysis to figure out what your competitors are doing, where they’re getting their links from and which links are the most authoritative, important, trusted links so that you can maybe go after some of those same links and -- but again. That’s more tactics than strategy. You’ve got to have a strategy to like go viral with some crazy, amazing content marketing piece and so forth. And so we can circle back to that if you’d like. But so that’s link analysis. And then let’s say we’re doing some competitive intelligence on what keywords and so forth are driving the most traffic and rankings for our competitors. We could look at tools like search metrics. That’s M-E-T-R-I-C-S.com or semrush.com. and if we’re talking about keyword research to figure out which keywords are popular. Not based on looking at our competition and what they’re getting traffic on but just like what’s popular with Google searchers in our niche, our categories and so forth. Then you want to use the Google AdWords keyword planner which is a free tool. You just have to have a Google AdWords account which means you have to sign up with AdWords and give them your credit card but you don’t have to start buying AdWords campaigns. You can just never do that. And then log in and start using this free tool inside of Google AdWords called the keyword planner and this will tell you which keywords are more popular than others, synonyms, verb tenses, plurals versus singulars, all that sort of great stuff. And there’s complication with like -- algorithms have gotten better over time with google so it’s not so much like oh, I’ve got to get the right verb tense or I have to get the singular or the plural right depending on which one’s more popular. It’s more about entities and stuff so we can geek out on that later. But keyword research tools, that’s one of my favorites but there’s also keyworddiscovery.com which is a paid tool. There’s a tool within authority labs that’s great for doing keyword research. Authority labs is knows as being a tool for tracking your rankings. Your search rakings across the engines. It’s like Google and Bing and so forth. And speaking of tracking your rankings if you have never thought of YouTube as a search engine you should because it’s the number two search engine by search volume, number of search queries. So, tracking your rankings on the YouTube search engine is something that’s not on anybody’s radar for the most part but it should be. And there’s a tool called Woot that you probably have never heard of that allows you to track your YouTube search rankings as well as some other YouTube engagement metrics like watch time and number of views and favorites and likes versus dislikes. All that sort of good stuff so that’s --   Nile:                Okay, spell that one for us.   Stephan:          Yeah. Woot, W-O-O-T.net.   Nile:                Okay, great.   Stephan:          Yeah. lots of tools.   Nile:                Well, you know what? That -- listen, that’s worth the price of admission just to the podcast here for getting that listing of tools. And I know that wasn’t a complete list.   Stephan:          Not even close.   Nile:                But, you know, the thing that amazes me is you were just rattling all of that off the top of your head.   Stephan:          Oh, yeah. there’s a lot more up there.   Nile:                I can't remember all three of my names consistently. First, last and middle. I’ve got to stop and think every once and a while so that was impressive.   Stephan:          Oh, thank you.   Nile:                So, listen, what are some of the common or maybe even the most common myth about SEO?   Stephan:          Boy, there’s so many. And I actually created a white paper full of myths to dispel many of them. There were 72 in that document all in so --   Nile:                And I bet you that document’s on your website, isn’t it?   Stephan:          It is. It’s my lead magnet on my home page, on stephanspencer.com. so, yes. You can go ahead and download that if you’re listening -- if you’re driving don’t do that now. Go do that later when you’re in front of a computer.   Nile:                Yeah, we’ll have the links on social media business hour. This is episode 142 so no problem. Just go get the links and in the meantime continue to listen.   Stephan:          Yeah, yeah. so, let me give you a few examples of just myths that need to die but still haven’t. so, I still, to this day in Florida people are talking about meta tags and them having really any value for SEO. And I’ll -- let me get into specifics here because details matter. Like the devil’s in the details. So, the meta keywords tag is a meta tag that never counted in Google. And this is a great screening question by the way. If you’re looking to hire a consultant or an in house SEO person ask them about meta tags and specifically about meta keywords. What’s your process for optimizing meta keywords, how are you going to go about doing that? And if they give you any answer other than meta keywords what -- they never counted. Never. If that’s not their answer you boot them out the door because they never counted in Google. And if they give you some BS line about how, you know, they’re not as important as they used to be. Or yeah, they used to matter and not anymore. None of that is true. They never counted in Google and I can point to concrete evidence of that fact. Google webmaster central blog which is owned by Google and Google engineers write for that blog. They said that -- and back in 2009. We never counted the meta keywords tag. So, that’s one. And there’s another meta tag that’s talked about a lot called -- so, that was the meta keywords tag. Now I’m going to talk about the meta description tag. Do you know the meta description tag doesn't move your rankings at all? It’s not part of the rankings algorithm. It’s only used to influence the snippet that’s displayed on your search listing. So, you can change that snippet from like a copyright statement all rights reserved sort of thing to something more compelling which is great. But if you’re position nine, who cares? Nobody’s going to see that search listing. You’re buried. Yeah, you’re on page one but barely. So, instead do stuff that’s going to improve your rankings in the search results instead of tweaking the snippet that’s displayed. So, meta descriptions, that’s a very much a second order activity if that, right. Focus on the things that really move the needle. So, you could ask another kind of trick question or screening question of your candidate in front of you in the interview. Like tell me about the meta description and how that influences the rankings or how that -- where that plays in Google’s rankings algorithm. And if they give you any answer other than it doesn’t count, it’s not part of the rankings algorithm you boot them out the door.   Nile:                Well, you’ve got a quick boot process. I mean, we’ve got two questions already that we could identify if they know anything and boot them quickly.   Stephan:          Yeah, so just download my white paper and you’ve got 72.   Nile:                And if they don’t get through all 72 you know that you need to be looking for somebody else.   Stephan:          Yeah.   Nile:                I bet that you have some recommendations. Tell us a little bit about your business and how people could engage with you in all seriousness.   Stephan:          Yeah, okay, cool. So, I used to have like dozens of staff. We were in three different countries and it was fun. And I decided after I sold my agency that I was not going to replicate that again. That I was only going to take on a small number of clients that I could work with individually rather than just handing them off because when you run an agency, you’re the thought leader who is writing books and speaking at conferences and so forth you don’t have time to work on individual clients when you’ve got, you know, 30, 40, 50 active clients at any given point in time. So, I take a small number of clients and I work with them directly. I’m the one doing the deep dive SEO audits, I’m the one writing the content marketing strategy and presenting it. I’m the one who’s doing the keyword research and creating keyword strategy and doing the ongoing month by month kind of retainer work for the clients. Now, I don’t do all the like trench work. I’ll recommend, you know, outside people for doing things like optimizing individual title tags across a 10000-page website. I mean, I’m not going to -- I’d rather like -- I’d rather pull my teeth out than do that work. But the more strategic work and the really -- the deep dive forensic analysis and a really creative brainstorming for content marketing to get links and so forth, I love that stuff and so I do that with my clients. So, _____25:59 handful of clients at the beginning. Those are all clients I work with personally since I sold my agency. So, _____26:06 Chanel, Sony, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Bloomberg business week, Best Buy, Canada. Those are all post acquisition clients. So, if you’re interested. If anyone’s wanting to talk more about potentially taking it to a whole other level in terms of Google and driving more traffic just, you know, contact me at my -- go to my website stephanspencer.com. email me directly at [email protected] and we can talk.   Nile:                And we’ll have all those links as I’d mentioned earlier up on the website. You know, I’ve been blown away. We’ve been through three segments. A lot of information. And I feel like we just haven’t scratched the surface. So, I understand why you’re so revered and have reached the status that you’ve reached. Because really, there’s just a lot of great information and I had so many questions that I wanted to ask we didn’t even get to.   Stephan:          You know, there’s always another level. There’s always deeper that you can go. Your website’s never finished, your SEO is never finished. If somebody is interested in doing more on your own DIY kind of SEO I encourage them to get a copy of my book the art of SEO. You don’t have to buy it in fact. I got permission from my publisher to share a free electronic copy of this 50-dollar book with listeners. If you email my assistant she’ll send the link. I can't -- we can't include the direct link to the O’Riley site because it’s super-secret and O’Riley, my publisher would have a fit if it got out there in the wild but for your listeners we can allow them to download one of my three books for free. So, there’s social ecommerce, art of SEO and Google power search and they could pick any one of those three for free. Just email my assistant [email protected].   Nile:                And we’ll make sure that that is on the site as well. Actually we won’t put that on the site. You’ve got to listen. If you don’t write it down, go back and listen to it. It’s there. I think there’s value in that. Wouldn’t you agree?   Stephan:          Yeah, yeah. you can allude to it and say somewhere towards the end of the episode there’s instructions about how to get a free copy of a 50-dollar book from Stephan.   Nile:                There you go. That’s what we’ll do. That will be the tease in the site. But you’ve got to go back and listen. You know, Stephan thanks so much for being with us. I can't tell you how much I’ve learned and how much I appreciate it. I know that all the listeners with me do. Again thank you so much.   Stephan:          Thank you Nile. It’s been great being on the show. I love it.   Nile:                You know, and for the listeners, I want to thank you too. You really make the social media business hour. We would be nothing without you. And hopefully you learned a few new ideas or concepts. I’d be surprised if you didn’t. you know that my desire is you take just one of the things that you learned today and you apply it to your business this week. I know those small changes can make a big difference and I’m committed to bringing you at least one new idea each week. So, identify just that one small change you could make from the information that we’ve presented here and find out what a big difference it will make for you. So, until next week, this is Nile Nickel. Now, go make it happen.

Tom Tancredi has worked (alongside twin brother Dominic) on the successful launch of over 250 digital products while building their digital agency, DOM & TOM into an Inc. 500 fastest growing company two years running. Tom is a resource on anything startup related including mobile strategy, onboarding a technical team, finding a cofounder or structuring a fundraising deal. Tom has built high profile applications for Fortune 500 companies and is an expert on intrapreneurship in large organizations.

Take Steve Balmer with Microsoft. He’s a great example of Intrepreneurship. One of the first employees of Microsoft (he was employee number 30) – Steve was really the right hand man for Microsoft founder Bill Gates. He negotiated himself 8 percent of the total company, which is really incredible, considering there were 29 employees who were hired before him. Steve helped build Microsoft into the huge company it is today. With over 90% internet using Microsoft products. Steve Balmer was not the entrepreneur. He didn’t come up with the product – he did however, see the potential for the product, understood the strengths of the team and had the vision to take the product (Windows) to the marketplace in a scalable way. Although Tom is not the entrepreneur for his company (his brother Dom is the entrepreneur) – Tom found himself in the unique role as the “Intrepreneur”. In 2008/2009 he saw a unique opportunity to learn all that he could about the Apple iPhone. Since no one was the expert on that platform, Tom realized that if his company could be the subject matter expert for iPhones, they could create demand for their mobile software development services.

70% of all retail “research” is done online, on mobile devices – before products are actually purchased. This makes for an incredible opportunity for any retailer who is open to (or already using) flash sales, deep discount offers or impulse point purchases. In fact, if you’re not using mobile, you’re going to miss a TON of sales, especially around the holiday season, with so many consumers making last minute purchases for gifts. Likewise, if you’re interested in year-round sales, mobile is equally as important. Before creating an application though, you really need to ask yourself what benefits and features your application will offer to consumers. Tom recommends that you don’t even bother with creating a mobile application if you haven’t clearly thought through the features and benefits of you application. Whatever you do, don’t just go copying some other larger corporation’s application. Large retailers for example, the money and resources to “get it wrong” many times before they get it right. As small business owners, we don’t have that luxury. As a small business owner, you must play to your strengths. One of the things that you can do, that larger corporations have a hard time with is – you can be face to face with your customers much easier. This mean, you can solicit feedback, answer questions and solve problems much faster than a larger corporation. If for instance, you can think of features for your mobile application that can help you do that, then your customers will find great benefits with that. Anyone you touch in that regard, will find more value doing business with you, than anyone else. In the hands of your customers or prospects, your mobile application may just be the first time they research what you have to offer and who you are. For a great example of how NOT to create a mobile application, you only have to look as far as the banking industry. It doesn’t matter who you’re banking with, just about all of them have one experience online and a completely different experience on their mobile applications. When you go to their website to do any kind of online banking, most of the time, they have really thought through what features, choices and the “look and feel” you as their customer should experience. Contrast that experience, with how most mobile banking applications operate: They are not user friendly, don’t offer valuable features and worst of all, they can feel totally insecure. Once again, this a great example of how NOT to design a mobile application. It’s absolutely crucial, that you take into account the user experience and value that your customers will get by using your application. 

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “Timing Is Everything”. Nothing could be more true in the case of mobile technology – especially when it comes to user purchases. Through real world experience, Tom shares with us that if you have some process for a user to go through…as an example, it could be a purchase. If they are using a mobile application to make a purchase, processing time included, if it takes up to 30 seconds, your chances for success are really great. If on the other hand, your purchase process takes longer than 30 seconds, you’ll see your users drop off, discontinue the purchase process and buy from a competitor who has a faster option. This could be making reservations for a restaurant, purchasing movie tickets – whatever the process Is, it needs to take 30 seconds or less.

Amazon is a great example of streamlining this process. When you open your Amazon application, you’re automatically logged in. Not logging in before making a purchase, lowers the total processing time. Then, once the application is open, you need to make a selection of what you might want to buy – Amazon did it again, decreasing processing time buy making suggestions for you. Think about it like this: Amazon took a process that was five steps long and shortened it into two steps. All so you can quickly open their application, easily find what you are looking for and make the purchase. This shortened process has created a hockey-stick like growth for Amazon. You can achieve success if you do the same thing. Other examples of organizations who lower processing time to almost nothing include companies like “Trunk Club”. Once signed up for this subscription service, customers automatically receive things they may like. If they choose to keep the products, the purchase is already made. Companies like Trunk Club have brought the processing time down to almost nothing for making purchases from them.

Tom’s Best Mobile Application So FarTom has recently created an application called “Life Is Simple”. It’s a mobile application that connects customers to beauty industry professionals (like hairstylists) and their employees for the purposes of scheduling appointments in a quick and easy way. This really hits at the heart of what Tom is all about. He wants to help those who are struggling to make ends meet. Most beauty industry professionals make less what is considered to be at the poverty line in the United States. If adopted, this application will change the lives of thousands of hard working professionals who are struggling every day.

Starting with offering services to generate cash flow, Tom and his brother Dom created an environment where they could offer value to others, including mentorship for those who are less fortunate. They were able to get the attention from Fortune 500 companies by taking on contracts with a simple philosophy: Do what you say you’ll do, when you say you’ll do it and charge a fair price for doing it. Most people just want to be treated fairly and with integrity. Once you provide services or products with that philosophy, the people who you do business with, will appreciate that and take notice. 

Once you have an idea for a mobile application, do some research. Try to find other applications that do something similar. If you find them, that is actually a good sign. You really want to see market validation before you invest time or money into your application. If you find other applications that do something similar to what you have in mind, the next question to ask is: “How are they doing?” Are they performing poorly? If so, then try to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are. Why haven’t they hit a bulls-eye? What are they missing? Once the above research is done to your satisfaction, before building an application, first find a designer. Designing out the application using wireframes is a great way to figure out how it will work and is a lot cheaper than hiring some one to write code before very important questions are answered. A great designer can be hired for as little as $30 per hour. Once that is completed, find a technical co-founder to work with you. This person can help work out the entire application process and just as important, who to hire for which parts of the development.

Twitter Handle: @dom_and_tom Facebook Profile: https://www.facebook.com/DomAndTom/ LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dom-&-tom Website: http://domandtom.com/

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Greg Smith is the Founder and CEO of Thinkific, a software platform that makes it easy to create, market and sell online courses. Greg practiced corporate law for one of the largest law firms in the country when he created his own online course and it took off, generating more revenue than being a lawyer.

He left his law career to start Thinkific and hasn’t looked back.

Greg and the Thinkific team have helped thousands of experts create and sell courses while building their brands and growing passive revenue.

Clients include everyone from the yoga instructor who wants to teach online, to companies like Hootsuite taking their training to millions of students worldwide.