Business Podcast | The $50,000,000 Podcast | Discover How the Practical Education Supplied On Today’s Show Has Helped 4 Current Clay Clark Clients to Earn $50,000,000 of Additional Income + Tebow Joins Business Conference

Audio Transcription

So we’ve actually seen our recurring services go up 360% just in Starwood Clay. 360%? Yes, sir. All right, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, we’re going to do a show that I’m calling the $50 million podcast. This show is called the $50 million podcast. Now it could be called the $100 million podcast, or it could be called an infinitely large number podcast, because the stuff we’re going to teach on today’s show could be worth to a listener out there, $50 million. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multimillion 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use because they believe in you and they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show starring the former U.S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zuckner. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. I’ll show you how to get here Started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, now we’re here We took flight, started from the bottom And now we’re at the top Teaching you the systems to give what we got Colton Dixon’s on the hoops I break down the books, see bringing some wisdom And the good looks As the father of five, that’s why I’m alive So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi It’s the C and G Up on your radio And now 3, 2, 1, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. The stuff we’re going to teach you on today’s show. We helped him to apply that which he learned, and he has increased his earning, his total gross revenue for his business by over $50 million over the past four years. So his revenue has gone up $50 million. So I want to ask you this. We have two guests with us here who work in the office, and we’re going to have a lot of fun. So first guest is seating to my right. Sir, can you introduce yourself to the Thrive Nation? Tell them who you are. Yes. Hello. My name is Caleb House. I work here at Make Your Life Epic, and it’s an awesome experience for me. I work in the search engine optimization side of things, and I also handle some calls for the call center as well. And to the right of you, who do we have over here? Hey, I’m Micah. And so I work for Clay as well. I work on one of his businesses, Elephant in the Room. Super fun, super energetic, lots of excitement going on at the Clay office. Okay, so I’ve got to ask you guys this, okay? So we’ll start with you, Caleb. Did you go to college anywhere, or high school, or were you born yesterday? Tell us about your educational background. Absolutely. I graduated high school in 2017, actually, and then I went to Victory Bible College back in 2017. So I went there for a couple years. It was a lot of fun. And then I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do after that. So I ended up going to this 20-month coding boot camp. And it was called Holberton at the time. I think now they’ve rebranded it to Atlas. But I was able to get a lot of technical skills at that point. Then I decided to enter into the workforce here and was happy to get hired on recently. Now, Micah, did you go to college somewhere? I did. I went to SDSU for business finance. Is that a real thing? Is that San Diego? It is San Diego, yes. Oh, it’s San Diego State University. Okay. So, what I’m going to do, I’m going to pop on my screen. Our listeners will not be able to see the search results that I’m referencing on today’s show, but I’ll edit it in a way that our listeners can see the search results. So let me do this real quick here. For everybody out there, if you’re listening right now, what I want you to do is I want you to go ahead, you can go right now to Google. Everybody go to Google. It’s a new thing. The kids are doing it. We’re going to go to Google and we want to search for something. So we’re going to go to Google. I want everyone to go to Google right now. I’m going to have you search for something. So pull up your Google search right now folks and do a search for, I’m just going to show a whole bunch of examples, but do a search for carpet cleaning quotes. So everybody do a search right now for carpet cleaning quotes. I’ll give you a second folks if you’re listening right now. Again just do a search for carpet cleaning quotes. So when you are looking for carpet cleaning quotes, no matter where in the world you’re searching for right now, you have to ask yourself, why does Oxifresh come up, after all the people who are advertising and competing for your attention, why does Oxifresh come up top in the search results? That’s the question. And the question is, is that search result worth $50 million of income to them or more. Another example, one of my long-time clients, if you do a search for OKC pergolas, like it’s a pergola, P-E-R-G-O-L-A, pergolas, why does my client, P-M-H-O-K-C, why do they come up top in the search results? Why? What is that? What is going on? When you type Why do we see Why do we see? PMH Tulsa coming up in the search results So I want to ask the question out there because you went to SDSU San Diego State University At any point did any class at all teach you how to optimize search results? I have never learned this before I have started working for you It’s so it’s never been taught to you never been taught once in my life Caleb You were born closer to yesterday, maybe the schooling system changed. Did anybody teach you this in college? Definitely not. I would say not even at coding school. Okay, so let me just tell you what happened. It’s a true story. In part two of today’s show, we’ll get into the details of how to optimize a website properly. I started a company called DJConnection.com. Back in the day, you had this thing called Yellow Pages. Do you remember? Do you have any idea, Mike, any concept of what a Yellow Page was? That’s a little before my time. Okay. Have you heard rumors about what a Yellow Page was? I know there’s big books that strongmen tear. Okay, so basically a Yellow Page was like a directory where you would go to find the services that you were looking for. So instead of typing in to Google Tulsa DJs, you would go to the yellow pages and you would open up the yellow pages to the section of the book called Disc Jockeys. And you would open it up to the Disc Jockeys section of the book and then when you would open it up to the Disc Jockeys section of the book, you would look through and you would go, oh, okay, look here. The company with the biggest advertisement, I’m going to give those guys a call. So that was back in the day when I advertised yellow pages, so you’d pay that was about 2,500 a month for that ad All right, so I’d pay $2,500 a month for that ad now again, Micah back in the day people were looking for a disc jockey They couldn’t go to Google because Google didn’t exist yet, right or it wasn’t known yet So people would open the phone book right and they would open up to the disc jockey section alphabetically speaking They would find the disc jockey section and they would call the company that had the biggest ad. Now again I’ll zoom in so you can see this, but why would people typically call the ad that was the biggest ad and the the most obvious ad? Why would people not call the smallest ad on average? I would assume it is perceived as the most reputable. What do you think there Caleb? You were born closer to yesterday, perhaps things have changed? Yeah I mean I would think it’s more eye-catching, especially with all these different things calling out your name, like with advertisements. I would think that the biggest one would catch your eye most of the time. So this is my ad, it was the biggest one in the section. Again, I’m asking the question both rhetorically and aggressively. Micah, why would people call the big ad and not flip through and call the small one on like page two or page three? Probably of convenience as well, because why would I look for the one on the second page? Oh Yes, that all of those reasons right so now we do a suit search in Google. We say I Am looking for Bill Belichick’s number one fan. I want to know who he is I want to interview him because you know I feel like this is a good guy I want to interview the guy if you look him up. You’ll find me You find me I come up top in the search results. And the question might be, why do I come up in the search results as being the number one fan of perhaps the best football coach of all time? Why? Why do I come up top? Tell me. Tell me. I would assume that was a lot of hard work to get there. A lot of SEO, a lot of… Search engine optimization! Yeah. It’s because the things I’m gonna teach you on today’s show could be worth $50 million to you because I’m gonna teach you specifically how to optimize a website. This show is gonna be hot. Now this show’s not taught at any college, it should be. And so I’m gonna walk you through how this works, but let’s continue just for, I wanna make sure we’re really dialed in here, okay? So I, years ago, was building my company djconnection.com and the internet began to become more and more popular. People were using Google. And so I needed to learn how to come up top in the search results. How do you think I did it, Caleb? You just… Come on, come on, keep it going. I would guess that you researched how to get your search engine results to show up better. Micah, what do you think? What would I do? Come on. I would assume that you say, how do I become number one? And then look into what goes in behind it. So what I did is I looked up my comp, I hired top college graduates, web companies, and nobody could figure it out. They all said, I don’t know how to do it, I can’t figure it out, it’s too complicated. It’s always changing, Internet’s always changing. So I said, this cannot be the thing. So I obsessed on it. What I did is I typed into the search result, Tulsa DJs. I looked at my competition and I asked myself, why are they top in the search results? And then once I found them in the search results, this is the company I sold many years ago. Once I would find the company, I would find the business, I would find the website. I would go to the website and I would right-click because I would view the source code. I would go in here and view the source code. Thank you so much for stopping by lionsroad.com in the weddings page. I am Hugo, owner. I am Hugo. Same way. So I would go to the website and I would right click and I would view the source code. And I downloaded all the source code and I started looking for common denominators. Like I printed it out and I was looking for common denominators. I kept looking and looking and then eventually I figured out the common denominators that make the companies come up top in the search results. Does that make sense? Yeah. I like reverse engineered that. You know how long that took me to do that? You want to just guess there, Caleb? Captain Fantastic. What do you think? I would guess years before you started. I mean, probably. I mean, no exaggeration. Probably five hours a day, every single day for a year to figure it out every day, just hack it away. And then I found a company called BruceClay.com. And this guy for $8,000 a month won your contract. He will teach you how to optimize a website. 8,000. Mike, how many people do you know that have a startup business that go, yeah I can pay $8,000 a month. And by the way, he doesn’t build the website. He doesn’t create the website. He just teaches you how to do it. How many people do you know that can say, yeah, I can pay 8,000 a month? Oh, not if you’re trying to start a business. Yeah, exactly. And so then I reached out to another. I hired Bruce Clay, by the way. Then I went to hire a company called seoinc.com. These are companies that I’ve hired. This company also, about $6,000 a month. And so I paid these companies. And why would I pay that much money, Caleb, for people to teach me this stuff? Well, I think it comes back to what you said earlier about how it can end up being like a $50 million decision, you know, because if you come up at the highest level of search results, then so many more people are gonna be clicking on your content and that can drive so much more money to your business. Now, so many people today, and then we’ll get into our training today with Bruce Clay, the man, they call this guy the godfather of search engine optimization the father of search engine optimization We’re gonna interview him on part two of today’s show, but before we do that. I want people to know this the reason why Micah our clients you know we coach clients we teach clients how to have success we teach them marketing branding photography videography web Search engine online app online ad optimization, hiring, firing, workflows, systems. The reason why I teach all 14 aspects of business growth, the reason why for our coaches, they guide the clients down the path as it relates to management, creating a sustainable weekly schedule, human resources, systems, processes, checklists, how much it costs to acquire a customer, sales conversion, marketing, branding, unique value proposition, accounting. Why do we coach the clients through the entire process as opposed to just search engine optimization? Micah? Well, that’s a lot of stuff that you do all in one. And without having the back-end management skills, as well as knowing how to get new clients, knowing how to get new leads, then being able to be number one on search engine optus position might not be that helpful if you can’t manage the people that come in. Because once the, again, if you look at this, folks, you got to thrive timeshow.com forward slash millionaire, thrive timeshow.com forward slash millionaire. You can download this, my book, where I teach all this for free, a millionaire’s guide, how to become sustainably rich. You can download it for free right there, thrive timeshow.com forward slash millionaire. But when I guide people through this path and they, box number one clients I ask them, you know, what are your goals, revenue goals? How much revenue do you need to make per year? How much revenue do you need to make per week? Most people, they don’t really know those answers. Box two, how many clients do you need to break even? Some people know that, some people don’t. It’s about 50-50. Box three, how many hours per week are you willing to work? And I’m not going to get into a religious philosophical debate about the Bible today, but I’m going to have a one-sided debate because I have the microphone and nobody else does. So the Bible is very clear. You’re supposed to work six days and rest on the seventh. So if you read the Bible, you like the Bible, you’re into the Bible, you say, I believe in the Bible, the Bible says work six days and rest on the seventh. I don’t know very, I know very few people that work six days. But in 1938, FDR and his lesbian wife, they came up with the concept of the 40-hour work week. That was in 1938. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a socialist, he and his lesbian wife came up with the idea of the 40-hour work week, and that’s a real thing. So that’s, that’s, um, but, so you’re gonna put in the work. I always tell my clients, work six days, right? Work six days. If you want to create, you gotta work like the creator. Make sense? Cool. Box four, unique value proposition. That’s a big, box three, by the way, that’s a big mental tune up for most people. Most people are used to working 40 hours a week and then talking about life balance and how they’re tired and how their head hurts and I just feel overwhelmed. I just don’t put up with any of that jackassery. That’s why I only take on 160 clients because I only want to work with clients that want to become successful. I’m an enemy of average. I cannot handle the poverty mindset. So box number four, you’ve got to come up with your unique value proposition. What makes you unique? So even if people go to your website and you don’t have a unique value proposition, it doesn’t matter. So we go to Elephant in the Room, where you happen to work, Michael, you do a great job there. Someone goes to Elephant in the Room, the first haircut is how much? One dollar. Bam! That’s what it is. So the unique value proposition is it’s a high-end men’s grooming experience, like a country club of men’s hair, but the first haircut is one dollar right so why not try it out even how many times do people come in every week just to screw us they that they’re not gonna sign up for a membership they’re never coming back and you know it too Micah they’re a college punk and they’re just looking to come in for a dollar just to see what happens I would say about 20% of the people who just like yeah I’m only here for the one dollar that’s okay but most people aren’t gonna take advantage of but some people do. It’s fine. Next box, box number five. The branding. In the event that you come up top in the search results but your website looks bad, Micah, what’s going to happen? They’re just going to pass it off as just another company that I’m not going to use. Right. So you’ve got to get the photography, the videography, the web development, all that nailed down. So on today’s show, we’re going to do this interview with Bruce Clay, but again, we do all of this for our clients. We don’t just do search engine, we do the marketing, the branding, the unique value proposition. Now, search engine optimization is a powerful way to generate clients. It’s getting in front of where people are searching. But it’s not the only way. You want to have a three-legged marketing stool. You want to have three ways that you reach out to your ideal and likely clients. Three ways. So we’ll go back to the haircut chain. We have signs and wonders. Micah, why don’t we put up signs for the haircut chain EITR Lounge? In addition to coming up top in the search results, why do we put up signs and wonders signs in front of our stores? Well, a lot of times you have to keep on reminding people. You just have to remind them over and over and over again. Even though people know it’s a $1 haircut that they come in, sometimes they forget. Yeah, and people drive by and they go, oh, it’s a dollar. I’ll check it out. So you’ve got to have a three-legged marketing tool. The third is we do social media marketing, social media marketing. That’s retargeting ads, social media ads, etc. Now box number seven, we have recorded call scripts, we have sales scripts, we have recorded calls, we have one sheet, pre-written emails, we have a lead tracking system. Box number eight, we determine what it costs for us to get a customer. Now you guys are writing search engine content. We have ads. Do you want to guess how much you think it cost me at Elephant in the Room, Micah, to get a new customer? Now again, we had a customer that comes into the website and we’re cutting that hair for a dollar. We’re paying the stylist, you know, their hourly wage, plus we’re paying the manager, plus we’re writing the content, plus we’re, you know, getting the signs up, plus we’re doing the social media ads. How much does it cost us per customer? It’s a little bit of a shot in the dark here. I’m going to guess 25. It’s about that. So we don’t make any profit from a customer unless they come back three times. So if we don’t sign them up for a membership, you know what I mean? It’s like we have to, if you come in for your first haircut for $1, that’s why I’m obsessed with signing up at least half of the customers, because it takes them about three haircuts for us to break even. Make sense? Next is we’ve got to create repeatable processes and systems. Micah, in the stores, why do we have checklists for everything? Why do we have an opening checklist, a middle of the day checklist, a checklist for every aspect, a checklist for a style guide, a checklist for Zanotti, a membership cancellation form, an employee handbook? Why do we have checklists and processes for the entire business accessible at eitrlounge.com forward slash staff? I would assume a couple reasons. The first one is to hold everyone accountable. I have so many times where people are just like, I think I’ve done everything, and I have a couple things that aren’t signed off on the list. I have to be like, hey, did you clean your station? Oh, I forgot this time. I’m like, okay, let’s get that done. And another one is just basically reminding people to do their tasks. I’ll tell you this. The pen is for remembering, the mind is for thinking. So I want you to think about that. The pen is for remembering, the mind is for thinking. You want to write it down. Okay. You want to document it. You want to document it. You want to simplicity scales, complexity fails. And if people have too many variables, they forget what they’re supposed to do. Box number 10. This is where you came in, Micah. You’re a manager. We teach that to our clients managing. You got to hold people accountable and you got to have a merit based pay program. And I’m not asking you to rip any of our employees or praise any of our employees, but I think in my mind about an employee like Carly or like Jordan, these are great employees who work at Elephant in the room. Why do they get tipped on average 30% more than everybody else? You think about Amanda, think about Carly, our top stylists average 30% bigger tips than everybody else. Why is that? They put in more. They do. They put in more, their work ethic shows. They’re always taking care of things around the shop that other people aren’t doing. And this is merit-based pay. You have to have merit-based pay in effect or it just won’t work. Now box number 11, these are all the things we teach our clients, okay? Box number 11, we have to create a sustainable and repetitive weekly schedule. You’ve got to have a schedule. Nothing’s crazier than working for a business where no one has a schedule. So Caleb, what hours do you work right now? Do you know your hours? Yeah, so I work 7 to 3 when I do SEO. And then for elephant in the room calls, I work 10 to 8. Okay, but you got that written down somewhere? Yes. And we’ve all had a job, or you will have a job in the future, folks, where no one knows their schedule. That can’t happen. You’ve got to schedule, block out time for that which matters. Box number 12, you’ve got to have a human resources team. So you’ve got A players, B players, and C players. Very succinctly, if you’re listening to this show, this is what an A player is. An A player gets to work early, leaves when the job is done. That’s what an A player is. There’s other details, but that’s what they do. A B player always gets to work just barely on time, and they usually miss deadlines. Just barely on time. There’s, you know, if they’re supposed to be here at 7, they get here at 6.59, pulling in the parking lot, running right on time. They leave right on time, barely get, they just kind of miss the deadline or barely get it. A C player is always late, never gets their job done properly, that’s a C player. So why, Mike, unless you hate yourself, why would you only want to promote the A players? I think, I know from my own experience with managing the shops, the A players are the ones that get things done, and the C players are the ones that you have to just keep on, it takes the most managerial stress, so to speak. It takes away from my mental focus, I have to figure out where they are, okay, where are they hiding? Where are they hiding all day? They are, they literally will hide from you. Yeah. They’ll hide in their car, they’ll bring their phone to work, hide in the bathroom, create these ethical dilemmas like you’re not supposed to talk to them because they’re in the bathroom, but you know they’re in there just hiding. It’s crazy jackassery. And then the final box is accounting. You got to know accounting. You have to know accounting. That’s what we teach every one of our clients, all 13 of those boxes. But then box 14 is you want to optimize your life. I mean what’s the point of achieving financial success if you can’t enjoy it in any shape or form. So we help our clients optimize their lives, and that’s by setting clear goals for your faith, your family, your finance, your fitness, your friendship, your fun. And that’s really what we do. So we help you implement those proven systems. So if you’re listening today, and you want to come to our next in-person Thrive Time Show workshop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, featuring Tim Tebow, the two-time Heisman Award winning football player, featuring the $100 million man Peter Taunton, the guy who built Snap Fitness, featuring one of the most successful podcasters on the planet, John Lee Dumas. He’ll be traveling in from Puerto Rico for this event. His website is EOfire.com. Jill Donovan, the multi-million dollar founder of RusticCuff.com. Mondo De La Vega, who went from basically extreme poverty in the gangster life to becoming a very successful entrepreneur. Esther Federkevich, a woman who’s one of the most successful literary agents on the planet for all the book writers out there. Colton Dixon, this is a Christian top 40 music recording artist, and Michael Levine, the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Nike, for Prince. They’re all going to be in the house and more, and you can get those tickets right now by going to thrivetimeshow.com. So without any further ado, we’re going to go into part two of today’s show, our interview with Bruce Clay, but you want to take notes because today’s show could be worth $50 million or more to you. So again, take notes. This is Bruce Clay, a man known as the godfather of search engine optimization. When possible, I try to interview people that really are the world’s best at what they do. We’ve had the world’s best public relations expert of all time. This isn’t an arguable thing. This is Michael Levine. I mean, he’s the PR consultant for Michael Jackson, for Nike, for Nancy Kerrigan, for pizza, for Charlton Heston, for Bush’s and the Clintons. The Prince. We mentioned Prince. There’s just so many. I mean, he’s huge. On today’s show, we have the number one expert in the history of the world ever in the field of search engine optimization. They might call him the Godfather. This guy writes the search engine for dummies each year for he writes the search engine for dummies on search engine optimization. Yeah. This is the world’s number one search engine expert. Most consider him to be the father of search engine optimization. When Larry and Sergey built Google as a way to help people find information more quickly, they developed an algorithm that determines what websites get to be the top of search engine results. And when you as a company get to the top, when you navigate through that algorithm and you find your way at the top of search results. As an example, if you train dogs and you came up top in Google when you type in Tulsa dog training or if you were a pizzeria in Florida and your company’s name was Papa Gallo’s and you typed in pizzeria and your company came up top, if you had an automotive repair shop and you typed in Tulsa automotive repair and you came up top, it would change your life. If you were teaching basketball lessons and you came up top in search engine results, it changed your life. If you were typing in any specific phrase and you came up top, like if you were typing in carpet cleaning quotes into Google today and you were top in search results, it would change your life. That’s worth a little bit of money. That’s worth the brands I work with like Oxyfresh. Oxyfresh, let me tell you, these guys are so successful for a lot of reasons. They have great systems, processes, wonderful people, a great vision. They have a very affordable franchise model. They have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning technology. But it wouldn’t matter if people couldn’t find them. And marketing is about getting in front of your ideal and likely buyers, and sales is about charging them money in exchange for solving their problem. But if you’re out there and you can solve a problem for the world, but you can’t get in front of your ideal and likely buyers, it’s like having a billboard hidden in the woods. So this particular podcast could be worth millions for anybody out there. We’re giving it away for free for anybody out there who’s willing to take notes, listen in, and understand what is being said. In our Thrive Time Show business coaching program, we will help you execute the system, but Bruce Clay here is teaching you how to optimize your website and how to get to the top of search engine results. This is the Million Dollar Show. It’s gonna change somebody’s life and I’m excited to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization. Bruce Clay, the author of Search Engine for Dummies, the world’s number one search engine expert in the house. Bruce, how are you? I am doing great, thank you. Bruce, your book, Search Engine for Dummies, took me, and I’m not exaggerating, about seven to eight weeks to read it. I have the highlighter to prove it, and then I had to read it again and again to fully understand it The last version I read was seven hundred and sixty something pages long. How long did it take you to write? search engine for dummies So Wiley approached us and it took a while to actually end up with the agreements that we were going to write it The dummy series is pretty specific, so it’s worth it to understand that, that the difference between a dummies book and a normal book is that dummies will not allow you to define it, use a term that’s not defined in the book. So we wrote it, we sent it to the editors, and they totally tore it apart, because we’re used to the jargon of the industry. And they weren’t. So mechanically, the first version of the book took over a year. Wow. I think for a lot of listeners, a year working on a book can seem like a long time. I know my Start Here book took me a couple years from start to finish. How long did it take you to go from total start to finish? Well we were lucky. We do a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course for people who really need to know how it works. So we already had an outline for the entire book. All we had to do was actually go through our course materials and write it down for everybody else. The job wasn’t that hard it was the actual writing and when I say a year I’m not talking about part-time For 52 weeks, I’m talking about one year of tracked time For us to actually full-time work on that book You know Wiley approached you to write the book I know about you because I I’m big into the friend big in the franchise world. I work with a lot of franchisees, a lot of franchisors. I work with a lot of business owners. Your name comes up in conversations a lot. For the listeners out there who don’t know your name, but who will undoubtedly search you on Google, in the search engines, and find the book Search Engine for Dummies, and find your website, can you explain how you became the search engine guru that you are today? Absolutely. This was back in January of 1996. For those of you who remember that far back, I think that’s when Al Gore invented the internet. Thank you, Al. But yeah, January 96 on my dining room table, I was deciding I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I had had large corporate positions, but I wanted to consult. I thought it was going to be somewhat easy. My bachelor’s is in math and computer science. I have an MBA. I thought, hey, this marketing thing algorithms is right up my alley, so I started doing it. Then it took off. And it just grew. I hired a couple people, kept growing, hired a couple more. I’m now located in Southern California in a suite of 12 offices with offices around the world. So it has certainly grown over 22 years. You’re right. I’ve been given credit for basically being one of the founders of the entire industry. And in fact, if you do a Google search for who is the father of SEO, I show up. Hey, real quick, real quick. I have an audio clip from somebody. We’re talking about fathers and father-related conversations. Perhaps the listeners out there aren’t as familiar with Star Wars as I am, but there was a scene in that movie where Darth Vader was claiming to be Luke’s father. And you just claimed to be the potential father of the search engine industry. So, Bruce, if it’s okay, I want to play a little audio excerpt. One of our listeners called in and wanted to leave this for you. Bruce, are you ready for this, Bruce? I’m ready. Here we go. Luke, Luke, I am your father. That’s from the movie Tommy Boy there, Bruce. So hopefully that tribute did you justice, my friend. So your credit as being the father of search engines, I know this, because I feel like I’m a, I feel like search engine is like nerd meets practical, you know, because you’re helping grow companies. Can you please explain to me, when you say it took off, were you cold calling businesses? Were you emailing businesses? How did you get your businesses? Because you have so many clients today. You have probably a waiting list for everything you do. How did you start? Were you starting out of an apartment? How did you start your business? As I said, I started at home, but the way I got my business is I actually optimized my own site. Oh, there we go. So I have actually in the entire history of the company not had to go out and do a cold call. Amen. It’s, I’m, I think my reputation is sort of preceding me, but I’m known as the company you go to when nothing else works. People cannot figure out how to get ranked. They’ve gone through one or two or three agencies that are mediocre and they finally decide they just have to do it right and I’m the guy. So I’ve not had the call companies. They basically call us. They go to the website, fill in the form, we touch base. I’m the gatekeeper here so if you were to go to the forum and fill it out, I’d be the guy that said, sorry, we can’t help you. Or that looks like an interesting opportunity, let’s take no names. What’s your website for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with your website and how to get in touch with you? Well my site is of course BruceClay.com. I have several sites, but BruceClay.com is the main site. It is all about search engine optimization. We’ve got a fantastic blog where we give away free information. In fact, the site is over 5,000 pages and not a bit of it takes ads and not a bit of it is in any way generating money. I don’t charge a subscription fee, the site is just there for people to learn about SEO. I guess the benefit to me is by the time somebody has gone to the site and learned about SEO, they recognize they just don’t want to do it themselves. Okay, okay. So here we go. Now you’re hitting on a hot button. I want to see if you can unpack this for us, your team, because you have a certain level of mastery. Also I like to freshen up our approach. We help companies with marketing and I always want to stay, I believe in coaching. I believe in hiring mentors who really know the path and you are, I mean seriously, you are in a good way. You’re kind of like the Darth Vader of search engine optimization. I mean, you are the Obi-Wan, you’re the Yoda, you know search engine optimization. You are the father of the industry. And so, you know, we’ve hired you, but it wasn’t free, and it wasn’t cheap, but it was effective. Why can the listeners out there not hire a search, why is it not possible to hire a search engine optimization company to help your business for $199 a month? Because every listener gets a call from somebody from some foreign country calling, emailing, saying that they can do your search engine for as little as $99 a month. Why is it just not possible? Well, the fact is that the industry is changing. Google changes the algorithm approximately five times a day. So it takes time to stay current on technology. There’s not much you can do about it. You just have to pay to be current. Well, if you’re not current, I can sell you whatever I want. You can give me a check. Then when I don’t deliver it, you go away and I ended up with a free check. So I think that a great many people take shortcuts. They don’t care if you get in trouble, they don’t care if you get penalized. The flip side of that is would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that most people wouldn’t. If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200? Or would you expect to pay a rate. Same for a lawyer. Same for a brain surgeon. It’s the Thrive Time Show on your radio. Stay tuned. Alright Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation. It is the Thrive Time Show on your radio. And on today’s show we are interviewing Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert, the best-selling author of the book Search Engine for Dummies, a guy who’s worked with some of the largest brands in the country. And his company, you can find more about them at bruceclay.com. I have paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars, and I don’t regret it. He is the world’s best for big companies. I will tell you, there are projects, Chuck, that he’s worked with where he’s charging clients over a million dollars a year for search engine optimization. And that just shows you how valuable that is. Most of the clients are $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 a month clients for him. I mean, he has big accounts. Chuck, why can you really not find a legitimate search engine optimization company that’s going to do it for $200 a month? Why does it never work? Because it takes more time than that. Like, it’s the simple math. Like, you can only get a few hours of work for $200 from somebody that knows what they’re doing. And so, ultimately, they’re going to end up outsourcing it to another country or somewhere with shady business practices that Google will end up penalizing you for. And so, if you’re out there and you have an awesome company, you do an awesome product or service, but nobody can find you, well, what are you doing? So, you’ve got to be where people are, and that’s on the Internet. So Thrive Nation, I would encourage you to listen in and take notes as Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, breaks down how search engine optimization really works. Would you work for somebody for a month for $200? And I think that If you wanted a competent CPA, would you get one of them for $200? Or would you expect to pay a rate? Same for a lawyer. Same for a brain surgeon. You know, if you wanted a brain surgeon to do surgery on your kid, $200 for the surgery would really make you suspect. So fundamentally, the problem is that the infrastructure is changing so much that Unless you are just taking somebody’s money. You can’t even possibly justify that kind of a rate it usually takes a few thousand dollars I’d say and Sometimes many many thousands of dollars there’s Large companies out there that have 30 to 40 in-house SEOs just working on their own property. Those are the big guys. And if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it, but you can bet that’s more than 199 a month. If you want it cheap, well, the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. And I agree with you. If you go overseas, it is entirely possible to find somebody that can make changes, but unless you know what kind of changes are being made, you’re just losing out. They’re taking your money. What I want to do is, if it’s possible, I want to kind of get into the weeds with you, and I want to kind of get into some of the details, so that’s all right with you, and kind of go through them in a linear fashion, and if you feel like the way that I’m organizing it isn’t the best way, feel free to interrupt me and lead the way here. But Google compliance, just overall. I have seen so many people with a beautiful website. Bruce, you’ve seen it too, or it looks great. The site itself, visually, you go, wow, that is nice. The problem is, it’s like a billboard in the woods and no one can find it. And then you go to Wikipedia that doesn’t look that beautiful, but it indexes and comes up top for everything. Can you talk to me about what it means to build a website that is crawlable or searchable by Google, and what kind of website is absolutely not findable by search engines and by Google? I can certainly address that. Understanding that Google is changing all the time, the technology is changing as well. The process of getting into the index is simple. Google will send out a spider. It’s a piece of software that reads your website and attempts to figure out what you’re about. Many of the really pretty websites have been built by designers who do not know anything about SEO. They don’t understand how to connect things. They don’t understand how to word things, they’re not authors and not writers, they’re people who can build pretty things. And a big part of the problem when you do that is you don’t dot the I and cross the T’s to make it appropriate for a piece of software to figure out what you’re about. It’s highly visual, which doesn’t help a search engine. The search engine basically is blind, deaf, and dumb. It reads your site. There’s three ways they influence ranking, but one of them is it will read your site and it will attempt to determine what you’re about by looking at your content and by looking at how page A is connected to page B, and the infrastructure and nature of your words really determines what the search engine thinks you’re about. Now, a lot of people in a very visual environment, they have very few words and a lot of really pretty pictures, and the search engine cannot understand what that is. Now, there’s two other things that fit and I’ll just go into them briefly. One is what’s referred to as backlinks, where other sites link to you. Well if your content is pretty you might be able to get some links and a great many offshore SEO companies that’s what they focus on but that is not going to make you an expert. It’s just going to be a bunch of people linked to you. The third part is something called RankBrain, which is the Google algorithm, and it’s based on click-throughs. So if you don’t rank, you don’t get clicked. If you don’t get clicked, there’s no dwell time or perception of your quality, and so it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that the best-ranked sites perform the best. So the only way a website can really get to the top is to build something that a search engine can perceive to be authoritative information, quality information, and then the search engine can put you at the top and then you will get links and then you will have RankBrain like you and then you’re pretty well entrenched over time. So all those things have to play together. You can’t just do one and expect it to be there. But pretty sites, everybody loves a pretty site. Oh, we love it. Google loves it. Because the prettier your site, the more likely you are to have to buy pay-per-click in order to get your traffic. Right. Now, here’s the thing about it. I hear a lot of people say, this is what people say a lot of times, they’ll say, gosh, you know, but Nike, Nike doesn’t have a lot of content, Bruce. They have a lot of pictures, Adidas. And I would say, well, it’s because Nike and Adidas are spending millions and billions on advertising, driving, and by the way, people are typing in nike.com every day. But if you’re the average plumber, dentist, doctor, lawyer, whoever you are, the chances of people typing in your name like a household name is probably not going to be there. I mean, Bruce, have you ever heard people tell you that kind of objection? They say, well, the reason why I want my site to look like that is because I want it to look like Nike. Well, yeah, and that happens a lot more often than you would think. People have this perception that if you build it, they will come. And therefore, if you build it prettier, more will come. When in fact, if you build it prettier, they won’t come until you buy the ads on Google. So if you’re out there and you have a business that is trying to generate more traffic, you have to learn. You just can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. Search engines, search engines, and how to get to the top of search engines. And when we return, it’s our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay. Stay tuned. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, who many consider, who everyone considers, to be the father of search engine optimization. Each year he releases an edition of Search Engine for Dummies and his firm, which you can find out more about at bruceclay.com, is the world’s authority on big budget search engine optimization. Now, I have hired his firm in the past, and if you have a big company, I would advise you to check him out as well, but I’m telling you, you are definitely going to be spending, he talks about it during the interview, but $200 minimum per article. Minimum. He’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking $6,000 a month, $7,000. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to them. Right. And they’ve got to reoptimize and rewrite and everything. This is a big deal. Bruce is search engine optimization on the next level. And so what I try to do on this show is I try to break down big concepts into actionable steps that our listeners can take to make the money that they want to make so they can have the time freedom that they deserve and desire. And so now without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the world’s number one search engine expert. You can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that the internet does not exist. According to Forbes right now, 88% of consumers, according to Forbes, and we’ll put a link on the show notes, 88% of consumers read reviews online before buying something, right? But they’re not going to read a review unless they find you online. And I don’t know the stats in there, Bruce, you probably know the stats more than I do, and I’m not certainly trying to paint you into a corner about knowing the stats, but I don’t even know the percentage. I know the last studies that I looked at from Forbes, I do write for Forbes, I’m a contributing writer for Forbes, I’ve looked at some of the stats. Well over nine out of ten people start any product or service, they start their search for any product or service online. Do you have any data that would argue that 9 out of 10 consumers don’t start looking for things online? Or is it higher, do you think? I think I’ve read it shows about 9 out of 10 people start looking for the products and services they’re going to buy with an online search. No, you’re right. The number has consistently been, the lowest number I remember is 84%, but I think it’s consistently over that. I also understand a statistic which is 94% of all people click on only the first page of Google, which means you have to be in the top 10. So, yeah, you gotta be there if you expect to satisfy anybody’s queries. I think that probably your entire audience finds things, or at least finds reviews and certainly how-to’s and things like that online. Digital is the way of the world now. Yeah, you’ve got to be there. Now we talk about, you kind of get it, that’s high level. We’ve got to have a website that Google can crawl, that the spiders can index. I want to get a little more into the details of this. There’s a stuff called meta-content, which you write so eloquently about in your book search engine for dummies That only took you a couple years to finish because it’s so detailed. I’m telling you that book Bruce I’m not sure if you make any money every time you buy a copy of that book, but that book is awesome Search engine for dummies with Bruce Clay talk to me about meta Data meta content things like the title tag and the description and the keywords I think I’d say the vast majority of our listeners have no idea what a meta title is, a meta description is, what keywords are. They just have no concept of these things. Could you kind of explain it in a way that a simple mind like me might grasp? Most of our listeners, Bruce, are very intelligent people, but if you’re just talking to me, break it down. Make it simple for my cranium. So you want it to be at your level. Right, because I am a shallow Hal. OK. So metadata, actually, metadata is data about data. So in a portion of your web page, commonly referred to as the head section, the top of the source code, you have a section which has data, these content fields, that describe what your page is supposed to be about. And in that area, there’s typically what would be a number of key tags. One is the title tag, most commonly recognized because when you do a Google search, the link that you get to click on, that is actually the title tag of the page you’re clicking. The second part is a description tag, so it’s called a meta description, and it is the part in the Google search results that commonly show up under the title. And that’s where you would put a call to action, that’s where you would describe why people should click to your site, or there’s a mismatch and Google won’t like you. There’s other tags, there’s a keyword tag, which is logically used as sort of a, just a list of words that should be on the page. Can I ask you a question about that for the listeners out there that might have a question about keywords there? Let’s say I cut hair. I’m a haircut, I’m a hairstylist, and I’m in Boise, talk to me about keywords. If I’m cutting hair, I’m in Boise, I think some people are just unfamiliar with that term at all. We have hundreds of thousands of people that download this podcast. I want to make sure nobody gets left behind. If I cut hair for women in Boise, what kind of keywords would you be talking about? I would think hair cutting, certainly Boise. These are things that somebody might string together in a query. Like a search? Like a search. Okay. So an interesting statistic is 70% of all searches have not been searched on in the last six months. Yes, repeat it again please. That right there is a knowledge bomb for somebody. Please repeat. 70% of all searches have not been searched for in the last six months. What does that mean? So, if I am in Boise and I need to find a dentist because at 2 a.m. I broke my tooth, you’re not going to just search for emergency dental repair Boise right now I’m in pain. And that is a string of keywords that most often are not on any websites. So when you come up with keywords and content and things for your webpage, you need to think about how somebody might actually try to find you and use those words on your web page. You’re making me cry, this is so good. This is so good. Oh, you’re preaching the good news, yes. I’ll tell you right now, most people, I’ve had cases where people come to me and they don’t understand why they don’t have a better ranking for a particular keyword. And when I do the analysis, they’re not even using the keyword in their content. Google isn’t going to believe you’re about anything if you don’t use it. So it’s a self-defeating action if you don’t use your keywords properly on your web page. Now in terms of just the amount of content, just content, I think a lot of people don’t grasp this idea. This is a funny thing I did, Bruce. This is back in like 2004, 2005. It was 2003. I owned a company called DJConnection.com. And for the listeners out there, if you go to DJConnection.com, you can see it’s still a company that’s thriving today. I sold it and moved on to open different ventures. But DJConnection.com, one of the things with that company was that I was starting to figure out how search engines work and this was early stuff. I mean, Yahoo was huge at that point. Yahoo was like a dominant player. Thrive Nation, stay tuned. We come back. We’re going to learn why content matters for your website. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and The Thrive Time Show. Thrive Nation, you are in for a powerful training today. We have Bruce the Truth Clay on the show. Bruce Clay, this guy is the father of search engine optimization, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. His search engine optimization firm is the number one search engine firm on the planet. His firm represents massive companies that have over a million pages of content that are making billions of dollars. And he’s here to teach you the principles and the fundamentals of search engine optimization so you can implement these systems and strategies in your own life and Business let me further a new back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay And I didn’t realize just how much content matters I had decided to write the most amount of high quality content in the world about the phrase, chocolate fountains, Bruce. So I wrote an insane amount of content because I owned a company called Chocolate Elegance and we owned chocolate fountains. It’s like the fondue, you know, weddings, that kind of thing, you dip fruit in it. And lo and behold, Bruce, I got Chocolate Elegance to the top of search engine results as a result of writing something like 80 pages about the origins of chocolate, chocolate fountains, how chocolate fountains work. It was all really well done. It was almost disturbing. Can you talk to me about why the volume of quality content really does matter? Sure. And this should be pretty clear if you understand what you would want when you do a search. There’s a concept called siloing. We invented it 18 years ago. And what siloing does is it says that you should have organized the content on your website in a clear hierarchy. That’s actually one of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. So in a clear hierarchy, what Google is looking for is a bunch of interconnected pages that are on the same theme. So what you did is you created a large group of pages that were clearly different. They had different purposes, but they’re all about the same topic, the same theme. And so what Google does is it looks at your website and sees that you have these connected pages. And therefore, they assume that you are more of an expert than somebody that doesn’t. So if your site is poorly structured, you’re not going to rank as well as somebody that has a properly structured website. The architecture and the way your pages are tied together make a lot of difference. So we’ll go and use that as an example. If I wanted to find a site about chocolate fountains, if there was a site that had one page about them or another site that has 20 pages about them, that user would prefer the 20 pages. It’s more content, more information, better able to satisfy them. And we all have to believe that Google knows that. So Google is looking at how much content that is quality, it has to be quality, how much quality content is interconnected to build a theme that matches what people are searching for. And if you build that correctly, in a nice hierarchy, connected correctly, then you can perform very well in search. And that’s what you had done. You know, Bruce, I actually was the head of a group called the Tulsa Bridal Association, which was the group that threw the wedding shows in Tulsa. You know, we started the Tulsa Wedding Show where brides would go and gather at these banquet halls. You get maybe 1,000 brides in one banquet hall at one time at the Renaissance Hotel, and they’re all trying to find their wedding vendors. And I remember a vendor in particular pulled me aside one time and she says to me, she had a wedding bridal store, and she says, how did you find the time to write hundreds of pages of content on djconnection.com? And I said, well, I didn’t find the time to write a hundred pages, or hundreds, I actually wrote thousands, and I did it myself. I usually, Bruce, did it between the hours of 5 a.m. or 4 a.m. You know, usually 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. About five hours a day, I’d write content every day. And, Bruce, I’d do it in the bathtub, which I know is a disturbing visual, but I’d sit there in the bathtub and I’m just writing content, just writing about how to throw a bouquet, how to catch the garter, when the first dance was, when the father-the-bride dance was, what’s the etiquette behind the toast, why we have a toast, why we do the cutting of the cake, the history of the cutting of the cake, why we have DJs, who the first wedding DJs were, I mean, on and on and on. I mean, all of the dollar dance, the waterfall dance, the Soul Train line, the cha-cha slide, the Cupid shovel, how to do it, the electric slide. I mean, I was like the Wikipedia of DJs, which is why I became the top-ranked company in search engines. Can you explain to me what percentage of your clients say to you, hey Bruce, can you just write the content for me? What percentage of them actually are willing to sit down and write the content themselves? I believe I have a psychological problem called I enjoy grinding. I have very few clients I’ve ever worked with who want to write the content. What percentage of your clients prefer to have your team write the content versus the ones that want to write it themselves? Well, we have large projects where they don’t have the team to do it. Under normal circumstances, I would look at you in that particular case and think of you as the subject matter expert. So we would partner with you. And we could write the draft. You can finish it. We can editorialize it and make it ready for SEO, and then as a partnership, we publish it. That’s the way most of our writing projects are actually structured, because when you’re doing that for a technical business at all, then you’re not going to be the subject matter expert. If you went to somebody, and this is my opinion, but if you went to somebody and said, hi, I want 200 pages on this topic, you’re going to get 200 pages of absolute garbage. Oh yeah, total garbage. Complete and total garbage. And that really annoys me. You have to spend the time to do the page right, to do the research. The average 1,000-word page is supposed to take about three hours. And it isn’t just writing, it’s editing. And it’s making sure that you have sources and which image do you put on the page. And it’s far more complex. And what we find with our clients, be it good or especially the small guys, what we find is that they absolutely commit to doing it, and then they unconditionally don’t. Okay, repeat that again. That right there, I’m going to put that on a t-shirt, I’m going to put that on a hat, I want to embroider that on my head and get a tattoo on my leg. Can you please repeat that? That was powerful. The companies absolutely commit to writing the content because they’re the experts, they want to do that, but then they don’t write it. And it is unfortunate, but that is the case. And we’ve had many projects where we become the company’s writing team. Yeah. But if it is technical at all, we still need them to read it. So what do you charge to write an article? I mean, if you’re going to write a thousand words for somebody, I mean, are you going to charge them $6, $12, 7 cents. I mean, there’s a lot of companies in India right now, and you’re aware of this, Mr. Bruce. I mean, there’s companies in India, companies based in China right now, companies in the Middle East that’ll say, I will write you an article right now for $9. I mean, what would you charge somebody to write a thousand-word page of content? Well, we’re back to the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it. I think that one of the problems that you run into internationally is they do not have a shared experience with you as the author. And so they make assumptions about your target persona person. They assume things about what it is that you do for a living and what your product should do and why people should use it and it hardly ever matches reality in a different country. So we believe that every country has to write their own product content. So in our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think, $200? Is that a low average, you think, maybe? That’s a low average. If it is more technical, it takes longer. Now I’m going to go out on a tangent here and give you some additional data. And I know you hate it when I do that. No, it’s good. This is good. This is going to blow someone’s mind here. When you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below them. Thrive Nation, do not get overwhelmed by search engine optimization. Just leave us an objective review on iTunes. Just subscribe to the Thrive Time Show podcast on iTunes. Leave us an objective review and email us proof you did it and we’ll send you free tickets to our next in-person Thrive Time Show two-day 15-hour workshop and we’ll teach you everything you need to know. Stay tuned. Attend the world’s best business workshop led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at thrive timeshow dot com. Hey Chuck. Hey man. Are you familiar with that thing called the internet? Enter in the net. That’s when you catch fish in a net, right? Chum, I’ll tell you this, man. There’s people out there starting to use this thing called Google. Oh, I don’t know if they do. Or they’re on the Facebooks. And I’ve heard that people are going on there to buy products and search for goods and services on that Google. Now, we boys from Oklahoma. And there’s three things I know about search engines, Chum. One is the word search is the first word. That’s right. The second word is optimization. And the third is I ain’t knowing nothing about it. You know what I’m saying? You want a V8. I know that about engines. Chuck, do you think I should grow out my perm or just kind of let it be? Yeah, you got to let it grow. Should I put the lightning bolts on the side of my mullet, Chuck? Yeah, yeah. Perm mullet with the lightning bolts, Clay. That’s what you want. You know, Chuck, you know, Chuck, you know, Chuck, I don’t know if you’ve thought about this very much, but one thing that we like to say in Oklahoma, Chuck, Chuck, you know what we say? What is that? You know what they say. See you abroad to get that booty, Ackle. Leg it down and smack on the Ackle. All right, now, Thrive Nation, if that’s about, if you’re saying to yourself, yeah, hey, when it comes to search engine, I’m serious. If you’re sitting there at an office party or an office event, gathering, a networking event, you’re talking to a buddy of yours who owns a business, and he says, well, you know, search engine optimization is key to our success. And you find yourself saying, well… You know what they say, see a broad to get that booty, yak him. Leg her down and smack him, yak him. If that’s all you know about search engine, if somebody put a gun to your head and said, teach me how to get to the top of Google, and you immediately said, la, la, la, Luke, then you need to listen in because Bruce Clay, the father of search engine optimization, is going to be dropping knowledge bombs on you like your name is Saddam. Oh. Eeeee. Thrive nature without any further ado, back to my conversation with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Mr. Bruce Clay. In our case, what is the right price? It varies. If it’s a thousand words and it’s going to take three hours, it’s a few hundred dollars. So $200 for a quality, you know, maybe thousand word article, you think, $200? Is that a low average, you think, maybe? is more technical, it takes longer. Now, when you look at the results in the search engines, typically the top ranked sites have more words on the pages than the sites below the pages. Bruce, I want you to help me on this. This is my six year quest. John Kelly knows this, my right-hand man. We have been working to be top of the world for the phrase business conferences for about six years. And we’re at the top of page two now. And we have a podcast that’s ranked in the top ten on iTunes in the business section. We have thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of downloads. But we’re competing against Tony Robbins. I mean, Tony, for everybody out there that is not aware of Tony Robbins, welcome to the planet Earth. But Tony Robbins, I mean, this guy, Bruce, he has tons of backlinks from news and media agencies. The guy has a team of bloggers writing content every day. And he’s a beautiful man, too, I’m sure. But it’s taken a long time to be, and I know it’s just, so every week we add content at a rate that exceeds his rate of adding content. I’ve kind of timed it out, and I believe in probably January of this year we’re going to beat him finally. But I mean, is that normal where you go into an industry and you go, wow, this industry… I mean, because Tony Robbins, when we decided to do it, I knew it would take years and years and years. Do you often sit down with a client and explain to them, like, hey, to be top of Google for your term, my friend, that’s going to cost you a lot of money and a lot of time. And many times that’s the case. And it depends upon what is missing. And I want to make sure everybody understands how it works. It isn’t also whoever dies with the most backlinks wins. It’s who has the best backlinks. And are the backlinks appropriate for that one keyword? And am I spamming the backlinks? Am I buying them? Am I getting backlinks from garbage sites? Those are the kinds of things that matter the most. Many brands, by the time you become a brand, you’re gonna get backlinks to you by your brand name, not particularly what your brand does. That contributes a lot of power to your homepage and then your homepage distributes that power to your subpages. So when you think about a Tony Robbins, you’re competing, and a Wikipedia, you’re competing against a brand over time has acquired a lot of link value. That doesn’t mean that you need to publish more content than them. It just means your content has to be better than them. And it has to be more of a solution to that user than them. We have a blog. And at one point, I felt that we have to publish a lot of blog posts. When I did the analysis, I decided it isn’t how many you publish, it is how good it is. We focus more on is this blog post solving somebody’s problem and then how do I tell that person I have the blog post. That is far more important than just publishing things. You have to kind of advertise that you’ve published it, and you have to advertise to the people that matter. But it isn’t an issue so much of quantity. It is far more an interest in quality that’s going to cause the search engines to perform well with you on your content. Now, having said that, I do believe that if you have too little content, you’re not going to succeed. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much content. We do projects large and small, hundreds of thousands of dollars at the high end and $500 a month at the low end. It really will vary, but we do them all over the board. Now Bruce, this is a concept that I would like to see if you can share with listeners. In your book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, you discuss the amount of content that needs to be on a page in order for Google to count it or for Google to really care about it or to index it or to think it’s not a waste of time. You can’t have two words on every page. And you talked about certain industries and you alluded to it earlier, certain industries you might have to have 1,500 words of content to be relevant, and certain industries you might have to have 350 words of content on a page for it to be relevant. Why do you have to have a minimum amount of words on a page for Google to care enough to index it? I know the Google algorithm doesn’t care, but in order for Google to index it, why do you have to have a certain minimum number of words per page? Well, you can get away with almost none. We’ve seen well-performing pages that have fewer than a hundred words. They have like 80 words. The issue with words is you need a sufficient quantity compared to your competition to prove to search engine that you are a subject matter expert. In some industries where all your competitors have 400 words, 400 might be a really good number. But if I am competing for an information source against Wikipedia, Google, government.gov’s government pages, university pages that are writing about it, and they all have 2,000 words, my 400-word page isn’t going to stand a chance. You have to be equal and then better, and just being, just showing up to the party is not sufficient. Bruce, whenever I have spoken at big conferences, I’ve spoken for Maytag and Hewlett Packard and O’Reilly’s Auto Parts and UPS, a lot of big companies. And I’ll get an attendee that will come up to me. I’m sure you’ve never run into this, Bruce, but someone will come up to you and say, they’ll say, hey, here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. Honestly, I’m willing to pay you guys up front quite a bit. And I just want to know, how do I get to the top of Google in like two weeks? I know you guys all preach that it’s a process, like growing a tree, and that you can’t get to the top of Google immediately because you’ve all kind of agreed to the secret society of preaching the process. But unlike planning a garden, and unlike raising a child, and unlike growing a successful business, I want it to be a microwave thing. And I’m willing to pay you, Bruce, right now, 40 grand up front. Make me top in Google in two weeks. Let’s go. Boom. Why, Bruce, is it not possible? Can you explain to somebody that I’ve run into, people you’ve never run into, but people that I’ve run into at my conferences that want to be top in Google in two weeks, why can you not be top in Google in two weeks? Many reasons. One, we don’t know what’s wrong with your site. We have to open the hood and look under it and see where things are broken. See, if everything was working correctly, then theoretically everybody would be number one. But in fact, most sites are their own worst enemy. And sometimes I could take a site and change their life in a few weeks. I don’t think two is a realistic number, but let’s say four. I can change your life in four weeks provided the reason you don’t rank is you did something wrong. It’s when you did everything right that it takes longer. I view reviewing websites and fixing websites to be a little bit like a hospital. The very first thing you do is you cart the website into the emergency room and stop the bleeding. You make them so that they’re not their worst enemy anymore. Then you take them into surgery. And that’s when you’re going to do the heavy lifting, deep thinking, SEO that an average person could not even come close to being able to accomplish. So it’s multiple steps. You have to go through them all and that’s the way you have to do it to get ranked. If you have no competitors, none, sure I can get you ranked in a heartbeat. If you have a million competitors, just do a query for your keyword. You’ll see how many different sites are out there. If these are real competitors, then it’s going to take longer. The best I think we’ve done is we’ve had the ability to get a site to the top out of 3.5 billion results, but it took two years. There is no easy button when you’re doing SEO. This leads me into a bigger question. I tell people all the time this, and Bruce, you run a, can I ask you, I mean, how many people, maybe not employees, but how many people work in your organization? How many people, because you said you occupy nine floors, am I correct, nine floors of a building? No, I actually have 12 suites. 12 suites, I’m sorry. So 12 suites, how many folks are working with you? I mean, do you have a couple dozen guys? Do you have hundreds of people? How many people are working with you? No, no, I want to make sure I say this correctly. We are extremely focused on basically taking no prisoners. We’re the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three. That’s what we do. As a result, we don’t take every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. One of the sayings I use is it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you didn’t do. Jeff, I want to save both time and money, and one way to do it is by having your office and printer supplies shipped directly to you, my man. That’s right, and you can do that with our awesome show sponsor, OnyxImaging.com. In fact, if you get your office supplies, your printer supplies and printer service through these guys, they’re going to give you a free printer copier. Free of charge. So get a hold of them at onyximaging.com. That’s onyximaging.com or call them at 918-627-6611. 918-627-6611. Stay tuned. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back. Today we are interviewing the founder, the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Bruce Clay. You want to get to the top of the internet search results? You have something you can sell, a product you can make, or a service you can deliver? Do you feel like you can really deliver to millions of people? Well, maybe. I mean, not maybe, but for sure, if you want to reach your ideal and likely buyers, you have to get to the top of search engine results. And who better to teach you and I how to do it, than the father of search engine optimization as an industry. The guy who literally has written the book on search engine optimization, the yearly edition of Search Engine for Dummies, my friends, I introduce you to my friend, Bruce Kleck. And that’s when you’re going to do the heavy lifting, deep thinking SEO that an average person could not even come close to being able to accomplish. So it’s multiple steps. You have to go through them all. And that’s the way you have to do it to get ranked. And so if you have no competitors, none, sure, I can get you ranked in a heartbeat. And if you have a million competitors, just do a query for your keyword. You’ll see how many different sites are out there. If these are real competitors, then it’s going to take longer. The best I think we’ve done is we’ve had the ability to get a site to the top out of 3.5 billion results, but it took two years. There is no easy button when you’re doing SEO. This leads me into a bigger question. I tell people all the time this, and Bruce, you run a… Can I ask you, how many people, maybe not employees, but how many people work in your organization? How many people? Because you said you occupy nine floors, am I correct? Nine floors of a building? No, I actually have 12 suites. 12 suites, I’m sorry. So 12 suites. How many folks are working with you? I mean, do you have a couple dozen guys? Do you have hundreds of people? How many people are working with you? No, no. I want to make sure I say this correctly. focused on basically taking no prisoners. We’re the company you go to when you unconditionally need to be in the top three. That’s what we do. And as a result, we don’t take every single account because they don’t really pony up and commit to doing the work necessary. One of the sayings I use is it’s funny how you will never get the results for the work you didn’t do. We run into that all the time. Their eyes are bigger than their stomach. They have the ability to write a check, but they’re not willing to do the work to get there. That is a problem that we run into often. But overall, it’s a tough thing. This is something that I want to get your take on. Because you have a big team, I mean people that work with you guys. And it’s not about having the most employees necessarily. I’m just saying, but you guys have a team of people that really know what they’re doing. I mean you probably have front end coders and back end coders, content writers, search engine experts. I mean you have a whole team there. Yeah, we have people that have been with us here at the company for over 15 years. And people know what they’re doing. And people want, though, search engine to be an overnight thing. So if someone said to me, Clay Clark, as a business coach, what’s the key to building a great team? I would say every week, never stop interviewing, step one. Step two, never stop advertising that you’re hiring. Let’s go back to step one, never stop interviewing. Step two, never stop advertising. Step number one, interviewing, advertising. And you never stop, and you prune the tree over time. That is how I explain to people how Search Engine works. You’re never done. It’s like pulling weeds from a garden. Can you explain, in your own words, why you can never be done optimizing your website? Oh, absolutely. SEO has a tendency to be a loop. And as you know, loops don’t have an end. The search engine changing the algorithm five times a day causes you to have to do different things. A good example is five years ago, nobody was talking about mobile search being as important as it is. And certainly, nobody was talking about voice search. And nobody was talking about how different tags are being invented every year by the search engines to help them. And the word schema wasn’t even heard five years ago. So because the technology is moving ahead quickly, focused on helping the search engines understand what you’re about so that the proper answer can be given, that change alone isn’t going to end. I have another sign I use in my class, which is SEO is done when Google stops changing things and all your competition is dead. So let me make sure the listeners get that. Search engine optimization, Google, Larry and Sergey started Google. They’re out of their Stanford dorm rooms there. They started Google. They’re using campus computers. They grew it. They moved into the founder of, the lady who’s now the CEO of YouTube’s Garage to grow the company. They kept growing it. They brought on Eric Schmidt to be the CEO and to take the company to the next level. They regret, they pushed back about monetizing the company for a long time, really resisting advertisements, that kind of thing. They wanted to create the most pure and the best search results possible so you’d always find the most relevant search results when using Google. But Google’s the only company out there that you can kind of kill by simply switching to another search engine. I mean, so if you don’t find what you’re looking for on Google, right, and you go to Yahoo or Bing, all of a sudden Google’s not relevant anymore. So Google’s always trying to increase the quality of the search results it produces, which is why it’s always trying to stop scammers and spammers. So I’d like for you to talk about scammers and spammers. Remember back in the day, Bruce, people could just buy backlinks from a foreign country and they could be top in Google and then how that doesn’t work anymore. Do you remember that, Bruce? Oh, of course. I still run into it. A lot of sites have poisoned themselves with those. So let’s start with that one. If you’ve purchased a bunch of backlinks that are absolutely not real, not legit, they’re from pop-up websites in third world countries, and by the way, Google knows, how do you remove or disavow or say, hey, hey, hey, I don’t want those backlinks. How do you remove those backlinks and tell Google, hey, or maybe you’re a, I ran into a client, this is probably what, three years ago? Their competitor bought backlinks and pointed them at them as a way to hurt their rank. How do you disavow or get rid of bad backlinks? Well, the concept of links to you is that some other site doing it to you. I mean, you don’t own that other site. They just choose the link to you. And what you’re referring to as bad links that a competitor pointed at you is referred to as negative SEO. It is clearly their attempt to poison your backlink profile in the eyes of the search engine so the search engine thinks of you as a spammer. What we want to be able to do is to monitor our own backlinks to determine what is acceptable and then to get rid of the bad links. However, we don’t own those other sites and that’s where a special special process called Disavow was created. It turns out I actually was the guy that recommended it to the search engines. Are you looking for an accountant who is a true expert about tax and accounting financial planning? Check out hoodcpas.com today. To claim your tickets to the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop for free, all you have to do is to subscribe to the Thrive Time Show on iTunes, leave an objective review and send us confirmation at info at thrivetimeshow.com. To claim your star in the National Star Registry, we can’t help you. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. On today’s show, we have the father of search engine optimization, Bruce Clay, with us on the program. I want to make sure we kind of reset so we know what we’re talking about. Back links, whenever a site links to your website, if it’s a good website, if it’s not a scam site or an adult website or some site with a virus on it, it actually helps your website. If a site that’s related to you, related to your industry, links to you, then you’ll raise up higher in the search engines. So an example would be if like Forbes, I write for Forbes, if Forbes links to me, that helps my search engine rank. Now, if you are a nefarious person and you wanna do reverse search engine optimization to hurt your competitors, this is what you’ll do. Is you’ll go out there and you’ll go to a website where you can buy backlinks. So you can buy backlinks. There are sites out there today that will sell you backlinks. And you might say, well, how do I find them? If you just type in buy backlinks, you’re going to find a lot of websites right now that they will, you can pay like $0.20 a backlink or $1 a backlink. And then they’ll link back to you. Well, what happened was years ago with my company, DJ Connection, one of our competitors noticed that we were beating them in Google search results. So they paid a nefarious search engine company to put thousands of backlinks back to my website, thus killing my search engine rank. And Bruce Clay realized that a lot of business owners were doing that to each other. They were actually tanking each other’s websites by putting bad links to your website, to your competition’s website. And so he invented a process called disavow, which is where he educated the search engine optimization companies, Google, Bing, that kind of thing, about how this practice was hurting small business owners because shady business owners were putting bad links from bad websites to good websites. And so that is what we’re talking about. So now without any further ado, back to our interview with the search engine wizard, the father of search engine optimization, Mr. Bruce Clay. And then to get rid of the bad links. However, we don’t own those other sites. And that’s where a special process called disavow was created. It turns out I actually was the guy that recommended it to the search engines, to Matt Cutts and Bing. And so what it was supposed to be is I have somebody linking to me that I don’t want. I don’t control their site. I don’t want it to count against me. So there’s a process in place supported by the search engines where I can actually get rid of the bad links pointing to me. I disavow them. What you’re going to run into is you’re always going to see negative SEO guys out there that are trying to poison your backlink profile. Or you have people who are naive and don’t know anything about your product, but they think that you’re a cool site and they steal your site, or they somehow scrape Google or something that actually hurts your overall ranking. At one point, I had about 900,000 links to my website, which is a ridiculous number of links, in my opinion. And it turned out that a vast majority of them were spammers, or they came from Russia. And it was just somebody that wanted to poison me and lower my ranking by getting bad links pointing to me. Did you have a problem with Putin? I mean, did you and Putin get into an argument? Is that what happened? Did he dispute? Did he claim that he was the father of search engines? Is that how that happened? No, that hasn’t happened yet, but you know, you never know. All right. So you had all these people linking to you from Russia that you had no connection with. And so you thought to yourself, I’ve got to find a way to notify the search engines. And you arguably created this strategy called disavowing links. Is that correct? That is correct. Now, I want to ask you this next question here. As far as these are the scamming, the spamming, and you don’t want to poison your website. My partner, Jonathan, and I, the renowned business coach, Eric Chup, who initially greeted you when we called you today, we see this all of the time where you’ll see a client, Eric, I’m sure you’ve seen this, where a client will just literally copy the content from another website and paste it on their site. Other people, other people’s clients. I’m sure none of your clients have ever done this. No, it definitely happens, especially if they decide to delegate something like this to a member of their team that they don’t know that well. Yeah, I’ll get it done. And then you go look at this. And so we use Copyscape and SEMrush to check. And it’s obvious, Bruce, when someone copies on your, you know. But an owner of a company will say, hey, you know, John, the front desk guy, Karen, the front desk lady, could you please write the content for my homepage because I’m too busy? And then this person, let’s say the Karen or the Kelly or the Al or the Marvin, whoever it is that works for you, they’ll copy the content from your direct competitor and just paste it and go, all done, Bruce. I’ve written the content. It’s beautiful. But our team will discover that the content was, in fact, plagiarized and copied. Why is that absolutely lethal to your search engine ranking? Well, there’s multiple layers of that. The first is, you’re absolutely right, people do that all the time. They still do it to me. The part I really like is when they paste my content on their site, it still contains my phone number. That’s downright ignorant. I periodically get, you mentioned Copyscape and others, I periodically get notifications that other people have my content. Used to be that I was stolen often because I ranked so well. So it is an issue. Now to the search engine, you’re right at the edge. They don’t really have a penalty if you have that duplicate content. They don’t call it a penalty. But what happens is Google views you as not necessarily being the author of the content, because they can’t tell who wrote it first. So what they end up doing is lowering the quality of your site in the rankings. That’s not a penalty. There’s duplicate content. We’re just not sure, so you know, we’re not going to guess. And the search engine can actually diminish your ranking, but they don’t refer to it as a penalty. We’ve had cases where content was syndicated, where sites actually allowed other sites to use their content through a syndication contract. And it turns out that a couple of our clients, being big clients, actually had syndication agreements with even bigger clients. And what would happen is they’d publish the content, they’d put it up on their website, the syndication would take it, it would be published on another website, they’re a bigger authority than you, they got credit for it, and you got hit. So Google has taken a position that even though there’s no penalty for you if you have duplicate content, there’s no penalty, they really think that you may not be the owner, you will see a filter and your rankings can be impacted pretty much as a quality item. And so the rule is publish once and make it the best you can make it. Thrive Nation, I encourage you during the break to check out one of our incredible show sponsors. That’s will-con.com, will-con.com. That’s Williams Contract. And these guys will do a great job building a piece of commercial property for you, adding on to your church, adding on to your building. Check them out today at will-con.com. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show on Talk Radio 1170. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Conversation. On today’s show we have the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, Bruce Clay, on the show. Now, Bruce Clay is explaining to you and I, the listeners out there, why you cannot copy content from another website and why if you copy content from another website, why it will absolutely destroy your search engine ranking. He’s also teaching you how the practical steps you can take to optimize your website and to get your company to the top of the search engine results so that you can get in front of your ideal and likely buyers who are searching for the products and services that they’re looking for online. This just in. Your ideal and likely buyers are using the internet to search for the products and services that they are looking for. Chuck, I think a lot of people push back right there. They go, I don’t know, I’m in a different industry, all my business typically comes word of mouth. Why do I need to do search engine optimization, Jeff? Because you cannot rely on word of mouth alone, especially if you’re trying to grow something and you have big goals you’re trying to get to. So you’ve got to get out there, you’ve got to market, you’ve got to be on the top of the search results because it can literally be worth millions of dollars to you. Furthermore, you saying that the reason why you shouldn’t optimize your website is because all your clients currently come from word of mouth would be like me living in the forest spending my entire day hunting for food and then saying to you I have no need for this new thing you’re talking about called the grocery store because all the food that I eat comes from hunting so I don’t need I don’t know what this is you’re saying it’s two blocks away yeah so if I walk two blocks I can go to the grocery store and have all the food I want now I don’t need this thing you call him an automobile. I got a horse. I’m red I track every single thing I kill and all of it comes from hunting so I don’t need a grocery store, so screw off I’m happy you’re an idiot And I don’t do search engines either Because 100% of my business comes word of mouth you see what happens is the other people who live in the forest with me They’re all extras from the movie Robin Hood the one with Kevin Costner All of us we all know word of mouth. I kill more deer than anybody else out there. But if you do go to whatever that grocery store is, I would like to know if they sell beer, because currently it takes me like a half a year to make any. It takes a long time out here. Like one barrel. It takes me forever. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes me to crush the grapes, to make the wine, to let it ferment. And I need a drink because hunting is boring. Wait a minute, so you’re saying that there is a grocery store? Yes. Are you saying that my ideal and likely buyers, 80% to 90% of them, are using search engines to find the products and search? What? Yes. We’re saying that. Do you know what this means? According to Forbes. Do you know what this means? It means that this thing doesn’t work at all. All right, now back to our interview with Bruce Clay, the search engine guru. But if you spin it out to a bunch of other sites, or if people on other sites steal your content, that will actually impact your perception as being a quality site for that particular article. Google doesn’t like the same article on multiple sites. They don’t like your content on other sites. One more thing, if what you did is you took the content and you randomly change a few of the words. Ooh, here we go, this is a hot button for me. That is considered spam by Google, not duplicate content. That’s worse. What you’ve done is you’ve actually tried to take the same content and manipulate it to get rankings for substantially the same structured content. And Google believes that that is spam. So if I have an article, whatever the article is about chocolate fountains in New York, both ends could receive a penalty for that. So again, if you’re out there and you’re scamming and you’re spamming and you’re playing little games, that’s bad. But I think a lot of our listeners are not trying to play games, but someone in your office might be trying to play a game. I mean, you might be the owner of the business, but you hire somebody and they’re going, well, what’s the fastest way to get this done so I can go out and have a burrito? And so we’re talking about scamming and spamming and things you shouldn’t do. One of the things I have seen is people hiring a company in a third world country, typically, to write articles for them. And they use a service called a spinner service. The service, what it’ll do is you’ll send them the links, right, Bruce, to an article that you like. And they’ll promise they’ll send it back. Paraphrased, right? I mean, that’s just what they do. But the problem is Google knows what you’re doing. And as you mentioned earlier, that’s a form of spam. Can you talk to me about just categorically why spinners or hiring companies to write articles for you in third world countries is not a move? Well, there’s multiple layers to it. You mentioned Copyscape. Copyscape was originally designed to identify plagiarism because we all know that there’s no plagiarism issue with high schools or college papers, but that’s plagiarism. Well, the search engines own their own index, and you have to believe that they know and have software to detect duplicate content or manipulated content or even resequenced content. So, all of that is bad. Your spinners, they did something a little bit different. What they would do is you would be able to hire a company, give them some keywords and a topic, and here’s my website, and they would write 50 pages for you, and all 50 pages were probably the fastest they could do it because they get paid per page, and they don’t charge a lot. So the faster they can pump out a page, the more they get paid. It isn’t that you actually have to write something that shows up in search. It isn’t that you actually have to have people like it or even comment on it. It’s just did you write a page? And when you go into that environment Google has repeatedly issued warnings and penalties against companies for what is referred to as spinning. Now what spinning mechanically is, is I will write one article, it’ll be low quality, but to make up for it I’m going to put it on 25 sites. And that’s the spinning part where you you take one piece of content and you put it everywhere. And often that’s where they do the minor modification every time they publish it and that is always going to get you in trouble. Google has indicated that if you have content on multiple sites, they consider it duplicate content. No penalty for it. It’s duplicate content. They’re going to ignore it in many cases. They’ve also indicated if that content links to you, they consider that duplicate links and they’re going to ignore them too. So there’s no real value to you to have a piece of garbage content published on other websites that will accept anything and probably aren’t catering to your persona and your target market, and the links don’t count. That is just poisoning yourself. And so Google has indicated that’s a serious problem and nobody does it anymore unless you’re overseas and that’s all you know how to do to make money. Now Bruce, I want to talk to you now about simplifying the complexity of search engine optimization. You are arguably the father of search engine optimization, you’re the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. You’re the guru. You are the Yoda of search engine optimization. And so I want to read you a notable quotable from Robert Green, the best-selling author of Mastery, and then I want to read you, I want to ask you a question. He says, in the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them. Those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and that can never focus enough to learn. My friend, the complexity of search engine optimization for many people, myself included, can be overwhelming, which is why at the Thrive Time Show, our team uses checklists for everything. We have checklists to help us manage the complexity of and the diligence required and the focus required to optimize our own websites. Can you talk to me about why the complexity of search engine optimization can be overwhelming for most people. This is part two of our interview with the center of the search engine optimization universe so good the father of the search engine Optimization industry the best-selling author of search engine for dummies Wow ladies and gentlemen we have Bruce Clay on today’s show and it was weird how you kept calling him dad and father and papa And all those things. I was cool. I liked it. It was what’s kind of a whole Darth Vader thing I feel like he is my father. This guy really, really does know what he’s talking about as it relates to search engine optimization. Absolutely. And so, as we jump into part two of this interview with Bruce Clay, he’s now breaking down how to simplify search engine. It can be very complicated and very overwhelming, and he explains his processes for simplifying the dark art of search engine optimization. Now, Bruce, I want to talk to you now about simplifying the complexity of search engine optimization. You are arguably the father of search engine optimization. You’re the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. You’re the guru. You are the Yoda of search engine optimization. And so I want to read you a notable quotable from Robert Green, the best-selling author of Mastery, and then I want to ask you a question. He says, in the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them. Those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds, and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them, and that could never focus enough to learn. My friend, the complexity of search engine optimization for many people, myself included, can be overwhelming, which is why at the Thrive Time Show, our team uses checklists for everything. We have checklists to help us manage the complexity of, and the diligence required, and the focus required to optimize our own websites. Can you talk to me about why the complexity of search engine optimization can be overwhelming for most people? Well, the entire environment is overwhelming before you even get the search engine optimization usually. You can have your website built on any number of technology platforms. WordPress being an example. You can build it in, it could be e-commerce, it could be informational, it could be I’m just designing it to be a business card versus this is my living. You have the complexity of that environment. Then on top of that, when you get into the complexity of SEO, SEO is so many things. I think I mentioned to you before, I teach a course on SEO. It’s a classroom course. I think it’s rated as the top classroom course out there. It’s four and a half days. And I know darn well, every time I start, people are curious about what you could possibly talk about for four and a half days. And then at the end of it, they want to know if there’s a follow-on course. And it’s because it’s so complex that it has so many moving parts that it’s overwhelming. When we do our projects, going to your checklist item, we have 300 items on our proprietary checklist. We keep them to ourselves, don’t get me wrong, but that’s how we end up getting people in the top three. How many items are on your checklist? How many? Over 300. I want to make sure listeners get this. I wrote a book called Start Here. It’s an Amazon bestseller and with my partner Jonathan Kelly we put together a part of it called the SEO manifesto. And it is a very simplified version of how to optimize your website for small business owners. And that our checklist is not 300 points. And I’ll tell you why it’s not 300 points. Because Bruce, there’s very few organizations or companies like yours that can handle a 300 point checklist. But you guys do. I mean that’s what you guys do. You’re known for… if you’ve got a website out there… I mean Bruce, who’s the ideal client for you? What kind of person out there is the perfect fit to be a Bruce Clay search engine optimization client? Well, under normal circumstances it would be any industry, mid-sized or larger. And mid-sized is a matter of interpretation. If you can afford a few thousand dollars a month to a million and in fact we’ve had both. I just want to make sure that we do a quick time out here to editorial to make sure that everybody’s grasping two big things he just explained. One, Bruce Clay, his internal search engine optimization checklist that he uses for his clients has 300 points on it. 300. I have hired his company before. I have invested thousands upon thousands of dollars paying Mr. Bruce Clay, and it was well worth it. Now if you want to attend his course, we put a link to it on the show notes, it’s $2,495 to attend the course. And Chuck, do you know why his course does not cost more money? Do you want to speculate as to why he does not charge more for his course? He’s not a hog. Well, I don’t know. Anybody else? Steve, do you want to guess? I think that’s part of it, yes. But what else? There’s one more reason why he doesn’t charge more. Why he doesn’t charge more? Because nobody can do it! Once he teaches you how to do it, there’s nobody that can do it, which is why he just said point number two. He said that he charges clients thousands of dollars a month or is up to a million dollars a month. Seven figures, yeah. I’m just trying to explain this to you. My company is, let’s say, elephant in the room. You say, Clay, what is it really worth to you to be top in Google? Well, let me just give you an example. When I grew DJConnection.com, no exaggeration, we, many weekends, would do 80 weddings. 80 weddings. Now, Chuck, let’s just look at this conservatively. Okay, do it. Because we had about 35% of our events that came from the internet. Alright, so I’m going to take 80 times.35 and that would be 28 and my profit per show was about a $167 in my performance. So that means it was worth $4,676 for me a week to be top in Google. That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. So if you’re out there listening, I encourage you to ask yourself this before you get back into the interview. What would it be worth for you to be top in Internet search results? What would it be worth for you? What is the value of that? You know, I actually got paid to speak for Maytag University multiple years to the International Community Bankers Association event. We’ll put links, Chip, let’s put links to Maytag University to where I’m speaking there so people can verify that it did in fact happen. And let’s also put a link to me speaking in Las Vegas so people can see that one. They would, Steve, groups will pay me and have paid me 20 grand, 15 grand to go speak and to teach an all-day workshop on how search engines work. Steve, why is it so imperative for all the small business owners, for all the organizations, for all the churches, for anybody out there to be top in Google for the internet search terms that your ideal and likely buyers are looking for? Well, if you want to win, then you need to be at the top of Google when people search for what you’re selling. So if you’re not at the top of Google, then you’re probably on page 3 and page 4 or maybe page 20. How would you process this idea, Steve? This is one that, this is something I hear all the time. Not from our listeners. This is from, I talked about it on yesterday’s show, but I really feel like I should talk about it one more time because I think somebody might have missed yesterday’s show. And I, or maybe somebody heard it yesterday, but it didn’t really fully sink in. But this is what I hear a lot. Well, Clay, I’ll tell you what, we get all our business from word of mouth. And so we don’t need to have no internet because we all, we get all of our business here, Chip, from the internet, from word of mouth. Well, you know, that’s how we always did it. And I’m a, and I know I sound like a redneck for this particular segment, but I’ll tell you this. I’m a surgeon. I’m a Nero surgeon. By God. I’m a Nero surgeon. And one of the things people don’t do is they don’t go on the internet to find Nero surgeons. No, they don’t. They don’t go on the internet to find cosmetic surgeons, because what they do is they do word of mouth. And that’s how it’s always been. And, Chip, I’m an orthodontist as well because I got the time on my hands. I became a neurosurgeon and now I’m also an orthodontist. In fact, I’m kind of a professional, therefore I only operate off of word of mouth. I mean, I entirely, I’ll tell you this, I mean, Chuck, I ask all my customers, I say, how do you hear about us? Have I ever had someone say the internet? No. And that’s why I don’t optimize my website. Because you see, Chuck, if people were to put spot on me on the internet, then I would definitely invest the money into internet optimization. Oh, I am a realist. Because no one ever finds me on the internet. And I pulled an AdWords report, one of them Google things. You added some words to it? And what I found is that nobody had actually found me on the internet, so I’m not going to invest money in my website. I agree with you. Now, Chip, I’ve got another thing I’m working on. This is a little bit more controversial, but witches, if you burn a witch, you know, because how do you know if she’s a witch? Well, the float. Well, she’s made out of wood. Yeah. So what you do is you burn people and if they burn, then they’re a witch. And if they burn kind of slowly, then they weren’t a witch. That’s right. I mean, this is the kind of stupid logic I hear all the time. Seriously, this is the lack of logic. I hear this all the time. I was way into that conversation. I was like, no, no. You had a client that said they burned witches? I am not exaggerating. I had a neurosurgeon I worked with in Denver, and this is what the guy says. He goes, Clay, none of my clients, we have a lot of patients, and I’ve never had a patient find us on the internet. Because you’re not on the internet! Right! It’s very simple. That’s why they didn’t find you there. No, and then they pull their AdWords report, because they feel like they know, but it’s been about four minutes of going on to AdWords on Google, and they’ve done a report, and they realize that none of their business comes from search engine optimization. So then they say, therefore I should not invest in search engine optimization. I was trying to think of it like a parallel, but I can’t even think of it. Here’s the deal. As a company, we only take on 160 clients. So we can’t possibly work with any more because there’s so much work that goes into search engine optimization. And if you have a $500,000 a year business up to probably a $3 million to $5 million a year business, we’re a great fit for you. But if you have a company like Oxifresh, or a huge brand, and you want to take it to the top of it, if you type in carpet cleaning quotes, Oxifresh is now number one in the world. Yeah. So if you want to be top, and you want to spend some real money to get your real national brand to top in Google, Bruce Clay and his team are absolutely the best. They’re the best. And they have a 300 point checklist, but he said this, I want to make sure we’re getting this, he’s going to charge you thousands of dollars per month, up to a million dollars a month. So if you’re out there and you’re saying to yourself, you know what, I want to be top in the Google search engine results, I would highly recommend, without reservation, that you start by getting the book Search Engine for Dummies by Bruce Clay. Get that book. Or if you’re somebody who you learn more kind of a hands-on, you like to interact and ask questions, I would encourage you to book your tickets for our Thrive Time Show in-person two-day workshop. It takes place on the left coast of the Arkansas River here in beautiful, Tulsa, Oklahoma at our 20,000 square foot facility. And if you want to get your tickets for free, all you have to do is subscribe to the Thrive Time Show on iTunes, and then leave us an objective review. So subscribe to the Thrive Time Show on iTunes, leave us an objective review, and then email us your review to info at thrive timeshow.com. So you subscribe on iTunes, leave us an objective review, email us proof you did it to info at thrive timeshow.com and we will give you those free tickets. So when we get back from the break, more with our exclusive interview with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Demons, Mr. Bruce Clay. Three, two, one, boom. You are now entering the dojo of the future. 3, 2, 1, boom! You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. Thrive Time Show on the microphone, what is this? Top of the iTunes charts in the category of business. Drilling down on business topics like we are a dentist. Providing you with internship like you are an apprentice. And we go so fast that you might get motion sickness. Grab a pen and pad to the lab, let’s get in it. Time to bear some fruit like some Florida O’Engine. 3, 2, 1, here come the business ninjas. Sonic Boom! Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. We are interviewing Bruce Clay, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies and arguably the father of search engine optimization. Again, his name is Mr. Bruce Clay, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, and as we hop back into the interview, this is where Bruce is explaining what kind of client would be ideal to work with him, or what kind of clients he prefers to work with, and what kind of clients he will not work. Search engine optimization is not an event. It is an ongoing process, and so Bruce explains the right kind of people that are the right fit for the search engine optimization process that he does. Because his process has been proven to work and he’s just kind of explained the criteria for who would be an ideal and likely buyer for both he and his organization. $10,000 a month to a million And in fact, we’ve had both then it’s something that we would be able to handle We don’t really say that we only deal with large companies and get snobbish about it That that isn’t what we do. We pick customers that are Able to realize their life is changing if this is able to be done for them, and we get a lot of reward for that. We’ve had clients for 15 years. They’re just totally enamored with the fact that they’re being taken care of. One of the brands I work with, with a coaching relationship, and I’m a partner with the founder of Oxifresh, but we’re topping Google for the phrase carpet cleaning quotes. We have 137,000 Google reviews, and we have 400 locations. And I can tell you the vast majority of the business comes in from the internet for that company. And it’s a game-changing thing. But I just want to make sure I’m understanding what you just said. You’re saying if someone’s willing to spend a few thousand dollars, let’s say someone’s willing to spend like 3,000 or $2,000 a month on just search engine, that might be a good fit. But you had companies that have invested millions of dollars in search engine optimization. Yeah, I have people writing six digit checks monthly. Six digit checks monthly. So Thrive Nation, you might say, what kind of sick freak would do that? I don’t know. I mean, there’s a company called Blinds.com that is top when you type in blinds. And Bruce, I mean, there are big companies that make a ton of money as a result of being top in Google. Because back in the day, if you had a question, you used to go, dear God, could you help me think of the answer to this question? If you lived in a field in Des Moines, Iowa, you’d say, dear God, could you help me? Or you’d ask your mom or your dad. Now people, they go to Google to search for everything. Being top in Google is unbelievably important. Being top in all the search engines is very important. And so, Bruce, I have a list of questions, kind of a rapid fire. I’m going to fire off just a bunch of questions for you. And this will be kind of our lightning round, OK? So here we go. What makes it hard to get to the top of Google search results for one keyword, but easy to rank for another? Well, that’s mostly your competition. If the competition for this keyword is less aggressive, it’s a lot easier. That’s an easy answer. The second part is probably got a lot to do with whether or not you understand what Google is expecting for that keyword and it may be that your site is more what Google expects already. Whereas for other terms it may be some work. If I want to rank for a term that is information, but I’m an e-commerce site, that’s going to be more work. So it’s a match between your content and what Google thinks everybody wants, and it’s a different match elsewhere as to whether or not you have competitors that are asleep at the wheel or not. I want to ask you this, Bruce, because this next question to me is one that I see people ask me all the time, personally. And I want to get your take on this, because you are the father of search engine optimization. Everybody wants to be to the top of Google. I think every business owner wants to be top of Google. I have yet to meet people that say, well, you know, overall, I want to be at the bottom of Google, because I don’t want anybody to find me. I’m trying to bury my secrets, my company on page four. People want to be at the top of Google, but very few people want to invest the work or the finances to get to the top of Google. Can you explain where your money goes? Let’s say that I hire a search engine optimization company. Where does the money go when you’re paying? What kind of stuff are the people doing to optimize a website? If you’re paying your firm $10,000 a month to optimize a website, I mean where does that money go? I mean what is your team doing with their time to optimize a website? Well in my environment the team is multi-layer. We actually have a service layer and then an engineering layer. So the service layer are people who are called program managers, and they’re the primary point of contact for the clients, because when you’re being aggressive in SEO, you’re going to have frequent customer contact. They’re going to send you emails often. You’re going to be doing an awful lot more. When they have a project, then what we do is we build an Agile team behind them. And the Agile team is probably well over 80% of the effort that we put into a project. And they are doing deep research. They’re analyzing your site. They’re determining what Google has changed. They’re looking at your competitors. They are evaluating your competition to determine if they have content you don’t have. Maybe that’s why they’re ranking. We look at the speed and performance of your servers. We determine whether or not the search engine spiders are able to get to your pages and spider you because if you can’t get spidered, you’re not in the index. We’re looking at, as I said, 300 items. That takes time. Most people don’t understand. They think that, okay, out on the web there’s some of these quickie little utilities where you put in your URL and it tells you everything that’s wrong with it. If it were that easy, everybody would be fixed. And it isn’t that easy because going the final step, it’s like the 80-20 rule. That final 20% takes 80% of your effort. So logically we have retainer programs and we determine what is an optimal speed based upon what the client has asked for and we just spend the time where the squeaky wheel is, where there is something that’s going to give them the best bang for their buck and the best traffic and conversion and basically search mileage. That is the way we spend our time. The people aren’t just sitting around saying, I want to be top of Google. We want our client to be top of Google. We need them to be top of Google. There’s actually a recipe. There’s a system. There’s a strategy. It’s not just luck. Are you saying it’s not just luck, Mr. Bruce Clay? Oh, it’s absolutely not just luck. When we return, Bruce Clay breaks down how to get to the top of the internet search results. How do you get to the top of the Google search engine results? The father of the search engine optimization industry breaks it down when we get back. Attend the world’s best business workshop led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at thrive timeshow dot com. Chubb, in a world where not being top in Google is like not wearing pants to work, there is only one father of search engine optimization. I got to get more out of the bowl, Chubb. In a world where not being top in Google is like going to work without pants, there is only one father of search engine optimization. And when you host an iTunes top ten podcast and you have no discernible talent, and when you get an opportunity to interview the father of search engine optimization, you get strangely nervous, and you begin to sweat and cry a lot. Probably opened up too much there, but now, ladies and gentlemen, without any further ado, back to my exclusive, game-changing, premium, platinum edition, exclusive game change premium Platinum Edition and super humble interview with the father of search engine optimization and the best-selling author of search engine for dummies the man I call daddy Welcome back back. We’re going to go back. I guess I’ve already welcomed it, but we’re going to go back. That’s huge. I’m really bubbling this, but the point is, ladies and gentlemen, I’m so nervous to interview my dear friend, Mr. Bruce. So the people aren’t just sitting around saying, I want to be top of Google. We want our client to be top of Google. We need them to be top of Google. There’s actually a recipe. There’s a system. There’s a strategy. It’s not just luck. Are you saying it’s not just luck, Mr. Bruce Clay? Oh, it’s absolutely not just luck. It is definitely a methodology. That’s what we refer to it as. And we have a pretty much a way of analyzing sites, determining what’s wrong, architecting repairs, getting them fixed. And we actually saw that as an audit project that’s, you know, just a couple months long where we tear your site apart and tell you all the stuff that needs to be fixed. We do that on our own projects. We do it on our own sites. We rank for a reason and our clients rank for a reason. If we’re actually operating on word of mouth, which we typically do, and people come to us because they’ve heard about what we can do, we can’t afford really to not achieve. So we’re paying attention all the time. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t sit around also going, we really want this. But it’s one thing to want it, and it’s another thing to do it. And so our teams are focused on results. You, Bruce, in your book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, the 560-page-plus book, I mean, that book is so detailed. But why? I mean, why does it even matter? Well search engine optimization can change a business owner’s life. Can you explain, and I’m not asking you to divulge a client’s personal information, or if there’s a story you’re at liberty to share, I’d love to hear, but how has search engine optimization absolutely changed the lives of people that have decided to invest in it and to become top or in the top three of search engine results for certain keywords? Well, as a couple of examples, and I’m talking like many examples, in our case, we have gotten sites to rank at the top, sometimes in six months, sometimes a year, sometimes longer. And usually what actually happens is they sell the company. So obviously that money is life changing. They get it to the top and somebody wants it. And so they sell it, move on and cost again. I’m not asking for a client that you’ve actually helped that has sold the company, but can you think of some examples of people that, or organizations you’ve heard of that have sold their company from a result of change in ops. I know business.com is a famous example, but could you think of a, because you’re in this every single day. Right. And it really matters a lot. We had one client. They were rather big. They were in the automotive space. They had 1.7 million visitors a month to our website. That’s pretty big. They brought us in. We did a year and a half restructuring of their entire 12 million page website. It took a while. It was very nice for us. But at the end of it, when they flipped went live, they jumped to 16.4 million uniques a month. That’s a lot of visitors. It is. And 16 million visitors changed their lives. They were originally in a lead gen business where they would get visitors and sell them to auto industries. They switched it entirely to an ad network where people would buy ads on their website and they made so much more money doing that and then about four months later, they sold it for a fortune. They were one of the top-ranked sites in that automotive space. That’s an example. A 900% increase in traffic on most websites, that would change anybody’s life. So what do you enjoy doing when you’re not optimizing websites? A lot of our listeners are going, OK, Bruce Clay, this guy is the father of search engine optimization, the author of Search Engine for Dummies, the guy who arguably invented the search engine optimization industry. Can you share with the listeners a look into your personal life and something that most people maybe don’t know about you or things you enjoy doing when you’re not changing people’s lives by optimizing their websites? Well, yes and no. The one problem with search engine optimization is it’s almost impossible to look at anybody’s website without mentally dissecting it. So it becomes really difficult to spend much time on the Internet. I’m recently married. Oh wow. I spend a lot of time with my amazingly beautiful wife. Congratulations there Mr. Bruce. Yay! I’ll tell you this is something I’m really enjoying. Watch a lot of movies or we were kind of into crossword puzzles. Oh wow. And then she has her kids and I have mine. So family’s important. And it’s actually sort of a strange thing. I have become somewhat disconnected. When I get home on Friday nights, I set my computer down. It’s in a backpack. And I don’t take it out until Sunday. That is different. I never used to do that. So I think there’s multiple layers. You can just really enjoy disconnecting. You don’t have to do a whole lot else. You’re just enjoying it. So what entrepreneurs do you look up to, Bruce Clay? Alright, Thrive Nation, when we return we’re going to go back into the mind of Mr. Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of the incredible book, Search Engine for Dummies. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. If you’ve not yet purchased your copy, I encourage you to buy one today. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. Bruce Clay actually wrote that book for me, Dustin. I think he dedicated Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. For both of us. I think it was dedicated to dummies. I feel like I’m the lead inspiration, the true dummy he wrote for. Stay tuned. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All right, DriveNation, welcome back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies. During this portion of the search engine optimization industry. In my industry, there’s certainly some that have really performed well, but they have had a specific exit strategy from day one. built two successful businesses or one business built twice. One of the things I’m doing for instance is I built a successful business. I got in early, I’m one of the, really I consider myself to be one of the founders of a billion dollar multinational digital movement. I feel that way. But it’s sort of a reinvention, and I like that. So when I look at others, I look at people that have succeeded and then reinvented it and succeeded again. And they’ve done it without being rude or angry all the time in the process. They’ve succeeded because they deserve to succeed. And those are the kind of people I like. I read books all the time, and you know, it’s all about what you’re doing. Right now, I’m spending a moderate amount of time on business books. So, let me ask you this, business books. I want to make sure you have time to get into your new product you’re developing, and to cut into the details of that. And I also want to ask you, I want to tap into your wisdom. What are a few books that you’ve read, you’re an avid reader, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re the father of search engine optimization. What are a few books you’ve read where you think to yourself, gosh, everybody should read this book? Well, the three that I will recommend, I read Scaling Up, that’s a Vern Harnish book. I think that if you’re looking for a way to be more organized as a business, you should do that. That’s important. Our organization, because we’re an agile team business, I read the book Mastering the Matrix. Mastering the Matrix. Mastering the Matrix. It’s by Susan Finnerty, I think. I’m trying to remember. And then one of the best, easiest reading books that I’ve read is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And it is really about team building. Between scaling up, which is organization, daily huddles, KPI management, having the big rock, if you will, then understanding how to manage in a matrix environment, and then team building. Those three books, I think, together are ideal for almost any business of any size. And those are the ones that I would say are probably the best that I’ve read. And then I have this little… Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt you. There’s a little Skype delay there, my friend. Back to you. Then I have this other area where I get into actually practicing this stuff. We have a business consultant, and I have – I do a lot of consultants. I have a lot of consultants in to help me and mostly because it’s just a lot of work to manage five international offices. So I use help and I think that that is a change for a lot of small businessmen. And in a larger environment, you really have to look for your peers that’ll help you the most. But anyhow, that’s where I’m at. So tell us about this new SEO product you’re developing, or what you can tell. I know it’s going to be something you’ve spent a lot of time on. I’m certainly not asking for you to divulge your secrets of this new search engine product. But for anybody who’s ever read your book, Search Engine for Dummies, or who’s familiar with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry, we’re all excited to know about this new product. What are you making? Well, we have developed some technology, patent pending, really advanced. And we have made a product, which is an API layer, that will work with any content management system. This is the primary concept. For as many people out there that are doing SEOs, there’s a hundred people doing content. There’s a hundred writers for every one competent SEO. we built a tool that helps people do SEO as writers. One of our first releases for the tool, first flavors, if you will, is that it integrates as a plug-in right into WordPress, because there’s 56 million blogs. So while you’re writing content for your website, you can see while you’re writing content, you could kind of maybe see whether it’s compliant or not, or whether you’re doing a good job or not, or kind of give you tips along the way. How does that work? Well, there’s a lot of businesses that have plug-ins, and a lot of the plug-ins just run on your desktop. They’re not really analyzing anything. Ours is software as a service, and therefore we can actually spider websites, we can spider your competition, we can see that you don’t have enough words based upon your competition and the number of words they have. So we have taken logically a what would be black and white television and made it color. We have taken the information available at the fingertips of the author of content and we have given them the power to see it as it is closer to the real internet once it’s published, which is really remarkable. And then we pull in all the analytics data so that you can actually see how well your content is performing on a writer by writer basis, blog post by blog post, page by page basis. And that particular product, I know I’m a little insane here, but we’re offering it at under $25 a month for each domain, which means that every blogger in the world is probably going to use it. And then, you know, if you’re really caring that you could publish a blog post and it goes right to the top, this is a mandatory kind of a tool. So I’m just anxious to get it out. It is imminent. Imminent. Bruce. We’re in final test right now. You’re messing with me, Bruce. Bruce, I’m a huge fan of your stuff, man. I’m buying what Bruce Clay is selling. I’m a customer of yours. I’ve used you guys. Very happy with the services and the results that you’ve generated. I’m honored to have the father of search engine optimization on today’s podcast. Sir, when can I buy it? Where can I buy it? When can you buy it? Yes, when and where? Come on, give to me. Okay, here’s what we’re doing. It’s $25 a month. Yep. We’re offering a 40% discount pre-sale. Oh! Bruce, where can I get it? Don’t tease me. Go to my website. Bruceclay.com slash WP slash, sorry, slash SEO slash WP. Bruceclay.com slash SEO slash WP. And it’ll take you to, not only will it take you to a form that you can fill out, it’ll actually show you a seven minute video about what the product can do. Ah Bruce, Bruce you’re blowing my mind. I have three final questions for you then I’m gonna let you get back to dominating the world and to doing what it is that you do that has allowed you to become the father of search engine optimization. So these are my final three questions for you. Question number one, how many keywords can you optimize for on one page of a website? Well, that falls into two categories. Unique keywords, you really should operate on one theme, right around one topic. You can have multiple variants, they’re called variants, different ways of saying the same word, like smiling and smiles. So you can have multiple variants and you typically would have several. If you only had one, you look like a spammer. We have some of our pages optimized and ranking in the top 10 for up to 16 keywords. So I’m not sure that the average site will ever have a problem getting ranked for, you know, half a dozen. We typically recommend that more than a half dozen, you’re going to need a bunch of content and a whole lot of structure. All you have to do is subscribe to the Thrive Time Show on iTunes, leave an objective review, and send us confirmation at info at thrivetimeshow.com. To claim your star in the National Star Registry, we can’t help you. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation. It is the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. Now, on today’s show, what we’re doing is we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry. And we’re asking him now why it would be better for a local small business to focus on local search engine optimization keywords as opposed to national keywords. Chup, can you explain on a very basic level for the listeners out there who are maybe not as familiar with what search engine optimization is, what a keyword is all about? We say keywords. What does that mean? Talk to us about local keywords and national keywords. So a keyword is going to be one of the words that the people are literally typing into Google to find you or what you do or your product. So like Tulsa mortgages. Tulsa mortgages would be something somebody would type in to find Steve Carrington and total lending. That’s all you’d find. And that’s all. That’s all you’d find unless you type the word mortgages and you’re going for it. You’re going to win it but you’re not quite topping the nation yet. So you’d want to have people searching for Tulsa mortgages. Well, I’m top in the nation, but people just don’t know it yet. Right, yeah, well, yeah, that billboard in the woods. But same thing with like Luke Owens and the HubGym, Broken Arrow, Gyms, the keyword gym is going to be a lot harder to win, so you want to optimize for that local version first. So as an example, if you’re out there trying to be top for the word mortgage right now, the number one website that comes up top in search engines pretty consistently is a mortgage calculator and bank rate and Wikipedia. So you might say to yourself, well, what would I have to do if I wanted to beat bank rate? Well to beat bank rate right now, you would need 34,300 pages of content. And so if you were going to hire Bruce Clay to do that, on the low end his articles are about $200 a piece. So if you took… Is it $600,000? Something like that? No, no, no. You would need… Seven. No, you would need… Let me pull this up here. Did I catch a niner in there? Well, do it in math on a radio show. It’s not advised, but I’m doing it. So here we go. Oh, yeah. I’m doing the math here. It would cost you $6,860,000 to be competitive, but to actually win, you would actually be spending close to $13 million. There you go. So $13 million. Now if you wanted to beat Steve Currington, and you can’t because we only work with one company in each niche, but if you did want to, right now, let me pull this up real quick here, 1,206. You need 1,206. I don’t know. I’m just guessing how many pages I have right now, you would need 2,300 articles to beat Steve right now. And so if I want to put this on the show notes so the listeners get that. Again, if you wanted to beat a bank rate, you would need to invest close to $13 million of search engine content at $200 plus an article to beat a bank rate. And to beat Steve Currington right now, again, you would need to have, let’s see here, and again, this is if you were to hire Bruce Clay’s team to do it, at $200 an article, you would have, and this is something, Steve, I’m sure you can share this with the team here at Total Living Concepts so they can see kind of what it would cost here. So to beat Steve right now on Google, if you were to hire Bruce Clay, it would be $472,000. That’s what he would charge you. Yeah, it’s per article his team. They’re writing content for you. They charge about $7 Previous segment of today’s interview Bruce Clay explained That his team if they were gonna write articles for you They would charge you approximately $200 per article on the low end Right so to beat Steve Currington in the Google search engine results if you were to hire a search engine optimization firm, at the going rate of $200 per article minimum, conservatively you would spend $472,000 paying a search engine optimization firm to beat you. And that would just be to beat me in Tulsa. Right. So you can see where search engine optimization can be expensive if you’re not willing to produce your own content internally. And that’s just something to think about. Let’s swirl around in your cranium before we get back into this interview with Bruce Clay about why you’d want to focus on local terms versus national terms. Stephen, you have a hot take there. Well, I was going to say, I’d like to point out that I think I paid you a lot less to get to the same place. And so I think that’s one of the benefits of working with Thrive is most search engine companies do charge you a lot of money to get to the top of Google. And I know we didn’t spend $4.72, but we’re there. Because you guys definitely were able to tap into our team’s ability to write content. And you also did a lot of your own podcasts, which we were able to transcribe, and that produced content for you as well. So Thrive Nation, without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of search engine optimization for dummies. Okay, I have two final questions. Why is it better, I work with a lot of small businesses, why is it better for the average small business, small business, I’m saying five hundred thousand dollars a year of gross revenue or less, why is it better for the average small business owner to go after local search engine optimization as opposed to national search engine optimization? Well, in general, national is competing more against brands, whereas local, the brand typically doesn’t have the bandwidth to penetrate every local market. So, there’s a competitive advantage if you are able to be local. A great many businesses are not national. There’s no reason to pretend like you are because you’re not going to want to deliver nationally. And so you’re going to want to understand what your service region is and just focus on that. And you can focus on that in a great many ways. If you’re a local business right now, you should write this down, Google Home Services. Check it out. It’s a new service. It’s not available everywhere, coming from Google, and it’s an amazing opportunity to get your site premierly presented in Google. So all those things make sense on a local level. If you’re trying to be national, just understand this is going to be a battle. You’re against brands. You’re against everybody everywhere, and that’s just the way it is I want to explain this to listeners real quick. I worked with a business years ago a bakery and She wanted to be top of the world for the phrase cakes Specifically Bruce truly top of the world for the term wedding cakes And I pulled it up, and I showed her what the competition looked like and I said listen Let’s focus on optimizing for Tulsa wedding cakes. Well, we got her to the top of Google in probably six months working with her. And she really wanted, her partner just didn’t want to pay attention and didn’t want to understand how search engines work. And Bruce, they are currently still spending just hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to be top for Google. And they’re almost out of money now for the phrase wedding cakes. And they’re not even close, man. They’re like on page four or something, you know. And the thing is they can’t even service. They got an online order for, you know, from New York or something. They couldn’t even do it. You know what I mean? They couldn’t mail a wedding cake. I mean, can you explain what kind of businesses cannot actually be national and which ones can be? A good example that I commonly use is a plumber. Yeah. A plumber, of course, can visit your house, but he’s not going to travel to New York to fix anything. Things that are inexpensive, those are more difficult because national is a more expensive proposition, takes longer to rank. So you really have to be careful about the value and return on investment for your product. If it has virtually no delivery problem, then you’re fine. We had a client that sold chocolate. Not fountains, just chocolate. Oh, okay, here we go. And it was great, and it was beautiful, and they had local contracts at hotels, and they were really, really cooking, and they decided they wanted to go national. So one of the first things they did is they sent me a sample. When it got to me, it was a box of molten chocolate because it was summer. So it is clear that sometimes you just don’t have a product that should be sold nationally. I think that it’s always prudent to dominate your area and then expand unless it is clear that you have some form of recognition already nationally. I just want to make sure that nobody just wastes money doing it. I think that local is so much easier and there’s more tools for local. Google prefers local. In my local area, I rank at the top, even though I don’t sell locally, just because I have paid attention to how to do that. I can probably get anybody to rank locally. It’s a little bit longer process to rank nationally. Now, Bruce, my final question for you today is talk to me about the difference between between long tail keywords and short tail keywords and why long tail keywords are easier to win than short tail keywords. Okay, there is what you’re calling short tail keywords is commonly also known as a head term. Head term, got it. They are used interchangeably. usually a one or two-word phrase that describes simply a topic, like chocolate fountain. What you’re really talking about on a long tail is things that are three, four, five-word describe a specific type of chocolate fountain or a specific use for a chocolate fountain where the number of competitors for those longer term phrases are far fewer. I think that many times people will say, oh there’s all these searches for this particular term without recognizing that people search and then they don’t go there. I’m going to give you an example, if I can, the word hammer. I think everybody knows what a hammer is. But here I am in LA and I do a search for hammer. And the number one result is the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. The number two item is a vitamin. The number three item is a bowling ball. And the number four item is MC Hammer. Not a single one of them are what you were probably looking for. So when there’s ambiguity in there, the ambiguity is far more rampant on what’s called a head term, because Google doesn’t necessarily know what hammer you’re talking about. Whereas if I said hammer or claw hammer or ball peen hammer or hammer with long handle that weighs over five pounds, those are long tail keywords. They are more specific to the mission of the visitor. They have a higher probability of being closer to the conversion point and you can write about those a lot easier because you know exactly what that product is instead of having to guess as to what I would put for hammer. And I think that it’s easier to rank for a long tail. I think it’s faster to get rankings show up in Google for a long tail keywords, then it’s easier to rank for the head terms. We always or constantly have head terms where we’ll get you ranked for a one term phrase, it’ll take you maybe a year and a half, but But the way we do it is we focus on the long tail first and then build expertise and then you can rank for the short term. DriveNation, obviously today we’re talking about how to do more effective marketing and how to generate more customers through search engine optimization. But another way to save both time and money is to have an accountant staying on top of your books. If you’re looking for a proactive accounting firm, I encourage you to check out hoodcpas.com today. One of our great show sponsors, hoodcpas.com. You are now entering the dojo of mojo and the Thrive Time show. All right, Thrive Nation, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry. Bruce, you are arguably the father of search engine optimization. You are factually, for sure, not my opinion, you are the best-selling author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. You are a man who’s worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet. My friend, I cannot express to you how much we appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to come on to the Thrive Time Show. So, my friend, on behalf of the Thrive Nation and everybody out there, the small business owners and mid-level companies and all the hundreds of thousands of people that download this podcast, thank you for coming on to the show. Well, thank you very much for having me. And Bruce, good luck with your incredible new wife there. I’m excited for you. And if you ever want to be on the show again, especially when the product comes out, I know you’re pre-selling your search engine optimization product right now. But when it comes out, if you want to do an update or tell us how it’s going, please feel free to not be a stranger. And you have just been a pleasure to interview, as I knew you would be. Well, thank you very much. Hey, take care and have a great day. All right, Thrive Nation, that was Bruce Clay. Check out his book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. What I want to do now is I want to spend the rest of the show making sure that every single listener that you leave today’s show knowing how search engine optimization works. And so I want to give you some tools, I want to give you a lot of free stuff and help you. So action step number one, Chuck, I want to put this on the show notes, is all the listeners out there, I would encourage you today to go to thrivetimeshow.com and to download the Start Here book we have for free. Go to thrivetimeshow.com, you can download my Amazon bestselling book, Start Here. In that book, I have a thing called the Search Engine Manifesto, the Search Engine Optimization Manifesto. I would encourage you to download, again, the Start Here book for free from Thrivetimeshow.com. Download that book. That way you have a Cliff Notes version of how to optimize a website. I would recommend that everybody invest the $15, the $20. I’m sure you can find one right now on Amazon.com. We’ll put a link to it on the show notes. Buy search engine optimization for dummies. Buy search engine optimization for dummies and have it on your desk. I mean, keep it there because you’re going to run into search engine charlatans all the time. I mean, how many people… Steve, how often do you get an email from some company, usually based in India or the Middle East or China, that is reaching out to you to say that they can do search engine optimization for as little as $199 a month. Multiple times a day. It happens all the time. Every single day, multiple times a day. Right. And so I want to make sure all the listeners get this. Once you begin to move up in search engine optimization ranks, you’ll get more emails from companies who are targeting companies that are on the first two pages of Google search engine results. And they’re going to have very compelling arguments. A lot of them use fear to sell. A lot of them will reach out to you and try to scare you. Oh, if Google sees this on your website, whew, whew, you’ll be in trouble. I noticed that you had an error on one of your pages. I’m like, well, I have thousands of pages, so it’s not surprising to think that one of them might have an error. So let’s focus on the big four variables that you need to have optimized to get to the top of the search engine results. Variable number one, your website must be a Google canonically compliant website. Now you might say, what does that mean? We would recommend that you would build your website in WordPress. And why would you want to build your website in WordPress? Well, WordPress is a site that is the best out of the box search engine friendly format. It’d be kind of like building a car, let’s say. And let’s say the car, Chip, what kind of vehicle, what kind of truck do you drive these days? A Ford F-150. King Ranch. Okay, so there you go. So it’s a Ford F-150. A lot of stickers on it too. It looks really great. Thanks. Do you haul a lot of stuff in that vehicle? I mean, do you haul all things from A to B with that thing? Only when I have to. Okay, well if you, let’s say the chassis of that vehicle, I’m just kind of trying to compare Ford vehicles, but I used to drive a 1989, not so dent resistant Ford Escort, and it has a hatchback. And that thing, the chassis of that vehicle is not built to carry the weight that an F-150 is. So, in the event that we put too much weight into the Ford Escort, it just simply could not handle the weight. And when you build a website, you want to build it on the right foundation. It would be like putting rebar in the concrete on your, let’s say, if you’re building a home, you want to put rebar in the concrete. Chup, you did concrete. That’s right. Why do you put rebar in the concrete? To hold everything together. The concrete has a very strong compression strength, but it doesn’t hold together well. If it cracks, and the rebar inside it holds it. It’s like the skeleton of the concrete. So you want to build the proper skeleton for your website and that would be using WordPress. You want to start off with a good foundation. Now after you build your site, and by the way if you’re saying I don’t know where are you getting all this information from? Well one, I wrote a book on it. It’s called Start Here and in that book we write the search engine optimization manifesto. But if you don’t believe me, if you don’t want me to cite myself, fine I’ll give you five books I’d recommend for you. You go do the work. You can read these books. Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. Oh, who’s that? This would be Bruce Clay. Also the Retargeting Playbook by Adam Burke is a great book. How Google Works by the CEO, written by the CEO of Google itself, Eric Schmidt. And then Get Rich Quick by Mark Ostrowski. And that’s the only book that I know of that’s endorsed by the co-founder of Apple himself, Mr. Wozniak, and The Honest Seduction. So again, search engine optimization for dummies. We’ll put this all in the show notes. Retargeting Playbook, How Google Works, The Honest Seduction, and Get Rich Click. Those are the books I’d recommend that you read to understand that. But just build your site from the very beginning with the right format, the right chassis. Make your website Google canonical compliant. If your site’s built on a different platform, heaven help you. And heaven’s going to need to help you because Google doesn’t like it. And that’s what we do as part of our business coaching program. We can help you fix your website right away. Now, the second variable that you want to be very aware of if you want to get to the top of Google search engine results is you have to have the most mobile compliance, the most mobile compliance. So when we come back from the break, we’re going to get more into mobile compliance and what that looks like. We’d actually be happy to do a mobile compliance test or a checkup for you. So if you just email us to info at thrive timeshow.com, email us your contact information and your website to info at thrive timeshow.com, we’d be happy to do a free diagnostic exam on your website to tell you what you’re doing well and what’s wrong with it. Right? We’ll be happy to do that for you. Also, Chuck, we’re giving away a lot of free stuff today. Oh, free stuff. What if you’re listening right now, Chup, and you’re saying to yourself, you know, I want a free printer. I would like a free laser copier. By the way, we have multiple of these copiers in our Thrive Time Show offices. And I want to save both time and money on getting my office and printer supplies. Chup, how can our listeners benefit not only one of our show sponsors, but themselves, my friend? So, hey, I also own a business by the name of Onyx Imaging. They’re your one-stop business shop for all your business needs, Steve Cunnington. You can check them out at onyximaging.com, but right now, if you buy your printer supplies and office supplies and use them for printer service, they’re going to give you a free copier for free all you gotta do is buy it. They price match, they have online ordering. Where can I get this? Same and next day delivery. Go to onyximaging.com or call them at 918-627-6611 918-627-6611 onyximaging.com Uh, Chup, you know, hooked on Onyx works for me. And you know what they say, see a broad to get that booty ackle? Lay her down or smack em, yak them. OnyxImaging.com. That is not their slogan. That’s not what they say. But check them out. It’s OnyxImaging.com. Once again, it’s OnyxImaging.com. Save both time and money today. Make sure you never miss a broadcast by signing up for the Thrive Time Show podcast. And back to a show that’s cooler than the other side of the pillow. It’s the Thrive Time Business Coach Show. All right, Drive Nation, if you have started from the bottom of the Google search engine ranks and you want to get your website to the top of these search engine results, I’d encourage you to get on a pen and a pad and get ready as we enter into the search engine optimization lab. On the first part of today’s show, we have the father of the search engine optimization industry and the best-selling author of search engine optimization for dummies on the show and now we’re breaking down what he’s been teaching into very actionable steps for all the listeners out there. So step number one, you’ve got to convert your website to WordPress. You just have to do it. Quit screwing around, not doing it. I don’t care how much money you…Chuck, how often do you hear people say I just finished building a site and I’ve spent a ton of money and I built it on this particular platform and I don’t want to switch it to WordPress. All the time. But Clay, I just built this awesome triple size billboard in the middle of the woods behind your house out here. It’s right, I’ve got to keep it. No one can see it. Yeah, that’s the problem. So it’s unfortunate and it happens, but that’s just part of doing business. You’ve got to build a search engine compliant website now. Right now. You’ve got to start now. Build it in WordPress. If you want our team to help you. We don’t do just one-off projects. We have 160 clients. That’s all we do. We work with a client and with business coaching, we also tackle their search engine, their web, their graphic design, their print pieces, their videography. We do it all. It’s a turnkey system. We don’t do just stand-alone websites. Hey, Clay, did I tell you about my new hot rod? No. It’s custom. It has no wheels. Nice. It’s beautiful though. It’s beautiful. It looks great. It just doesn’t have wheels. I just had them on purpose not put wheels on it so nobody can see it. That’s kind of like having a website that can’t be found. It might look nice, but it won’t go anywhere. So now what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to have the most mobile compliance. Now your site has to work well in mobile because this just in from our home office. Steve, are you aware of this? Most people today are using smartphones. Shut it. No, I’ve actually been out and to the airport. I went to the park, to the mall, and in all instances I’ve noticed that people are carrying these smartphone devices. Every single person. And they’re on them all the time. What? Even people going out to eat. People walk into a fountain or something because they’re on their phone. I wouldn’t doubt it. Even if they’re using a smartphone. That’s what I did the other day. Making you dumb. I walked into the door. It’s so funny. Bam! Right into the… That’s one of my favorite things. Yeah. So I would just say this. People are always using their smartphones. And they’re always on Google. And they’re always searching for the products and services that they are looking to buy. They’re looking for the answers to the problems they have. And so I just want to give you some examples there Thrive Nation of people you could check out there. If you type in Tulsa mortgages, you’re gonna find Steve Currington on the, he’s obviously on today’s show, but you’re gonna find his website there in the search results. If you type in Tulsa cookies, you’re gonna find Barbie cookies. So again, this is a real system that works and you’re gonna generate a ton of business doing it. But I don’t think a lot of people take the time to realize how much of a game-changing thing this could be in your life if you do get to the top of search engine results. And so we had one of our thrivers, we like to have them on the show when possible, stop by the studio and I asked them if they’d be willing to hop on this show and share about how much they’ve grown as a result of implementing the proven systems that we teach. Ladies and gentlemen, this is our interview with Aaron Antus, the marketing director for Oklahoma’s now largest home-building business. Hi, I’m Aaron Antus with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them and actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes, and then I met Clay and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing 800 million in sales over a 15 year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of sales people for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. And, I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in Tulsa area and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually in a four month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us, and it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing and Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town, and so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean the thing is it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 year history of Shaw Holmes this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us and I know if you give him a shot I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me, the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1,800% increase in our internet leads, going from 10 a month to 180 a month. That would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it because we sure haven’t. 1170. Alright Thrive Nation, welcome back to the special edition, the Bruce Clay edition of the Search Engine Optimization Conversation. Bruce Clay is the father of the search engine optimization industry. He was on the earlier part of today’s show. If you’re just tuning in on the podcast button and look for this interview with Bruce Clay. Bruce Clay is the father of the search engine optimization industry, the best-selling author of Search Engine for Dummies, and we are now, as we wrap up today’s show, we’re breaking down the big four variables, the big action steps that every single listener, and that includes you, you need to take if you want to make. Okay. And then also to provide more and more proof this is not a charlatan thing. We’re providing facts so you know this is not fiction. We’re giving you examples, testimonials, I mean everything is cited. You can find all of this at Thrivetimeshow.com. Click on the podcast button. So we’re talking about variable number one. You’ve got to fix today. You’ve got to convert your website to a Google canonically compliant website. You have to switch your website today over to WordPress. Stop not switching over to WordPress. What the crap is going on? Why would you listen to a show about growing your business and then not take the action steps? I don’t understand it. The other thing that’s crazy to me whenever we get pushed back on this idea is that a lot of people out there are always looking for that automated solution. This is actually it. It normally doesn’t exist, but WordPress, they automatically update. You don’t have to have a custom coder you don’t have to have somebody right just working on your website 24 7 where I does a lot of that for you and that’s kind of the point so step number one switch to a WordPress based website and use the Yoast plugin y o a s t y o a s t use the Yoast plugin for WordPress to make sure your website is mobile compliant how do I know if my website is mobile compliant? Just email us at info at thrive timeshow dot com. Send us a link to your website and your contact info and my team will run an exhaustive diagnostic test on your website to see what’s going on and we can help you. Now the third variable, Steve, you’ve got to get Google reviews. Why do you have to get verifiable Google reviews? Why do you have to do that if you want to optimize your website, your local small business? Why do you have to do it? Well, it’s part of the components of what Google looks at when you’re ranking in the local search results And so when if you’re trying to rank locally for any term the more reviews you have Coupled with the canonical compliance of your website coupled with the content on your website will help you rank Furthermore recently furthermore just like in two of our different markets, I got phone calls from people who said they found us and read our reviews. And that’s why they called us. For mortgages? Yeah. I had a realtor call me that said… It was for pet puppies. It was for… I mean, total lending concepts, you’re a mortgage company. Those people aren’t familiar. You have a location in Tulsa, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Alamosa, Missouri. What’s the website, Steve? What’s your website? SteveCurrington.com. So they can go there to learn more about you. Are Tulsa listeners out there looking for a mortgage? It’s a real company, and you’ve got real clients as a result of them really finding you in Google Chat. Yeah, and the importance of the Google reviews is that the map shows up above the organic listings. It’s at the top of the page, and you want to get more reviews in your competition to show up on that map? Can I continue piling on? Please, pile on. According to Forbes, 88% of people read Google reviews before attending your church service. What? Before attending your seminar. What? Before buying something. Before 88% of consumers trust online reviews more than a personal recommendation now. Mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. Absolutely mind-blowing. Another deep thought is Google wants to make sure that only sites that are relevant come up top. So it’s their way to vet to make sure that you’re not a scammer. Right. Because they’re very hard to get Google reviews. So you need to get Google reviews, objective Google reviews, from your ideal and likely buyers. And last thing, since we’re piling on here, this is like the thing as the business owner you literally have the most control over. You can work with us at the Thrive Time Show to optimize your website and everything, but you and your team can go get Google reviews, and it will absolutely move the needle. You know what I want to do? I want to brag on one of our listeners out there, and I want to play a testimonial from Keith, who proudly served our country in the United States military, and who now owns a company called Witness Security. And I get a witness. He and his son, Tyler, have diligently been asking for objective reviews. They’ve been writing content. They’ve reached out to us after a workshop. They asked us to convert their site to WordPress. And they’re now bringing in more deals than they’ve ever brought in before in their entire life. So without any further ado, back to our interview, our testimonial here from Can I Get a Witness? Witness Security here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For the past 18 months that we’ve been working with Clay, you know, our growth was averaging pretty close to 10,000 a month on a regular basis. You know, shortly thereafter we doubled that to close to 20,000 and now we’re close to 40,000 on a regular basis every month. Clay has helped us increase our sales in every aspect when it comes to the calls that come in to our business, helping us to hire people to be able to do that and follow a good script, you know, setting up the appointments and how we do them when we go into the appointment, the sales pitch and how we do it, you know, and then from then on forth, just the SEO and everything he’s done has increased our sales exponentially. Clay has helped us grow our business in the aspects of individuals, how to hire people, how to manage people, how to necessarily organize our business, how to structure the functioning of our business. Though we’ve been in business for close to nine years at that time, Clay has revamped do to a much more better operational business than what it ever was before. Working with Clay is a little bit different than what you’d find in most. Clay pushes you to the point you get out of your comfort zone. And as long as you continue to do what he asks you to do, you will continue to grow. But if you don’t, then you won’t. We heard about Clay Clark on the radio. My son heard it on the radio and had been listening to it for a couple of weeks, and said I ought to listen to it, gave him a call, and within a day or so, Clay gave me a call, and we came in for an interview. He’s helped us in our search engine optimization by helping us with the actual Google ratings when it comes to being placed on the map in multiple locations so that we dominate the industry, you know, on the map, as well as organically, so that when people are searching in a variety of different words, we always pop up on multiple locations on the first page. That of which he did, it’s a long process, but it works very well. And Google how their algorithms work, it doesn’t change in what he does. So we’re always on top. CLEA has restructured everything we did when it comes to selling the security systems. Being a local company, we do things quite a bit different. And by doing so and restructuring everything he did in the nine years that I was in business, you know, trying to do it on my own, he came up with a package deal and within less than ten minutes and revamped everything we do. If you’re looking for coming to Clay Clark for asking him to help you grow your business, I can guarantee it’ll be a success if you follow through with what he says. You know, you have to follow through with what he says in order to make it work. And so you have to come to the table making sure that you’re going to do what he says. Be teachable and you will be successful. But Chuck, what if I sell pizzas and I live in Florida? Will search engine optimization work for me too? Absolutely. And so now without any further ado, yet another testimonial coming in hot from beautiful and sunny Florida. Hi, this is Dave and Tricia Rich coming to you from Sallie Beach, Florida. I’d like to list a few of the wins we’ve had since we started with Thrive 15. We’ve completed group interviews, we’re fully staffed, we’ve received over 100 Google reviews to increase our Google rating, and we now have more money in the bank than we have ever had. Thanks to the Thrive Coaches. Thank you. Good night. Now, Chuck, what happens if I’m a person who makes fresh baked cookies? Will search engine optimization work for me? Freshly baked will work for you. Well, without any further ado, back to a testimonial video from Barbie Cookies. This year’s sales for this week. So this is the same week last year. Do you see the difference? What is that? I can’t really tell. One is… Michael can you can we just… Jason can you kind of pull this end maybe just so you can see it. It’s kind of pull it that way. Let’s get the length. It’s more of a… I can’t tell that the length. It’s hard to tell. Last year’s sales and the total is a mere $4,711.73. Same week this year, 2015. The total is, read it Michael. $11,313.50. Oh, boom! There it is! What? Awesome! Unbelievable! Unbelievable. Thrive Nation search engine optimization works, but to quote the incredible Maya Angelou, nothing works unless you do. So if you have a functional mind, now is the time to become aggressive and proactive about your search engine optimization. You can begin the conversation by going to thrivetimeshow.com today and booking your tickets to the next in-person Thrive Time Show workshop or you can continue hanging out at the bottom of the internet where you go to bury things. If you kill somebody, hide them at the bottom of page two on the internet search results because nobody will find the body. Thrive Nation, that’s my encouraging word. And without any further ado, let’s wrap this show up my friends. Three, two, one, boom! Hello, I’m Wes Carter. I’m one of the shareholders at Winters and King. My favorite thing that Thrive has helped me accomplish here in our firm is thinking a little bit outside the box. They do SEO, they do printing, they help us with a lot of things from the day to day marketing for the firm, but they also help us think of things that as attorneys we probably wouldn’t normally think of that help us market our services to our clients. One of the things I love about working with Thrive is that they make it enjoyable to actually do work with them. It’s not dry, it’s usually fun, but it’s always very enjoyable and practical. They give me things and ideas that I can put into place, it’s not just some theoretical spiel that they give me. We get practical steps that we work on together to do my job better. So me personally, I would easily recommend Thrive 15 services to my friends, my families, I recommend them to my clients. I think they do a good job, they’re passionate, they care about their clients, and I think it’s actually a valuable service they provide to people that are in the business world. My name is Jeff Thomas. I’m originally from Atlanta, Georgia. It’s all about getting to the grindstone. It is about putting the… It’s one thing to have a specific vision or a dream, but knowledge without application isn’t knowledge at all. So that’s nothing. Really funny. The atmosphere is very lively. Everybody that is working for Clay is very upbeat and not tired, not sluggish, not complaining, not whining. They don’t have anything to do with those types of characteristics. It’s all about getting to the grind and having fun while you do it. I haven’t actually been to any conferences in the past, but what I will say from what I’ve seen on YouTube and what from other friends have told me is this isn’t like a motivational kind of thing to just you know hoo hoo rah rah get you motivated, but it’s like practical steps that if you do take them, which most people aren’t willing to do, then you will grow and you will achieve the specific things that you want. Well, for one thing, I will say that this isn’t for you. But I will say that if you are willing to work and you know you’re just getting started, but you have actually taken a step in that direction, then this will actually help you grow further exponentially than you could ever imagine. My name is Taylor Hall. I’m the general manager of the Tulsa Oilers professional hockey team. You know, our goal every night here at the BLK Center is to try to fill the seats with lots of people and create an exciting environment so when somebody comes to a game, they want to come back. Working with Clay and the staff at Thrive, they’ve really helped us in many, many ways. Website and graphic design and video production and a lot of things that go along. And a lot of businesses, including ours, doesn’t have a staff or a full-time, you know, videographer or graphic designer. But the biggest thing that we noticed was the needle mover. More sales, more attendance, more successes in business. We had a record year last season working with Clay for the first time. Our average attendance is higher than it’s ever been. So there’s a lot of really cool things that we did and they worked. That’s the nice thing about working with Clay and the team over there. It’s just not one person, you get the entire team. If you need video design and editing and production, they’ve got that. If you need graphic design, if you need some coaching, your sales people and call scripts, PR, they offer all that. Play was instrumental in helping guiding us and getting us on the right track so that you know we could you know really you know raise the raise the bar and become ultra successful so it’s been an amazing experience for us. My name is Kaitlyn, I own a tumbling gym called Justice Tumbling Company, we call them. Working with Play is so helpful, it’s being diligent with everything and making sure we execute our goals and really make things happen. It’s fun to be a part of the team, it’s fun to be a part of the team. It’s fun to be a part of the team. It’s fun to be a part of the team. It’s fun to be a part of the team. and everything and making sure we execute our goals and really make things happen. It’s fun, it’s high, it really gets you energized and going and just makes you really want to work. To get the momentum going, to really just like get that buzz, to really give you the energy to get up and make it happen. I’m Bob Healy. I’m in the charcoal grilling industry and the name of my business is Grillblazer. How will I apply what I’ve learned so far into my business? I’m actually a client of Dry 15 and I learned so much from what I’m learning at this conference and my regular weekly attendance that it’s helping me establish the business and get it off the ground. Clay’s presentation style is just blatant disregard for what anybody wants. He just has fun. It’s him. Everything that you see is authentically Clayton. It’s a great deal of fun. Everybody enjoys it. They know when you walk in, they think they’re coming into a carnival, and frankly they are. It’s just great fun. There’s not another conference like it. You just don’t go to a carnival atmosphere and learn what you do here as a driver. It’s great. The reason people should attend at least one of these conferences is because it’s common sense. And everybody’s said an entire line about the way you should run a business, but until you actually experience running a business, which is, candidly, what you learn here, how to run a business, you don’t know what you’re doing. My name is Tyler Hastings, and this is my wife, Rachel, and our company is Delrick Research out of New Orleans. During our time working with Thrive, we’ve had numerous successes. When we first started, we were working with one physician, we had one research site, and we were seeing on average, you know, between 10 and 15 patients a week. Since working with Thrive in the last 18 months, we now have four research sites, we work with over five physicians, and on average we’re now seeing over 60 patients per week. Recently we’ve been the top enroller worldwide in seven studies, which is just incredible considering where we were two years ago, 18 months ago. Thrive really differs from the other conferences that we’ve been to and the other kind of programs that we’ve been through because they actually really practice what they preach and they implement the same systems and the processes that they teach you about. And they give you real life examples that really work for them and show you with the training how to implement that yourself. For example, Tyler and I actually got the opportunity to come out to Tulsa and we’re fortunate enough that the Thrive team took us out to some of the businesses that they own. And we really got to see in real life, real time, some of the systems and processes. And it was just incredible. A real life example of some of the businesses and the things that they’re implementing. Having a coach is important to us. They act as not only an accountability factor, but they’re someone we can talk to on a daily basis as we go through the problems of running a business that inevitably come up. They always understand what we’re going through and they’re always there to help us or guide us through the problems that we experience. The best part of our experience working with Thrive has just been seeing our relationship grow. So at each step as our business grows, you know, if they have something else to provide us with, they’ve got the resources, whether it be marketing, graphic design, website development, or even in our accounting practices, maybe we need a new insurance policy. If they have someone they can connect us with or they have the direct resource we need to speak with for any of the problems we face. If someone’s thinking about signing up for the coaching program, I would highly recommend that they call in for a free 30-minute coaching session and see exactly what the team can do for you. Just speak with someone, let them know what you’re going through, and I think you’ll find that regardless of what you need, there’s someone there that can help you. Clay’s presentation style is very real and raw. Like it just gets real down to the bone of it and the real purpose of it. There’s no like fluffy vagueness about it, you know. So he really gets to the point. I’m always reminded about how important it is to be intentional and to really pay attention to how you schedule your time and really honor it. Because whatever gets scheduled gets done. That’s what he said from Lee Cockrell himself. Just constantly hearing that and getting reminded helps me to reinforce that in my own life. It always helps to get an outside perspective, and especially from a guy that’s grown so many multi-billion dollar businesses, it doesn’t hurt. My name is Nick Guajardo. I heard about the Thrive Time Show workshop through Andy Mathren. He is my, Andy Mathren and Larry Montgomery, they’re my bosses at Restore Home Health. So I work with a home health company called Restore Home Health. And my role is pretty much to bring in business. So I was hoping to learn kind of the sales process on top of just kind of the responsibilities and help understand what it looks like on the SEO side and just kind of an all-around what it looks like to own a business because that’s something I want to do in the future for sure. How I would describe the atmosphere here at Thrive is high energy, great professionalism, great people. It’s just it’s a place you definitely want to visit and be at. Plays delivery style, humorous, professional, hilarious. Just he does it. I haven’t seen someone do it better. So he does he does a great job Most valuable thing I’ve learned so far a lot of it has been extremely valuable So but one one thing that’s was really stuck out to me is the s learning the SEO stuff I mean that is I think things you don’t Really even think about and then you hear it and you think you know it, but you don’t know it So I feel like that was the most valuable. Well, they’re missing out on just what comes down to just basic applications to be a business owner. I mean, I feel like it’s like an absolute necessity to come here and learn the ins and outs and maybe come here once or twice if they take good notes, that kind of thing. Why? So just, it’s the experience here and what you can learn, like absolutely. So marketing and SEO seemed like something that would be very scary, but then in the way that Clay and his team described it, became very clear and concise, and something that’s very accessible to any business owner. I’ve learned a lot about marketing at this conference, and a lot about business management and HR, really everything, the key components of anybody’s business, they’re going to give you the best tools to be successful at it. So most workshops or conferences can be really boring, really one note, or they just seem so theatrical that it’s a joke and it’s not even giving you the tools that you need or that you came there for. But here, it’s still high energy, it’s still fun, everything’s to the point, but it’s very professional and, yeah, you’re missing out on easy steps to use in your business that are very accessible and very clear. My name is Abigail McCarter. The best thing I’ve learned so far is definitely organization, schedule wise, always keeping a to-do list, keeping your calendar organized. I’m kind of all over the place, so that’s always good to know. So Clay’s presentation style and the atmosphere is electric. It’s so energetic, it’s so fun. Clay’s hilarious but also knows a ton so it’s just really great all around. This conference is much different than any other conference I’ve gone to again because it’s fun. A lot of other conferences it’s like really quiet, really cold, and you’re just kind of get bored but this one you’re like always engaged, you’re always learning something and the staff is amazing. They’re always super helpful. So it’s just been really great. My name is Clint Howard. We’re a personal training and fitness training facility. Oh wow, I’m learning a ton. Like this morning so far has been search engine optimization. So really just the importance of being at the top of Google, how Google works and why it’s so important to go out and get video reviews and all that stuff. So I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning a ton. I’m learning how Google works and why it’s so important to go out and get video reviews and testimonials and getting Google reviews. And so all those things we can take back and really apply that like immediately. So it’s really cool to see not only how to do it, but really the relevance and importance of it in your long-term strategy of your business. Now, it’s amazing actually the way in this morning and yesterday I was walking in the front entrance and actually me, I go to a lot of seminars, I go to a lot of conferences, masterminds. I’ve been doing that since I was like 22 years old, so gosh, almost 20 years now. And this is by far the most entertaining, not only the content, their content is amazing, but Clay and you guys do a great job of mixing in entertainment, entertainment works fun, it’s fresh, it’s lively, you never get bored. And I heard a study one time that the reason that children learn so much quicker is because it’s fun, learning is fun. And so obviously, LA is a nail-dab where it’s very fun to be here and keeps you awake, keeps you energized, so I’m having a blast. Yeah, I think any business owner or someone that wants to own a business or considering owning and starting a business should definitely come. I know that I was referred here by friends of mine and clients of mine and I’ve referred other people. Again, just to understand what it takes to make a business successful, have a good time, obviously, you’re not going to stay and have fun. And that works. There’s a lot of people here you can learn from and there’s a lot of breaks you can talk to other people. So I think this is a must-attend treaty by the owners of business and for the ones who started this. My name is Jamie Fagel. I’m with Jameson Fine Cabinetry. I heard about the conference through Andrew. He’s a great guy. He’s a great guy. He’s a great guy. My name is Jamie Fagel, I’m with Jameson Fine Cabinetry. I heard about the conference through Andrew, he’s the coach that I deal with here at Thrive. The most valuable piece I found even working with Andrew, but it’s been solidified when it came here, was you’ve got to actually do the things that they’re telling you. With no action, you’re not going to get anything from it. I would highly recommend this to almost anybody in business today. It’s really something that if you want to start a business, the old way of doing things is gone. This is what you got to do. It’s the only way it’ll work. Hey, this is Charles and Amber Kola. We’re the owners of Kola Fitness. The way we’re able to do that is working with Clay for the last three years, he has really readjusted our thinking and taught us that our business is here to serve us. And by doing that, we’re able to live the lifestyle we want and take off on a random vacation last minute. So we had totally planned on being at the conference. So wish we could be there and meet all of you. We know you’re having a great time. So. Yes, Clay in the last three years has helped us build all the necessary systems, checklists, workflows, task lists, time blocks, audits that are always running and the right capable lieutenants to keep track of all that so that you too can get time freedom, financial freedom. And that’s what we have done and Clay has helped us do. We’ve got multiple companies in multiple states and they’re all doing very well, getting ready to go to more locations in this next year. And Co-op Fitness has a really big future. We’re teaming up with a couple other groups and we should scale the company here shortly. Hopefully we’ll open like 50 locations in the next 10 years. So, but yeah, we’re on the way. We’re going to probably more than double our company, maybe triple our company in the next eight to nine months. And it’s just awesome. God is working in our business and we’re making Jesus and changing lives. We’re a strong Christian company that focuses on making Jesus famous and changing lives in the fitness field. And this is Charles and Amber Cola. Thank you, Thrive. Hit your action items. We love you guys. We wish you were there. You guys have a wonderful day. Bye-bye. My name is Jennifer Johnson. We love you guys, we wish you were there. You guys have a wonderful day. Bye bye. Now we’re doing the next level of refining the processes for just a different concept. And so it’s getting better and better. Things that were just big processes before, we have the foundation laid. And now we’re able to make it better and better. And I’m hearing different things now that we’ve implemented things. And so we can just make it even better, implement it in our own business. Clay’s presentation and the atmosphere is very exciting and fun. It keeps you awake. It makes it interesting. You have a lot of information, but if it’s not going to be entertaining, your brain is going to tune it out. But Play makes it just entertaining enough that you retain what you learn. Lots of rhyming and catchy things so that you remember stuff. Something that makes this conference different than other workshops or conferences that I’ve been to is that there’s a lot of people here in my same situation. We’re all, most of us are pretty small businesses wanting to improve and we want real life information and something that will work and that’s attainable. And not just some crazy magic formula but actual action items that we can implement in our business and actually see a difference. Everyone should attend a drive type business conference, whether you’re a business owner or not. A, if you’re a business owner, it has practical applications that you can apply to so many different parts of your business. And then you need to come back for more so that you can keep doing more of the concepts can actually be applied to home. Like getting routines and getting, setting systems at home has just seriously made a huge difference in my life at home. So I’ve been able to improve our business, but I’ve also been able to improve things at home. And so that’s why everyone should come, no matter what your station is in life. My name is Nolan Hugh. I’m originally from San Francisco, California. The industry that I’m in is financial services. I’ve learned a ton so far, but what I can best apply from this conference is the opportunity, that hunger to go out there and make a big difference in my industry. Blaise’s presentation style is amazing. He’s got an endless amount of energy. It’s contagious. And yeah, by being here, I really do want to go back and be able to face all the adversity that the industry has. Yeah, this conference, the thing that makes it different is that it’s special because it has a unique set of individuals that all share that same energy. I think you typed it as dragon energy, but yeah, that’s… Everyone should come to multiple, but their first would be very special. Yeah, you’re welcome with a lot of enthusiasm. That’ll last for a long time. My name is Gabriella Bruce. Our business is HCS Electric. My husband’s the owner, but I’m involved with that, so we’re an electric company. Well, here at the conference they talk a lot about consistency, and so just staying consistent with different things in the business. I feel like applying that to our business model will really help us grow. The atmosphere is very positive, uplifting, and then it’s very fun and energetic. And so it gets you pumped and it gets you excited and it encourages you to do big things. I probably how real they are. They tell you up front what you need to do and what’s like a no-go. And some conferences are, they kind of sugar coat things, so I like how real they are here. I think it’ll definitely if you want your business to grow, I think this would be a great, a great experience. And then not only that, it’ll encourage you and inform you on so many things you don’t think about on a daily basis. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you the linear workflow, the linear workflow for us and getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place, so having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday. And we’ve been learning a lot, which we’ve been sitting here, we’ve been learning a lot. So the humor definitely helps. It breaks it up. But the content is awesome, off the charts. And it’s very interactive. You can raise your hand. It’s not like you’re just listening to the professor speak. The wizard teaches, but the wizard interacts and he takes questions. So that’s awesome. If you’re not attending the conference, you’re missing about 3 quarters to half of your life. Definitely, it’s probably worth a couple thousand dollars. So, you’re missing the thought process of someone that’s already started like nine profitable businesses. So, not only is it a lot of good information, but just getting in the thought process of Clay Clark or Dr. Zellner or any of the other coaches, getting in the thought process of how they’re starting all these businesses, to me, just that is priceless. That’s money. Well, we’re definitely not getting upsold here. My wife and I have attended conferences where they upsold, where it was great information and then they upsold us like half the conference. Now I don’t want to like bang my head into a wall and she’s like banging her head into the chair in front of her. Like it’s good information but we’re like, oh my gosh, I want to strangle you shut up and go with the presentation that we paid for and that’s not here there’s no upsells or anything so that’s awesome I hate that it makes me angry so glad that’s not happening so the cost of this conference is quite a bit cheaper than Business College I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. I would definitely recommend that people would check out the Thrive 15 conference. The information that you’re going to get is just very, very beneficial and the mindset that you’re going to get, that you’re going to leave with, is just absolutely worth the price of a little bit of money and a few days worth of your time. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey, guys. I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house, right? This is where we used to live, years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s, uh, nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing. And this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing. And this is our new team. We went from 4 to 14. And I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past. And they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales. Which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to ten locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd. We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. So we really just want to thank you, Clay, and thank you, Vanessa, for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crocker, the head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day-to-day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from start-ups go from start-up to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system critical thinking document creation making it putting it into organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable scalable business like one of his businesses like 500 franchises that’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with so amazing guy Elon Musk kinds kind of like smart guy he kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much when I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. That’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best of you. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends. My most impressive thing was when I was shadowing him one time, we went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. And anyways, just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company, or navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months, he helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs were all closed for three months and you have $350,000 of bills you’ve got to pay and we have no accounts receivable. He helped us navigate that and of course we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. But he was a great man. I’m very impressed with him. So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing. And I encourage you, if you haven’t ever worked with Clay, work with Clay, he’s gonna help magnify you. And there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does. He probably sleeps four, maybe six hours a day, and literally the rest of the time he’s working. And he can outwork everybody in the room every single day. And he loves it. So anyways, this is Charles Kolaw with Kolaw Fitness. Thank you, Clay. And anybody out there that’s wanting to work with Clay, it’s a great, great opportunity to ever work with him. So you guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Kola. We’ll see you guys, bye-bye. Hi, I’m Aaron Antis with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them, and I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes, and then I met Clay, and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing $800 million in sales over a 15-year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of sales people for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. We’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually in a four month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So, I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us, and it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing and Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town and so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing and I think for a lot of people they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean the thing is it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 year history of Shaw Holmes this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us and I know if you give them a shot I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me, the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1800% increase in our internet leads. Going from 10 a month to 180 a month, that would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it because we sure haven’t. My name is Danielle Sprick, and I am the founder of V Sprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After being a stay-at-home mom for 12 years, and my three kids started school, and they were in school full-time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide, what do I want to do? My degree and my background is in education, but after being a mom and staying home and all of that I just didn’t have a passion for it like I once did. My husband suggested real estate. He’s a home builder, so real estate and home building go hand in hand and we just rolled with it. I love people, I love working with people, I love building relationships, but one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things. The processes and the advertising and marketing. I knew that I did not have what I needed to make that what it should be. So I reached out to Clay at that time and he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes that we represent, everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage, our real estate brokerage, eight months ago and in that time we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week we signed on our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions. Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents. But I have to give credit where credit’s due. and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision. When you dream big, big things happen. I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way. I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer to insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations. I answer to my patient, and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways. I mean, I went to medical school, I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63,000 embezzlement. I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world. He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. JT, do you know what time it is? 4.10. It’s TiVo time in Tulsa, Rosalind, baby. Tim TiVo is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. What year were you born? 1995. Dude, I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old, but I’ve never had the two-time Heisman Award winning Tim Tebow come present. And a lot of people have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field. And off the field, the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now, the big question is, JT, how does he do it? Well, they’re going to have to come and find out, because I don’t know. Well, I’m just saying, Tim Tebow is going to teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Also, this is the first Thrive Time Show event that we’ve had where we’re going to have a man who has built a $100 million net worth. Wow. Who will be presenting. Now, we’ve had a couple of presenters that have had a billion dollar net worth in some real estate sort of things. But this is the first time we’ve had a guy who’s built a service business and he’s built over a $100 million net worth in the service business. It’s the yacht driving, multi-state living guru of franchising. Peter Taunton will be in the house. This is the founder of Snap Fitness, the guy behind Nine Round Boxing. He’s going to be here in Tulsa, Russel, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. JT, why should everybody want to hear what Peter Taunton has to say? Oh, because he’s incredible. He’s just a fountain of knowledge. He is awesome. He has inspired me listening to him talk. And not only that, he also has, he practices what he teaches. So he’s a real teacher. He’s not a fake teacher like business school teachers. So you gotta come learn from him. Also, let me tell you this folks, I don’t wanna get this wrong because if I get it wrong, someone’s gonna say, you screwed that up, buddy. So Michael Levine, this is Michael Levine. He’s gonna be coming. He said, who’s Michael Levine? I don’t get this wrong. This is the PR consultant of choice for Michael Jackson, for Prince, for Nike, for Charlton Heston, for Nancy Kerrigan. 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times best-selling authors he’s represented, including pretty much everybody you know who’s been a super celebrity. This is Michael Levine, a good friend of mine. He’s going to come and talk to you about personal branding and the mindset needed to be super successful. The lineup will continue to grow. We have hit Christian reporting artist Colton Dixon in the house. Now people say Colton Dixon’s in the house? Yes! Colton Dixon’s in the house. So if you like Top 40 Christian music, Colton Dixon’s gonna be in the house performing. The lineup will continue to grow each and every day. We’re gonna add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup, but I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? What do I do? How does it work? You just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the Business Conferences button, and you click on the Request Tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that. I had to work for it and I’m super grateful I came to a business conference. That’s actually how I met you, met Peter Taunton, I met all these people. So if you’re out there today and you want to come to our workshop, again, you just got to go to Thrivetimeshow.com. You might say, well, when’s it going to be? June 27th and 28th. And you might say, well, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where’s it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russell Oklahoma. I suppose it’s Tulsa, Russell. It’s I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russell. I’m sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you go to if you type in Thrivetimeshow and Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office. And so it’s going to be packed. So when? June 27th and 28th. Who? You! You’re going to come. I’m talking to you. You can just get your tickets right now at ThriveTimeShow.com. And again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford. And we do have some select VIP tickets, which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things. And those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop, over 20 hours of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re gonna leave with a workbook. You’re gonna leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. Hello, I’m Michael Levine, and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years, 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies. And I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now, why would a man living in Hollywood, California, in the beautiful, sunny weather of LA, come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it, and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put together an exceptional presentation. Really, life-changing. And I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine. I’ll see you in Tulsa. James, did I tell you my good friend John Lee Dumas is also joining us at the in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Workshop. That Tim Tebow and that Michael Levine will be on. Have I told you this? You have not told me that. He’s coming all the way from Puerto Rico. This is John Lee Dumas, the host of the chart-topping EOFire.com podcast. He’s absolutely a living legend. This guy started a podcast after wrapping up his service in the United States military and he started recording this podcast daily in his home to the point where he started interviewing big time folks like Gary Vaynerchuk, like Tony Robbins, and he just kept interviewing bigger and bigger names, putting out shows day after day. And now he is the legendary host of the EO Fire podcast and he’s traveled all the way from Puerto Rico to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the in-person June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show Two Day Interactive Business Workshop. If you’re out there today, folks, you’ve ever wanted to grow a podcast, a broadcast, you want to improve your marketing, if you’ve ever wanted to improve your marketing, your branding, if you’ve ever wanted to increase your sales, you want to come to the Two Day Interactive June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop featuring Tim Tebow, Michael Levine, John Lee Dumas and countless big time super successful entrepreneurs. It’s going to be life changing. Get your tickets right now at thrive timeshow.com. James, what website is that? Thrive timeshow.com. James, one more time for the voice of Enthusiasm. Thrive timeshow.com. Even if I got three strikes, I’ma go for it. This moment, we own it. I’m not to be played with because it could get dangerous. See, these people I ride with. This moment, we own it. Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshops are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops because we teach you what you need to know to grow. You can learn the proven 13 point business system that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, and I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses, or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s gonna be the best business workshop ever, and we’re gonna give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you’ve got to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re closed, but they’re completely different worlds. and of our special guest today. Definition of intelligence is if you agree with me, you’re intelligent. And so this gentleman is very intelligent. I’ve done his show before also, but very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts. And so Mr. Clay Clark is a friend of a good friend, Eric Trump. We’re also talking about money, bricks, and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hour. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man, and there’s so many ways we could take this thing. But I thought, since you and Eric are close, Trump, what were you saying about what Trump can’t, what Donald, who is my age, and I can say or cannot say? Well, I have to, first of all, I have to honor you, sir. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorn, who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old, working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. He said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? I said no. My father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. And I went from being an employee to self-employed, to the business owner, to the investor. And I owe a lot of that to you. And I just wanted to take a moment to tell you, thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. And I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump. I just want to tell you, thank you, sir, for changing my life. Well, not only that, Clay, you know, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. You know, more than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there too, or bad influencers. Yeah. Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much and thanks for reading my books. Yeah. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not a thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy, Kings Point in New York, acta non verba, watch what a person does, not what they say. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey, I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business, and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. The linear workflow. The linear workflow for us and getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are all over the place. Having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls, figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super. It’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Once I saw what they were doing, I knew I had to get here at the conference. This is probably the best conference or seminar I’ve ever been to in over 30 years of business. You’re not bored, you’re waiting live the whole time, it’s not pushy, they don’t try to sell you a bunch of things. I was looking to learn how to just get control of my life, my schedule, and just get control of the business. Planning your time, breaking it all down, making time for the F6 in your life, and just really implementing it and sticking with the program. It’s really lively. They’re pretty friendly, helpful, and very welcoming. I attended a conference a couple months back, and it was really the best business conference I’ve ever attended. At the workshop, I learned a lot about time management, really prioritizing what’s the most important. Biggest takeaways are you want to take a step-by-step approach to your business, whether it’s marketing, what are those three marketing tools that you want to use to human resources. Some of the most successful people and successful businesses in this town, their owners were here today because they wanted to know more from Clay, and I found that to be kind of fascinating. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned is diligence, that businesses don’t change overnight. It takes time and effort, and you’ve got to go through the ups and downs of getting it to where you want to go. He actually gives you the road map out. I was stuck, didn’t know what to do, and he gave me the road map out step by step. He’s set up systems in the business that make my life much easier, allow me some time freedom. Here you can ask any question you want, they guarantee it will be answered. This conference motivates me and also gives me a lot of knowledge and tools. It’s up to you to do it. Everybody can do these things. There’s stuff that everybody knows, but if you don’t do it, nobody else is going to do it for you. I can see the marketing working. It’s just an approach that makes sense. Probably the most notable thing is just the income increase that we’ve had. Everyone’s super fun, super motivating. I’ve been here before, but I’m back again because it motivates me. Your competition’s going to come eventually or try to pick up these tactics. So you better, if you don’t, somebody else will. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrice 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. This is where we used to live, two years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? This is life, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing. And this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new van with our new marketing and this is our new team. We went from four to 14 and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to ten locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now, it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd. We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month. And we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. So we really just want to thank you Clay and thank you Vanessa for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. If you decide to not attend the Thrive Time Workshop, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. The Atmosphere Place office is very lively. You can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door and it really got me and my team very excited. If you decide not to come, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your business, bottom line. Love the environment. I love the way that Clay presents and teaches. It’s a way that not only allows me to comprehend what’s going on, but he explains it in a way to where it just makes sense. The SEO optimization, branding, marketing. I’ve learned more in the last two days than I have the entire four years of college. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned, marketing is key, marketing is everything. Making sure that you’re branded accurately and clearly. How to grow a business using Google reviews, and then just how to optimize our name through our website also. Helpful with a lot of marketing, We’re helping to improve our website also. Helpful with a lot of marketing, search engine optimization, helping us really rank high in Google. The biggest thing I needed to learn was how to build my foundation, how to systemize everything and optimize everything, build my SEO. How to become more organized, more efficient. How to make sure the business is really there to serve me as opposed to me constantly being there for the business. New ways of advertising my business, as well as recruiting new employees. Group interviews, number one. Before we felt like we were held hostage by our employees. Group interviews completely eliminates that, because you’re able to really find the people that would really be the best fit. Hands-on how to hire people, how to deal with human resources, a lot about marketing, and overall just how to structure the business, how it works for me and also then how that can translate into working better for my clients. The most valuable thing I’ve learned here is time management. I like the one hour of doing your business is real critical if I’m going to grow and change. Play really teaches you how to navigate through those things and not only find freedom, but find your purpose in your business and find the purposes for all those other people that directly affect your business as well. Everybody. Everybody. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real.