Sticking to your niche doesn’t mean you have to produce the content all over again. Today, Ken Courtright shares to us the power of keeping everything you do in one document, so you do not repeat your ideas and bore your followers or target audience. He also talks about how search engines work and what Google spiders do for your ranking. He then also includes the true cost of interns for your business or online growth.
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Listen to the podcast here:
The One Doc
This is the podcast that goes through what are the things being done now. The smaller things that few people aren’t going to write about or talk about because they’re so small or subtle that they don’t make up a whole chapter or podcast. They certainly aren’t a big enough tip or a nugget to put on a big annual event around. I created a podcast that was dedicated to every little growth nugget that we do, whether in our offices, when we’re out consulting, writing a book or doing a podcast. What are the little nuggets that when you stack them all together grow businesses? For those of you that are new to the podcast, our company has about 800 revenue-generating websites worldwide. We have 3,100 clients that we’ve consulted in many years. We’re a growth consulting company and as we’re teaching other businesses, we’re learning their strategies of what’s working in their industry and we end up learning it ourselves and then we take those nuggets. Sometimes you don’t realize your fix or the fine-tuning you need has already been done in another industry.
This podcast is dedicated to three micro growth nuggets of which two of the three I’m going to cover at our Digital Footprint Event. If you don’t already have your Digital Footprint tickets, you want to get those. We sell out every year. We’re going to sell out this year too, as there’s only so much space. If you need info on that, that’s DigitalFootprint.net. Let’s get started, number one, content pace. I’ve talked about this on five other podcasts. I have not talked about it in the way I’m going to talk about right now. I want to explain something of how search engines work. The reason this is even going into this podcast is when Kerri and I got back from New York talking about my 3rd, 4th and her 2nd book and getting a publishing system lined up. In there, I was going through my notes and I realized, “Few people are using what’s called a content pace the way we do.” Google is always looking for new, timely, relevant information. It has to be unique. They’re not that excited about you finding a piece of content somewhere else and giving your spin on it. They want unique content and they reward it. To get you up to speed of exactly how this works, we use a platform called WordPress in about 90% of our websites.
Number one, it’s free. Our two corporate sites are on what’s called the Avada theme. It has something called parallax, which I like to call it a cool, sexy look and feel to it. It looks like it’s an expensive theme. You might want to check out that. The real reason we use WordPress is, of our 7 to 800 money-making websites. You could stay with the old rules years ago that close to half of our websites are broken on purpose. They’re not tagged and meta tagged properly. There’s certainly not search engine optimized to the extent that we used to do years ago. The reality is you can do that and you can make sure every picture is tagged perfectly and every piece of content is tagged perfectly. In WordPress, you can hit a button on a plugin that in essence, is a self SEO-ing plugin. What it says is, “Dump in content and Google’s going take care of the rest.” I want to walk you through this, if I put a piece of content into one of our sites on Thursday, the spiders of Google are going to go in and say a sentence or two and they’re going to give some value or some ranking for the title and maybe the first sentence. I’ve hit on this a little bit before in one podcast, but not as deep as I am about to go.
Find a way to use interns for your SEO, if you have to. Click To TweetWhat’s going to happen is, if you post next week, the spiders of Google are going to check out that title of your post, that’s called the H1 tag and they’re going to go in a little bit deeper, maybe a sentence or two, and they’re going to give you credit for that. If you do it again a week later and again a week later, they’re going to keep doing that. If you consistently post once a week, after about maybe 8 to 10 to 12 to 16 weeks, the spiders of Google are going to go back into some of your older posts and they’re going to go deeper. They’re going to start ranking you for maybe a whole paragraph or a whole page. If you can do two posts a week or three posts a week for 2, 3, 4 months in a row, immediately upon writing a piece of content, Google is going to go much deeper than your H1 tag.
If you’re writing, if you’ve got a team may be of interns and you can slam in some content and what’s called a keyword silo. If you’re not sure what that is, I strongly urge you to go read the first twelve podcasts, they’re short, and they’re sweet. Some of the titles are How Google Ranks. You want to dig in there because first of all, every one of these 100 podcasts, every tip is free. I can’t think of one thing that I’ve said that people should have to go out and buy. The point is, the first 10 to 12 blogs are structured around what can an entrepreneur or a company does, no matter how big or small, when it comes to their website specifically, to get it to face away from the residential neighborhood and face that towards the highway? Meaning, the highway of the internet, the highest traffic street in the world.
I purposefully scripted those first 10 to 12 blogs and there was a theme in there. If you go back and read them again, they’re short. If you go back to them, you’re going to catch the theme that quantity of content trumps the quality of the SEO or the tagging or this and that. You’ll have to reread those. Here’s the key, this is a three-point podcast. Point number one, find a way. I’m going to jump down to point number three, find a way to use interns if you have to. Even if you have to use interns and you hire them to study some of the key phrases in the silo of your industry and you get them to write 2 to 4 pieces of content a week. I cannot describe to you how quickly you’re going to get Google’s attention.
All the other content that’s been sitting stale on your website gets resurrected and Google starts paying attention to it because it’s based on content pace. Google says, “They woke up here. All of a sudden, they’re a player in this industry. They might have been smart a year or two ago. Let’s go back and investigate that old content.” As a side note, if you want to resuscitate content that’s more than six months old, you content curate it. Meaning, you take a piece of it, a picture, a paragraph, a sentence or two, and you drop it in things like Reddit, StumbleUpon even Facebook and Twitter. If you go back to some of my old podcasts, I talk about content curation and resurrecting old content. Let’s talk about interns. What is the true cost of interns? Number one, if you use interns in the same state you live in, it’s free. You have to pay for their gas and food. If you use interns in another state, there is a fee that you have to pay depending on the state so check with your local state. Your local college usually has directors of the internship program and they’ll fill you in and how it works. Why is it critical, in my opinion, for the solopreneur? Could you imagine, even if you’re in network marketing, in an MLM, a direct selling door to door, it doesn’t matter?
Everybody, in my opinion, should have an intern doing their social media. If anything, we have 23 people in our office under 23 years old because these are the kids that are living with the tools we need to move business now. They’re living with them. They’re using them. They’re talking through them. We, the typical entrepreneurs, are not. We need these people that are in the throes of what’s going on to show us the way. I hope that makes sense. The true cost of interns, in my opinion, is the cost of not using them. Many people, especially older entrepreneurs are like, “I don’t want to take the time and start with an intern. They’re only going to be here for a few weeks. They’re probably not going to come work for my company.” Some of the stories or excuses I hear of why people don’t break down and get an intern or two, knowing that every major big company out there has been using interns as a rule of thumb for years.
You’ve got to have these people of that age and it is critical. They are the future of America. You’ve got to bring them aboard and for crying out loud, it costs nothing. Finally, I want to drop a nugget. I don’t know how to title this. I don’t know what it’s called, but I take every podcast I make and I take the transcriptions. I take every blog post I do and I take the transcription or the piece of content of the blog post. Every interview I do on radio, TV or podcasting, I take the transcription of that interview and I have them all stacked in one document. Everything I say, I write, I get recorded on in an interview, everything gets stacked into one master document. If I want to write another book, blog posts or podcasts, I can quickly check the search bar of that one-word document, type in a few phrases, and I can see if I have ever said that, written that or put it in a book before so I’m not repeating myself.
That has saved me so many times from re-cutting a podcast on something I did months ago or years ago or doing an interview with questions that I was asked 2 to 3 years ago. You remember the internet is forever. If they Google my name, they can find the same interview questions from years ago. You’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to remember it’s 2016. We’ve got to think differently. We talked a little bit about the content pace. If you want to resurrect and give shock treatment to your website, start kicking up how many posts per week. Then we talked about the true cost of interns and the little subtle tip about keeping everything you do in one document so you don’t repeat yourself and bore your followers. I’ll talk to you soon. Take care.
Important Links:
- DigitalFootprint.net
- How Google Ranks – previous episode
- Content curation – previous episode
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