David Sinick — The Ultimate SEO and Content Marketing Playbook

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

Joe Fear.

Hey.

Hey. Welcome back to another episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is Joe Fear.

This is Matt Wolfe.

Yay.

And today we have an old friend of ours named David Sinek. And this guy is definitely the smartest SEO mind. He's content marketing guru at this point, running a massive platform@paleohacks.com which, I mean, it's totally in a different niche from anything we've ever played with. But at the end of the day, you are going to have a masterclass or a playbook or whatever the hell you want to call. You have a roadmap of specific points of how to do content marketing for any business.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. By the end of this episode, you'll have a good idea of how to run content marketing and SEO on your site so that Google actually pays attention to your site and sends traffic to you. Literally. He kind of unloads all of it. Everything you can think of around content marketing and SEO. Some of the stuff we're doing, a lot of it we haven't done. So even us, we're like, we've got so many takeaways we're going to do in our business from this.

And here's the cool thing. Anyone can do this because we're talking about free tactics. Free tactics. We're not talking about paid advertising at all. We're not even talking about things that you have to do on other websites. It's all things that you do on your own website. And that's what's beautiful about this whole topic. So everyone has basically the rights to use everything that we talk about in this podcast. And you should.

He is a ninja with this stuff. Let's go ahead and dive right in with Mr. David Sinek.

Voila.

All right. Hey, David, thanks for joining us today. How are you doing?

I am doing great. Thank you guys for having me. I'm excited to share my information with.

You guys today and looking forward to just having fun.

Awesome. Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting because Joe and I, we are hardcore focused on content marketing. That's sort of our number one traffic driver. It's been the main focus of our business. We even had a content marketing agency for a while, but then we realized we really don't like doing it for other people. But we've never really had an episode where we've really dived into content marketing and why you should focus on content marketing and how to do it and, you know, all of the stuff that goes around content marketing. So that's why we're really pumped on this, because I can't think of anybody better to talk about content marketing than you. So I'm excited to talk about this. But before we do, let's do a little bit of a backstory. I want to know sort of what you did before, you're doing what you do now, and kind of how you got to where you're at right now.

Okay. Yeah. Well, I've been working on the Internet, the interwebs, in some capacity or another since about 2009. In college, I wanted to be a personal trainer.

And so I signed up for a guy's email list named Eric Cressy, who.

Got me on Ryan Lee's email list, who, if anybody is not familiar, in 2010, 2009. Ryan. Well, actually, Ryan is kind of responsible.

For the growth of the fitness marketing.

Information business way back in the day. And in 2010, he was one of the top dogs in the Internet marketing.

Space, and he still is.

And so, you know, long story short, the same way you didn't want to do content marketing for other people because you just like doing it for yourself, I decided I just like working out. I don't like training other people. And so one of Eric Cressy's emails on his newsletter was like, oh, you.

Gotta follow this guy, Ryan Lee, if you want to do anything in online business.

And so I went to one of.

His events and I emailed him in advance because I wanted to intern for him. And also because the event was in Stanford, Connecticut, which is where I'm from.

And I also, as a side note, couldn't believe anybody would ever host an event in Stanford.

It's actually. It's funny because Stanford is actually a totally legit place, but, like, you know, it was my hometown, so it's like a weird thing to think that anybody.

Else would like the hometown.

It's kind of like that you grow.

Up and you just hate where you grew up.

Right?

Right. Well, we live in San Diego, so, you know, it's hard to hate it here. Yeah, it's hard to hate our hometown.

But, yeah, ye. I probably would not have that same vibe if I grew up in SoCal. But so, yeah, I showed up. I interned with him for a bit. He introduced me to my first local SEO client and a couple of other.

Local clients in the New Canaan area.

Through that, I bought a food drop.

Shipping business, which was a complete and total utter disaster.

Let's just Say, like all the money that I had saved up at the.

Time disappeared into a black hole called Magento.

If anybody here has worked with Magento.

Does the platform, you'll understand what I'm talking about.

And then I got behind the scenes with a guy named John Romanello in the fitness space.

Launched in your terms, bestseller. Worked in the women's and men's dating space with a guy named Adam Dulad. And then Paleohacks fell into my lap in 2013.

And it just happened that I was working with somebody who knew somebody who knew the guy who owned Paleohacks and.

He needed help turn me into a real business. He contracted with me and my group.

Of guys to turn into real business. Fast forward about a year or so, he decided he wanted to just work with me directly. So I took that fast forward a year after that, I brokered a deal between him and the current majority owner.

Of Paleohacks, who is a guy named Mike Geary.

And so Mike and I are partners in Paleo hacks and then we also.

Own Paleo Plan as well, which is a partner site that has a meal planning subscription service.

Got it. Now, Mike Geary, he's the Truth about Abs guy, right? He was.

Yeah. For the longest time, I think that was the number one selling product on ClickBank.

I think for a long time.

For a long time he was crushing. He like the domination he had in that space, like, doesn't really exist anymore, you know, like, he was basically the first guy to come to. Mike is like a math savant. Like, he's the smartest math person I've.

Ever met in my life.

And he was one of the first guys to crack cold traffic for info.

Products or at least in the fitness world at the time, and just destroyed it forever for like four years straight.

Imagine like getting an offer to maximum.

Scale and then just keeping that running for four years.

That level, like, that's basically what was happening. Worked out really well. Yeah, worked out really well.

No, I think when we first connected, it was in. Back in. It was in Washington, D.C. i think it was one of Yannick's underground events. And I think at the time. Didn't you have an SEO agency?

Yeah, that was probably. So there was two. It's funny because I met Mike in person for the first time at that. At that event too, before we were even before I was on his radar at all. And we had like the most awkward conversation of all time. But yeah, I had an SEO agency back then. And that was also when I was.

Still doing the food drop shipping.

So yeah, I was probably trying to sell you guys or somebody else on SEO services.

Yeah, we didn't hire you anyway, but we're still friends.

Well, I think you were flying back to San Diego at the time. I remember because we all like got people to rearrange their seats so we can all sit next to each other and chat about SEO. On the flight home.

I think I remember being.

I remember talking about it in the car on the way to the airport.

I feel like.

Yeah, I think I was very hungover that I remember in the van, like.

Yeah, that sounds like the events back in those days.

Yeah, times have changed.

Yeah, I mean it's so Paleo hacks. So it's basically just the two of you guys. You have a team. What kind of team are you guys working with?

So I have a couple full time employees. We've got Charisma, who is my editor in chief of our content marketing operation and she basically runs the entire show. If I get hit by a bus.

Tomorrow, like she's got it.

Then she has an associate editor named Lauren. And Lauren helps Charisma do all the stuff that she does. Helps edit content, helps what's it called, format stuff.

She helps with guest posting and syndication.

Some other special projects.

We've got Zoe who manages her social media entirely. We have Spencer who does our video content who is.

She's basically Steven Spielberg or James Cameron or whatever is appropriate for the editing side of stuff.

We've got.

Who else is on my team?

Jill is my marketing manager. She's our newest hire this summer. She's just been absolutely doing amazing work for me.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs get.

Stuck trying to hire a clone of themselves and I'm fortunate that I think.

I found that person, which has been really good. And then we've got customer service.

Trying to think who else I'm trying to forget.

Oh, and we've got Rita who does.

All of our numbers and analytics and things.

We've got a bunch of other contractors.

We work with, but those are the main thing. The next person we're hiring is a full time developer. That's probably the next focus for us. Strong need.

So with Paleohacks, what's sort of the business model behind there? What are the revenue streams and what is that business?

Yeah, I would say that the revenue.

Streams are essentially three or four things.

One is our selling of our own products and that's through our internal email list, through our own organic traffic, through advertising on Facebook and through affiliates. If I Didn't say that already. Secondly is affiliate marketing, which is less and less of our business these days. So I'm trying to get it to.

Be less, but one of the good things actually about that is that the.

Reason why I'm trying to get it.

To less is because I want to sell less other information products and I wanted to just focus on super complementary offers to what we sell since we sell cookbooks.

But there's all these new physical products and food items coming out that have.

Actual good direct response marketing around them.

So like I can sell an olive.

Oil, an avocado oil, a salt, a set of chef's knives, all stuff that's like super aligned with my business that I would never sell.

So affiliate marketing, because there's more and.

More of those products coming out every.

Month it seems, is still a strong part of our business and our revenue model.

And then the third part of our.

Model, I think this is, yeah, I think it's just three pieces is advertising revenue and that is through our AdSense.

On our blog, through sponsored content and.

Through sponsored emails where people rent our list to promote a product. And that has become a huge part of our business model pretty rapidly. And that's been a really, that's been really good for us.

Right on, man.

Yeah, that's interesting. So with the advertising model, what kind of traffic do you have to get to a site for that advertising model to be viable?

It's a good question, you know, like.

It used to be. I think like I'm like opening up my analytics to take a look. I think like it's less, it's less about the quantifiable number and more about, I mean this is common obviously and I hate to give you this answer, but it's more about like the quality. So like, you know, just as a comparison. So for Paleo hacks, where's my blog for Paleo hacks, we're getting almost 2 million visitors a month for the.

Here it is for the blog.

And I can, you know, that makes us anywhere from like 20 to 40k in adsense a month depending on.

Depending on how much email traffic we're getting to the blog. I think also.

Well, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that like that we have a ton of traffic. But I would say that for certain markets where it's like for example your guys space, which is more like B2B.

Selling money at a discount sort of.

Deal, you can probably make more money on advertising much faster than I could.

Because of the types of products that are being sold and whatnot.

Like, my girlfriend, for example, has a 11,000 person following on Instagram and she's.

Making money from doing sponsored stuff on.

There right off the bat. So I would say you could start pretty early. I think it's less about the quantifiable traffic. I guess what I'm trying to make.

Is less about the quantifiable traffic and more the influence you have over that traffic.

So I would say, like, honestly.

Revenue per visitor for us is probably lower than the average person with advertising model, partly because advertising came later in our. In our kind of schematic and it's also not our main focus. So, like, if you look at the AdSense banners on our blog, for example.

They could probably be in better positions to make us more money.

The second part of that is that, like, we don't have.

As much influence.

I think, with our content as a personal brand would. And so we command lower prices or I can only charge lower prices for.

Like, sponsored articles and stuff than maybe like a key to the Wellness mama of the world.

Because people like, nobody really knows who.

Dave Sinek is at Paleo Hacks. It's more just about Paleohex itself.

Whereas if I was. If it was a Dave Sinek show, then whenever I say something, it's that much stronger. Am I making sense?

It's a personal brand rather than kind of this big umbrella company.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, so we do well.

With advertising, but if we were a personal brand, we probably could have done it much earlier on in the game and potentially more profitable per visitor. I think.

AdSense is still really good, though. Like, believe it or not, I thought AdSense was a joke. And then we put it up and.

We were making like anywhere from six to ten dollars per thousand visitors.

And that's like, honestly, I think you.

Could probably even beat that with a little bit of optimization. So that's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. I think everybody's head was in this, in the camp of like, it's dead. That was so like, you know, 10 years ago.

Yeah. We haven't even experimented with that.

Right.

That's cool.

So I'm just curious now, I know you had some chats with Matt recently, but I want to know what your platform looks like and maybe just explain what your platform is, what that means to you, and kind of your philosophy when you're building out all this big content plays.

Yeah. So our platform overall, just like in terms of the assets, I guess are we've got Paleo Plan, which combined get.

Close to 3 million visitors, I want.

To say somewhere in that range, that.

Email lists of about 500 to 600,000 people, depending on who we're suppressing at any given time.

We've got Facebook fan page of like 850,000 people on Paleo hacks and like 300,000 on Paleo plan. Might be slightly less Instagram, decent sized on both Twitter, I don't care. Pinterest is almost 100,000 on Paleo hacks and much more on Paleo Plan.

That's kind of our quantifiable platform, if.

That'S what you're looking for.

Sure.

I've already forgotten your second question.

What was it? Yeah. Oh, kind of your philosophy when you're building this out.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I looked when I first came into the Paleo world, I was looking around and everyone was getting a ton of traffic through blogging and content. And it was usually like.

I'm about to make myself sound like a total asshole. Just get ready for it. Basically, like.

There was a lot of.

Bloggers, and they weren't business people, they were bloggers that were doing this because there was some business aspect of it. But for me personally, if you're not like a raging capitalist like I am, I usually think you're just in business.

To boost your ego.

And that's kind of what I felt. So what I saw was people who got SEO but didn't really get the business side of it. And I felt like that was a big opportunity for me to come in and just kind of kick people out.

Basically just come in and kick some ass, which is kind of what we did.

And so at first, for a couple years, our content was getting crushed in a sense of.

We weren't able to compete in Google.

Because we were a newer site.

Our blog didn't get built in 2013.

Whereas some of these other Paleo blogs.

Were built in like 0607, et cetera.

So it took us a little while.

To get off the ground.

We are now very dominant if you.

Look up any Paleo keywords.

But it certainly took a little bit. And my philosophy in getting to that point was like, okay, I'm going to come in and here's what I'm going to do. Number one is I'm going to create better content than anybody in this space on every topic that exists. So it's going to be.

My recipes are going to be way better. I mean, at a certain point, you.

Kind of like, a recipe is a recipe.

Sure, sure.

But still, ours are the best.

We're going to have whenever it's informative, informational content, it's going to be, it's going to be best in class, like it's going to solve whatever the problem is. You know, if someone has a thyroid condition and they come to our article about thyroid conditions, it's going to be.

As comprehensive as possible.

And from a user perspective, and also.

From an SEO perspective, we're going to.

Make sure our content is very shareable because I'm not going to be a one trick pony and only rely on SEO traffic, but also because social media feeds into it. And then how I'm really going to dominate people in this space is aside from just creating the best content possible, following SEO practices, following good social media practices and using our email list as a leverage point to drive traffic to.

Our content to help boost it quickly.

I'm also going to win in the operations front, which is to say that like nobody in the Paleo space, as far as I know, has an editorial team.

Like they might say they have like a team, but it's like one person.

Who'S doing the job.

Like we have an actual. And, and this isn't saying this isn't always that good. Like having a staff doesn't necessarily mean.

That you sure have a great company.

But we have a staff and, and we are able to create an output at a level that most of our.

Competitors can no longer keep up with. It's just because we've built a better.

Operational thing and we've also made more.

Money to invest in it.

So yeah, I hope that answers the question.

I'm just trying to be the best.

There's nothing wrong with that that makes sense.

So I kind of want to dive into the sort of strategical elements of it a little bit. So when it comes to the content marketing plan for Paleo hacks, what sort of frequency do you focus on? How long do you try to make the posts? Can you give us any sort of those sort of details about how the systems work there?

Yes, totally. So we post for this month. We've cut down to one a day because, and this is something I can dig in a little bit more. We've been doing a content audit for like probably two years now, but we're almost done. And so, and the problem, like, basically I encouraged my team to get us up to three posts a day and we did that in November and then.

But like this audit was kind of just sitting there and I'm like, we have so much basically, like we didn't always have the best quality content. Through the quality standards that we have now. And so one of the things that we did as soon as we started.

Getting comfortable in the higher level quality is go back and revamp all of our old content to make it kind of fit our quality standards and also update it for SEO and all that sort of stuff.

So right now we're doing one post a day for this month to kind of give my team some more time to finish up the audit. Because essentially the audit is like it's revamping old content, but in terms of how much work it is, it's basically.

The same thing as creating that content from scratch or redoing it from scratch. So essentially it's still producing the same amount of content.

Then in January we're going to scale.

Back up to three a day, because also January is our biggest month.

So, yeah, we're doing about three a day.

So when you say content audit, just to interject on that point.

You'Re going through your old content and trying to figure out what stuff is kind of outdated and need some updating and reworking it. Kind of deciding whether it's worth updating, worth deleting, that sort of thing.

Yeah.

So our content is.

99% of the time is evergreen. So when I'm looking back at old content, I'm not looking for like, oh, turns out we were wrong, salt is bad for you.

Turns out the whole Paleo diet's a lie. It's more of like, is this article as thorough enough as it could have been?

Is it formatted properly? Are there good sub headlines, subtitles, images?

Is there like a pinnable graphic? So basically what I do is I have a spreadsheet, and in the spreadsheet the columns are the name of the article, the URL of the article.

The keyword that that article is focused on, or keywords, and then the next column is like an actions column.

So.

What you're going to do, so.

That'S either essentially the article is being, worst case scenario, the article is getting deleted because it's just useless if it's good enough.

But it could be to stay on the website. For example, I would delete an article that was like, for example, if I did a blog post about a contest.

In 2015, that article, pretty much everything.

Else though gets redirected to a more relevant article. So if I had like six, we had like seven articles on sleeping Better, and I think six of them, they were like redundant. So six of them went and we redirected them all to a main sleeping article.

So. And then the other, the other things in that column are essentially no changes.

Or like redo from scratch and then you can, if you were auditing, you could obviously add in different things there.

And then outside of that, the other columns in the sheet are essentially the.

Specific things I'm auditing for, which is.

If the photos need updating, if schema.

Is set up properly, if the SEO metadata is set up properly or needs.

Updating, if there's interlinking, if the content is long enough, if the content is.

Already ranking or not.

Actually, sorry, those aren't the columns.

That isn't the column thing. That's actually a separate piece of evaluating what else is there.

Formatting, if there's any formatting issues, how it looks on mobile, for example, because.

That was not a strong consideration for us initially.

Then if it has all the necessary.

Marketing elements that we add to these pages, which is lead boxes, call to action, graphics, AdSense, a pop up, all.

That stuff, we go through all of.

Our content, which was 1300 articles, and.

Review each one of those things and then there's an action step that happens.

And then we then go through and.

Put that into our publishing workflow.

So like Lauren, our associate editor, goes.

And does the actual review, lists out.

All the things that need to be changed, and then that gets put into.

The publishing workflow where then someone, one of the writers or charisma or whoever.

Will go in and actually make the.

Changes and then republish the article and relaunch it.

Got it. Now, is this like an SEO benefit thing? Because I feel like most people out there that have blogs, you know, once it's out there, they just kind of leave it alone and it's just old content. They assume nobody's looking at it. You know what, what's the benefit of going and doing all that?

There's an enormous benefit. So there's a few, there's a few things. So first off, a lot of our old content was starting to rank and had decent social performance, but it wasn't, it was never going to like really rank. So like by starting to rank, I mean like it was in position 30.

To 50 or something, right?

So at that point I'm saying, like, okay, Google is giving me something for this, but it's been a couple years, it wasn't enough. So I'm going to go back and flesh out that article and make it better because I know it has the potential to rank higher than 30 or 50.

And I already know Google is saying it's acceptable to rank.

Now if a piece of content didn't.

Rank at all and it was like.

From 2015, then I can probably just.

Scrap it entirely and start over.

But usually I'm looking at if it's kind of ranking and then revamping it.

And also a similar kind of thought on the social performance.

And yes, long story short, it helps.

SEO performance immensely, immensely.

And it's not just the content specific.

Stuff, but just like auditing your site overall, like site speed stuff makes a huge difference.

The one thing I would say to anybody who's listening on content audits, aside.

From doing it yourself and following kind of a simple process of reviewing stuff, obviously the less content you have, the easier it is. If you were looking for someone to do an SEO specific audit, which often.

Overlaps with the content audit, the guy that you want to hire is named Alan Bliway.

So that's B L E I W E I S S. So if we're.

Talking about SEO benefits, right, we did our content audit first, which when Alan then did his audit, one of the things he looks at is content quality. And he's like, man, he's like, your site has really good content, but everything else you're fucking up on. So like, everything else is terrible. So he did an SEO audit for us.

And so combined with the quality of.

Content we were putting out and the changes he suggested make, which really was more on the technical side.

So like we, the biggest thing being we increased our site speed a lot. Our SEO traffic quintuples. And I'm not talking about like, oh.

We went from 5,000 visitors a month to 25, which would actually be great.

It was like 150,000 visitors a month to like 650,000.

Dear God.

So yes, that is to say that monitoring your stuff is enormously beneficial because Google's like kind of measuring like the average quality of your content. And if you have like, if you just recently, for example, started publishing really epic shit, but for the last six years you were not, those pieces of poor content will drag you down. We want to keep kind of the average content quality level as high as possible. And also because we have that content, it's an asset to us. We might as well leverage it properly.

Otherwise it's just sitting there.

Sure. Got it. Right now you're focused on about one post a day, but you're going to shift it back to three posts a day. Is that based on sort of testing and you've seen that that frequency is what performs the best for traffic? Or how did you come to that conclusion? That this is how much content we should be putting out.

You say it as if, like, I had a real process with that.

It was more like, I didn't like one a day. We did two a day for a bit, and then I was like, we could probably do three a day and.

It wouldn't be a problem.

And so there's a couple reasons why.

I wanted to ramp it up.

I won't say, yeah, we posted three.

A day and we doubled our AdSense reven. I don't actually know if there's a correlation. I haven't done a strong analysis, and I think there's other factors aside from just producing more, like what the content is, how it's being promoted, and so on, as to how it gets affected.

But I would say that.

Oh, my God, I'm totally losing my channel.

Do you see a strong correlation between frequency and traffic on days where you post 3 posts? Do you see a spike in traffic on those days? Are you able to work out a correlation?

Not necessarily. It's basically like it gives.

The reason why I create three posts.

A day is because if we promoted.

It all properly, which we're still kind of figuring it out, but if we.

Promoted it all equal, then, yes, it would definitely boost our overall traffic because.

It'S just more content.

It's more stuff that we're posting on Facebook, more stuff we're emailing about.

The other reason why I want more content is because when I'm doing my.

Newsletter, I'm often including multiple articles, and I start to run out of articles to promote if we're not producing enough content.

And then the other big thing that's.

Kind of a leverage point for us.

Is that we own everything that is.

Created in our content.

So one of the things I was.

Telling Charisma, my editor in chief, in.

Regards to the three posts per day, I think two of those are recipes.

And so because we own our recipes.

Whenever I create a new recipe book, I can just say, hey, Zoe, or.

Whoever, can you go to the blog and curate me 70 crock pot recipes?

Oh, yeah, that's awesome.

If they're there, it takes all of 20 minutes for her to get the URLs, give it to our designer, and.

Next thing we know, we have a crock pot cookbook.

But again, if we're basically like, we started doing that a lot. And at a certain point, you're like, every recipe book is overlapping dramatically. So I wanted to make sure that.

We were killing two birds with one.

Stone by producing more content, not just because there is benefits of it in.

Terms of more stuff to promote, but also because we use that content for other purposes as well. And I wanted to get as far ahead of the as possible.

Got it, Got it.

I have a question about. Because we did a lot and we still do a lot of content repurposing, so taking the content one and then and just distributing all sorts of platforms. Do you guys do that?

The only repurposing like that that we do is. Well, it's the recipe books like I.

Was mentioning, that was pretty dang smart. I like that.

And then.

I guess in terms of inward traffic to help with SEO and referral links, all that stuff.

So just for an example, when we make a new blog post, what I'll typically do is I'll take that blog post and maybe like a week later I'll take that same content and put it on medium.com with a link back to our site. And then a week later after that, I'll put it on LinkedIn Pulse and then we'll actually have that content converted into a PDF and put it on SlideShare and issue and Speaker Deck. And so one piece of content ends up getting spread to 15 different platforms that all link back to our site.

I'll be totally honest with you. I am not against that strategy, but.

I've never really had a lot of success with that sort of approach.

I think it also depends on the market that you're in. Like. Like, obviously, like, I don't know, for example, like you guys have LinkedIn's blogging tool. Like you're discussing as a channel that you're. And Medium as well, which is both places that have very relevant audiences for you. I guess I could post some of my stuff on Medium, but I think the Paleo space doesn't quite. And I get that it's not just reaching audiences. It's also like from a.

Like, you know, if something happens, I'm going across it. Why not?

But there isn't quite that sort of.

Website like LinkedIn's blocking for Paleo other than Facebook. Like, Facebook is where the vast majority of our audience lives. And so I don't care as much about, like the slideshares and distributing it like that as much as just really honing in on the key channels which.

Which is Facebook and also Pinterest as well for us.

So we strongly focus on those platforms.

And so like, in regards to that, like, we.

It's not repurposing, but we highly focus our content around those platforms. So like every article we have has.

Multiple photos that people can use as the.

Well, actually, I guess you can't really.

Do this anymore with meta tags, but essentially, theoretically there's multiple photos that someone could use as their cover photo when they are posting or the big photo image when they're post.

Sharing your content on Facebook and then Pinterest stuff, we have a pinnable collage.

Image or a pinnable instructor graphic at the bottom of every post to encourage people to pin our content more.

So that's not repurposing as much, but in terms of building our content for.

Other channels, we do that.

There was a period of time where I got the bright idea to take.

Some of our more popular articles and.

Have them turned into podcast episodes.

And back when we had a podcast.

Podcasts are a total waste of time.

By the way, guys, I don't know what you're doing, but back when we.

Had a podcast.

Having also what I.

Called article casts boosted our total listens.

Like a lot because a lot of this was evergreen content. So it was just like a regular.

Article about autoimmune disease or whatever and then the author did a voiceover.

But I don't. I stopped doing it because I didn't really see.

Aside from. Well, first off, because we stopped podcasting.

Overall, so there was no extra benefit from it eventually, but I just didn't see much from it.

So I just focus on the kind.

Of key platforms which are Facebook and Pinterest.

That's interesting and it's definitely a niche to niche kind of thing because like when. When it comes to podcasting in our business, I think the podcasting is probably the highest leveraged thing that we do as far as networking and driving traffic and, you know, a lot of that kind of stuff. So for us, the podcasting is probably like the highest level stuff that produces the most results for us, which we.

Had a killer podcast, honestly. Clark, our host, was amazing, but it was our least popular content for some reason. Even though I thought it was our best stuff, like it was. Clark didn't mess around. But I think it's also like Paleo World is.

Aside from blogging being kind of the medium of a lot of people, podcasting.

Was a huge part.

And I just felt like we didn't.

Give our podcast as much support as it could have, whatever it was.

So when it comes to your blog posts and the content you actually put on the blog, what are some of the best practices you follow as far as.

What sort of things does the post need to have? Starting with what's the common length of a post and then also what sort of things do you make sure it has as far as like a certain number of H1 tags and images. Do you follow any sort of best practices for that kind of thing?

I would say there's a. Yeah, there's.

A lot of best practices. So the first thing that you should.

Know is that I have a manual for my own internal team and also.

For writers that's like 30 plus pages long that walks them through every single thing. So when people come and write for.

Us, they have to read that. Like I will.

You will not pray for us if you don't read that shit. I won't tolerate it.

But yeah, so, okay, so here's, I'll.

Run through kind of the list of stuff.

I mean a lot of these are.

Just going to be on site SEO factors. But then I'll talk about some more specific stuff though.

So first off went to the content. We go for a thousand plus words for recipes. I'm a little bit more flexible on that. So it's like 750 words or so at a certain point.

You've said enough about fucking chicken. Catchy.

Tori.

I'm pretty sure in our writer's guide where we say like and include a.

150 to 250 word introduction, there's probably.

Something in there that says like, just bullshit your way through it. Like I don't, like, you know, I just like, I don't know what to say. Like, oh my God, this recipe's tasty.

Here it is.

And then you say it like six.

More times and then the recipe anyway.

So longer content on the actual informative articles. And I do think there's a point of diminishing returns where.

Like I think longer content almost always ranks better. But I'd imagine once you get above like 4 to 5000 words depending on the market, but I mean like health, you start to run out of people's attention.

And I think there's a certain point of diminishing returns where it stops getting as good share traction and whatnot. So we try to keep the upper limit at like 2500 I would say. So you have your keyword and the title, the URL and then the post content.

That's just very small piece. You have your meta title and description.

Tags and that's for Google, for Facebook. And I think Yoast has a Pinterest section. I forget I'm not in there these days. But we have a different meta title.

This is important to note.

We have a different meta title and description for Google than we do with Facebook. Because with Google, obviously people are searching for stuff. So essentially if they're searching for how to fix my thyroid disease, the headline.

Being how to fix my thyroid disease.

Or something that's very specific to the question is going to be better than.

What it would be on Facebook, which.

Would be like very much a curiosity based click.

Because people on Facebook are just there.

Because they're taking a poop or something. They stumble across your stuff.

So Yoast lets you do different ones for each platform.

That's good.

We try to include media when appropriate on our content.

That's video, audio, and images. I mean, every piece of content you'll.

See on our site has multiple photos.

Usually audio is less often these days. And then video, we layer that in. If an article performs well, like if.

It gets a good amount of shares.

Over, I wish I could do like an exact number, but it's kind of.

By feel a little bit.

If an article performs well on social and email, we'll add in a video.

And embed that into the article as well.

Because I think. Well, for a couple reasons. One, because there's no way YouTube is not being rewarded or sorry, there's no way Google is not rewarding people for embedding YouTube videos.

That makes sense.

Engaged.

We get passive YouTube traffic and subscribers from it. And it's just good.

So we do that.

We have recipe schema. And I would encourage anybody listening to.

This who has food content to, if.

They'Re not doing schema, look into this. It's a very technical conversation and I honestly would have a hard time explaining it. But essentially it's code that goes around your recipe content and also other types.

Of content to help Google distinguish what that content is. And by making Google's life easier, Google will reward you.

Are you talking about, like, let's say I go on Google and I search like how to. How to tie a tie. Right. And the very thing, the first thing that pops up is like a little gray box that says, like, step one, do this, step two. And that's like pulled from somebody's website.

Yes, that's the. Those are the search snippets. And that's what schema lets you do. If you don't have schema, Google will never put you up there. If you do have schema, you give yourself the opportunity to be in that position.

Cool.

Got it.

The money spot. Yeah.

Okay.

Social sharing, that's not really. That's after the fact interlinking. So we link to multiple other posts.

That are relevant on our site internally.

We also link out to sources and authoritative websites that are relevant.

This is not. Three other things I would say that are extremely important but not necessarily in the editorial process are making sure your site is secure. That happened in October. I think that Google is all in on SSL certificates now.

So if your site is not HTTPs.

Yet, you should get on that. Secondly, mobile friendly again, that is actually something we check for every time we publish a piece of content because depending.

On the formatting it can look weird.

On a phone, but in general has to be good on mobile. And then site speed, which is more of a holistic thing. As I mentioned earlier, that was a.

Huge part of what we do or sorry, a huge part of our growth traffic.

And so then beyond that, in terms of like the marketing layer that we put over that and also like I'm not going to talk about like how to write a great sentence or a.

Great paragraph or anything like that, but.

You know, charisma takes care of all that. So like by default assume when I'm talking about this that our content is.

Like well written, stellar and all that stuff.

So the other piece of this, where.

Is my note here is the marketing layer.

So here's what we also add in.

To monetize our content.

There's an ad unit at the bottom.

Of every piece of content that's a.

Essentially we have like 25 high converting.

Text links that all rotate into a unit of like four or five of them.

And so that was a custom plugin that we built. So that's below each article that generates a good amount of extra money. Every piece of content has three ads in banners though right now you probably.

Won'T see them because I made a boo boo and we're getting unsuspended due to my incompetence.

Had a tech issue that got us.

In trouble with them that I just.

Missed anyway, but those will be up hopefully by the time this is published. We have a specific relevant call to action at the bottom of every article that I think we do it manually sometimes, but for the most part we've actually built using our tagging in WordPress a system so that call to action.

Graphics get put in. What's it called.

By tag. So I can do it in bulk. Every article has a lead box that is related to the content at hand.

So if it's coconut flour recipe, I've.

Got a coconut flour recipe free report. I guess it's more of like a free cookbook.

Each one of those lead boxes then has a specific thank you page for that lead box and ideally a specific.

Relevant offer on it. Eventually I'll be building out autoresponder sequences around those, but there hasn't been a big priority just yet.

Every article.

I'm like 95% sure this.

Is like 100% implemented, but we're probably.

Still QA ing it is along with.

A custom lead box on each article. I also just started doing a custom pop up on each article.

So instead of it being the Paleo.

Beginner's guide, pop up on every single article on our site. If it is a coconut flour recipe, it's a coconut flour recipe. Pop up. If it is a thyroid article, it's a thyroid.

What is it? Thyroid condition.

And so on and so forth. And then as we were discussing before, the next step for us on this is to start to actually do stuff with pixeling, retargeting and using Facebook traffic.

On that as well, which we have not quite dug into.

We're starting to. I realized the other day that a lot of our boosted content was getting.

Like 3 to 5 cent clicks.

And so you better believe that's a.

Big focus of ours this month so that we can capitalize on it in January.

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean you could totally target any relevant affiliate offers that way or other opt ins with those retargeting.

And we also do a lot with Google search. We actually get way cheaper clicks with Google search ads than we do with Facebook ads. Which is bizarre to me that not more people are talking about Google Ads and Facebook ads are the hot topic for everybody because Google Ads are like where we get all of our cheap.

Clicks from and that is to content.

To content. Yeah.

I think that's like an important point to make to anybody listening in terms of like the why content marketing.

Like, you know, there's all sorts of.

Alternative benefits from this. And I actually want to share something on email marketing with you guys.

That's kind of an important piece too.

And I think, I think a lot.

Of people look at content marketing and they're like, well why not just do.

A sales funnel where I know I'll make money back immediately, right? And because content marketing is a much.

More long term approach and for some.

People that's not good.

For me, I'm a long term guy.

I'm planning on being this in the wild. So building a blog and a platform and an asset brand asset like this was worth it to me.

But also as we were just discussing.

About the running ads to content like.

Two years ago.

Maybe a little Bit more. That probably would not be a conversation we were having. It'd be like running an ad to.

An article like, are you insane?

You know, like, what are you doing? Or actually, I bet there's people listening that, like, we're doing Taboola stuff back then.

And like, actually I was doing that, bro.

But anyway, long story short is that the advertising world and online marketing world.

Gets more and more competitive every week.

And being able to use your content as a tool in advertising gives you a ton of flexibility. So not only does it give me flexibility in that.

I don't have to worry about compliance with Facebook as much in terms of sending people directly to a sales page, that that's like the gold standard.

That's kind of what you're shooting for.

But it's hard because, A, it's hard to get the traffic to convert, but it's also B, you have to write your copy in a way that's totally compliant for Facebook. And so when you're sending people to content instead, it does seem like there's a lot more flexibility. And it's also you get cheaper clicks. As we're talking about, sending traffic to a sales page is not going to do as well on Facebook in terms.

Of like the organic engagement that you get out of that as opposed to other.

So if I do, we have this lower back stretches article that somehow got 131,000 shares on Facebook. And using that as a boosted post.

The amount of organic traction that's getting.

It just kind of piggybacks into the ad itself and gets me more traffic overall as opposed to my sales page. I'm not going to get as many.

People sharing and talking about.

So it's a huge benefit from that among the other things. And each piece of content to me is like an annuity. It's a little investment that like, I.

Hope makes me a dollar to $2 a day.

And, and I hope that I can continue to, you know, I can continue to add an extra dollar or two a day every day and. And then also throughout the year, optimize our content so that dollar becomes like.

$1.50 per article through better marketing practice.

Yeah, so it's interesting. We actually don't look at our ad spend on a, like a per article basis or a per, you know, we look at our whole ad spend in aggregate. Right. We look at the whole ad spend on a month, how many sales we made from that, that ad spend as a whole. We don't look at any one individual ad. We do go in and optimize and the stuff that's getting really crappy cost per clicks and stuff like that will, will phase out. But for the way we do a lot of our, our traffic is cold traffic, pretty much always goes to content. Any sort of cold traffic, the Google search traffic, Facebook ad traffic to cold audiences, that's all going to content, right? And then anything that's an offer, any sort of affiliate promo we're doing, any of our products that we used to sell, our consulting, any of that type of stuff that's purely retargeting. So we use the content to sort of segment people into, you know, what, what the right offer is and then we use just purely retargeting when we're pushing people into offers and that's how we look at it.

I love that strategy and it's something.

That we're definitely getting into. One of the kind of issues that I, or one of the things that I've done kind of, I don't know if it's actually wrong, it just makes my life a little bit more complicated is we cover so many different topics that I have like 25 different lead magnets, for example, on my site. And so I've done this thing where I've over complexified that process, but we'll.

Have to clean that up next year.

But yeah, that's a huge thing I'm.

Definitely interested in because again like it was very easy for us to get 3 to 5 cent clicks to content.

And Facebook traffic is good quality.

So it's just a matter of making that kind of roi.

But you know, again, like, kind of.

Like what you were alluding to too.

Is like, it's also not always about.

Like that day, zero earnings. Right? I mean like you're looking at it over the course of a month and building a real, you know, program with it as opposed to just like a, like just a money making advertisement or something.

It's all about the platform. Like you've, you know, we've used that word multiple times throughout this episode, but it's all about building the platform more so than making the sale right now.

Right, Yeah, I agree. And that's, I think that is going to continue to be the direction that we go. I mean like I, I am fortunate that we have a ad campaign for our dessert cookbook.

Selling our dessert cookbook directly that is profitable and that's been really good. But like.

Essentially it's tenuous. You know, like every day I'm waiting.

For us to get shut down.

But for our content, stuff like that's.

Just Never on my radar. It's not even a concern because it's just that's what Facebook is promoting right now, it seems it's just what people like better.

That makes sense. Yeah. So I guess going back to content management and obviously when you start doing this, it's probably going to be in that whole mix too. But I think I kind of know this answer, but I want to just lay it out here. What kind of tools and processes are using to actually execute things day to day? Writing, content and kind of the whole motions.

Yeah, well, first, first off, it's important that everybody knows that I don't write anything ever. I. We're very much a magazine style and I, I have no part in the.

Content marketing process these days aside from suggesting ideas, adding in the marketing aspects of it. But in terms of the topics and.

Like I made the mistake a few times of like being like, oh, charisma. I don't think I like that idea.

I don't think it's going to do as well.

But we'll give it a shot and then it like crushes. Okay, I'm just gonna shut my mouth.

And let her do her job. Which is usually a good thing to.

Go when you have an A player.

But. So here's how our editorial process works.

So like I mentioned, we have a writer's guide for all of our writers.

Which also includes a food photography guide, which is very specific to us.

But that's an important kind of first step that everybody reads that and gets onboarded properly.

I.

Again, I will not work with somebody who's not willing to actually do.

A little bit of homework there.

The other thing is they sign an agreement. Writers will sign an agreement that says.

That we own the intellectual property that they're creating for us, which is recipe, which gives us the ability to then use it on. What's it called in our own recipe books and stuff.

I find writers and I found most of my team on Pro, Blogger, the job board, or honestly Craigslist or if.

You can find people on popular media site.

And in terms of the tools that.

We use, there's a couple things. Where's my list here?

I'm sure this is a tool answer, but I'm also curious. What do you use to figure out what keywords to go after? Or do you even think about keywords first? Do you just think about the content and then figure out.

I think about keywords. Okay, so just real quick, the tools.

That I use, I'd say we have.

Yoast, like I mentioned, which helps us out significantly. We have Google Webmaster Tools, which is actually, I think Google Search console for a while now.

And then Semrush is the tool that I am in most often because Semrush makes it very easy to find out what keywords you should target.

Right.

Very simple strategy is go put in your competitors, export a spreadsheet of all the keywords they're ranking for, sort that spreadsheet, and then be like, oh, do I have content around this?

Okay, I should probably do that because it's good traffic and I can do.

A better piece of content than this person can.

Our strategy heavily revolves around finding what's.

Working and then doing better versions of that. And I want to be very clear about what I mean when I say that, which is that I'm not going and I'm plagiarizing people's shit.

I'm saying you have a really good.

Article on.

Bone broth, but I'm going.

To do a better one. My article is going to have a video, my article is going to have a better tasting recipe.

My article is going to have more.

Information about bone broth. My article is going to load faster, it's going to be better on people's.

Phones and so on and so forth.

So I have a spreadsheet, basically an inventory where I have a huge like 5000 row list of keywords that we could target and who's currently focused on those keywords. And then when Charisma is doing her editorial planning and meetings and stuff, she'll pull from that list occasionally and also.

Pull from trends and all that sort of stuff.

So we do focus heavily on keywords. However, with recipes especially.

There'S a lot of trendy things that are not SEO focused. So we will definitely layer in content.

That'S more specifically for social media. So like for example, unicorn bars.

I don't think people are searching for unicorn bars, but that's the type of.

Shit that you see all over Facebook when it goes. So we did a recipe like that for example, but it's more on the SEO side.

So in terms of the actual day to day operations. So we use Trello and Slack extensively. The way that we use Trello is.

We have three main boards.

We have the. What's it called, the Post ideas Trello.

Board, which is, if you guys are.

Familiar with Trello, essentially imagine a cork.

Board or a whiteboard with lines drawn.

Down every couple of every foot or.

So for a column. And then each column represents a list of tasks or a list of things. So basically what happens is we have.

A list for each writer that is.

Writing for us and they will come into the post Ideas Trello board and create a new card which is essentially an item in the list, and send.

Charisma their ideas for content for the month. And Charisma will also send them her ideas. They'll discuss what ideas they want to.

Work on and then they'll come to an agreement about what content we're going to publish.

And then.

A new card is made.

On the next Trello board, which is.

Our writer assignments board. So before I jump into that, are you guys following on this one?

Yeah, we actually started using Trello based on your recommendation. So we have been using Trello for our content marketing sort of strategy lately.

I can tell you that Trello is really good for a lot of things. It is the best at editorial management. I don't think there's another tool that.

Does it quite as good as Trello does.

It's been great. I wish my one wish about Trello was, I wish there was some more automation to the things where if like I drag it from this board to this board, just automatically add my checklist in there for what needs to happen while it's on this board. That's my only complaint about it. But other than that, I love it.

Yeah, there's definitely some hacks around that, but every time I tried to do that, I've seen screwed it all up. So I just.

So the second board is a writer assignments board, and that's where you've come to an agreement on the article and now the writer, it's now an assignment for them. And so the same formatting on this board, which is that there is the board and then a list for each writer and under each writer's name is a list of each article that they're currently in the works on. They then will submit the article to the Trello card tag Charisma Editor in chief, and then she'll go and do her edits and stuff. And then eventually they will say, okay, it's good, it's good, let's move it on to getting it ready for publishing.

So we then move that card off the writer assignments board and move it to the content marketing and. Or, sorry, the. The editing and QA board.

And it's funny, you.

It's funny you just said the thing.

Like a templated checklist. And I'm like, holy.

Revamp.

This whole process with checklists.

This QA.

Section, I'm like, shit, I could do.

This in one list as opposed to.

Five Anyway.

Guys, don't listen to me. I'm changing this all tomorrow.

That's cool. I'm actually about to make a video of how I set up our Trello board, and it's going to go on our blog probably next week or something. So I'll send that over to our workflow. Because ours is a modified version of your workflow, basically.

Yeah.

And mine's going to be outdated tomorrow, I think. But anyway. No, not really. So in the editing and QA board, there's a list for. Essentially, this is the board.

It's like an assembly line.

And so there is.

First there is the. Seems like the SEO aspects, making sure.

The title is good, making sure there's.

All the final, like, QA elements, then there is final edits, then there is design aspects and getting all the design elements ready, then putting it into the Ready for Publishing, which is where it gets. Gets the final sign off from Charisma. And then finally it gets put into a Ready for Social promo list where.

Our social media manager comes in and grabs it and then promotes it on Facebook or adds it to her Facebook schedule.

Got it.

And all of this stuff feeds into a master Google Calendar, which is a.

Which is the editorial calendar itself. We used to do that in Trello, but Trello does not do big calendars.

Well, it was just.

Okay, sync it up to Google. Got it.

Yeah, it did sync up fine, but it just. When you go to trello.com and just loads super slow.

Right. That makes sense with three a day, every day, plus other shit that's gone.

Yeah, it's a lot.

Yeah.

I've got two little rabbit holes I still want to go down with you.

Well, I'll be honest, you guys told me that an hour is your limit, but I. I'm telling you guys, keep me. I'll stay here as long as you need me. So.

So let's keep rolling. Let's get these rabbit holes covered.

My daughter actually is singing like in a choir tonight for a Christmas thing, so I do have a hard stop. But I mean, we could probably stretch an extra 20 minutes or so.

I mean, it's all right. That's only gonna hurt her for the rest of her life.

That's all. But we're helping so many people right now. Come on.

Okay, so you mentioned a few minutes ago there was an important point you wanted to make about email, and I don't know if we got to the that point yet, so did you want to touch on that?

No.

No. Okay.

Not a big deal.

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so this is a really important piece of this because I feel like I've talked about this quite a bit.

With direct response marketers and they all.

Kind of come back to me and they are like, this seems like a really roundabout way to make money. They're like, why not just focus on sales funnel stuff? And my answer is usually, well, we also do that.

But there is, aside from like, you.

Know, the adsense money, which in the grand scheme, I mean, I'm not complaining about it, but in the grand scheme of things it's, you know, it's not as high. Like AdSense is a smaller percentage of.

Our income than product stuff by a long shot.

But also.

It'S free money. So I'm not complaining about that. But there is a very specific, very.

Profitable direct response use for our content outside of all the stuff that we talked about.

And again, like the next time we.

Have this conversation, I'll have been digging into Facebook for a couple months and we'll have some more specific direct response stuff there.

But the other way that we make bank from our content is through email marketing. And so the way that it works.

Is.

I don't know what email marketing is like outside of the health space these days because I just followed all of my people.

But one of the things that, you know, you guys I'm sure are aware of is like, you know, if you promote just offer after offer after offer to your list every freaking day, people are just going to be like, leave.

Me the fuck alone. You know, I don't want to hear from you anymore.

And a few years ago you could.

Just do that and it wasn't a big deal. But now there's like, and I mean there was a lot of people a.

Few years ago, but there's even more.

People now doing the same shit. So like imagine you're on 100 different email lists and they're all emailing you the same stuff all the time.

It's always offers like eventually you're just like, fuck this.

So I'm very much, like I said, I'm a long term approach type of person.

And so I would say.

That using content has allowed us to email our list more frequently, make more money from those emails and get less complaints and unsubscribes and still have really high engagement. So our, like I said, our list.

Size is anywhere from 500 to 600,000. We rotate our inactive suppressions on every send.

So like sometimes it'll be more, sometimes it'll be less, but we still are getting anywhere from 18 to 25% open.

Rates on that size of the list.

And unless I'm missing something somewhere, I'm.

Pretty sure that's pretty solid in our world.

Yeah, definitely.

So here's what we do.

Every email we send out, and this is something everybody should do anyway. Every email we send out, we track.

Our subject line performance and email broadcast revenue. So we know what topics get the.

Highest performance, but also the specific subject lines.

And when I promote an offer, I always will have a couple of articles that I've, that I've mailed to my list before that I can use to promote that product. So let me just give a very specific example because I'm getting too vague here.

So here's how it works.

There is an offer called unlock your hip flexors by a guy named Rick.

Casselge, or Castle J as I like to call him. That's not how you pronounce his name.

And it does super well for us. It's one of our higher converting offers.

We provide as an affiliate.

And I can do the solo for that. I can do a solo email promoting.

His product like this month, right? But then I'm probably not going to.

Want to do that again for, I.

Don'T know, at least another month, if not a couple, like two or three months. I'm not going to send that solo out no matter how much it made because eventually people are just like, okay, I heard about it already.

Right?

Now what instead I do is it's.

Funny, I'm talking about it like this. This might not be that mind blowing for some people, but for me, this.

Was like a big thing for us when we figured it out is.

I'll take an article. So I have an article called 13 stretches for tight hips that performs insanely well on social.

And.

So I usually use social, like how it performs on Facebook as a baseline for like, okay, I should try.

This as a lead article in my email because I knew it'll perform well on Facebook, so it'll probably perform well as a subject line.

So I have this article through 13 Stories for Tight Pips and I.

Will use that article as a lead article with the subject line Hip openers. Because I've tested a shit ton of.

Subject lines, but Hip Openers was the one that got me the most clicks.

And so the email will look something like short introduction, like a sentence that says like, if you've got tight hips.

Then today's article is going to make sure to give you some sweet, sweet relief. Make sure to check it out and.

Then there's going to be a link.

To the article below.

Now right below that link is a couple of lines or just a line. And then I put the ad creative for unlock your hip flexors right there. And so essentially what ends up happening on this is that I will make.

Something like, depending on how many times I've done this already, but usually on average it's going to be about 80% of what I made for that solo email. So if I made 10 grand on solo email, I'll likely make 8 grand as a sponsor. That will fluctuate too, depending on how, how tightly relevant the article lead that you're using is like, for example, if I use a dessert recipe and then.

The ad below, it was for the Hit Flexors offer that probably would not convert as well.

So basically like I'm having these articles that are super relevant to the offer using that article content as a subject.

Line to get people who are interested in what that offer is going to.

Be to open that email. Not because there's an offer in there, but because there's content. And then some of those people will.

Definitely click through and read the article. In fact, a shit ton of them will, but then a huge amount of them will also go and read the article or, sorry, read the ad below.

And buy the thing. So we end up, again, we end.

Up making about like 80% or so.

Of what we normally make with the.

Solo, but we also get like 50% or less unsubscribes and complaints on that kind of stuff. Because someone opens up that email and sees that there's, if it's just an ad, they're like, okay, I'm done.

And screw this guy. Like, he's promoting shit to me.

There's a piece of content in there. They're like, oh, you know, they're either interested in the article or they're not. But at least it's like, here's an.

Offering for you of value as opposed.

To like, hey, come buy this thing.

I want you to buy it.

That's pretty damn genius because you're, you're just, you're just opening the net wider for eyeballs to see that ad that they would have never probably clicked in. Now they're just like, they got their trust alone.

Little bit more so in the email, enormously. Yeah, you're linking to the article and then below the article there's actually an ad to an offer as well. So it's sort of a, like you used to be able to mail just to offers. You're still mailing to offers, but you're providing them with a link to content as well, which tends to piss less people off.

Yeah, I still will do affiliate solos, don't get me wrong. But those are much like. Because email deliverability, this is also something that's relevant concept too is like, because email deliverability is getting tougher and tougher, this strategy has allowed us to still make good amount of money without burning.

Our list out and pissing them off. But I still will do affiliate solos, but just only for like stuff that really kicks ass and then, you know, that's about it. But this is great because like when I find a home run offer, I can promote it like seven times.

Or like at least three times as many as I would normally because I'll have.

All these other things promote.

So like I'm looking at right now.

For example, I have a spreadsheet that's color coded. Thank you, Jill.

That's color coded of all of the emails we've sent out and basically like which subject lines did the best in terms of open rates, click rates, and then also revenue. So we can, you know, essentially I can go back and see, okay, this solo did really well, so I should go and. Oh, and this other article that's relevant.

To the solo did really well previously. So I should combine the two or just reuse it or something.

But like, yeah, it's an amazingly effective thing to give you more excuses to email your list. And we email our list every day and this allows us to really do.

That without.

Suppressing response. And again, I think this is a big reason why I think our open.

Rates are still some freaking awesome.

Oh, I love that. I mean, that's something we're going to probably implement starting tomorrow. Literally, like there's no reason not to.

Everyone should.

Yeah, I love that. The other thing that I wanted to touch on before we wrap up here that we haven't really gotten into yet is off page factors. I know you mentioned that you're really big on focusing on the on page factors using Yoast. Actually, quick question, total side topic, but when you use Yoast, do you recommend the upgraded version or is the free version just fine?

I think I bought the paid version just in case.

I forget why, but I recall there was like one thing that I wanted, but for the most part I was like, I feel like with that plugin I was like, why do I need this? And then I was like, you know what, it's probably worth it.

Let's just do it.

I mean, it's freaking badass.

That's what they're banking on probably. It probably doesn't do anything else what's at all. But anyway, so off page factors, you know, you constantly hear people talking about backlinking and you used to. You don't hear this stuff anymore because I don't even know if it's like a thing anymore. But like link pyramids and link wheels and all that kind of shit. Do you focus on any.

I haven't heard that phrase in a while. Last time I used the link wheel I ended up fucking up one of my sites real bad for good.

So everybody should just go buy a whole bunch of Edu backlinks on Fiverr, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

I think the more shitty backlinks you can get, the better off you're going to be. No, I.

Say that.

I'd say like the vast majority of our efforts are on site and that's worked out really well for us. We don't do traditional link building like in theory. I don't know if you guys have ever read the blog backlink of Brian Dean. He's got like the whole skyscraper method which is like create a better piece of content. It's kind of what we do minus the outreach part. So it's like create a better piece of content and then basically email 100.

People that are relevant to get them to link back.

Yep.

I think we could implement that process into our business.

I just. I hate when I get those emails and I just.

I don't know.

I. It's like a task that I could task out pretty easily but I don't do a lot of link building in that traditional sense. We do have really good relate.

We do it in a more like.

Natural way which is like probably really obnoxious to hear for any SEO person listening. But.

We have good relationships with popular blogs in our space that we will guest post or syndicate our content on. So we are able to do for example a guest post on Mark's Daily Apple.

I think we do it once every month or two and that's like a hyper relevant website for us.

The backlinks we get from that are off the charts.

It's amazing. So we focus on kind of like building that sort of thing where I kind of pimp out my writing staff.

And I'll create content for other people.

I don't do the whole like just link to it for the sake of linking to it. It's more like I want to guest post content.

I would imagine that we will improve on that strategy as we start to reach the Upper limits of what on site can do.

I mean, we do get backlinks naturally too, like without doing any outreach because.

We'Re just a large platform and people pay attention to us.

But I think we haven't needed to really make it a strong part of our process. We focused way more on optimizing the on site stuff and I think maybe long term we might add that in more, but more in like the way of like this. I hate, I hate saying it like.

This because it's so fucking pretentious.

But like more doing it the natural.

Way that like Google wants like the.

White hat shit which is like do.

Like a local scholarship for example. That's like real and legit.

It's like a couple grand and it might be related to like agriculture or.

Farming and get, do some press about it and get some attention for us that way. Like stuff like stuff like that kind.

Of like bigger efforts as opposed to the typical, you know, outreach stuff and.

The guest posting thing too.

That's kind of our biggest outreach and that's been really good for us.

Because that gets you traffic too. I mean, not a ton, but it.

Definitely gets us traffic.

And, and then the final thing, I don't know if this is really, I don't think there's any SEO benefit from this. We do get some traffic is we syndicate our content.

So there's a few big sites like Popsugar and stuff that will take our.

Content and repurpose it or basically put it up, put the exact same thing on their site and then give us a link back.

So there you go. That's similar to like what we were talking about earlier with Medium. And you're just targeting sites obviously that have eyeballs with your niche.

Yeah, yeah.

That are just as relevant to our audience as possible. So I mean, similar to what you guys are doing for sure.

Yeah, yeah. And I like the fact that really the focus is on, on page. It's shit that you can control and it's within your grasp. So maybe that's something, I mean, because we've done a lot of more the outside.

Well, we've, we've. Well, I would say our, our approach to SEO has always been that that approach, take the content, put it on other sites and then put a little like, you know, a little blurb on it that says this was originally posted over here with a link back to the original article. That's been pretty much the extent of our backlinking strategy. And I don't even know if it's effective or not. But you Know, for us, we've always followed that similar approach of if you just create good content and then share it in the natural ways you'd share it on social media and our email list and stuff like that, then over time it just, it just ranks, it just happens.

Yeah.

And I mean, let's be very clear too though that it's not just about the quality of content, it's also like the, I don't want to say highly.

Technical because I think that's overstating it.

But it's also very much a technical aspect of it.

Like the stuff we're talking about, the.

Site speed, making it look good on mobile, making the formatting good.

You know what I mean?

There's all this foundational stuff that you.

Need to have, basically.

Long story short is like this.

If my site loads slow, I could have a full fucking backlink from the Google home. Actually, I shouldn't say that. That's probably not true.

I'd imagine if I was on the homepage of Google.

But let's just use that as a hyperbolic example here. If my site doesn't fucking load on your phone or your computer in a prompt period of time, I'll never rank no matter what links I have. So I think it's definitely a quality aspect of the content, length and all that sort of stuff. And it's also the technical side of.

It is making sure it's every accessible and usable for sure.

Cool.

Yeah, and one thing we did too, that seemed to help with our rankings as well is we focused on the amp stuff with Google. The accelerated mobile pages.

There'S a couple plugins that we had to use. I don't know the name off top of my head, but you may know what I'm talking about with the amp stuff.

Well, I know what it is, but we looked into it last year and our SEO guy was kind of like.

Like he was bearish on it because he wasn't certain that Google was going to keep it. But I guess since they've been around.

For a year, it might be worth revisiting. We do Facebook instant articles, which is.

Obviously very similar, though not SEO related at all.

But I'm very curious.

Yeah, I'd be curious to learn more.

About the amp stuff because I bet.

I mean, we're talking about site speed.

Those are the fastest pages I'd be curious to see. That's something we should test on my side for sure.

Yeah. My only downfall with the amp stuff is it kind of wreaks habitat on our Google Analytics because every Single page that loads through AMP is like a different URL domain. Other than that, we do get a lot of traffic to our. When I look in Google Analytics, I can see a lot of the AMP pages are the pages that are ranking.

Yeah, no, I mean that's not surprising to me. I got to tell you guys, I think you could ignore 99% of what I said about SEO and just focus.

On site speed and you'll see the deal move for sure.

That's very sweet. That's great feedback. Yeah.

Well, cool.

Time to do that audit.

Cool.

Well, let's wrap it up, huh?

Oh man. I mean, I'm sure we can. We could probably do a round two if you're up for it, you know.

Yeah, I know you are.

We go way back, so we have a lot of history and there's a lot of shit that we haven't covered.

So you always amaze me with just like the wealth of knowledge you have and you're always applying it in some freaking creative ass way. And now this is the biggest operation I think think I know you've run.

As far as I know, it's the biggest operation I've run too. There you go, man. Every day I'm. Well, first off, I really appreciate that and I would just say like every day is kind of a new adventure.

I've never had a company this big.

Before and so I pretty much am learning something new about how to run this thing properly every day in a.

Various form of a panic attack.

But you know.

Yeah, it's great.

Just play more Ultimate Frisbee and you'll be fine.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I got that. Tonight's Ultimate Frisbee is at 9:20pm, believe it or not.

Oh my God.

I still have more Frisbee to play today, so.

Okay, so we do have like a few little wrap up questions that we ask everybody. Do you have any books that you find you recommend to people? Often, you know, maybe on the topics of SEO or content marketing or just on business in general. Either way, we're always looking for new books.

I would tell you when it comes.

To like the hard skills in digital marketing, books are probably never going to give you that sort of info. Like there's probably no book on SEO that is timely. Right. Because the day it comes out, first off, the book was, it comes out, let's say it comes out January 1st.

That book was finished like in April of that year. It's already out of date.

Yeah. So I would be more like looking at blogs and I would say like the best blogs to read on content marketing and SEO stuff would be Brian Dean's Backlinko. I would say anything on Neil Patel site, quicksprout or neilpatel.com I know Sujin, who is Neil's cousin, is also really good at content marketing. He runs the family, I guess, and.

His site I think is susanpatel.com eventually, eventually when someone asks me this question, I'll have my own place to send them to.

But for now, I'm focused on the paleo world.

In terms of books though, the two.

Books that I would recommend people read.

One is a business book and one is not.

Actually before those, I would say read.

Everything Dan Kennedy's ever written.

Do that first, like you set your head on. Right?

But Traction is a business operations book.

That I love and I know that's kind of a nerdy, boring subject for a lot of people, but there are few books that have mapped out how.

To run a business properly that are.

Actually applicable to a digital marketing operation. Like, in fact, there is no other book like that. Like the E. Myth is about running.

A fucking muffin store and Joanne and her muffins or whatever.

If I have to read another book.

That'S written in parable form like I'll.

Kill myself, that would be the first thing I would recommend. And then another book that I just read that's not business related, but I think everybody should read anyway because I really, I don't get like.

Moved by things very often. But this book, Braving the Wilderness by.

Brene Brown was really fucking good. Like, really good. It's only 167 pages, so you guys.

Anybody can handle it.

But it's about, it's about like. This is another phrasing that I hate to say, but like, it's about like being your authentic self, you know, but like, not by like pretentious Facebook people. Like, by someone who actually like understands the concept. It's fucking good. It's a really good book. It'll make you like, ask a lot.

Of questions about yourself. It's cool.

I am going to get that tonight.

Very cool.

Looking it up right now.

Have you ever read the book Content Inc. By Joe Paloozi?

I have it on my phone as a Kindle book. I know who it is. I have not really Mike's.

As far as content marketing goes, that's probably one of the better books I've read as far as just sort of a good go to. Like, you can flip open that book, flip to any chapter and kind of get an idea of something to test.

Yeah. My impression was that it is a really good starting point.

Yeah, I thought it was good. I think I ended up not reading it too much because.

Because of what I was saying before is like, I was like, oh, I know this book is like multiple years old, so I bet you he has some stuff in there I usually like. Instead of reading the book, I just.

Would go to the guy's blog.

Makes sense. And if you ever want to write about content marketing or SEO or any of those topics, you're always welcome to write for the Evergreen Profits Blog.

If you don't have an outlet, you know, we can be that outlet for you. That's cool.

Yeah, we can definitely talk about that. That's my guest posting strategy.

There you go.

Very cool.

All right, man.

Well, where do you want to send people after listening to this? Where's the best place to connect with you? Obviously, everybody should check out Paleo hacks if that's a topic that really interests you. But is there a place where, you know, you connect with people?

Facebook, I guess. Yeah. I really wanted to get the domain daverants.com because that's all I do.

I like your rants.

Your rants are awesome, though. I think I've liked every single rant you post.

So I was like, I was looking it up last night, but someone already.

Owns daverance.com and he has like, these weird.

He has like, a really long post about the gender wage gap. And I was like, I can't. I can't buy this domain from this guy because people are going to look and be like, wow, Dave really hates women.

Oh, geez.

I had to find a new domain.

What about David Rants or Cynic Rants?

Cynic Rants.

That's not bad.

Doubt anyone has that.

Yeah, I'll come up with something.

All right, cool.

Buy it before we publish.

Yeah, Very cool.

All righty, man. Well, thank you so much. This was a. This is like a masterclass of content.

Oh, yeah. No, I'm going to call this episode, like, the playbook of content marketing and SEO or something like that, because this was like, we covered a lot of ground.

I'm glad. Like I said, guys, I'm incapable of doing this in a short process.

I should probably have a disclaimer at.

The beginning of anytime I get interested.

Read or something of like, this is not going to be, like, five tips for whatever.

It's going to be like.

I'm going to literally tell you everything I know.

Until you make me stop. Like, there's no Reason for me not.

To share this, like, that's true.

I could give you. I could actually give someone, and I'm not going to do it, but I could actually give someone all of like our proprietary data.

And I still don't think people could compete with us.

Dude, I love, I just love the business model that in the mindset you have as a company to just do better work and just be better. And if I think, if anyone just approaches business in that fashion, not even just content, but business, I mean, there's so much data out there, you could see what works already, figure out how to do it better or different, whatever it might be.

And can I just say a cliche?

Yes.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day, right?

If I'm going to fucking do something, I'm going to do that shit, right? And I'm going to. I'm going to do it the best I can possibly do it. Because I just don't see the point in half assing stuff. And I don't think it benefits me. I don't think it benefits this audience that we have. Like, I'm trying to do shit the best possible way. And like, you know, I'm always looking at competition from like the really big players in the space. Not like my direct competition, but like.

The people that are a couple tiers up. And that's something I would suggest to anybody too.

Like, go for the fucking gold, you know, shoot for the moon. Whatever other metaphor you want to use there, like, it's. We're all gonna. The day is gonna go by anyway, so you might as well do it.

Yeah, I think everybody should have more of the, you know, let's do this. Best approach. Oh, yeah.

Love it.

Go back.

You're a very generous person and very generous with your time and your knowledge. So we really appreciate it.

Thank you, Mr. Sinek.

Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.

Thank you, man. We'll talk soon. All right, thank you.

And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learned there. The second thing is to go to iTunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes, and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.