85: Rachel Lindteigen: On a Mission to Teach SEO in an Easy-to-Understand Way

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Welcome to the Course Creators MBA podcast. I'm your host Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners increase the revenue with digital products and automated sales funnels. In this podcast we tell the stories of ordinary business owners just like you. We talk about their story and how they got started, the challenges they've experienced and how they overcame them. And these are discussions with real people who understand what it's like to own an online course or membership business. Before we begin our show today, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by our flagship Course in a Box program which helps you create your revenue generating course in less than a week. Course in a Box is available on AppSumo at a special deal and you can learn more about Course in a Box by visiting the link in the show Notes. Let's jump right into our show.

And today my special guest is Rachel Lynn Teigen. Rachel is a marketing expert with more than 20 years of experience in traditional and digital marketing. She specialized in SEO and content marketing for over a decade and worked with some of the biggest e commerce retailers during her corporate career. Her clients regularly earn 10 figures a year from SEO alone. She left the corporate world late in 2016 and founded Etched Marketing in 2017. She works with small business owners and provides SEO and content services. In 2020, she launched etched Marketing Academy Simple SEO program and teaches overwhelmed course creators, coaches and online entrepreneurs how to use SEO in an easy to understand way so that they can get more traffic from Google without buying ads. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me. I'm super excited to jump into our discussion today, learn more about your story and how you've maneuvered through online entrepreneurship.

Thank you so much for having me today. It's a great honor to be here with you.

So why don't you jump right in, tell the audience a little bit more about your story and how you got started into what you're doing today.

All right, I would love to. So like many people, especially once you get to that mid to upper level management position, I ended up in a situation where I was laid off. The agency that I worked for was sold to an investment firm and and they decided to reduce staff, reduce that middle management layer. I was the Senior Director of Content Marketing and SEO. So they were sold, I was laid off. And as I started looking around trying to find my next role, what was the next best move for me for my career, I realized it wasn't in the corporate world. While I loved being an SEO, a content marketer, a strategist, running a team I oversaw teams in three different states. It was amazing. At the time I was laid off, I had a little boy who was 16 months old and the career that I had loved when I was single and before I had a family I didn't love as a mom with such a young child. So I looked around, I interviewed for a number of positions, and I really came to the conclusion and that I didn't want to go back to the corporate world. I wanted to go out on my own. And it was with my husband's blessing, a little bit of push on his part, honestly, to help me feel that I was ready to do it. I launched Etched Marketing in April of 2017. And I made the decision not to go back to the corporate world. And in doing that, I actually removed myself from consideration for a position as the director of content marketing for an e commerce company with over 800 locations. On the morning of interview number seven, when I was supposed to be meeting with both the president and the CEO that day, we made the decision I was not going to do it because as we talked about it, my husband commented, you don't want this job. You want the paycheck. And it was very true. I wanted to go back to earning six figures, but I didn't want to go back to the corporate world. So I found it Etched. I started working with small business owners, entrepreneurs, helping them with their SEO, helping them create marketing plans, really teaching them what they needed to know. Loved it. Worked fantastic with my son, being able to have him in preschool, have me work, have the flexibility that I needed for my family. In the interim, my husband took a new position, My family relocated to a different city. I was able to keep moving without missing a beat because I had built a business of my own. Then Covid hit, and I worked with a lot of small business owners, and small business owners were hit really hard by Covid. So I had to start looking at where could I pivot. And that's how I ended up in really developing the online course for SEO and teaching SEO. And I can share more about that. It was kind of a long and winding road to that particular course, but that's how I got to where I am right now.

I love what your husband said to you. You don't want this job, you just want the paycheck.

Yeah.

That is so powerful. It is. That was. That would have been. I'm sure that was like one of your aha moments. I really need to go out and do this.

Yeah.

So In April of 20, 2017, you decided not to Go back. You started your business. Who were you working with at that point in time? I knew you were working with small business owners, but describe that a little bit more detail.

Technically, I didn't have a single client. When I removed myself from consideration for that job, I didn't have anybody.

It was a huge leap of faith.

So once it was September when I signed my first client client, and then I signed three or four in a matter of a couple weeks. I worked with a Medicare insurance agent. I worked with a company that was a manufacturer for cannabis products, of all things. I worked with a travel blogger. I worked with somebody in the education space. So small businesses coaches all sorts of different people, really, to get my business going and start making some money and figure out exactly where my niche was going to be.

So did it take you from April 2017 to September of that. Of that year to find your first client? It did.

Because just because you decide you're going to go into business for yourself doesn't mean that it happens overnight. I was very lucky because I'd been in the corporate world for so long. A lot of my first clients came from referrals from people I had worked with in the corporate world over the years. So they, my network really helped me launch.

And that was one question I was going to ask you. How did they find you? So that was a great segue. So you did this for some time. Walk me through what was your rationale for going into developing the online course and tell me about that experience.

Yeah. So I knew when I started trying to take clients, I had a number of people who I talked to where I didn't win the business because while they wanted to work with me, they couldn't afford to hire me to do it for them. It was outside of their budget. And that was part of why it took me a while to really find those first couple of clients. So my husband, who is my biggest supporter, I am so lucky to have him. He and I sat down and talked about it, and I said, I feel like I need an offering for someone who can't afford to hire me yet. And he said, I think so too. You need to grow your clients. So our initial thought was we'd create these online courses to help people, to grow them to the point that they were earning enough revenue, they could then hire me to do the done for you services. Then I realized how much I love the thought of just having that online training business as the bigger part of what I do. Because for many years in the corporate world, I led training workshops for the companies I worked for, for my clients, I led training meetings with clients. I love training people. So it became a natural fit. But it was not my first thought as to where we were going with the business.

So how long did it take you to create the course? What was the process that you went through? And tell us a little bit more about that.

Okay, so I've created a couple of.

Courses over the years.

So the very first one I created was an SEO fundamentals course. And it was everything that somebody needed to know to do SEO. And it was based on everything I had done in the corporate world. And it flopped. And I walked away from it thinking nobody wanted to learn SEO. They were more interested in Facebook ads, Instagram ads, et cetera. What I know now, looking back on it, that was 2018. What I know now, looking back on it, is I created what they needed, not what they wanted. And there's a huge difference. And that's one of the mistakes that I think people sometimes make when we're creating the courses.

So what did you do? Where did you go from there? What were your next steps?

So my next steps, I took the scenic route. So I was pretty sure nobody wanted to learn about SEO. So I went back to more of my background because I was getting more questions about marketing and how do I create a marketing plan and how do I market my business? So I started working on a marketing program and I started going through all the steps and trying to figure out what I was doing there and creating basically a program based upon a marketing training workshop that I did for new franchise owners when I was within a franchise organization's corporate office many years ago. And I did this whole training class that walked them through how to market their new business and how to create their marketing plan and their launch plan and their events and all of that. So I worked on that. And I had some really. Actually I had some pretty good success with that. I did. I launched it with a five day challenge and used some Facebook ads and ran them through a group. And I managed to build my group up to about 500 people. I had a little over a thousand that went through or that signed up. Obviously not everybody shows up for the webinar or the, the challenge, things like that. I did sell a few of that class. I had a few more people who did it as beta testers and I had really, really, really good feedback. They loved it. Some of my beta testers and first students said it was more detailed than they were expecting. They didn't begin to understand how much was actually involved in marketing. And I had a couple people say, this is so good. If you added a little bit on how to start a business, this would be an entire course on creating and launching a business. So I thought that was my next logical step was to do the revision on it to turn it into that full business building program. So I did all my ideal customer interviews. I really went deep to make sure that I was coming with this, with the correct strategic focus. And I had everything I needed. I made sure all my content on my website and my social and my YouTube channel and all of that for months was talking about building a business. I chose to niche down into a market very similar to myself. And that was busy working moms who were in the corporate world who wanted more income. But more than that, they wanted flexibility and control of their schedules because they had that family. So I worked on this and worked on it and worked on it. And I was ready to launch in March of 2020. And we know what happened in March of 2020. Suddenly I had a program I had been working on for six months that was ready to go for an audience that was no longer interested in what I had to offer. So I had to pivot again because of COVID.

So you pivoted again? Yep. Where did you go this time?

I'll be honest, I kind of sat in the overwhelm for a little while because that was a lot of work.

I think everybody can relate to what you are describing.

My son went on spring break from preschool and never went back and he was 4 years old at the time. So I kind of sat in the overwhelm of what am I going to do? I can work an hour a day. So it took me a little while to figure that out. I was working with a couple people, I'm in a mastermind group and I was just helping a few of them with SEO and marketing and like they were launching websites and they'd have questions. And I was sitting with one of the gals doing a review of her website one day. And this was last fall, this was maybe August or September. And she asked, she finally, she's like, why are you not teaching SEO? You are amazing at this. You understand it better than anyone I have ever met. And more than that, I understand what you're saying and I don't understand SEO. And I said, because nobody wants to learn SEO. I tried that. That was the first course I did. Nobody wants to learn. And she challenged me and she said, I think you're wrong. I think people want to And I think they need to. And I think you need to start at the beginning and you need to be focused on SEO. So I went back to the very first steps and I did ideal customer interviews. And what I found was they don't want to do SEO. There was a lot of should surrounding SEO. I should do it, I should learn it. I know it's important. I don't understand why I'm not techie enough. It's above my pay grade. There's a lot of fear surrounding it. There's a lot of I don't think I'm smart enough. I don't think I can do it. I'm overwhelmed. I try to read a blog post and I have to go to Google to figure out what the words are in the blog post. So it's scary to people. So what that helped me realize was my positioning needs to be that once you understand it, you're going to be amazed how easy it is, because SEO truly is a rinse and repeat process. The challenge is that so many of the people who teach it, they're. And I don't know how to say this without sounding not mean, but just they're the techie nerdy boys. And I say that with love because I used to be their manager, I used to be their boss, and I would have to be on their calls with them to. To help explain it in real people terms. So I spent many years in the corporate world explaining SEO in a way that was easy to understand so that smart people who were not technical could get it. So that's what I have spent. I spent six months researching, reviewing, interviewing, and revamping a program that is now on Evergreen. And everything focuses on how easy it is to understand and that you can learn it. And I offer step by step process and hand holding because I know more than anything what people want is that hand holding, to walk them through it, to make sure that they get it right. And I am so excited to be able to do that, to go back to my first love and just realize I was wrong. People do want to know. They just are afraid of it. And I can make it not so scary. That's easy for me.

I love the whole story that you just gave us there. And whoever was in your mastermind group that, you know, kind of gently, you know, nudged you to said, go back and, you know, look at this. You know, look at this again. I think she was brilliant because I was sitting there thinking, I'd like to learn more about SEO. And I know, and I know how Important it is. And extremely important for your website and driving organic traffic to your website. So here you said right now that it's on Evergreen, so tell the audience a little bit about that, how you have it set up. Are you going to be launching it again soon? What are your next steps related to it?

Yeah. So it's on Evergreen because I realized that at this point in time, that is the best solution for me, for my business. And the thing is with SEO, you need to do it when you decide you're ready. Like nobody is going to decide I want to learn SEO and then look at it and be like, oh well, this class is available in six months. That's not helpful. SEO is one of those things that you need when you decide you're ready. It needs to be there and be available because the sooner you start, the sooner you get the results. So for both myself and my students, it is Evergreen. I do have an evergreen funnel. So I have a couple of opt inside. I have a free training webinar that is the three crazy easy secrets to getting found on Google. So you get more website traffic without buying ads. And I do get traffic to that. Both organic, thank goodness, because that's my focus as well as through paid ads. I have a YouTube channel that has tons of information on SEO along with those links to the webinar and some of my opt ins, things like SEO checklists and SEO quick start guides. I also have lots of blog posts because blog posts are an SEO's best friend when it comes to getting found on Google. I have tons of blog posts about SEO and how you do it and what's the most important and when to start it and all of that. So it just at this point it's more about revising and adjusting my funnel based on results. So recently I found I was kind of losing people at a specific point in the webinar. So I went back through and I looked at the data and where was I losing them? And I've revised it and I'm going to be rerecording the webinar and launching it this week so that I can hopefully improve that portion of the funnel. And that's really where I'm at now is analyzing the data, which I'm a data nerd. So I love that part of it, analyzing the data and then adjusting my strategy based on results.

So may I ask what software you're using for your evergreen sales funnel for your webinar?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I use easy webinar.

Okay.

I like the fact that they have the additional data I can see. If people ask questions, I'm alerted to it. I know how, what percentage of it they're attending. I know if they've shown up or not, if they've asked questions, all of that. I just like the additional data in the background.

Thank you for that.

You're welcome.

So, Rachel, you've. You've kind of taken some twists and turns here. What do you see as the next steps in your business for this year?

So for this year, I'm going to continue working on the SEO course and really optimizing that funnel so that it is performing outstandingly well. That's my goal. Isn't that everybody's goal? And then I'm starting to look at some of those small offers, really deciding where I'm going to go next. I think what I'm going to do is to develop a small offer funnel that's focused on that original marketing training workshop that I did a couple years ago, because there was so much. Really good response to that. But what I'm finding from the research is people don't want a big, huge marketing training program. They'd like something smaller and easier. And I think it's a perfect fit for a small offer or, you know, one of those, like, $197 maximum type offers, which will likely go on Evergreen as well.

And that would be great because it sounds like you have all the content there and maybe you just repurpose it and repackage it in a different way. So I love, I love that for you.

Yeah.

We are going to. And I would love to make this all about learning about SEO. So I have to have you on the podcast at a later date and kind of do a teaching, a more teaching type episode and kind of delve into SEO, because it's definitely something I'm interested in. But also, I think all business owners out there who have a website need to learn SEO.

Oh, I would love that.

I love to teach it.

And yes, it is, in my opinion, the single most important marketing channel out there, because once you figure it out, it is unstoppable and it's free. There is no better combo.

You've been doing this for a few years. You've obviously taken some, you know, went back to your original love. And I love the fact that you didn't give up on that because that, that, that would have been disastrous. What advice do you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs out there?

Don't give up if you do something. I think there's too much focus on this overnight success. And I think that we go into it expecting that we're going to have these five figure launches the very first time out the door. That's not necessarily the reality. But if you don't experience that, it doesn't mean that you failed or you've done it wrong or you've made a mistake. It means there's a lesson to be learned. There's something in that data, there's something to tweak. Your opportunity is still there as long as you keep moving towards it and making some adjustments and kind of figuring out where is it broken? What do I need to fix?

Yeah, and I think that's great advice. And you're a perfect example of not giving up on something that you knew that was in your wheelhouse and that people actually were want. Can you let people know, Rachel, where they can find you?

Absolutely. So my website is etchedmarketing.com you can find me on social at Etched Marketing Academy and that would be on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. You can find me in all three. That free SEO class that I mentioned, if you really want to learn how to use SEO, that free class is available right on my homepage. Just go to the website etchedmarketing.com and you're going to see it right there at the top of the page.

And I will make sure all of those links are in the show notes and the link for that free SEO course is there too, so people can find you. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me today. I loved hearing about your story and how you moved from your corporate job into online entrepreneurship and the journey you've taken from there. It was very inspirational.

Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you having me here and I look forward to doing another one where we can talk about SEO and help people really understand how to use it to grow their businesses too.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love the show, we'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.