Nate Broughton — How To Get Millions Of Visitors With SEO

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flow chart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. Good morning.

It's not morning. I know.

It's actually kind of, well, recording this like it's dark outside. Dark and rainy.

Dark and rainy in San Diego. Why the hell is that a thing? That should not be a thing.

It should not. Well, it does get dark in San Diego, just not typically rainy that I was living on the beach with, you.

Know, in the sun all day. Yeah, no, it's been very.

Well, there are parts of Alaska right. Where the sun never goes down during, I think, the summer.

I don't know. But yes, I think Alaska definitely. Russia probably experiences that too.

Probably the more north you get, the more you experience Norway.

Sweden, probably. Yeah.

Some places the sun just doesn't go down parts of the year. So if you. If you wanted to not get dark, move there.

Well, if you want to stay away from vampires, move there too.

Well, for part of the year.

For part of the year, yeah. Well, yeah, get the hell out of there. If not, when it gets dark, run.

The other part of the year. It's dark all year round.

Vampires everywhere. It's insane.

That's the worst time to be around vampires.

Horrible. Well, totally not related to vampires. Nate brought and we're talking to him today. Perfect segue. I know you love that Nate.

Dude is a. He actually emailed us after this and he was like, hope, that was amazing. I can nerd out on SEO all.

Damn day and nerd out on SEO. We did.

We done did.

We done did.

Don't worry, it's not. We're not really nerds. I mean, we are, but we like to say we're some of those cool nerds.

Yeah, we're just nerds.

We're not really that cool. We just really try to keep up that image. But yeah, Nate is a total badass. He is a business partner of Nate or of Nate. Jesus Christ. Dana Robinson, who is also on the podcast, and they co run something called Opt Out Life, which Matt is promoting on his T shirt right now, and he claims that he did not plan this.

Yes, I'm wearing an Opt Out Life T shirt.

Calling BS on that. I think he's a fanboy.

Opt Out Life is their podcast. It is a membership they run and then they actually put on local events here in San Diego where they round up local entrepreneurs under that Opt out brand.

Correct.

It's really, really good shit.

And Nate is this mastermind, so they're a pretty sweet duo. If you want to learn all about Dana, go check it out. He's a previous podcast a couple months ago, but Nate is just ninja SEO. Just that's his thing. So he's looking for all these gaps in the market and that's what we talk about. What's happening 2019 with SEO. Yep.

Yep.

So I think that's it. And you know what? I'm gonna give another shout out because we did this, you know, the previous episode to Jen M. Again, Nate is. Matt rolls his eyes. For some reason, I'm rolling my eyes.

Cause I don't know what order these episodes are being released in. So by saying your previous episode, it may not actually have been the previous episode.

Well, you know what, make it happen, Matt. Okay. No, but Nate, you'll hear in this conversation, and this is something that we are looking to optimize in our own business is to grow kind of a staff of writers and folks to help us out to create more content, but more in depth content as well. You'll learn. Obviously, SEO loves this Google, they love deep rich content. So one place you could do that, and this is something that, that we have used a lot of folks on GenM. But go to GenM and you can get some folks that are actually interested in doing this stuff in the marketing space.

Evergreenprofits.com GenM gets you actually 10 bucks off because we had Mo Abbas, the founder of GenM on our show and he hooked up listeners of our show with 10 bucks off. So evergreenprofits.com genm and again, that link is evergreenprofits.com genm, and now talking about.

Links, let's go talk to Nate about links and SEO and SEO stuff and all that fun stuff.

This is a nerdy but fun SEO conversation.

These nerds like to make money. So let's go make some money. Nate, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

What's up, guys? Good to be here.

What's happening? Another San Diego guy dealing with weird San Diego weather. This doesn't feel like San Diego these days.

Yeah, man. So thanks for being on the show. We had your partner Dana on. Dana Robinson. For those who haven't listened. Go listen after this one though. Yeah. You and Dana, what you have Opt out life, the podcast, this whole training thing. What are you guys doing together? I'm just like, I don't know all the gamut of what you guys do.

Well, I mean, these days, Opt Out Life's kind of the brand we've adopted, but we've been friends for about 10 years. And we've put on events here and there in San Diego for like minded folks like us and like you guys, entrepreneurs, investors, people doing what today we call the opt out life. But from doing that over the years, just kind of socially and just kind of for fun and not really charging for it or having any plan for kind of led up to the opt out life. When Dana published his book last year called Opt out, which he wrote after having a midlife crisis and going to Bali and selling all of his stuff. And I liked the story and the name and I was like, let's adopt that brand. So we've turned that into a podcast of our own, like you mentioned, where we interview people and tell their opt out life story. Kind of four hour work weeky. But people have taken an alternative path to life and income. It's been fun and we're slowly building community around it. You know, podcast listeners, subscribers obviously, but email list and Facebook group. And now we do kind of have kind of a paid membership where we're interacting on a weekly basis where we got some coursework, but also more just one on one coaching and helping people either grow their business or launch business. Love it.

Sweet. And I'm actually wearing my opt out shirt today by coincidence.

Fanboy fan. Yeah, Matt was. Matt claims that he did not do this on purpose.

I don't. I never. I actually never pick out my clothes on purpose. It's literally always the top of the pile is what goes on.

Very methodical. Very methodical.

I feel honored. I'm honored.

It's just the universe. It's meant to be, Nate.

Yeah.

So how the hell did you get into business for yourself? Like what's your story? Because I honestly, I know you've done a lot. I don't know your history or. Yeah, I know you're from St. Louis. I think that's about all I know.

I just learned just now from you saying it.

So I think I'm right on that.

Right? Yeah.

Correct.

That is right. Yeah.

My deep research, I don't know if.

You could even find that on a cursory Google search. That might be hard.

That is from my brain, my friend.

Take us back, man. Because Matt and I, yeah, we've been to your events, the opt out life one you had last year. We've been to yours and Dana's freaking house parties where you just take over mansions in San Diego and everybody just smokes cigars and drinks whiskey. It's amazing. But yeah, where do you start in this whole crazy journey it started when.

I was in college. So when I was a freshman, probably the first couple weeks, I was a little bit bored with all the free time I had after class. And I never really thought about being an entrepreneur before that. And that's not necessarily where the entrepreneurial bug bit, but it's where it started because I found a job in the school paper working for a company that turned out to be a online ticket broker. And so they sold tickets online, you know, much like StubHub today. But back in the day that was a bit more of a mom and pop. Not just because the. Well, I guess primarily because the Internet was in its infancy. So this was 2001 and a couple of younger guys in their 20s had figured that out in my college town that they could sell those tickets online and not just be standing outside the football stadium slinging tickets with all the people that might picked up by the cops. So they learned Internet marketing as a vehicle to sell those tickets. And I got caught up with them pretty early. So they were still working out of their house, kind of bedroom style, basement style.

Nice.

And I learned SEO there. It's kind of before paid traffic, it was much of a vehicle or a thing, but SEO was in and around. And Google had enough. Google was the place to do it. And we generated a ton of sales through people just searching for anything and everything. So there was an inventory you could tap into that was a shared inventory of all the ticket brokers that had formed like an association so we could sell super bowl tickets and New York Rangers tickets or LA Dodgers tickets, even if we didn't have them necessarily in our midst in house. So we took that opportunity and just marketed the hell out of all events, concerts, sports, season tickets, whatever. And that's where I learned SEO. And I got caught on it pretty early, obviously as a skill set and saw the power of it and saw what these younger guys were doing building a business and fell in love with not only the power of the Internet, but also just the culture that they were able to build around that. You can imagine a bunch of 20 somethings hanging out in a house and then eventually an office. I mean, it was a pretty fun place to be and really became kind of my college social life and education. And that's where it all started.

That's like the best way to spend college. It seems like usually it's just like, feels like a waste of time or a blur. Yeah, that's rad. So you learned. So that's how you got into the SEO game. So what did you do after that? Because I definitely didn't know you during that age.

Well, those guys, by the time I was a senior, they sold the company. There was some VC money coming in. I mean eBay acquired StubHub or I don't know what, and then TicketsNow acquired a bunch of people and got bought by Ticketmaster. So that world was maturing. And I don't. I think they knew that they probably couldn't compete. And also just the regulations and laws around it are a little sticky. Never quite really know what's going on. So they got out at the right time. And when they sold that business and it was a good sized business, I mean we did 22 million in revenue in 2004 and they sold it in 05. And we had already started some other stuff on the side. I mean it's kind of typical Internet entrepreneur story now where it's like we can spin up websites for just about anything we want. Let's play around in real estate and mortgages and vacation rentals and a bunch of other things that I probably forgot. But a couple of those stuck and they were nice enough to kind of fund a business with me. I worked for them pretty cheap as a youngster in school, learned a lot and they were like, let's keep you and your team together and we'll kind of go 5050 and on a marketing company and incubator and build some sites. And we got pretty deep into mortgages. They actually started a mortgage company next door as we realized we could generate leads. So we were generating leads by the tens of thousands, mostly via SEO and selling those off to the big banks, some of which are now defunct because this is pre mortgage crisis and then also to ourselves. So we just send them next door. And that fuel really led to a pretty big fire growing over there on that side of the wall. And that mortgage company got to be pretty big. And eventually like fast forward several years that turned into a gigantic mortgage bank that specialized in government backed home loans, VA FHA program loans. And that was really my next big entrepreneurial thing. We started a few other sites and sold them off and had a vacation rentals network that we sold. But the mortgage company really took off and was a really cool learning experience on a whole other level because it grew to 50 million, 100 million in revenue and we had hundreds of employees. And I kind of got to sit on the board and see that rise into another level of a size of company and was a nice feather in my cap as well because it led to me being Able to exit out of that business and then go on to the next thing, which is apply the same tactics and some capital that I had now had access to to a few other endeavors.

That's a hell of a way to learn right there. Through all that, latch onto the SEO thing and then you just frickin direct it as you wish. It's just, you're in the right place.

What was a mortgage lead worth, just out of Curiosity?

Probably like 15 bucks, 20 bucks. And then pretty quickly into the 40 to $50 range before AdWords really took off. And as it was taking off, that drove up costs over time, just because click costs drove up and there are more competitors. But when you're just getting organic SEO mortgage leads and there wasn't much of a maturity or trust in a mortgage lead, we were in that kind of, I remember selling them for 12 bucks, 15 bucks.

So how were you like, what did these landing pages look like that you were driving traffic to? Because you know, Google obviously, I mean back in the day it could have been totally different, but they seem to kind of favor more content than like landing pages. Were you actually ranking landing pages where you were collecting the, you know, the name, email, phone number, that kind of stuff, or were you actually driving people to content through SEO?

Primarily to content. I mean, not the long, deep stuff that you'd expect today, but 500 words, 800 words, some FAQs, you know, pages like that spread around the site would, would rank and drive most of the traffic. And then we would just stick kind of like short forms in the sidebar sort of thing, kind of click, you know, name, phone, click to step two, complete on, complete on that page. And I mean most people were on desktop, they weren't as used to quick, sexy forms or even being prompted by them. So, so it worked decently. I think the conversion rates were probably still got on a, on a long form content page, 6, 7% and I mean sometimes 10, 12% even.

Wow.

Not bad.

Not bad at all.

Yeah, no, I'm kind of curious just like what, what SEO looked like back then. Like what did you, what were you doing to, to rank the sites back then? And you know what, what worked then? If you're, you know, you were so successful with this, you're able to kind of knock a whole bunch of these, these types of businesses out. You must have had sort of a routine or strategy that you kind of worked each one of these through.

Yeah, of course, it's a great question because it was different back then than it is now. But you kind of got to always have that playbook that's working and evolving. But back then it was, I mean, it was still content. I mean, keyword rich content on a. You know, if you're going to talk about VA loan refinances, that's what the page title needed to roughly. And that's what the URL needed to be roughly. And you had to write 500 to 700 words about VA loan refinances and then you had to buy a shit ton of links.

That was the game whether you're buying them or earning them or I don't really care what you want to call it. But for mostly us, it was a volume play with link buying. So we set up a department of outreach, you know, offshore and here in the US for follow up and would just really scale up what is now. I mean, it's been kind of abused and it's probably not even a common practice. But finding email addresses of related sites and blasting them out, negotiating deals and paying them anywhere from five bucks a month to, you know, 1,000 bucks a month to host links in their sidebar on a dedicated page that we created, I mean, something like that. And it was totally a volume play where we had. We were probably spending half a million dollars a year on just links.

That's funny. It's funny because Joe and our first business model, when we first got into business together in 2007, we were actually creating these blogs. We were trying to get them to rank for keywords and then we were actually selling links on the blog. That was actually how we monetized the blog was we were allowing people who were trying to do SEO to come to us and buy links on our website.

Text link ads. Yeah. So that was one of our first monetization efforts.

Yeah, I don't think those services are really around as much anymore. I think it's a little more frowned upon by Google.

What are some of the big differences now? I know like you said, more of this journey, but if you compare now what are. Unless maybe this is a deeper dive that we wait until later in the conversation. But SEO, what are some of the big things you should be nailing now? Obviously title tags are still super important.

Yeah, I think kind of, as I mentioned, it still has to be one focus topic is what you're writing about and that's in the URL and that's in the title. And I think now so much more. It's about content planning, content depth, content outlines, content briefs, whatever you want to call it when we are trying to rank sites these days. We're writing several thousand words and we're being very prudent about the order and the questions that we address as we kind of create like the, a lot of it would be like back in the day we just, we would write whatever it took to get 500 words about a topic. Today we want to write the ultimate guide to that keyword or topic for every single page that we create. And Google seems to really like that. And there's tools that are built around finding out what all those things are. So you can't just talk about VA loan refinances. You have to talk about rates and the history of the program and how long it takes to get your application in and processed and what the different types of refinances are that you can do and cash out refinances. And on down the list there's probably 10 or 15 FAQs that probably used to live on a separate page or were just not something that you would write in depth about. Google really seems like that stuff. And so I think it's put the onus on the site creators to not just hire an overseas person to write 500 words. You have to think it out, plan it out, show you the authority, demonstrate that with long form content and spend just a lot more time on the content creation versus the link buying and building. It probably used to be 10% of expense and time on content. Now it's 90% versus what it used to be.

So let's start with on page optimization. What's the 80, 20 people should be concerned about with like on page optimization?

I mean when I think about that, I think it's simpler than people can make it out to be. Or maybe they just half ass it. I don't know if I'm building a site from scratch. I have a nice clean site structure that's like putting things in a couple of buckets in the navigation with kind of hover over navigations that drop down. And then you see like how to do this FAQ question. This if it's a. If it's a site that covers different states, like I was just working on a divorce website and divorce is obviously different state by state. You've got kind of a state section and then state pages for each one. And then the URLs for those things should just be simply California main, not some long drawn out thing buried in some other folder. And then as you go on down the site and on site or on page stuff itself, it's H2 tags with, you know, titles and subheadings. Those questions that we were talking about, pulling in those different topics that you have to address. I like nice clean code with long form content with H2 tags and then related links on the sidebar, like interlinking the five most related topics that you're writing about or that you have on your site that address whatever the finance side of divorce in California, you'd want to link to that from the sidebar. And that's really not that complicated. I think sometimes there are competing forces that make you not do that. Whether it's like the CMS you're using or the template that you pulled off of WordPress, or you're working on some sort of conversion optimization thing and not worrying as much about the content itself. Like, I think the more a site, when you view the code, looks like a word doc that's just a long form guy that you would have bought on red on the topic, the better. And that seems to work a lot for me in ranking sites.

That's cool. Now, when you. With the actual content itself, are you going and writing the content? Because I imagine you're probably working in a handful of niches that you're not that super knowledgeable in. So do you write the content yourself and do research when you do this stuff for these kinds of sites, or are you going and hiring writers?

Hiring writers, for sure, I don't write any of it. I know enough about the topics to create the outlines. Obviously there's a bit of science to that where you could probably do that without even knowing what the topic is at all. It's almost like use the tools and intuit what some of the questions and related things are. Like, I could probably do it about car parts or something, and I don't know anything about car parts. But then, yeah, it's just aggregating writers that over the course of 15 years, I've run into a bunch of freelance writers for a bunch of different projects and just hiring them, vetting them out, and then kind of having them on, on staff or kind of on call to crank this stuff out.

I don't know if you guys saw it, but there was some AI demonstration of writing an article, like a news article that was released on some big publication the other day, and it was like freakishly perfect and it was pulling in different sources. Like all that stuff you said, Nate, that you're like, okay, we got to grab in some interest rates and all these other things and did that just AI. I'm like, holy crap.

I don't know how that's going to affect.

Tell me where to sign up.

That's crazy.

Exactly. Well, that's what's amazing.

Do you have any specific resources that you can recommend where people might be able to go and find some quality writers or how do you vet out writers?

I don't have as much on the writer side as far as tools and resources. As far as tools and resources to do the content planning and the outlines, I got a handful of those that we can address. But writers, we found them everywhere. I found them via college job boards, I found them on freelance sites, I found them on Craigslist. I mean, I think the last batch we've gotten in the last couple years have been mostly on Craigslist. Honestly. I know that just becomes a pain of vetting and going back and forth and it's not easy. You have to just assign them something and get it back. But just like anything else in business or life, you just kind of got to go through some of that pain. And I think that if you can get a direct relationship with a writer like that, like we've got some that are local to Southern California that are former journalists, I think everybody can come around to the idea that there's a lot of those folks sitting around looking for work and have a good, direct one to one relationship with them. Your rates are going to be a little bit better, the quality is going to be a little bit better. And that's where we've really found success and some scale because we found a few people who have been excited to have their cousins and nephews and relatives and other people they know right too. And then our contact kind of helps edit and corral. That's pretty cool.

So what are some of those resources and tools you said you kind of go to for your content planning?

One of them is more of an enterprise tool, I guess. It's kind of enterprise light, I would say, meaning it's a little expensive. But Market Muse is one and I did a webinar with them recently, kind of walking through kind of how I use the tool and how it's working so well. But a friend of mine is co founder of that business and it is a great content planning tool where you can plug in a keyword and then get a lot of competitor analysis. Basically they have their own Google algorithm and so many words to go out and analyze. The top 10, the top 20. It give you a lot of red, green, blue on what keyword topics are being covered by each one and kind of a grid you can Kind of start to see where gaps might be in between the keywords that you definitely want to touch on or the questions you want to touch on and those that are maybe being missed by some of those in the top five or 10 or 20 that you want to target. So you can build content briefs using that tool and that concept. Hopefully it's kind of being painted as I explain it. And that tool also does a lot of side by side analysis. So once you do write content, it can give you a content score based on their algorithm, compare it to some competitors, and then you can kind of identify areas or topics you could add to it to kind of beef up your score. And it's a pretty good test of where your content's going to rank, all things considered. If you're going to put it on a site that has some history and is doing links and all the other things. I found it very useful to aggregate a bunch of the work you'd have to do otherwise using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, free tools like answerthepublic.com I mean these are great tools, but there's a little bit more legwork in creating keyword lists and backlink lists and competitor lists and exporting everything and trying to find piece that all together into a content outline for a topic.

Yeah, we use hrefs. We use $200 a month or something.

The plan we're on I think 179amonth or something. What is something like Market Muse cost?

I think it's around 1000 bucks a month. They have a couple different plans and they have like an agency level, but I think that's where it's at.

Gotcha.

And that you can kind of anything you can do with like Ahrefs and stuff that would kind of replace it. Or would you use both of them?

I still use both. I mean I use all of them. Honestly, it's nice to have different sets of data and Market Muse doesn't have some of the reporting and kind of the robust stuff you can do from on a keyword level. It's more of a content planning tool then tracking campaigns and rankings over time. And I still go to Semrush or Ahrefs for a quick competitor analysis when I'm just playing around. And when it's time to sit down and actually map something out, I'll lean a little bit more on a Market Muse.

Cool. Got it. Yeah, that's usually our like just to look for some gaps for some content or some very specific thing. Ahrefs With a little. Was it Content Explorer? I think it's what it's called. On top of something like that. Yeah. Or competitor analysis, like you said.

Cool. So anything else on. So we have like writers. I know people get intimidated not to really bring on the writer, but to take their voice or write with their voice or their structure that kind of works. Can you shine a light on maybe a good common structure that you guys use for your content that also kind of serves a purpose to bring them in almost. Maybe it's like advertorial stuff.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the stuff we create today that I use those writers for is I try to keep it a little voiceless in that I'm usually using it to create like the meat and bones of a site, whether it's a service site or even maybe a product site. But most my stuff is services. And I was just talking to a writer about this yesterday where it's like, you're writing too much like a journalist. I need this to be like a textbook that is very plain and simple. And we've kind of geared more towards writers that can do that. And then if you're doing something more like a blog or something through social, I can certainly understand where that stuff comes in, like voice and matching it and who you are. But I also believe that if you're building a site out early on or even if you have a site, you're actually going to make a push, concerted push towards more organic traffic. You can try to write pretty bland, write for Google and worry about finding a voice later when you have a bunch of traffic. I don't think that much about voice early on. I actually had this conversation also this week with some partners where they're like, we need to worry about how this is being perceived if you're a user and what the voice is. And I'm like, it doesn't fucking matter. Because all that matters is we have long content that ranks and when we rank, I promise I'll come back and figure out the voice wrapped around this stuff that we need to do to get there.

Now, in the content that you create, are you trying to like, do you have calls to action? Is there any persuasion in it where you're trying to sell them something, or is this just content that you're trying to rank and then hoping they take an action like in the sidebar or something?

Yeah, usually that's our approach, is we'll go back through and add like, you know, many opt in forms every x hundred number of words on certain Content pages and stuff on the sidebar bar. And you can always go back through too and pretty easily jam that stuff in, I think, I don't know, I think it's a little bit harder to worry about that. Kind of in the same vein when you're just building a site from scratch or adding a bunch of content. I worry about that later.

Gotcha.

Got it. I like the approach of just build what you know that Google wants to see first just to get some momentum going. And then it's almost like you can like cherry pick the ones that are sending the most traffic to you, bringing you the best results and then maybe modify as needed, new call to actions, links, voice, if you really want to.

Yeah, yeah, I think that works. I mean that can't work for every single site and every type of business idea, but for just about everything I've done or is popping up in my head as examples, you can apply that somehow to drive meaningful traffic and have that type of content being built for sure in that way.

Got it.

And then so what sort of like off site stuff are you doing? Are you still going and buying links to get the links back to the site or do you have any tips or strategies there?

Yeah, we're doing a little bit of that. I mean it's certainly not the text link ads, the sidebar widget stuff anymore. There are networks that you can plug into to get access to. What that evolved to. And it's been this way for a while as you probably know, is more like article links, guest posts, editorially, including links in sites that actually do get traffic and are read. So I think there are still some connections for that ones that I have just from being around for a while. And also straight up vendors that are worthwhile to go to and see what their publisher menu is. I can kind of just cherry pick through and pick out sites that are ones that haven't been use too much or actually have a few good metrics. And I think it is important for any site that wants to build up some SEO value and organic traffic to get those types of links. You just kind of make that a piece of the strategy and we'll do that. We'll also do outreach like old school stuff to get, I call them resource links, whether that's from libraries or associations or scholarships with colleges. I think that's all part of a good link profile as well. So all that stuff still goes on. It's just at a way lower scale than back in the day. I think as Google's kind of crushed the Volume, game of it and also dissuaded a lot of people from kind of going out and doing it. But we'll totally have like if we're jumping into what's a good example, like I have a fertility site, we're jumping into fertility. We'll go out and find all the fertility associations and related things for pregnancy and we'll build some content specifically towards them on the site. Kind of resource style calculators, tools, do manual outreach to try to get on old school link pages or maybe get a write up on one of those sites. And that's cool, that's not trying to game anything, I don't think in the way that Google's truly trying to punish anything. And that's an important piece.

Yeah, I guess if you're enhancing content and somehow giving more value within maybe a post that you want to get updated with something for you, a quote of yours or a brand new dimension and link back. We've definitely done that before and it works almost like the outreach approach.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Now when you get into these various niches like fertility and mortgage banking and stuff like that, how do you find these people? How do you decide which one to go explore next?

I don't know. I go to dinner with people like you guys and. And then someone says something and we're like, yeah, that's a good idea.

It has to be generated from somewhere like that. But then I think evaluating it is you go and look at the competition, the search volume, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean you've got to obviously assume that you can monetize the niche before you start building out the content. So you're going and finding companies and going, cool, I can send these guys leads. I found somebody I can sell leads to. And then you go and build a site or do you go build a site and then go find people to sell the leads that the site generates.

To A little bit of both. I mean it's certainly like one of the other sites I built recently was eligibility.com which is a kind of a derivative of the mortgage stuff because we were doing government backed loans and I knew that there were components of that. You think of it as like a top of the funnel eligibility for anything in the universe. Well, being eligible for a home loan is certainly one that gets search traffic and there's people that will buy those leads. Being eligible for Social Security disability, which is a government program that typically requires you hire an attorney to go through the process. Attorneys are going to buy leads and there's A mature market for that. And then there's all kinds of other ones that it's like, yeah, you know, I know there's a professional service provider behind this. Maybe it's not as mature of a industry, so to speak, as mortgages or certain types of attorneys. Meaning that there's not affiliate programs for it. And it's not people you see advertising@LeadsCon, but you can understand that there's people bidding on those keywords already and having landing pages looking for phone calls or lead submissions. You see that sort of stuff. That's probably enough to say that's going to be worthwhile.

I like it.

Gotcha.

Yeah, I'm just thinking because we take a big heavy affiliate approach with everything we do selling other people's stuff. Sounds like you just being mainly leads.

I was gonna say our business models are pretty much kind of the same business model.

Right.

Sounds like you sell the leads where we go for the, you know, affiliate referral. But kind of the same business model. We, we lean pretty heavily on, on ppc, you know, Google search ads and Facebook retargeting ads and things like that. But we also are trying to put more and more effort into SEO as well. So.

You know, what we've actually found is that when we run Google Ads, like Google search ads, that actually helps with our SEO as well. It's almost like telling Google, hey, here's something relevant to put in front of people. And if people click on our Google Ads and they stick long time and we get high sort of quality scores on Google, we do notice that the actual article organically starts to climb the ranks a little bit too. Have you experimented with anything like that?

I haven't done many direct experiments with that, but I've heard that and I'm not surprised because there's no reason to believe that they're not using some of that data in the way you've just described it. So I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean they're doing so much more today with organic results from click through rates and time on site and user experience. They've got access to all that data. Might as well throw it all in the same pool. So that's interesting to hear another example of that work.

Yeah, that's what we noticed. We're like, huh, this is kind of cool. It's now all of our paid efforts. Totally. Just like SEO is just a kicker. So it's just free traffic from there. Now you're showing up twice, maybe on the same page. Yeah, even better.

Now, is there anything that we're not bringing up or not thinking about when it comes to driving SEO traffic for the purpose of either generating leads or making sales of affiliate products. I feel like it's kind of a big topic and we're kind of touching on the content and the SEO, but I'm wondering if there's like anything, something we're missing. Yeah, if there's like a missing piece to the puzzle that, you know, if, if somebody listening to this was to try to go test some of this kind of stuff, like might be left out.

Not in my playbook. I mean that's all it is. It's content and link building and a clean site structure and you know, and it's. I think that maybe the thing we're missing is the stick to itiveness that it requires and the patience, whether that's with budget time or both. I think a lot of people get frustrated with SEO because it takes time and it goes. Some sites go way faster and way better than others and not always direct monetization happening in month two. If you're kind of building towards something and especially if you come from the world or know about the opportunities with paid traffic, flip it on today. Get users, figure out what you can do with them. I can see why that's appealing. So SEO can take a back burner or have a bad taste in some people's mouth because it's more like just going to the gym every day and maybe not seeing the results.

Yeah. Well, even the Google search ads, it's an amazing keyword research tool because you can actually split test different headlines and things like that. So let's say we're driving PPC traffic to an article. I can test three different headlines for that Google Ad, see what headline gets the best click through rate, the longest time on site, things like that. And then the actual article that I was driving that ad to, I can go rename that article to whatever got the best click through rate and optimize for click through rates, which impacts the SEO as well. So I feel like there's a lot of benefits to sort of cross breeding your PPC search traffic with SEO.

I like that because that's like you can almost go back and just split test and update your posts themselves. I don't know if that's even a thing. I've never heard anybody doing that split testing their Google ranking titles.

Is there a certain amount of time that you're kind of shooting for with SEO as far as how long it takes to rank? Do you typically see something takes Six weeks or two months. I know it could be all over the place and it's dependent on the competition and all sorts of things. But. But is there kind of like a benchmark you're shooting for?

I guess there is and it's probably project specific because the qualifier you just gave. But starting something from scratch. I'd like to see some of the easier keywords in three months, six months. I think every site builds like a year project. I've had some that have really taken off in year one, but most of the ones I built even in the last couple years. I mean year two is where you really start to see the big hockey stick going north east from a couple thousand uniques. Now we're 30,000, now we're 60,000, now we're 100. If you're going after stuff that has that potential, it's definitely a 9 month, 12 month sort of thing.

Yeah, I think that's probably like the hardest thing for people to wrap their heads around is just knowing that the work we do now, the seeds we're planting now, we're not going to be able to harvest them for a year.

Nate, have you ever done, have you purchased previous domains that have some authority.

Rather than building something from scratch?

Yeah, not as much recently, but a couple examples from the past with that our vacation rentals business I mentioned we bought lakerentals.com and coastrentals.com and they were existing websites that some old man owned in Wisconsin or something like that. There's a lot of leaks. Pretty quickly able to change 301 a bunch of the old pages, kind of create our own kind of clean folders and a bunch of new content. Then you got a 60 day turnaround to see some real results. I've also done the whole buy an old existing site, 301 it to a different one and within two weeks you've got a top five ranking on a new URL. That game can probably still be played. I think I saw someone doing it this week I was kind of digging in on. So there's still some things that you can leverage like that if you find the right thing. I think it needs to be like we did. That one that we did was in and around web design, web designers. This was like 0607 it was ranking top 5 or 10 for those two keywords and it was just a generic regional site and we bought it and 301 it to a sexy web design company name and built out a bunch of new pages. But we held onto those top tail keyword rankings and built out a bunch of other ones so it was relevant and had some age and it worked.

That makes sense. I'm sure there's a lot of them out there that are just sitting on Flippa or some other, I don't know.

Site that'd be the place to look.

I'm just thinking out loud because we might be able to get some free advice right now about something.

Go ahead.

I was going to say, so we've got a site in the health space that we built back in 2007.

Right?

Right. So we built, we built all of this content in like this health blog and it was built up over like two or three years. There's probably like maybe a thousand articles on the site by now and we've never done anything with it. And it gets like probably 50,000 visitors a month. And all we ever did was like throw some adsense on it and go, all right, let's see if we can make some money off this AdSense. And it's still live to this day. Getting that kind of traffic. Is it really getting that traffic? Yeah.

And God, I forgot about this.

And then our AdSense, I'll check in and it's like, we're making 20 bucks a month on it. And I'm like, fuck this, there's got.

To be a better way.

So I'm curious, if you had a health site that was getting that kind of traffic but was pretty much not monetized, what would you do with it?

Good question.

You should be making more money, dude. You're getting that much traffic. That's awesome.

Well, it's just something that's been a back burner sort of thing that's never really been front and center. Let's go play with this thing.

Not in the hell space.

Right? I mean, that's an exciting general vertical to have a site like this in. I mean, that's one of the top ones. Right? So I would, I don't know, I would bring that up at one of those dinners and see if anybody's got any ideas where they could JV and 301 that to something. Or I would try to sell that thing on Flippa probably. Or if you got a site with that much history, I mean, who cares if you're really monetizing it right now, you might have the opportunity to publish a bunch of new content. You might even test finding like five or 10 keywords that are not overly competitive but are related and throw up some new content, long form content on that and see if those rank pretty Fast, because that'd be a good indicator to know, oh, we could do something with this. Or it'd be nice to know that if you're going out to try to JV or sell it too. Right.

Ooh, I dig that. That's easy enough. Yeah.

Well, this podcast is going to be heard by a lot of people, so if there's anybody out there that's like, hey, I want to help you monetize that health site, get in touch.

There you go. You know how to get us. Thank you, Nate.

Yeah, I'll write a couple of the articles if you let me drop a link in there. Man.

I was just gonna say maybe we could work a deal out here somewhere.

Yeah. I actually haven't looked at the analytics in probably a year, so I'm sure there's been some drop off, but I'm gonna look into that again because that's a. That's a site that does rank for some pretty good keywords.

Yeah. Some random ones, but yeah, we haven't.

I got content coming out my eyes with For Health, so there we go.

Maybe we shall chat after we check the numbers on our end and see. That's cool. How about, like, okay, so you guys have the podcast too. I want to be careful on time here. We got like 15 minutes before you got to bounce. Do you guys do any kind of SEO for. For your podcast to try to get that more exposure?

We haven't proactively done it yet. I've. I mean, there was plenty to do just to get that launched, but I've been kind of keeping a watchful eye on it because part of it too is just having a site with a little bit of age. And I know we'd pick up some links here and there with whatever PR we were doing. So, yeah, I've kind of gone back and looked at that now that it's about a year old. And it's cool to see us ranking for some random terms, some articles we put up, and our guest name. So we had Boston George on the guy from Blow, the movie Blow, and we were getting a bunch of traffic for searches on his name because we were. I think we're actually not even page one. I think we're like 12th or 10th. But seeing that pop through on the analytics was interesting. And yeah, I think I was thinking today about how that's definitely an opportunity, especially given my skill set, to think about what are the 10 or 20 things we could create this year that would be worthwhile to get 5,000, 10,000 searches a month? And go after that would be wise. Thank you for reminding me.

So, yeah, I mean, we've pretty much only ever. With the podcast, we've only ever focused on ranking people, people's names. We're doing pretty well for some names. Like, I think we're on page one for Roland Frazier and we're on page one for Bob Serling and there's a handful of others.

But.

Oh, yeah. So with the podcast, I know you've kind of used some unique strategies to kind of grow it to where it is now outside of SEO. I know you probably don't want to share all of them, but is there like one or two really cool things that have worked well? That's sort of outside the box for growing a podcast.

I've been a little frustrated in the avenues for growing podcasts. Honestly, it's such a. I don't know what to call it. A little cottage world where there's just not a lot that you can do. But yeah, I've tested some things. Reddit ads have worked really well for us and have been fairly cost effective. So targeting a couple different subreddits and changing up the messaging and how often we run them to not piss anybody off over at Reddit just because I'm sensitive about what's going on over there.

Sensitive.

F. That's been good. And we got a lot of anecdotal emails that people found us there. So I think that's worked really well. We also bought some ads on a couple of different second tier podcast apps. I think Overcast was one. Maybe. I think we told you guys to do that.

Too.

Did that work out for you? Is that all right?

I think it worked pretty well, actually. Turned it off and our podcast producer guy was like, you should turn that back on. And I was actually driving it. Sweet drivers and stuff. So nice. Not bad.

And. But you tried something. Do you know any other platforms you did some ads on?

Off top, your head, Cast Box, maybe Castbox. They all kind of sound the same. Addict. I think we did some ads.

We did one on anything that was.

Kind of in that second tier.

We just recently did one on a site called Podcast Republic. Yeah, that one. It's doing okay. If when I look at our last 30 days, it's actually like our fourth most used app for listening to the podcast.

So it's.

Yeah, they all kind of add up. But like you said, it's kind of a weird way to go about growing a podcast. Yeah, we've never done really interesting.

We've never done anything with our Podcast where that one marketing tactic, when you look at our stats, created like a hockey stick growth curve. It's always just been kind of like slow, like incremental growth month over month.

Yeah. And that's what's so frustrating about it. It's also just the analytics side of it is just so limited.

Oh, yeah, it's archaic as well.

We're used to Facebook and Google and it's just not there.

Yeah, you can't track shit. Like you said anecdotal that. No, Reddit's working because I'm getting a random email from someone that said they found me on Reddit. That's literally podcast in a nutshell right there.

That's quite honestly.

Like, how does it work on Podcast Republic? Is it like a CPC thing or a flat buy or.

No, they just. It's a flat monthly rate. So I think we paid like 400 bucks for 30 days.

And it's like a ranking thing and.

They have like a website where they like rank podcasts, but you can actually like pay to jump to the top of the ranks. So we pay to rank right to the number one podcast on their platform.

Number one.

But don't tell anybody.

Yeah.

Podcast listener. Podcast Republic listeners.

True patriots.

Hey, unveiling the podcast in nature.

Yeah. You're getting a little behind the scenes of some of the growth tactics that we probably never thought we'd actually share. But fuck it, we don't care.

Yeah. So what other badass stuff are you working like? You have opt out life with Dana. Obviously the whole point of that is not to work too hard, though. But.

What is it that you're getting? Are you just going to. It sounds like you play the long game with everything. I know you have some real estate, too.

Yeah, real estate. Nothing too exciting about that, but it's a smart thing to do. Yeah, I do. I'm not in a big rush to chase after much stuff. I've kind of learned to calm myself down over the years. And also with my biggest probably skill set being SEO, you kind of got to play a long game. But yeah, I'm excited about some of the stuff we're doing in health. I'm watching some sites in and around Genomics Genetics with some good backing, some good partners who have connections in that industry. So there's a lot of, I guess, growing awareness about that stuff from like 23andMe. And I mean, that's really just the tip of the iceberg of consumer interest and what those tests are going to be able to diagnose and do. So going after some of that stuff kind of hard. I mean relatively hard based on long term content growth and. And going after some traffic. Excited about that and we'll see where it goes.

Yeah, really quickly. Do you know this, the guys, what is it called? Self decode, Matt Self hacked. Self hacked, yeah, we had him on the podcast, the founder. And yeah, they're deep in that space that you're talking about genomics and all that. You should check him out. If you need a connection, let us know because.

He has doctors cranking out content for him on that website and they also have a whole genomic side.

But yeah, no, his requirement for writers was like you had to go to be a doctor that went to one of these specific school. He's very, very strict and hardcore about what writers he gets on, but his site's all about the genomic stuff. He actually built an app where you can take the raw data from 23andMe, upload it into his app, and it actually kind of gives you supplementary data that you didn't get direct directly from 23 and me.

That's really smart. I've definitely come to that conclusion as many people have, that there's a need because when you get those results, especially from those types of tests, you're like, okay, awesome. Now what? You can pay them 10 bucks a month to expand your family tree. That's not really that interesting.

The lifestyle stuff is where it's a lot more interesting and that's housed inside that data somewhere. Totally.

Oh, I nerd out on that stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff there. But like Prometheus I think is what I use. And it's just like you got to be like a computer science test to even like understand what the hell they're telling you.

I just remember like the self decoded thing, the one that Joe Cohen did, that one was like, it was pretty cool because you plug in your 23andMe data and it would say like, we recommend these vitamins and it would actually like tell you which vitamins that you should be taking as supplements based on like the. All the data that you uploaded and things like that. And like, you know, you're probably sensitive to this food, but not this food, so eat more of this. And it sort of helps you give you suggestions, basically. Yeah, it helps give suggestions on like what lifestyle changes you should make based on the data that you uploaded.

Right.

Interesting.

Where's that guy based? Is he in San Diego or is he spots?

No, he's.

I don't remember exactly Yeah, I forget.

He was on the podcast. He was probably from last year or the year before even, but you could check him out. Yeah, Joe Cohen. But yeah, if you need an intro, just let us know. We have his team's context.

Cool. I mean, yeah, it's an exciting space, right? Like anybody and everybody you talk to about it, there's a story or a relation or something about it that makes it interesting. So it's a cool place to be playing around.

Yeah. Timely.

All right, man.

Just want to make sure we're good on time. So a couple wrap up questions, Matt, unless you had any other SEO stuff, top of your head.

No, I think we kind of covered a lot there.

Yeah, we did. So what's like a good book? Some kind of resource that you just recommend to others, either business or maybe, you know, just total personal life type book that you just love to read and say, hey, yo, read this shit.

There are. Well, there's one I always mention that's called when I stop talking, you'll know I'm dead when I stopped talking. Almost Undead by Jerry Weintraub. So he was a Hollywood producer and he took Elvis out on the road. I think he died a couple years ago. But he's got an HBO special called His Way, and I really loved his story from the 50s on through the oceans movies. He was a cool guy that interacted with a bunch of different people. And I loved his book, his kind of autobiography. And then the other one I just read called Billion Dollar Whale just came out. It is kind of like new school Wolf of Wall Street. So there was this Asian guy named Joe Low who has set up a fake sovereign wealth fund with the Prime Minister of Malaysia and had some, I don't know, dubious accounts in the Seychelles that were allegedly backed by Middle east financiers. And he basically stole like 5 to 10 billion dollars and blew it on parties and celebrities. He actually was. He founded a production company that financed the Wolfgang Wolf of Wall street movie. Wow. Actually hung out with those guys and did produce that movie. So it's real world stuff. But that book just came out recently and it was a fun read.

What's that called again? Billion.

Billion Dollar Whale.

Billion Dollar Whale. That sounds super interesting.

Yeah, that sounds like one that'd probably be good on like, Audible or something too.

Yeah. Hell yeah. All right, cool. We'll check both those out. I haven't heard of either. All right, man. So where should folks go learn more about you? Look at opt out life.

Yeah, I guess these days just opt out or check out the podcast on wherever you get your podcasts. Got some cool ones up there, and we've got about a year's worth in the archives now, so something that should cater to everybody.

Yeah, man, you guys are like the big boy. You have the big boy pants on for the podcast. You know, you have the nice studio, cool imagery. We're just here in Matt's house, you know, in spare office.

But no, we're in a professional podcast studio.

Long time, though, man. So I admire, admire your stick to itiveness on this, for sure.

No, the podcast is definitely, you know, sticking on that theme of the long game. It's definitely one of those long game plays that we've been doing, where the first, like, year we did it, we were kind of like, why are we doing this? There's. We're not making any money as a result, and constantly debated about keeping the podcast and going. But now, you know, almost three years in, we're like, we're really starting to see all the benefits as far as, like, networking and people. People coming to us, offering us opportunities. And we've invested in other people's businesses now from people who discovered us on the podcast and things like that.

It's hard to see the light at the end when you first start a podcast, but eventually stuff starts to come together.

Yeah, I agree, man. It plants a flag. And if you like the medium and the practice of creating it, I mean, it is a bit of a grind, but it's not as bad as staring at a blank cursor and having to write something, in my opinion, and probably most people's opinions. And you're right, it's a fun thing if you stick with it, which fortunately, most people don't. I'm digging around, looking at other podcasts in the store. It's like 90% of them you find are dead. Totally a higher statistic than that, right?

Yeah, Podfeet is legit. It happens. And that's another thing. That's an opportunity. We could buy a show, potentially.

Yeah. That was actually something that somebody was recommending to us at a different podcasting event that we went to is you go find shows where the guest is no longer making content super actively, and you go to the host and offer to buy that podcast off of them, and then you just replace their feed with yours, and then everybody gets your episodes downloaded to their device. But we haven't done that yet. That kind of borders the gray hat side of things, of podcasting that we don't really want to do.

You never know.

Yeah, I don't know. I think you should try it and tell me how it goes.

We'll try in a different niche.

Give it a shot. There you go.

I like it.

All right, so opt out Life. That's where you can learn everything you guys are up to right now.

It's a badass podcast. Badass, guys. Dana is awesome as well.

When's the next event? You putting on another event or do you not have plans yet?

We're talking a lot about it. Can't quite decide if we want to do a really big one or more like what we did with kind of the 50, 60 people. But I think we're going to have one of more of our local kind of old school house parties in the next three or four weeks. We got a house up in Del Mar, so I know you guys will be on the list for that. We'll talk about a bigger one while we hang out there.

Awesome, man.

Sounds good. Thank you for your time. It's been fun, man. And we'll see you soon.

All right, see you guys.

All right, bye. 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 learn 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.