Entrepreneur Podcasts | Why You Must Learn to Followup Until Your Head Explodes If You Want Your Business to Grow + The Ultimate Search Engine Optimization Training w/ The Godfather of Search Engine Optimization Bruce Clay

Audio Transcription

All right, Thrive Nation, this just in, nothing will happen unless you follow up with your people. James, you happen to work here in the ticket sales department. You do a fine job. And why would people not buy a ticket to our conferences, even though they’ve requested a ticket, unless you followed up? If I don’t follow up, then we don’t talk. You know, not everyone answers the phone on the first call. Most people want to ask, you know, what hotels can I stay at? How much does it cost? How long is it going to be? Can I bring food? What are other common questions people ask? What time does it start? Are there any meet and greets? And even though, you know, we could put that on a flyer, put that on a website, put that on a print piece, even when we have all of that on the website, people still ask the same questions. Right. Because you have to follow up to close the loop. Okay, let’s do another example. Every day I carry around this clipboard with me at all times. You do. And on the clipboard I write down all the items that other people who work for me are supposed to do. That’s right. And what do I spend my day doing? Following up on who did what. So I call them and I say, what, hey, did you get your action items done? And then they might say, no. Right, and then I say, gotta get it done. You watch it all day. Every single day. How long is the typical follow-up call? 60 seconds max. Okay, and that’s what I do all day. But the follow-up, if you don’t do the follow-up, your business is never going to blow up in a good way. It just won’t. Because you’re gonna have all these ideas, all these wonderful visions of what could happen, but they don’t get done. I just think, and there’s somebody out there listening right now, you have an automotive repair business, you have a photography company, you have a videography company, you have a medical practice, and you’re going, man, we have all these great ideas. I’ve been to seminars and workshops. I’ve been to all these, I’ve seen the business building gurus. I’ve written all the plans down, but nothing’s getting done. Why? Why? I don’t know why, but you’ve got to go back to square one, and that’s dial the phone, make the calls, and sell the product or service. I want to ask you this. You know, we’re going to get it out of you. Why do people go to the seminars, they read the business books, they get all the stuff, and they don’t actually implement. Why is that? Why is it that people would go to take the time to go to a conference, to go to a workshop, and to gather the information? Because at first it’s a new idea and it’s exciting and then when you do it over and over and over and over again it gets boring and they just can’t handle doing that thing over and over and over and over again, Clay. Okay, I’m gonna read this quote to you from Chet Holmes, the best-selling author of a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine. He was one of the best business consultants on the planet before his passing. He died too soon. I think everyone dies too soon, unless you are excited to go to heaven, and maybe you don’t die quick enough. But Chet Holmes, he says, we all get good ideas from seminars and from books and from business building gurus. The problem is that most companies do not know how to identify and adapt the best ideas to their businesses. Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success. To-dos, tasks, and deadlines must be assigned at every meeting. This is important stuff here. And this might not feel like, oh man, this is incredible stuff, but people, this is what I call the messy middle. This is what keeps people from getting stuff done. So I have a staff meeting every morning at six, which you’re not a part of, but you probably see the end of it, you know? I do. But what I do every time is I’m going, hey, did we get, I’m just giving an example right now. Did with one particular client. This is a client who’s paying me, and I’m still asking the client. There’s a client, again, this is a client who’s paying us. So we have coaches, and the coaches work with the owners to help them grow their company. And so I’m pretty intense with the coaches because I want their clients to have success. So there’s a particular, it’s a fitness business that one of our coaches is working with. And to be top of Google, this just in, there are four variables that get you to the top of Google. Hot! Whoever has the most organic, original HTML content, the most organic, original HTML content. So on part two of today’s show, we’ll do kind of a deep dive nerdery into how search engines work, but how the search engine optimization works. But it’s the most original hyper text markup language content. Got it. Second, it’s whoever has the most canonically compliant or Google compliant website. Do you follow Google’s rules? Second, are you mobile compliant? Fourth, it’s whoever has the most objective reviews from their real clients. And so Sean, God bless Sean who works here, I’m going, Sean, this morning, Sean, did your client write a thousand words of content for the homepage and weave in the keywords six times per 1,000 words? And Sean, God bless him, nothing wrong with Sean, but he’s like, man, the client, they ran out of time. Ooh, but the client needs to grow their business. So what’s gonna happen to the client’s business if they don’t write the content, it’s not going to grow. Right? And so I have to say, hey, you’ve got to call that person and get that content. You have to do it. There’s people in the office that write a thousand words of content in five minutes. And so I’m just saying, this is real though. And then so I have to, and I constantly follow up. So there’s an agenda and it’s a master agenda that I use in our coaching program where I basically have to link to every agenda. And I follow up with every client, every client’s doing their stuff every time. And certain people, like Charles Colon with Colon Fitness, he gets his stuff done. He actually appreciates the follow-up as a client and he has a lot of success. Other people like to let drifting happen. And drifting is where you assign an action item and it doesn’t get done. And you just talk about your feelings and other new strategies of the week. And so Sean’s got this client. I go, Sean, do they write the thousand words of content? And I follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. And it’s a relentless thing. And people intuitively want to avoid the conflict so they want to move on to something else. But I will not. I just keep bringing it up, bringing it up, bringing it up until we actually get the success. That’s how it works. And when you have someone fill out the form, they request to come to a conference, they say, hey, I’d like to get more information, I want to come to a conference. How many times do you call the same person? It depends. You know, sometimes I get them on that first call, sometimes I call them 50 times. But you follow up until it’s done. I do. That’s the big idea we’re trying to talk about. You’ve got to follow up until it’s done. If you’re out there today and you’ve been struggling to get stuff done, go to thrivetimeshow.com, attend one of our workshops, we’ll teach you all the systems, all the moves, all the processes, and we’ll even get into how to follow up, but if you don’t follow up, folks, nothing will get done. You have to follow up until your head explodes, you have to follow up until things get done, and this just in, most people are not gonna thank you for holding them accountable. Most people will not say, oh, thank you for following up with me for the 47th time. And by the way, it gets more difficult with family, people that you’re related to. You know? So it’s real. I got a family member, kind of a, you know, it’s a real thing. Family member and they said, hey, you know, we want to get together, our family, we’re all going to go out and get some food. I’m like, well, great. What time? It’s on my list today. I’ve probably asked the person, I don’t know, 10 times? And it’s getting almost violent now because they won’t answer the freaking question. They like to talk about, oh, well, this might happen and that might happen and this might happen too. And this might happen and I feel like this and you feel like this and we feel like this. But at the end of the day, when are we going to this meal? And you know why I have to know when? So you can put it in your calendar. Right. But people that are not entrepreneurs, they don’t carry a calendar. Or they don’t have a to-do list right and so they’re like well Why do you have to know now because I’m planning things, and I just I hope this the show is Helpful for somebody out there. You know Steven acts 760 in the Bible okay, this is he’s he ends up ultimately getting killed Because he won’t stop Following up and sharing the gospel. He’s like. I’m not gonna stop and they’re like you got to stop bro He’s like not gonna stop. They say bro, you have to stop and he’s like, I’m not gonna fall asleep So they stone the guy, you know, this is a probably a motivational part of the I don’t know Maybe this is motivation for somebody but Steve it’s like, you know, I’m gonna I’m gonna share the gospel That’s what I’m gonna do because that’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s what I do They’re like dude, you have to stop sharing the gospel, stop following up. And Stephen’s like, I’m not going to stop following up. And so they stone him to death because he won’t stop following up and sharing the gospel. Cry dire bye, baby. I’m just saying that’s how it is. That’s what it is. So a lot of times, I mean, I don’t know that I have clients that will stone me, but it’s pretty funny. I get people that will glare at me, people that get irritated, even though I’m helping their wallet grow. So I just scheduled a video shoot with a client, this wonderful client I’ve worked with for years and God bless him, every time that he books a time to do the video shoot, he misses the shoot. Come on. Now when our team is standing by on a Zoom call to do a video commercial, if he doesn’t show up for the appointed time, then we have to reschedule a different time. So right now as we’re doing this show, a member of our team is rescheduling with the same adult man for, I think, the fourth or fifth time. And it’s just, for whatever reason, we follow up. We’re like, hey, do you want to reschedule? It’s like, stop calling me all the time, you know. But it’s just interesting how that works. There’s certain people like follow up, certain people don’t. But you’ve got to follow up if you want your business to blow up in a good way. If you want your business to grow up, you’ve got to learn the follow-up. But if you’re the kind of person who stops following up the first time you run into any adversity at all, you’re not going to win. Napoleon Hill, the best-selling author of Think and Grow Rich, he once said, failure is a prerequisite to success. I would just say, rejection is a prerequisite to success. Most people just cannot handle the level of follow-up that I bring to the equation. It will make you strong. I’m just telling you, if someone’s a client of mine, it’s so funny, I helped a client of mine write a book. They’ve been talking about writing a book for years. We helped them literally write the book in a week. Dude. They’ve been talking about it for years. I’m going, you want to write a book? Okay, well what you have to do is you got to write the book. So what you need to do is call your wife and say you’re checking into a hotel for the week. That’s a move. Another move is to get up at four in the morning and ride until nine every day. That’s a move. Another move, this is a self-employed person, ride all Saturday. Another move, stay up late at night. Another move, sip on a nice warm glass of Shut the Hell Up and then start riding. I mean, I don’t know, but you got to find… And so this guy was like, man, you’re killing me. Well, anyway, we got his book done in a week. This is a guy I’ve been talking about writing a book for years. So I’m just telling you, we all get good ideas at seminars and from radio talk show hosts and gurus, but at the end of the day, it’s all about getting stuff done. So James, I appreciate you carving out time for me now on part two of today’s show. We’re going to do a deep dive into how search engines work. Two men, 13 multimillion dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrive Time Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year. I’m the father of five kids, and I feel like it’s my mission to help you create both time and financial freedom by teaching you the practical skills that will help you to enjoy time freedom. And so on this show, 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 Hut, for Pizza Hut, 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. 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, 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 why- It’s worth a little bit of money. Well, that’s why for the brands I work with, like Oxifresh, I mean, Oxifresh, 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- Leadership. 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 Thrivetime 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 going to 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 760-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 Dummies series is pretty specific, so it’s worth it to understand that the difference between a Dummies book and a normal book is that Dummies will not allow you to define a 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, right? 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 is 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 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’m big in the franchise world. I work with a lot of franchisees, a lot of franchisors. I work with a lot of business owners. And your name comes up in conversations a lot. And for the listeners out there who don’t know your name but who will undoubtedly search you on Google and in the search engines and have 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 you 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, you know, 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 and programming and 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. Oh, 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. La la la, Luke. Luke, I am your father. La la la. That’s from the movie Tommy Boy there, Bruce. So hopefully that tribute did you justice my friend. So your credit is 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? Were you, how did you get your businesses? Because you have so many clients today. I mean you have thousands and thousands, you have probably a waiting list for everything you do. How did you start? I mean, were you starting out of an apartment? I mean, how did you start your business? Well, 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. 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 to 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 form 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, 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. I know you can, but my company, my companies have actually hired you to do work 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, 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. Uh, 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. This is the Drive 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 the bruce clay dot com i’ve paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars and i don’t regret it he is the world’s best offer big companies i will tell you their projects chappie’s worked with for his charging clients over a million dollars a year for search engine optimization and that just shows you how valuable that is most the clients are six thousand seven thousand eight thousand dollar 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 a 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 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. 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 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, you know, 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’ve seen so many people with a beautiful website. Bruce, you’ve seen it too, where 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. Well, 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. They’re 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. Yeah. 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. 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 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. 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’ve 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’re definitely going to be spending he talks about during the interview but two hundred dollars minimum per article minimum he’s talking about thousands of dollars a month for search engine optimization. We’re talking six thousand a month, seven thousand. He talks about clients that their website has 12 million pages when they come to him. Right. And they got to re-optimize and rewrite and everything. This is a big deal. Bruce is search engine optimization on the next level. And so 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 percent 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 of their, 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 9 out of 10 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 ten. So yeah, you got to 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 and yeah, you got to be there. Now we talked about, you kind of get it, that’s high level. We 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 of 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. Okay. 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. So those have to be balanced out against the content of 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 hair stylist 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 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 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 dentist. You’re going to 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 web page 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 all 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 you know, it’s a self-defeating action if you don’t use your keywords properly on your webpage. 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 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 and 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 that you can implement these systems and strategies in your own life business. Without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay. And I didn’t realize just how much content mattered, so I 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. 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. We started the Tulsa wedding show where brides would go and gather at these banquet halls. You get maybe a thousand brides in one banquet hall at one time at the Renaissance Hotel. They’re all trying to find their wedding vendors. 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., 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 it, the dollar dance, the waterfall dance, the Soul Train line, the cha-cha slide, the Cuban shuffle, 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, you know, hey, Bruce, can you just write the content for me? And 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. But 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 gonna put that on a t-shirt, I’m gonna put that on a hat, I wanna 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. And, 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, you’re 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 will say, I will write you an article right now for nine dollars. 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 like 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. Oof. 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. 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 Thrivetimeshow.com Hey Chuck, are you familiar with that thing called the internet? Enter in the net, that’s when you catch fish in a net, right? Chuck, I’ll tell you this man, most people out there starting to use this thing called Google, or they’re on Facebook, 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, Chuck. 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 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 ought to let it grow. Should I put the lightning bolts on the side of my mullet, Chuck? If that’s about, if you’re saying to yourself, yeah, 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, yakka. Lay her down and smack them, yakka. 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 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 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? That’s a low average. If it 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 them. Pages. Bruce, I want you to help me out on this. This is my six year quest. John Kelly knows this, my right hand man. We have been working to be top in 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. And 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 going to get back links to you by your brand name, not particularly what your brand does. That contributes a lot of power to your home page, and then your home page distributes that power to your subpages. So when you think about a Tony Robbins and a Wikipedia, you’re competing against a brand that 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. And when I did the analysis, I decided it isn’t how many you publish, it’s how good it is. And so 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. So 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 the 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. In 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? 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’ll 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 a 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. And 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. And so 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. Okay, okay. So 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. 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. 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 or call them at 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. Well, 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 Klepp. 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 gonna 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. Okay, okay. So 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, 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 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. And 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. And 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, people that work with you guys. It’s not about having the most employees necessarily. I’m just saying, you guys have a team of people that really know what they’re doing. You probably have front end coders, back end coders, content writers, search engine experts. You have a whole team there. 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 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 using campus computers. They grew it. They moved into the founder of, the lady who is 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, 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 was probably 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? The concept of links to you is that some other site is doing it to you. 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. 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 process called Disavow was created. It turns out I actually was the guy that recommended it to the search engine. 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 2-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, and 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 side or an adult website or some site with the virus on 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 want to 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 gonna find a lot of websites right now that they will, you know, you can pay like 20 cents a backlink or a dollar 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. being 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 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 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, we’re the renowned business coach, Eric Chupp, 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 are doing this right now. 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, that’s all the- 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, that 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 copy scape 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. 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. 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 do, 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, Chuck? 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 of 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? So if I walk two blocks, I can go to the grocery store and have all the food I want, nah. Well I don’t need this thing you call an automobile, I got a horse, I’m good. 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. 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 ferment the whole thing. 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 percent of them, are using search engines to find the products and… What? Yes. 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. 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 Los Angeles, and then somebody took it and put it 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. 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. I mean, that’s just what they do. But the problem is Google knows what you’re doing. 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 copy scape. Copy scape was originally designed to identify plagiarism issue with high schools or college papers, but that’s what they were designed to do. They were designed for an instructor to be able to say, here’s my paper, is it on the web? And if it is, then 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 re-sequenced 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. 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. 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 bestselling 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? Thrive Nation on tomorrow’s show Bruce Clay continues to break down how search engines work. The father of search engine optimization Bruce Clay will be back on tomorrow’s show to break down how search engines and search engine optimization works But before we wrap up today’s show, let me tell you about one of our great show sponsors and Tulsa’s number one Ford Automotive repair shop with over 80 years of combined experience. That’s RC auto specialist up RC auto Specialist comm what’s their phone number? Their phone number is 9 1 8 8 7 2 8 1 1 5 again Again, that’s 918-872-8115. You can check them out at rcautospecialists.com. Thrive Nation, there is no danger. Don’t be a stranger. Go to thrivetimeshow.com today. Podcasts, workshops, one-on-one coaching, it’s all there. I’m telling you, you can change your life simply by going to thrivetimeshow.com and implementing what you learn. Three, two, one, boom! you Two men, 13 multi-million dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the Thrive Time Business Coach Radio Show. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to another exciting edition of the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former United States Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year for the great state of Oklahoma, where we’re broadcasting right here from the center of the universe. And Chep, on today’s show, we are interviewing the, 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 bestselling 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. It was cool. I liked it. It was kind of a whole Darth Vader thing. It was a rapport building. 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 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 Thrivetime 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, 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. I know darn well every time I start, people are curious about what you could possibly talk about for four and a half days. Then at the end of it, they want to know if there’s a follow-on course. 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. Chuck, I just want to make sure that we do a quick time out here 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 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. 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 it’s up to a million dollars a month. Seven figures yeah. So I’m just trying to explain this to you. My company’s let’s say elephant in the room you say Clay what what is it really worth to you to be top in Google? Let me just give an example. When I grew DJConnection.com, no exaggeration, we many weekends would do 80 weddings. 80 weddings. Now Chuck, let’s look at this conservatively. Okay, do it. Because we had about 35 percent of our events that came from the Internet. Alright, so I’m going to take 80 times 0.35 and that would be 28 and my profit per show was about a $167 in my performance. Okay? 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 would 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. 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, you know, 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, 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 know the internet because 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 know I sound like a redneck for this particular segment but I’ll tell you this, I’m a 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, you know, 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. I was trying to get 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, Chip, 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 that you see each other people We’re supposed to find me on the internet, then I would definitely invest the money in the internet Because no one ever finds me on the end and I pulled a ad words report one of them Google things Yeah, and I’m working well I found is it nobody had actually found me on the internet, so I’m not gonna invest money in my website I agree with you now Jeff. I got another thing I’m working on this is a little bit more controversial, but witches, if you burn a witch, you know, cause you, how do you know if she’s a witch? Well, the cloak. Well, she’s made out of wood. Yeah. So what you do is you burn people and you just, and then if they burn, then they’re a witch. That’s right. 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, I was zoned out. You had a client that said they burn 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! 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, so 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. No, and here’s the deal. As a company, we only take on 160 clients, OK? 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, if you type in carpet cleaning quotes, Oxifresh is now number one in the world. But 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 time show dot com see subscribe iTunes leave us an objective review emails proof you did it info at drive time show dot com and we will give you those free tickets so we get back to the break more with our it’s exclusive interview with the father of search engine optimization in the best-selling author of search engine for 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 mentorship 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 this. It’s time to best some fruit like some Florida oranges. Three, two, one, here come the business ninjas. I’m a kaboom. All right, 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 just kind of explained the criteria for who would be an ideal and likely buyer for both he and his organization. If you can afford a few thousand dollars 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 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. I can tell you the vast majority of the business comes in from the internet for that company. 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, these 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 like Des Moines, you know, 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. I mean, 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, okay? 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 mean, I think everybody I’ve ever met, 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. Now, 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? I mean, 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. And that is the way we spend our time. 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. 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.com In a world where not being top in Google is like not wearing pants to work there’s only one thought of search engine optimization I gotta get more out of that one, Chuck. In a world where not being tough and cool 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, 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, Mr. Ho-ho-ho. That may have come across I’m going to go back. I guess I’ve already welcomed him, but we’re going to go back. I’m really bumbling this, but the point is, 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 Kline? 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 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. And 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. Usually what actually happens is they sell the company. Obviously, that money is life-changing. They get it to the top and somebody wants it. They sell it, move on, and call us 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 you know or organizations you’ve heard of that have sold their company from results of search engine ops. I mean 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 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 their website. That’s pretty big. Wow. They brought us in. We did a year and a half restructuring of their entire 12 million page website. Took a while. It was very nice for us. But at the end of it, when they flipped the switch and the site 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. They made so much more money doing that. Then about four months later, they sold it for a fortune. But they were one of the top-ranked sites in that automotive space. So that’s an example. With 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, okay, 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 kind of 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. Right. So it becomes really difficult to spend much time on the internet. I’m recently married. Oh, wow. So I spend a lot of time with my amazingly beautiful wife. Congratulations there, Mr. Bruce. Yay! But 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. Amen! 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? All right, 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, Steve. 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 the book for. Stay tuned. You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, 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 interview, I’m asking Bruce about new projects he’s working on and kind of a deeper look into the personal life of the founder 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. I enjoy people who have 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. And having succeeded at that, the next thing I am doing is I’m really developing a lot of software, almost like I’m building a new within my business and that software is very very close to release it’s going to be great 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 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 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, an agile team business, I read the book, Mastering the Matrix. Mastering the Matrix. Master the Matrix. It’s by Susan Finnerty, I think, 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. So 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, I did 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. 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 do you make it? 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 100 people doing content. There’s a hundred writers for every one competent SEO and so what we did is 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 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 or what how does that work? Well there’s a lot of businesses that have plugins and a lot of the plugins 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. 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. We’re in final test right now. Bruce, 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. I’m 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 it. 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. We return more with our exclusive interview with Bruce Clay, the founder of the search engine optimization industry. 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 thrive timeshow.com. To claim your star in the National Star Registry, we can’t help you. Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation. Now on today’s show, what we’re doing is we’re interviewing Bruce Clay, the father of the search engine optimization industry. 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. Shep, 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? And talk to us about local keywords and national keywords. So a keyword is going to be one of the words that 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. 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 top in the nation yet. 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. The billboard in the woods. Same thing with Luke Owens and the Hub Gym. 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. Wow. And so if you were going to hire Bruce Clay to do that, on the low end his articles are about 200 hours a piece. So if you took… Is that $600,000? No, no, no, no. You would need… Let me pull this up here. Did I catch a niner in there? We’re doing math on a radio show. It’s not advised, but I’m doing it. So here we go. 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, $1,206,000. You need $1,206? I don’t know. I’m just guessing how many pages I have right now. Let’s see how close I am. I’m just trying to give an example. You would need right now, you would need 2,300 articles to beat Steve right now. And Chip, 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 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 Leading 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. So per article, his team, they’re writing content for you, they charge about $200. On a 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. 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. That not dull hairs. 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 it swirl around in your cranium before we get back into this interview with with Bruce Clay about why you’d want to focus on local terms versus national terms. Steve, do you have a hot take there? Well, I was gonna say I’d like to point out that I think I paid you a lot less to get to the same place. 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. 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. 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, a small business, I’m saying $500,000 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 primarily presented in Google. So all those things make sense on a local level. If you’re trying to be national, just understand this is gonna be a battle. You’re against brands, you’re against everybody everywhere, and that’s just the way it is. I wanna explain this to the 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. She wanted to be top of the world for the term wedding cakes? 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, 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. They’re not even close. 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. 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. 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 and 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. Now, having said that, 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 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 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’re used interchangeably. A head term is usually a one or two word phrase that describes simply a topic, right? Like chocolate fountain. Got it. What you’re really talking about on a long tail is things that are three, four, five word phrases that 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 L.A. 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. 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. I also have many years of experience where if you can rank for many 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 we can do it. 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, all 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. We’re 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. 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. And in that book, I have a thing called the Search Engine Manifesto, the Search Engine Optimization Manifesto. And 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. But 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 day? Oh, 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, woof, woof. 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. 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 would 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. It’s got 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’s 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 Click 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 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. When we come back from the break we’re gonna 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 Thrivetimeshow.com, email us your contact information and your website to info at Thrivetimeshow.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. We’ll be happy to do that for you. Also, Chup, we’re giving away a lot of free stuff today. No, free stuff. What if you’re listening right now, Chup, and you’re saying to yourself, I want a free printer. I would like a free laser copier. By the way, we have multiple of these copiers in our Thrivetimeshow offices. And I want to save both time and money on getting my office and printer supplies. Chubb, how can our listeners benefit not only one of our show sponsors, but themselves, my friend? So, it’s also owned business by the name of Onyx Imaging. They’re your one-stop business shop for all your business needs, Steve Carrington. 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 printer at no charge. Okay, what is it? Did you just say surely you can’t be serious? Wait, does it? I am serious. And don’t call me surely and copy and copy printer copier for free. All you got to do is buy they price match. They have online ordering. Where can I get the same and next day delivery go to onyx imaging.com or call them at 918-627-6611 918-627-6611 onyx imaging.com chop, you know, hooked on onyx works for me. And you know what they say, see a broad to get that booty act, lay her down and smack them, 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 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 had 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-sized billboard in the middle of the woods behind your house out here. It’s right…I gotta 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 gotta 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 do, we’re like, 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 standalone 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 looks great. 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. Shut it. No, I’ve actually been out 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. They’re using a smartphone. Yes, I saw a dude the other day walk into the door of Target. It’s so funny. Bam! Right into the… That’s one of my favorite things. I would just say this is… 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 at Thrive Nation of people you could check out there. If you type in Tulsa mortgages, you’re going to find Steve Currington. He’s obviously on today’s show, but you’re going to find his website there in the search results. If you type in Tulsa cookies, you’re going to find Barbie cookies. So again, this is a real system that works and you’re going to 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 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 salespeople 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 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 to 180 internet 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 Homes, 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 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. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show on Talk Radio 1170. All right, 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 radio and you missed the earlier segments, go to thrivetimeshow.com, click on the podcast buttons and 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 the amount of money that 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 that 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 pushback 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 just working on your website 24-7. WordPress 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. Use the Yoast plugin for WordPress. Two, make sure your website is mobile compliant. How do I know if my website is mobile compliant? Just email us to 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, the third variable. Steve, you’ve got to get Google reviews. Oh yeah. 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 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, 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… It was the total ending concepts. You’re a mortgage company. Yeah. 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. Our 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. Google, Chuck. Yeah, and the importance of the Google reviews is that the map is shows up above the organic listings, like 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, before attending your seminar, before buying something, before 88% of consumers trust online reviews more than a personal recommendation now. Mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. Absolutely mind-blowing. So 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. 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 who now owns a company called Witness Security. Yeah, Can 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, Keith and Tyler. My name is Keith Schultz and my company is 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. 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 into our business, helping us to hire people to be able to do that and follow a good script, setting up the appointments and how we do them when we go into the appointment, the sales pitch and how we do it. 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 everything we do, you know, 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. You know, 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 weeks and said hi 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 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. Google how their algorithms work. It doesn’t change in what he does. So we’re always on top. Clay 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, trying to do it on my own, he came up with a package deal and within less than ten minutes, he 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 gonna 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 David Trisher, a ranch company from Sallie Beach, Florida. I’m about to list a few of the wins we’ve had since we started with Drive 50. We’ve completed group interviews. We’re fully staffed. We’ve received over 100 Google reviews to increase our Google rating. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. We’ve had a lot of good feedback. interviews, we’re fully staffed, we’ve received over 100 Google reviews to decrease our Google rating, and we now have more money in the bank than we have ever had, thanks to the Thrive Coaches. Thank you, goodnight. Now, Chuck, what happens though 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. I can’t tell without the length. It’s hard to tell. So that’s last year’s sales. This is 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, wow. There it is. Awesome. 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! And without any further ado, let’s wrap this show up my friends. Three, two, one, boom! The 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. When 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 with 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 going to be the best business workshop ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve 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. The number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. We are Jared and Jennifer Johnson. We own Platinum Pest and Lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. And we have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah, so what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now. Okay, I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminex, they’re both 1.3 billion dollar companies. They both have two to three thousand pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually nonexistent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has, by being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also, we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, you know, asking our customers for reviews. And now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pest and Lawn company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. Okay, so 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now our closing rate is about 85% and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one and done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process. And that has obviously, the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah, so here’s a big one for you. So last week alone, our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals, more new customers last year than we did the first five months, or I’m sorry, we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year from before we worked with Thrive. So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. It’s incredible, but the reason why we have that success is by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews, that way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists, that way everything gets done and it gets done right. It creates accountability, we’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly, both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast like Jared had mentioned that has really really contributed to our success but that like is it the diligence and consistency and doing those and that system has really really been a big blessing in our lives and also and you know it’s really shown that we’ve gotten a success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive we were basically stuck really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut, and we didn’t know. Oh, sorry. The last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. You know, they implemented those systems, and they taught us those systems. They taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind, absolutely it’s been a grind this last year, but we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we were in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut, and if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline, but that’s what it’s going to take in order to really succeed. So I just want to give a big shout out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42% increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense, starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth-to-mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proven turnkey marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry, graduated in 1983 and then I did my pediatric dental residency at Baylor College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. 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. Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with 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, graphic designers, and web developers. 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 6 to 8 weeks he’s doing reawaken America tours. Every 6 to 8 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 startups, go from startup 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 has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So amazing guy, Elon Musk, 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. And that’s what I like the 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 you and Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. My most impressed with him is 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. And 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 got 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. 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 a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See, it’s 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 10 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. 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 BOK 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’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 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. Clay 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. 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. Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with 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 Crockrell, 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, graphic designers, and web developers. They run 160 companies every single week. Think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. Every 6-8 weeks he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every 6-8 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. I’ve seen guys from start-ups go from start-ups 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 has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So, amazing guy. Elon Musk, 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 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. Anyways, just an amazing man. Anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate any time 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. I encourage you, if you haven’t 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 Colaw with Colaw 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 Antus with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through 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 to a hundred and eighty internet 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 Homes 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 percent increase in our internet leads. Going from 10 a month to a 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 D. 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 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 Clay and his team 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 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 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 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. Hi my name is Josh Sperl from Sperl and Associates Chartered Professional Accountants based out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. And I started, I met Clay at a conference, at his conference in Tulsa in June of 2018. Started working with the coaching program shortly after there. You know the experience has been great. You know you really have a partner in the grind. You know most people, I like to say most people are wrong about most things about business most of the time. And it’s very difficult for entrepreneurs to connect with other entrepreneurs who actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to business, but Clay and his team really does understand. The tangible improvements that we’ve seen is we’re up over 50% since starting with the coaching program and they’re helping to help business owners create time, freedom, and financial freedom. And I know what you’re going to think. You’re going to say, what the heck are you going to do with your time, freedom, and financial freedom when you’re in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. That’s the most northeast city in North America with a million people. You know we’re probably just sitting in our igloos hoping for some television, but I’ll give you an idea of what we’re doing in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. So over here we have Sandra and we have Emma. Emma, say hello. Hi everybody, this is my daddy’s channel. Emma really likes any video so let’s give it a try. Let’s see what actually the time freedom and financial freedom can do for you in Edmonton. So believe it or not we have a beach here guys. And I’ll take you on a little tour of Edmonton’s beach. Now it’s not what you Americans are going to think of as a beach. This is a northern beach. We’ve got a really cool slide here. I don’t know if you can see this purple slide. This purple slide that you’re looking at here is a full loop-a-loop. It knocks you completely upside down when you go into it. Let’s see if I can get the right angle here. That does not appear physically possible, but it really is going to knock you upside down. Went on it last time and here is the Edmonton Beach. This is a northern beach. You guys always call us up. You Americans think you have all the beaches here but here is the northern beach complete with waves. We got 30 degree weather inside here. Sorry 30, that’s 90 for you guys over there. I gotta do the translation, the math in my head. And we even got a zip line that we can ride down here. And this is what we’re doing with our time freedom and financial freedom in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Thanks to the Thrive Time Team. Thanks very much, guys. Hey, Eric, it’s Ron Howell. I just wanted to just express to you and to Clay how excited and appreciative we are about this relationship and the immediate results of the just a couple of days run on the rental boats that you guys are extraordinarily good at what you do. So we’re excited. We want to do more as all your customers do. So we’ll keep figuring out how we can move forward on the variety of fronts. I’ve got Dusty from Brownies. Eyes are wide open now. Anyway, the main thing is thanks so much. Really appreciate everything you guys have done for us and are doing. Looking forward to the future. Thanks, Eric. Please pass that along to Clay, if you would, as well. Thanks, everybody. This is Brent Sturts with United Slending from Stewart, Florida. To give a shout out to Thrive Time Show and Clay Clark. We’ve been with them for, what, three years now. We’ve been working with them to help us with our systems, get our arms around our numbers, get some great systems in place as far as marketing, working with our Dream 100, holding us accountable, and so actually hooking us up with a lot of fine vendors as well that save us a lot of time and those referrals really help us out as well. But we’ve seen tremendous success putting those in place, getting our Google reviews, our video testimonials, all of those things coming together as a full marketing plan has really helped us out. So we can’t say thank you enough for Clay Clark, Thrive Time, and Andrew Bloomer, who’s worked with us for three years now. So wonderful job, guys. Thank you for all you do. My name is Joe Lye, and I’m with Kirkpatrick & Lye Orthodontics. At Kirkpatrick & Lye Orthodontics, we create beautiful smiles by straightening kids’ teeth and adults’ teeth. The services that Clay and his team provide would be something like how to get more customers into my business and get the message out that I’m the best orthodontist in Tulsa. He does that by social media. We get the word out through videos and pictures. Being just top of mind awareness as he would always say. Also how to reach out and create that bond with my referring doctors. He helped me kind of get somebody in house to go out and meet doctors and help me kind of continue building that relationship while I do the work. Website, the website is so majorly important. We get several patients through our website. And what he’s doing is there’s a certain way that you want your website to look and certain content because you want call to action items in your website. And we didn’t have that before, so now we get seven or eight new patients just through the website alone. Clay and his team are, I would just say they’re over the top. I mean nothing is too big, nothing’s too grand for Clay and his staff and his team. I mean he says boom, he really means it. I mean they over deliver really to be honest with you. And they come up with ideas that are just top notch and if you don’t like something, great, move on. He’ll figure out something that works for your style and your identity. But I would just say the biggest thing for Clay and his team is they over-deliver. Clay and his team help kind of create that culture also for your business that, hey, we gotta get things done in a timely manner. Holds me accountable to do the certain tasks so that we can create things in a timely manner. So there is a sense of urgency that he creates. And a lot of it is just through his enthusiasm. He’s always on the go so it kind of puts you on that same mindset of, hey, let’s get this done, let’s work hard, but let’s also have fun with it. When I went to orthodontic school, we got zero training on marketing. Actually, when I got out of school 18 years ago, it was kind of taboo to actually do any marketing. The most you could do is put your name in the yellow pages. And so now it’s pretty common knowledge and pretty mainstream to go ahead and get your name out there, tell everybody your story, who you are, what you’re about. If you don’t do that, it’s a leg of your business that you’re lagging behind. Because you could be the best, or the not-best, or the best, whatever, but if people don’t know that, then you won’t get the customers coming in. I meet with Clay and his team on every Friday about 11 o’clock, and to be honest with you, at the beginning I wasn’t that thrilled with it. Coming in every week just kind of seemed like a lot. For me, I find the marketing aspect interesting. I enjoy it. I love working with Clay. I think it’s the main reason why. I’ve kind of built a relationship with him. I think it got to a level now where we’re pretty good friends. To me, it’s enjoyable, I really enjoy the creativity and how when you put the energy into it and the work into it, how you know, everything kind of comes back and it works. I’ve worked with Clay and his team for about, I think it’s about three years and every year it’s just gotten better and things have grown more every year. I’ve been trying to get my wife and her pediatric dentist office and our partners on board with Clay for a while. I just saw that they were kind of getting stagnant in their practice and times were kind of getting slow for them and they needed more referrals and I knew that Clay could definitely help them out by even just one thing which would be change your website. And just by doing that you’re going to get patients very easily. But another thing too is that they needed to change their culture and their mindset of how to bring in patients and creating a brand as well for them and giving them more of an identity so the whole staff can kind of rally around them. For anybody that’s coming out of school or just starting new with a business of any sort, be it medical or anything of that nature, I highly recommend Clay helping you create that business model. We’re trained to do what we’re trained to do, but we’re not trained to do the business aspect or the marketing or how to deal with our staff. So Clay can pretty much do all that, but what I like the most about Clay and his staff is that everything’s in-house. I don’t have to go to one place to do my website. I don’t have to go somewhere to do my videos. I don’t have to go another place to shoot photographs. Somewhere else to do web content or team coaching or entrepreneurship. Clay pretty much is the total package. He’s really a great mentor. So if you’re new and starting a business and you want to avoid all the pitfalls, I would definitely hook up with Clay and his team. If someone’s not using Clay and his team to help build their business, they’re missing out on a lot. There are so many details and so many aspects of creating a business that Clay really makes it simple, makes it fun, and you learn so much in a short amount of time that I think he’s the best entrepreneur, business coach, marketer, you name it. The guy’s, and his team’s got it all going on. Well Thrive Nation, we have so many wonderful people like you on our website every day checking out the podcast. And I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the success of a long-time client that we’ve had the pleasure of working with for a while so that they can complain and tell you all the terrible things that we make them do en route to growing their business. And so now without any further ado, we have the owners of Cornerstone Fence. Welcome, guys. How are you? I think we’re good. How are you? I am doing great. Now, just so people can know you’re not a hologram, could you guys kind of introduce yourselves, tell us your name and where you’re from, just so people can verify you’re not a hologram? I’m Danica. I’m one of the owners, and this is my husband Jordan. My name is Jordan. We started Cornerstone Fence about three years ago. I’m a full-time firefighter so it started as just something to do on my off days, make a little bit of extra money and about a year and a half ago we went to a business conference that Clay had out at his place and we decided that maybe instead of building fences as a hobby, maybe we should actually turn this into a business and start trying to grow the business. Now, how did you originally hear about us? How did that conversation come about? I’ll pick on Danica here. How did that conversation come about? Initially, it was the first Reawaken America tour that we went to, and one of my friends was like, hey, you should definitely go to the business conference beforehand. It was a shortened version, I guess, in the morning before the Reawaken America conference in the afternoon. Really, one of my friends was just like, this could really help you. Just the tools that you gave us in the shortened version of the business conference were just mind bombs going off. Now, as far as the growth, you two work together, and I’ll pick on Jordan here for this. What kind of growth have you guys experienced at maybe a percentage or what kind of growth have you seen since we started working with you guys? So the year, the first year we were in business, I maybe did four or five fences. Like I say, it was kind of not a hobby necessarily. I don’t consider fence a hobby, but it was three or four fences the first year. So we maybe did $30,000 in fences. Second year, which was still before you, we maybe were on pace to do about $70,000 or $80,000 total revenue. And then we started with you in October of 21. 22. October of 22, and so that first year with you and putting your systems in place, really going after the Google reviews and trying to grow the company, we went from roughly like $80,000 to $700,000 in total revenue. That was last year. Then this year, we’re hoping our goal is $1.5 million this year. I mean this. I’m not just saying this because you’re here. I really do love working with you guys. Our team is always speaking so kindly about you guys. I don’t tell my team, guys, run around saying nice things about these people. But you know, work with a client, I mean, we’re working on the website, we’re working on the photography, the video, it’s a lot of interaction, and every week you have a coaching meeting with Andrew, and Andrew loves working with you guys. So can you maybe share, Danica, what it’s like to have Andrew helping you implement the system and program that I’ve created? What’s it like working with him on a weekly basis? Andrew’s phenomenal. He always brings so much wisdom to our meetings. Every problem that we have, he has an optimistic and realistic solution to it. And just the accountability in general, it’s hard being accountable every single week to update your sheet, to update your tracking sheet, to track all your leads. And just the accountability is… I don’t think we’d be where we are if we didn’t have that kind of accountability. And just him constantly bringing us encouragement, realistic solutions, different resources we can look to just to continue to find solutions for some of the issues that we run into. Now, you know, I call this the core repeatable actionable processes, aka the crap. You know, there’s all these self-help books about the big idea and the vision and get your mind set, but there’s very few books about the core, repeatable, actionable processes, the stuff behind the stuff. And I find that people like yourself, Shawhomes.com, Oxifresh.com, SteveCorrington.com, people that have massive companies now, but I’ve been working with these people for a lot of times over 10 years. The people that do the best are the ones that like the core, repeatable, actionable processes, or they learn to appreciate them over time. The people that struggle are the ones that are always looking for the new shiny thing. I’d love to get your idea, Jordan, on just the importance of knocking out these core, repeatable, actionable processes week after week, day after day, because early business coaching is about helping you guys grow, but it’s not an event, it’s more of a process. I’d love to get your thoughts on what it’s like to have those weekly meetings with Andrew. Yeah, they’ve been, like Danica was saying, we like to think we’re organized, we like to think we hold ourselves accountable, but without that meeting, it’s just, it’s awesome because first, we can see on a weekly basis, how are we doing, where are we at, are we meeting the goals that we’re supposed to be meeting. So without that weekly meeting, I would imagine that maybe we would get to it once a month maybe if we didn’t have the coaching. And it would, so first the accountability, because we’re showing up every single Friday, same time, same location, and going over exactly what did we do this week. And so just staying consistent with that and having the accountability has really changed our business for sure. For just having that business meeting every week. So what would, Deanna what do you think would happen without that weekly meeting and then that coaching with Andrew? What would happen with all these ideas you’ve learned at a conference or learned in books? I mean, what would happen to the plan? It would fall apart, because then it’s like, oh, like you said, the big shiny thing in front of you. You can always have things that interfere with your day, but unless you have a plan and something that, and a step that you know is gonna hold you accountable, I mean, that’s one thing we learned doing business as husband and wife is it’s really hard for us to hold each other accountable. So just, yeah, Andrew’s just phenomenal. He’s- Having a plan and having a deadline. Like every Friday is a deadline. So it’s like, well, half steps we’re supposed to do. But if you don’t put a deadline to that, and it was just me and her trying to do it by ourselves, you know, we might get it done in six months or eight months or, but having that deadline, which is Friday, every single week is, and then we get like well why didn’t you do that that was that was what you were supposed to do it’s like okay yeah we we messed up this week we’ll for sure get it done. I wanted to touch on some of the things that you said you we learn over time to like it’s like I remember when you first brought up the group interview I’m like that doesn’t work there’s no way and then now it’s like we are group interview savvy. I tell everybody that owns a business, I’m like, do a group interview every single week. Because you never know when people are not going to be loyal. You think that they’re awesome. Well, you do, it’s weekly almost. Yeah. Having a plan and a deadline, how would you describe the importance of that, Danica, having the plan and a deadline? Well, you can just get caught up in the roll of your week and before you know it, it’s Sunday and you’re starting Monday, first thing in the morning. So it’s like, just, you get caught up in the tumble and roll of everything. There’s constantly a burning fire, there’s constantly kids that are sick or kids that, you know, something can always distract you and take you away from the necessary things you need to do to be successful. Sometimes it’s cram time at 3 o’clock on Friday before I come down and meet Andrew. It’s like, uh-oh, uh-oh, we’ve got to get the tracking sheet updated. I don’t know what we would do without that. We think we’re making money, but unless you know on paper and can see it in black and white, it’s a life changer. Now I want to ask you this, Jordan. What I did when I built my first company, DJConnection.com, and I don’t wish this on anybody, but I grew up very poor and I got a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV, just like you’re a firefighter. I was working three jobs and I didn’t know what to do. So I would go to these seminars where they’d have these get rich quick, get motivated people, and they would say, for $4,000 a month and a six-month contract, we’re going to teach you how to become successful. And at every meeting, they never really taught the stuff. There was nothing really actionable. And then I would go, okay, now that I finally think I know what I need to do, do you guys do the website? They said, no. Do you guys do the graphic design? No. Do you guys help me with my bookkeeping or my tracking? No. Do you guys actually do print pieces, photography, videography? No. Do you help me optimize my website? No. Do you launch ads? No. Do you actually know the people? No. But it was all this big idea of just work on your business, not in your business. Could you maybe explain how the meetings are with Andrew? Because I think a lot of people when they think of business consulting or growth, they’re thinking of what I’m thinking, what I thought of was paying people $4,000 a month to talk in generalities and not get into the weeds? So, the structure of the meeting. So, when we come, first thing is, Wednesday of the week, what’s going on? What’s going on in the business? What’s happening? Any big wins. After that, burning fires. What’s, is there anything major that we need to discuss or get off any big problems, fires that we need to put out right now. And then after that, we get into the items, some of our homework that we’re supposed to be working on. Are you guys doing this? Are you doing this? And then we get into our tracking sheet, exactly how much money came in, how much money went out, how many quotes, how many leads. Like it’s very, very detailed. Like way more detailed than I thought you could get. Exactly what our conversion rate is, how many quotes we did, how many customers we funded, why we funded them, what happened there, did we do our group interview, did we do our meetings. So the tracking sheet, I think our tracking sheet has probably 30, 25, 30 different metrics that we go over every single week. Everything from money to leads to where are these leads coming from, is this working, do we need to adjust here? So it’s very tailored to our business. One of my clients I was talking to, I talked to him just the other day, and he was telling me the story. He said, Clay, when I first hired you 12 years ago, he’s still a client 12 years later, he said, you helped me grow my gym, and then I learned those systems, and I hired you guys to help me grow my next business. And his next business is a lumber business. He sells lumber wholesale log cabins. The materials need to make log cabins. And now he has a fencing business, but it’s in Idaho. And so he’s got the fencing going on, he’s got the log cabin thing going on, he’s got the gym going on, and he also owns a Tip Top K9 franchise. And he told me, he said, the reason why I bought the Tip Top K9 franchise is I just knew it was the same system so that I could apply. I’d love to get your thoughts on that, Danica, because now that you’re kind of really learning the systems, is it helping you to view business differently now that you see that, wow, this system over here? Because you come to the conferences where there’s many different industries represented. Has that helped you to kind of view business differently? Oh, yeah, 100%. Before, it’s really easy to get emotional when it is your business and things aren’t working, they’re not systematized, but if you having those systems in place and just knowing that that’s what you have to do every week, it’s not emotional, it’s a checklist item or even a checklist, like what, why are we missing these tools? These are all the tools that we’ve bought and this should be on this truck and so what happened here? If you don’t keep track of those things and have, it takes the emotion out of it and makes it a system. So my final two questions I have for you guys and I’ll let you get back to having a great Saturday. A lot of our clients who work with our couples, a lot of them are couples, this just in, a lot of them are couples and my wife and I, what we do is I run the daily operations and she loves accounting. That’s kind of her sheet music she likes to read. She likes to kind of sing that song, the accounting song, that’s kind of her world. And other couples I work with, they work together on everything. For anybody out there who is working with their spouse, how has that helped you guys? Because my wife and I, we don’t really talk about business at home, and we don’t have any work-related conflict at home. We just, it’s sort of like we have our lanes, and we figure that out at a young age. But I know a lot of couples, when you don’t have coaching, it can just be like a perpetual debate that never ends about how should we optimize the website or what’s the best route to hiring or what’s the most effective way to launch an ad. It’s like there’s a lot of debates going on. I’d love to get your thoughts, Danica. Has that helped at all on the home front at all? Oh, yeah. We wouldn’t be where we are without just not having to think about the website, not having to think about where we stand because we have to discuss it every single week, and that time’s allotted for those discussions. And like you said, kind of our lanes, it’s, I’m like the phones, the at home, uploading pictures to Google, you know, all that, and he’s the face and the person that’s meeting and discussing the logistics of any project and directing the guys. So knowing your lane, staying in it, and just not having to think about our assets, not having to think, that’s all on the back end and you guys take care of that and it helps me sleep at night. Alright, that’s great. That’s a bonus right there. Now final question I have for you guys, and I’ll go back to your husband on this one. So Jordan, for anybody out there who’s thinking about scheduling a 13-point assessment, well, we did our 13-point assessment. It was a free assessment, a free initial meeting, or coming to a conference. We have scholarship tickets so that everybody out there can afford to go. So we tell people, you know, it’s $250 for a ticket or whatever you want to pay. What would you say to anybody out there that’s thinking about coming to a conference or scheduling a 13-point assessment? I highly encourage it. When we came to the very first one and we had we didn’t know about your coaching stuff. The first part of that conference was condensed version of the coaching and then you guys offered the 13-point assessment. Danica was like, I think we really need to do this. I was like, man, I don’t know. You know, we like last year, you know, at this point, we’re doing like 50 or 60,000 in fences, total revenue. I was like, I don’t know. It’s just we’re a tiny business. We don’t have like the skills to run a massive business. I was almost scared first to grow it, but very doubtful that something that we were running maybe could be a big business. It still sounds weird to say that we did $700,000 last year and this year that we’re hopefully on track and our goal is over a million dollars. In my mind, that still doesn’t compute because I guess I don’t consider myself like a successful business owner, or I didn’t at least before. And so doing, really it all started with that coming to a conference and then doing that 13 point assessment and talking with you. Our first meeting was we came in and visited with you. And I don’t know, it was just totally, it freaked me out. But it’s really changed the way that we view business, number one, how we run our business, and has gotten us to this point where maybe we will this year be over a million dollars in total revenue. Can I give you a little pro tip on the show? This is my little pro tip for you on the show. Do you want to hit two minutes? Yes. This is a real thing, this is a real advice I’ll give you. One of my wonderful clients named Don Calvert with Score Basketball, he did this move, and I’m giving you this move, and everybody listening to the move. And what he did is he said, you know, in the future I’m gonna start servicing Owasso, Oklahoma. Not now, but soon I’m gonna start providing basketball, consulting for Owasso, and soon I’m going to start gathering, I’m going to start servicing Broken Arrow. Now at the time he was just in Bixby. So I said, so Don, let’s go ahead and register the Google Map for the office that you’re building or the location you’re going to service and let’s go ahead and put a sprinkling of articles on those search engine content and on those markets so that your phones will start ringing before you actually open up the new basketball training facility. And no exaggeration at all, his leads almost tripled by doing that, and then that created the growth and the justification. And I’m telling you, just a little secret between you and me and everybody watching, Oklahoma is in need of some serious professional fencing installers. I mean, I’m just telling you. So if you guys were to do what you’re doing and start going down a little bit further down the highway, like registering a map in Owasso or Oklahoma City or whatever markets you’re thinking about going to, and begin putting not a lot of energy, but a little bit of energy into calling your current happy customers and getting reviews and writing that content, you’ll start getting massive leads and you’ll probably hit 2 million in the next 12 months. I’m just telling you, because you guys have the systems, you’ve worked so hard to build these systems, and I know you guys can continue to scale. Thank you guys for carving out time. Are you guys in like a pole barn here? Is this the man cave? Where are you guys? This is our big win of the week. Yeah, that’s the win of the week. We’re finally working on getting the shop finished so we can start buying materials in bulk so we get better pricing on materials, storing it, and saving time. Instead of the crews right now, the crews get here in the morning, then they go to the supplier, get materials, and then they go to the job site. Did you build this? Yeah. This is awesome. This is exciting. Yeah. It’s a 40 by 60. Anyways, it’s exciting because this has been one of our big hangups is we need to get better pricing on materials, which is happening now. The way you do that is you buy it in bulk, but you’ve got to have somewhere to store it. And so it’s all, anyways, this is our big win of, I guess, really. Can I get a little tour? Can I get a tour real quick? Can you kind of walk us around real quick? This is awesome. I’m so excited for you guys. I love it. Does it smell like new wood? It does. Oh, yeah. Look at that. All right, so this is the front of the shop. And really, it’s at our house. So a lot of things is like we wanted a commercial facility, but right now that’s not in the budget, so we’re making do with what we have. So we got a 40 by 60 going in. So we got all the work trucks here behind us. Anyways, right now it’s going to get us by until we hit that 1.5, maybe 2 million. And at that point, we’re going to go and start looking for commercial lanes. So anyways we’re gonna store a lot of like uh two by fours pickets uh steel posts like the bread and butter of what we do will be stored in here and uh so garage doors are coming hopefully in two or three weeks those take a little while but uh we just got the concrete poured um so it’s a blank canvas right now. So we got today we’re planning out shelving and where we’re going to start storing everything and how to, I guess, try to make the best use of it. You’ve got to be pretty pumped up about this, huh? Oh, I’m super excited. We’re both very excited. Oh, this is awesome. Well, congratulations, guys. I know you guys have been putting in the hard work there. It’s good to see it paying off for you. And again, thank you so much for carving out time, and we’ll see you next week, okay? Thank you so much, Clay. Take care, guys. Bye-bye. See you. Hey, Clay Clark and my Thrive peeps. Steve Carrington, as you can tell. Although I’m not wearing my signature green shirt, as usual, but I am riding in my signature green Lamborghini, and I just wanted to say how appreciative I am of Thrive and all the guys at Thrive Time and the show and everything that you guys have done at Total Ending Concepts. We have had tremendous growth and a lot of things changing, especially on the marketing front and from a coaching perspective and from a web presence and branding and our internet leads are up, everything is hammering on all cylinders and really we’re just trying to figure out how we can leverage the systems and the processes that we’re learning it thrive more in our business. So now we’re setting up a lead tracking system that has been long overdue and we’re doing lots of stuff but I want to take a minute and say thank you, thank you, thank you to Thrive and Clay Clark and Dr. Z and everybody for all the help and helping us grow our business and hopefully buy more Lamborghinis like this the more we sell and everybody for all the help and helping us grow our business and hopefully buy more Lamborghinis like this the more we sell so appreciate it guys see ya