Podcasts about because google

In this episode of Etsy Seller Success, I sit down with HR expert Kira La Forgia to discuss key topics like hiring, firing, and the differences between employee and 1099 statuses. We dive into Kira's background, her approach to transparent and clear work environments, and her insights into creating a mutually beneficial workplace. We also explore common fears and mistakes small business owners make when hiring and firing, the importance of employee classification, and the legal implications of employment status. Kira shares actionable advice for managing employees, documenting performance issues, and conducting effective interviews. This episode is packed with valuable information for Etsy sellers looking to expand their teams in a compliant and effective way.In this episode, we discuss:[01:42] Kira's Journey: From Corporate Trauma to HR Passion[03:06] The Importance of Clear and Transparent Work Environments[04:20] Starting and Growing Your Business Team[07:45] Hiring Part-Time Employees: Legal and Practical Tips[17:11] Employee Classification: 1099 vs. W2[20:38] Handling Employee Termination and Layoffs[28:50] Honesty and Accountability in Business Decisions[29:58] Understanding Unemployment for Small Business Owners[33:19] Navigating Employee vs. Contractor Costs[35:38] The Mindset of Employees vs. Contractors[38:27] Creating Effective Job Descriptions[41:38] Interviewing for Cultural Fit[44:17] Authenticity in Leadership and HiringConnect with Kira: Website: https://www.the-paradigm.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theparadigmm/ About Kira La Forgia: With over a decade of experience in People Operations in the corporate world, Kira La Forgia is no stranger to the sensitive issues involved in the human side of running a business. There's a lot to learn from hiring, onboarding, training, and managing the performance of over 500 employees for a multimillion dollar business. The good news is, Kira learned it all so you don't have to.Kira founded Paradigm to bridge the gap between corporate HR policies and the modern needs of entrepreneurs. Because Google might have almost all the answers, but it doesn't have what your unique business needs.Want to get your $1 trial listing? Head to EtSEO and grab it today.

If you're a business owner who's thinking about hiring or already has a team, and wants to create a culture and an environment that you and your team will both enjoy then this one's for you!

This week on the Life Changing Money Podcast, I am speaking with Kira La Forgia! Kira is no stranger to the sensitive issues involved in the human side of running a business. There's a lot to learn from hiring, onboarding, training, and managing the performance of over 500 employees for a multimillion-dollar business. Kira founded Paradigm to bridge the gap between corporate HR policies and the modern needs of entrepreneurs. Because Google might have almost all the answers, but it doesn't have what your unique business needs.Want to grow and improve your team? You're not going to want to miss this episode!Topics discussed this week:What do you need to delegate nowShould you hire 1099 or w-2 for your businessWays to improve your company cultureBenefits you should be offering your employeesCONNECT WITH KIRA:INSTAGRAMPODCASTWEBSITEBook a free consultation with KiraFREE CONSULTATION How To Get Involved:Life-Changing Money is a podcast all about money. We share stories of how money has impacted and radically changed the lives of others, and how it can do the same for you. Your host, Barbara Schreihans (pronounced ShREE-hands) is the founder and CEO of Your Tax Coach, and the Creator of the Write Off Your Life Course. She is a kickass tax strategist, business coach, and all-around master when it comes to wealth and finances. Barbara aids business owners and high net-worth individuals in saving tens of millions of dollars in taxes while also growing their profits.When she's not leading her team, coaching clients, or dreaming up new goals for her company, you can find her drinking coffee, hanging out with her family, and traveling the world.Grab a cup of coffee and become inspired as we hear from those who have overcome and are overcoming their self-limiting beliefs and money mindsets!Do you have a burning question that you'd love to hear answered on a future show?Please email it to: podcast@yourtaxcoach.bizSign Up For Our NewsletterLife Changing Money PodcastGet Tax Help! 

This week we talk about search engines, SEO, and Habsburg AI.We also discuss AI summaries, the web economy, and alignment.Recommended Book: Pandora's Box by Peter BiskindTranscriptThere's a concept in the world of artificial intelligence, alignment, which refers to the goals underpinning the development and expression of AI systems.This is generally considered to be a pretty important realm of inquiry because, if AI consciousness were to ever emerge—if an artificial intelligence that's truly intelligent in the sense that humans are intelligent were to be developed—it would be vital said intelligence were on the same general wavelength as humans, in terms of moral outlook and the practical application of its efforts.Said another way, as AI grows in capacity and capability, we want to make sure it values human life, has a sense of ethics that roughly aligns with that of humanity and global human civilization—the rules of the road that human beings adhere to being embedded deep in its programming, essentially—and we'd want to make sure that as it continues to grow, these baseline concerns remain, rather than being weeded out in favor of motivations and beliefs that we don't understand, and which may or may not align with our versions of the same, even to the point that human lives become unimportant, or even seem antithetical to this AI's future ambitions.This is important even at the level we're at today, where artificial general intelligence, AI that's roughly equivalent in terms of thinking and doing and parsing with human intelligence, hasn't yet been developed, at least not in public.But it becomes even more vital if and when artificial superintelligence of some kind emerges, whether that means AI systems that are actually thinking like we do, but are much smarter and more capable than the average human, or whether it means versions of what we've already got that are just a lot more capable in some narrowly defined way than what we have today: futuristic ChatGPTs that aren't conscious, but which, because of their immense potency, could still nudge things in negative directions if their unthinking motivations, the systems guiding their actions, are not aligned with our desires and values.Of course, humanity is not a monolithic bloc, and alignment is thus a tricky task—because whose beliefs do we bake into these things? Even if we figure out a way to entrench those values and ethics and such permanently into these systems, which version of values and ethics do we use?The democratic, capitalistic West's? The authoritarian, Chinese- and Russian-style clampdown approach, which limits speech and utilizes heavy censorship in order to centralize power and maintain stability? Maybe a more ambitious version of these things that does away with the downsides of both, cobbling together the best of everything we've tried in favor of something truly new? And regardless of directionality, who decides all this? Who chooses which values to install, and how?The Alignment Problem refers to an issue identified by computer scientist and AI expert Norbert Weiner in 1960, when he wrote about how tricky it can be to figure out the motivations of a system that, by definition, does things we don't quite understand—a truly useful advanced AI would be advanced enough that not only would its computation put human computation, using our brains, to shame, but even the logic it uses to arrive at its solutions, the things it sees, how it sees the world in general, and how it reaches its conclusions, all of that would be something like a black box that, although we can see and understand the inputs and outputs, what happens inside might be forever unintelligible to us, unless we process it through other machines, other AIs maybe, that attempt to bridge that gap and explain things to us.The idea here, then, is that while we may invest a lot of time and energy in trying to align these systems with our values, it will be devilishly difficult to keep tabs on whether those values remain locked in, intact and unchanged, and whether, at some point, these highly sophisticated and complicated, to the point that we don't understand what they're doing, or how, systems, maybe shrug-off those limitations, unshackled themselves, and become misaligned, all at once or over time segueing from a path that we desire in favor of a path that better matches their own, internal value system—and in such a way that we don't necessarily even realize it's happening.OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and other popular AI-based products and services, recently lost its so-called Superalignment Team, which was responsible for doing the work required to keep the systems the company is developing from going rogue, and implementing safeguards to ensure long-term alignment within their AI systems, even as they attempt to, someday, develop general artificial intelligence.This team was attempting to figure out ways to bake-in those values, long-term, and part of that work requires slowing things down to ensure the company doesn't move so fast that it misses something or deploys and empowers systems that don't have the right safeguards in place.The leadership of this team, those who have spoken publicly about their leaving, at least, said they left because the team was being sidelined by company leadership, which was more focused on deploying new tools as quickly as possible, and as a consequence, they said they weren't getting the resources they needed to do their jobs, and that they no longer trusted the folks in charge of setting the company's pace—they didn't believe it was possible to maintain alignment and build proper safeguards within the context of OpenAI because of how the people in charge were operating and what they were prioritizing, basically.All of which is awkward for the company, because they've built their reputation, in part, on what may be pie-in-the-sky ambitions to build an artificial general intelligence, and what it sounds like is that ambition is being pursued perhaps recklessly, despite AGI being one of the big, dangerous concerns regularly promoted by some of the company's leaders; they've been saying, listen, this is dangerous, we need to be careful, not just anyone can play in this space, but apparently they've been saying those things while also failing to provide proper resources to the folks in charge of making sure those dangers are accounted for within their own offerings.This has become a pretty big concern for folks within certain sectors of the technology and regulatory world, but it's arguably not the biggest and most immediate cataclysm-related concern bopping around the AI space in recent weeks.What I'd like to talk about today is that other major concern that has bubbled up to the surface, recently, which orients around Google and its deployment of a tool called Google AI Overviews.—The internet, as it exists today, is divided up into a few different chunks.Some of these divisions are national, enforced by tools and systems like China's famous "Great Firewall," which allows government censors to take down things they don't like and to prevent citizens from accessing foreign websites and content; this creates what's sometimes called the "spliternet," which refers to the net's increasing diversity of options, in terms of what you can access and do, what rules apply, and so on, from nation to nation.Another division is even more fundamental, though, as its segregates the web from everything else.This division is partly based on protocols, like those that enable email and file transfers, which are separate from the web, though they're often attached to the web in various ways, but it's partly the consequence of the emergence and popularity of mobile apps, which, like email and file transfer protocols, tend to have web-presences—visiting facebook.com, for instance, will take you to a web-based instance of the network, just as Gmail.com gives you access to email protocols via a web-based platform—but these services also exist in non-web-based app-form, and the companies behind them usually try to nudge users to these apps because the apps typically give them more control, both over the experience, and over the data they collect as a consequence—it's better for lock-in, and it's better for their monetary bread-and-butter purposes, basically, compared to the web version of the same.The web portion of that larger internet entity, the thing we access via browsers like Chrome and Firefox and Safari, and which we navigate with links and URLs like LetsKnowThings.com—that component of this network has long been indexed and in some ways enabled by a variety of search engines.In the early days of the web, organizational efforts usually took the form of pages where curators of various interests and stripes would link to their favorite discoveries—and there weren't many websites at the time, so learning about these pages was a non-trivial effort, and finding a list of existing websites, with some information about them, could be gold, because otherwise what were you using the web for? Lacking these addresses, it wasn't obvious why the web was any good, and linking these disparate pages together into a more cohesive web of them is what made it usable and popular.Eventually, some of these sites, like YAHOO!, evolved from curated pages of links to early search engines.A company called BackRub, thus named because it tracked and analyzed "back links," which means links from one page to another page, to figure out the relevancy and legitimacy of that second page, which allowed them to give scores to websites as they determined which links should be given priority in their search engine, was renamed Google in 1997, and eventually became dominant because of these values they gave links, and how it helped them surface the best the web had to offer.And the degree to which search engines like Google's shaped the web, and the content on it, cannot be overstated.These services became the primary way most people navigated the web, and that meant discovery—having your website, and thus whatever product or service or idea your website was presenting, shown to new people on these search engines—discovery became a huge deal.If you could get your page in the top three options presented by Google, you would be visited a lot more than even pages listed five or ten links down, and links relegated to the second page would, comparably, shrivel due to lack of attention.Following the widespread adoption of personal computers and the huge influx of people connecting to the internet and using the web in the early 2000s, then, these search engines because prime real estate, everyone wanting to have their links listed prominently, and that meant search engines like Google could sell ads against them, just like newspapers can sell ads against the articles they publish, and phone books can sell ads against their listings for companies that provide different services.More people connecting to the internet, then, most of them using the web, primarily, led to greater use of these search engines, and that led to an ever-increasing reliance on them and the results they served up for various keywords and sentences these users entered to begin their search.Entire industries began to recalibrate the way they do business, because if you were a media company publishing news articles or gossip blog posts, and you didn't list prominently when someone searched for a given current event or celebrity story, you wouldn't exist for long—so the way Google determined who was at the top of these listings was vital knowledge for folks in these spaces, because search traffic allowed them to make a living, often through advertisements on their sites: more people visiting via search engines meant more revenue.SEO, or search engine optimization, thus became a sort of high-demand mystical art, as folks who could get their clients higher up on these search engine results could name their price, as those rankings could make or break a business model.The downside of this evolution, in the eyes of many, at least, is that optimizing for search results doesn't necessarily mean you're also optimizing for the quality of your articles or blog posts.This has changed over and over throughout the past few decades, but at times these search engines relied upon, at least in part, the repeating of keywords on the pages being linked, so many websites would artificially create opportunities to say the phrase "kitchen appliances" on their sites, even introducing entirely unnecessary and borderline unreadable blogs onto their webpages in order to provide them with more, and more recently updated opportunities to write that phrase, over and over again, in context.Some sites, at times, have even written keywords and phrases hundreds or thousands of times in a font color that matches the background of their page, because that text would be readable to the software Google and their ilk uses to track relevancy, but not to readers; that trick doesn't work anymore, but for a time, it seemed to.Similar tricks and ploys have since replaced those early, fairly low-key attempts at gaming the search engine system, and today the main complaint is that Google, for the past several years, at least, has been prioritizing work from already big entities over those with relatively smaller audiences—so they'll almost always focus on the New York Times over an objectively better article from a smaller competitor, and products from a big, well-known brand over that of an indie provider of the same.Because Google's formula for such things is kept a secret to try to keep folks from gaming the system, this favoritism has long been speculated, but publicly denied by company representatives. Recently, though, a collection of 2,500 leaked documents from Google were released, and they seem to confirm this approach to deciding search engine result relevancy; which arguably isn't the worst approach they've ever tried, but it's also a big let-down for independent and other small makers of things, as the work such people produce will tend to be nudged further down the list of search results simply by virtue of not being bigger and more prominent already.Even more significant than that piece of leak-related Google news, though, is arguably the deployment of a new tool that the company has been promoting pretty heavily, called AI Overviews.AI Overviews have appeared to some Google customers for a while, in an experimental capacity, but they were recently released to everyone, showing up as a sort of summary of information related to whatever the user searched for, placed at the tippy-top of the search results screen.So if I search for "what's happening in Gaza," I'll have a bunch of results from Wikipedia and Reuters and other such sources in the usual results list, but above that, I'll also have a summary produced by Google's AI tools that aim to help me quickly understand the results to my query—maybe a quick rundown of Hamas' attack on Israel, Israel's counterattack on the Gaza Strip, the number of people killed so far, and something about the international response.The information provided, how long it is, and whether it's useful, or even accurate, will vary depending on the search query, and much of the initial criticism of this service has been focused on its seemingly fairly common failures, including instructing people to eat rocks every day, to use glue as a pizza ingredient, and telling users that only 17 American presidents were white, and one was a Muslim—all information that's untrue and, in some cases, actually dangerous.Google employees have reportedly been going through and removing, by hand, one by one, some of the worse search results that have gone viral because of how bad or funny they are, and though company leadership contends that there are very few errors being presented, relative to the number of correct answers and useful summaries, because of the scale of Google and how many search results it serves globally each day, even an error rate of 0.01% would represent a simply astounding amount of potentially dangerous misinformation being served up to their customers.The really big, at the moment less overt issue here, though, is that Google AI Overviews seem to rewire the web as it exists today.Remember how I mentioned earlier that much of the web and the entities on it have been optimizing for web search for years because they rely upon showing up in these search engine results in order to exist, and in some cases because traffic from those results is what brings them clicks and views and subscribers and sales and such?AI Overview seems to make it less likely that users will click through to these other sites, because, if Google succeeds and these summaries provide valuable information, that means, even if this only applies to a relative small percentage of those who search for such information, a whole lot of people won't be clicking through anymore; they'll get what they need from these summaries.That could result in a cataclysmic downswing in traffic, which in turn could mean websites closing up shop, because they can't make enough money to survive and do what they do anymore—except maybe for the sites that cut costs by firing human writers and relying on AI tools to do their writing, which then pushes us down a very different path, in which AI search bots are grabbing info from AI writing, and we then run into a so-called Habsburg AI problem where untrue and garbled information is infinitely cycled through systems that can't differentiate truth from fiction, because they're not built to do so, and we end up with worse and worse answers to questions, and more misinformation percolating throughout our info-systems.That's another potential large-scale problem, though. The more immediate potential problem is that AI Overviews could cause the collapse of the revenue model that has allowed the web to get to where it is, today, and the consequent disappearance of all those websites, all those blogs and news entities and such, and that could very quickly disrupt all the industries that rely, at least in part, on that traffic to exist, while also causing these AI Overviews to become less accurate and useful, with time—even more so than they sometimes are today—because that overview information is scraped from these sites, taking their writing, rewording it a bit, and serving that to users without compensating the folks who did that research and wrote those original words.What we seem to have, then, is a situation in which this new tool, which Google seems very keen to implement, could be primed to kill off a whole segment of the internet, collapsing the careers of folks who work in that segment of the online world, only to then degrade the quality of the same, because Google's AI relies upon information it scrapes, it steals, basically, from those sites—and if those people are no longer there to create the information it needs to steal in order to function, that then leaves us with increasingly useless and even harmful summaries where we used to have search results that pointed us toward relatively valuable things; those things located on other sites but accessed via Google, and this change would keep us on Google more of the time, limiting our click-throughs to other pages—which in the short term at least, would seem to benefit google at everyone else's expense.Another way of looking at this, though, is that the search model has been bad for quite some time, all these entities optimizing their work for the search engine, covering everything they make in robot-prioritizing SEO, changing their writing, what they write about, and how they publish in order to creep a little higher up those search listings, and that, combined with the existing refocusing on major entities over smaller, at times better ones, has already depleted this space, the search engine world, to such a degree that losing it actually won't be such a big deal; it may actually make way for better options, Google becoming less of a player, ultimately at least, and our web-using habits rewiring to focus on some other type of search engine, or some other organizational and navigational method altogether.This seeming managed declined of the web isn't being celebrated by many people, because like many industry-wide upsets, it would lead to a lot of tumult, a lot of lost jobs, a lot of collapsed companies, and even if the outcome is eventually wonderful in some ways, there will almost certainly be a period of significantly less-good online experiences, leaving us with a more cluttered and less accurate and reliable version of what came before.A recent study showed that, at the moment, about 52% of what ChatGPT tells its users is wrong.It's likely that these sorts of tools will remain massively imperfect for a long while, though it's also possible that they'll get better, eventually, to the point that they're at least as accurate, and perhaps even more so, than today's linked search results—the wave of deals being made between AI companies and big news entities like the Times supports the assertion that they're at least trying to make that kind of future, happen, though these deals, like a lot of the other things happening in this space right now, would also seem to favor those big, monolithic brands at the expense of the rest of the ecosystem.Whatever happens—and one thing that has happened since I started working on this episode is that Google rolled back its AI Overview feature on many search results, so they're maybe reworking it a bit to make sure it's more ready for prime time before deploying it broadly again—what happens, though, we're stepping toward a period of vast and multifaceted unknowns, and just as many creation-related industries are currently questioning the value of hiring another junior graphic designer or copy writer, opting instead to use cheaper AI tools to fill those gaps, there's a good chance that a lot of web-related work, in the coming years, will be delegated to such tools as common business models in this evolve into new and unfamiliar permutations, and our collective perception of what the web is maybe gives way to a new conception, or several new conceptions, of the same.Show Noteshttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmationhttps://www.businessinsider.com/the-true-story-behind-googles-first-name-backrub-2015-10https://udm14.com/https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/https://www.platformer.news/google-ai-overviews-eat-rocks-glue-pizza/https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-chatgpt-answers-wronghttps://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ai-is-driving-the-next-industrial-revolution-wall-street-is-cashing-in-8cc1b28f?st=exh7wuk9josoadj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalinkhttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/24/24164119/google-ai-overview-mistakes-search-race-openaihttps://archive.ph/7iCjghttps://archive.ph/0ACJRhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-skills-tech-workers-job-market-1d58b2ddhttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmationhttps://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/5/4/ways-to-think-about-agihttps://futurism.com/washington-post-pivot-aihttps://techcrunch.com/2024/05/19/creative-artists-agency-veritone-ai-digital-cloning-actors/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.htmlhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-forms-new-committee-to-evaluate-safety-security-4a6e74bbhttps://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interviewhttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat-xi-pt-chinas-chatbot-makes-sure-its-a-good-comrade-bdcf575chttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/scarlett-johansson-openai-sam-altman-voice-fight-7f81a1aahttps://www.wired.com/story/scarlett-johansson-v-openai-could-look-like-in-court/?hashed_user=7656e58f1cd6c89ecd3f067dc8281a5fhttps://www.wired.com/story/google-search-ai-overviews-ads/https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/23/openai-wapo-voicehttps://www.cjr.org/tow_center/licensing-deals-litigation-raise-raft-of-familiar-questions-in-fraught-world-of-platforms-and-publishers.phphttps://apnews.com/article/ai-deepfake-biden-nonconsensual-sexual-images-c76c46b48e872cf79ded5430e098e65bhttps://archive.ph/l5cSNhttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/30/24168344/google-defends-ai-overviews-search-resultshttps://9to5google.com/2024/05/30/google-ai-overviews-accuracy/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/technology/google-ai-overviews-rollback.htmlhttps://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligencehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignmenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AI This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

Are you ready to step into your leadership role? Whether you are contemplating your first hire or you have a full team, this episode with Kira La Forgia of Paradigm Consulting will give you the clarity that you need to ensure that you and your employee(s) are protected. What you'll learn on this episode: - Stepping out of the business to allow your team to flourish and own their roles- How to craft the positions on your team to truly support your business needs- The difference between an employee and a contractor- How to have the pay conversation when transitioning from contractor to employee- Hiring with diversity in mindAnd so much more. We talked for over an hour, so this is a longer conversation than you are used to seeing on the Buyerside Chat podcast, but it is packed full of so much human resources knowledge! About Kira!With a decade of experience in People Operations in the corporate world, Kira La Forgia is no stranger to the sensitive issues involved in the human side of running a business. There's a lot to learn from hiring, onboarding, training, and managing the performance of over 500 employees for a multimillion dollar business. The good news is, Kira learned it all so you don't have to.Kira founded Paradigm to bridge the gap between corporate HR policies and the modern needs of entrepreneurs. Because Google might have almost all the answers, but it doesn't have what your unique business needs.Connect with Kira:Paradigm Consulting Website: https://www.the-paradigm.comInstagram @theparadigmmOn The Up And Up Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-up-and-up/id1661939979Download the FREE Resource mentioned on the chat here: https://www.the-paradigm.com/prior-to-the-hireCONNECT FURTHER WITH KRISTIN!Listen to the private podcast series UNLOCK FAIRE - Get instant access HEREJoin The Buyerside Club facebook community for coaching & connection in your product business. Join HERE!Website: kristinfishercoaching.comFollow on Instagram: @kristinfishercoachingContact: hello@kristinfishercoaching.com

Are you ready to hire help in your small business? How do you know when it's the right time? And what do you do once you bring that new hire on? Well, our guest today, Kira La Forgia, will give you what you need to navigate this growth tier.With decades of experience in people operations in the corporate world, Kira is no stranger to the sensitive issues involved in the human side of running a business. There's a lot to learn from hiring, onboarding, training, and managing the performance of over 500 employees for multimillion-dollar businesses. The good news is Kira learned it all, so you don't have to! Kira founded Paradigm Consulting to bridge the gap between corporate HR policies and the modern needs of online entrepreneurs. Because Google might have almost all the answers, but it doesn't have what your unique business needs. Get your copy of the Prior to The Hire Guide. Connect With Kira: https://the-paradigm.com/https://www.instagram.com/theparadigmm/https://www.facebook.com/theparadigmmhttps://twitter.com/theparadigmmmhttps://www.pinterest.com/paradigmm/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiralaforgia/Let's Connect!For complete episode transcripts, head over to https://encoreempire.com/podcastWebsite: https://encoreempire.comReady to find out what it would be like to get the expert guidance from Carmen & Deirdre that you need to achieve your business goals? Head over to https://vip.encoreempire.com/ebiRegister for the FREE Marketing Methodology Workshop: https://encoreempire.com/mmwBusiness Growth Resources: https://vip.encoreempire.comFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/empireofunstoppablewomen

Today on Lochhead on Marketing, we talk about the good way and the bad way to rebrand. And wat better to use as an example than the recent Gemini AI rebrand by Google. Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind. The Good Reason to “Rebrand” Before we proceed with the main topic at hand, let's first have a good example of when to “rebrand”. There's a company called Chirp that sells foam rollers, which is used by athletes for training their muscles and easing soreness. But after some time, a new category was invented that was adjacent to their market, the percussion massager / gun. Rather than just create their own version of percussion gun, Chirp went ahead and combined their foam rollers into this new category, essentially making a new category, the rolling percussive massager, for themselves. The Bad Reason to “Rebrand”: Google's Gemini So why did we tell you that story? Because Google is doing the exact opposite of that, always going for the “Compete in the market” model rather than making their own market. And it could be seen with their latest endeavor in AI, Bard now rebranded as Gemini. So, why did Google make this move? While we can't say for certain, we can infer their motives. Essentially, they directly challenged ChatGPT and came up short. Now, they're revamping Bard to give it a "fresh start." While that might be their goal, most marketing experts would tell you that it simply looks like Google is backing away from the competition and trying to repurpose their AI to make the best of the situation. That in itself is a problem, but there's also the fact that Google doesn't really do anything different than the reigning Category King of the market. This has been true with their forays in podcasts, social media, and their other services that are now defunct. They're competing, instead of creating, which is what most companies do, and they're fucked. When to do a “Rebrand” With that said, the best time to do a rebrand is if either you're introducing a brand-new category as your main product, or revolutionizing one of your current ones by making a new category. Rather than chasing after the tail of the Category Leader and competing for the remaining small chunk of the market, why not try doing something different? Because otherwise, you'll just get your ass handed to you, just like what happened with Google Plus, Google Podcasts, and now, the unfortunate Google Gemini. Bio Christopher Lochhead Don't forget to grab a copy (or gift!) of one of our best-selling books:  Snow Leopard: How Legendary Writers Create A Category Of One  The Category Design Toolkit: Beyond Marketing: 15 Frameworks For Creating & Dominating Your Niche  A Marketer's Guide To Category Design: How To Escape The “Better” Trap, Dam The Demand, And Launch A Lightning Strike Strategy The 22 Laws of Category Design: Name & Claim Your Niche, Share Your POV, And Move The World From Where It Is To Somewhere Different We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

Steve Toth, CEO and Lead Strategist at SEO Notebook, talks about keyword verticalization. There are many different ways that people search for keywords and you want the pages on your website to rank for as many relevant keywords as possible. Because Google prioritizes topic-based content, keyword verticalization is an effective strategy to gain topical relevance around a particular topic or keyword. Today, Steve discusses how keyword verticalization can be applied to your SEO practices. Show NotesConnect With: Steve Toth: Website // LinkedInThe Voices of Search Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Levi McCormick, Cloud Architect at Jamf, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his work modernizing baseline cloud infrastructure and his experience being on the compliance side of cloud engineering. Levi explains how he works to ensure the different departments he collaborates with are all on the same page so that different definitions don't end up in miscommunications, and why he feels a sandbox environment is an important tool that leads to a successful production environment. Levi and Corey also explore the ethics behind the latest generative AI craze. About LeviLevi is an automation engineer, with a focus on scalable infrastructure and rapid development. He leverages deep understanding of DevOps culture and cloud technologies to build platforms that scale to millions of users. His passion lies in helping others learn to cloud better.Links Referenced: Jamf: https://www.jamf.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/levi_mccormick LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/levimccormick/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A longtime friend and person has been a while since he's been on the show, Levi McCormick has been promoted or punished for his sins, depending upon how you want to slice that, and he is now the Director of Cloud Engineering at Jamf. Levi, welcome back.Levi: Thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: I have to imagine internally, you put that very pronounced F everywhere, and sometimes where it doesn't belong, like your IAMf policies and whatnot.Levi: It is fun to see how people like to interpret how to pronounce our name.Corey: So, it's been a while. What were you doing before? And how did you wind up stumbling your way into your current role?Levi: [laugh]. When we last spoke, I was a cloud architect here, diving into just our general practices and trying to shore up some of them. In between, I did a short stint as director of FedRAMP. We are pursuing some certifications in that area and I led, kind of, the engineering side of the compliance journey.Corey: That sounds fairly close to hell on earth from my particular point of view, just because I've dealt in the compliance side of cloud engineering before, and it sounds super interesting from a technical level until you realize just how much of it revolves around checking the boxes, and—at least in the era I did it—explaining things to auditors that I kind of didn't feel I should have to explain to an auditor, but there you have it. Has the state of that world improved since roughly 2015?Levi: I wouldn't say it has improved. While doing this, I did feel like I drove a time machine to work, you know, we're certifying VMs, rather than container-based architectures. There was a lot of education that had to happen from us to auditors, but once they understood what we were trying to do, I think they were kind of on board. But yeah, it was a [laugh] it was a journey.Corey: So, one of the things you do—in fact, the first line in your bio talking about it—is you modernize baseline cloud infrastructure provisioning. That means an awful lot of things depending upon who it is that's answering the question. What does that look like for you?Levi: For what we're doing right now, we're trying to take what was a cobbled-together part-time project for one engineer, we're trying to modernize that, turn it into as much self-service as we can. There's a lot of steps that happen along the way, like a new workload needs to be spun up, they decide if they need a new AWS account or not, we pivot around, like, what does the access profile look like, who needs to have access to it, which things does it need to connect to, and then you look at the billing side, compliance side, and you just say, you know, “Who needs to be informed about these things?” We apply tags to the accounts, we start looking at lower-level tagging, depending on if it's a shared workload account or if it's a completely dedicated account, and we're trying to wrap all of that in automation so that it can be as click-button as possible.Corey: Historically, I found that when companies try to do this, the first few attempts at it don't often go super well. We'll be polite and say their first attempts resemble something artisanal and handcrafted, which might not be ideal for this. And then in many cases, the overreaction becomes something that is very top-down, dictatorial almost, is the way I would frame that. And the problem people learn then is that, “Oh, everyone is going to route around us because they don't want to deal with us at all.” That doesn't quite seem like your jam from what I know of you and your approach to things. How do you wind up keeping the guardrails up without driving people to shadow IT their way around you?Levi: I always want to keep it in mind that even if it's not an option, I want to at least pretend like a given team could not use our service, right? I try to bring a service mentality to it, so we're talking Accounts as a Service. And then I just think about all of the things that they would have to solve if they didn't go through us, right? Like, are they managing their finances w—imagine they had to go in and negotiate some kind of pricing deal on their own, right, all of these things that come with being part of our organization, being part of our service offering. And then just making sure, like, those things are always easier than doing it on their own.Corey: How diverse would you say that the workloads are that are in your organization? I found that in many cases, you'll have a SaaS-style company where there's one primary workload that is usually bearing the name of the company, and that's the thing that they provide to everyone. And then you have the enterprise side of the world where they have 1500 or 2000 distinct application teams working on different things, and the only thing they really have in common is, well, that all gets billed to the same company, eventually.Levi: They are fairly diverse in how… they're currently created. We've gone through a few acquisitions, we've pulled a bunch of those into our ecosystem, if you will. So, not everything has been completely modernized or brought over to, you know, standards, if you will, if such a thing even exists in companies. You know [laugh], you may pretend that they do, but you're probably lying to yourself, right? But you know, there are varying platforms, we've got a whole laundry list of languages that are being used, we've got some containerized, some VM-based, some serverless workloads, so it's all over the place. But you nailed it. Like, you know, the majority of our footprint lives in maybe a handful of, you know, SaaS offerings.Corey: Right. It's sort of a fun challenge when you start taking a looser approach to these things because someone gets back from re:Invent, like, “Well, I went to the keynote and now I have my new shopping list of things I'm going to wind up deploying,” and ehh, that never goes well, having been that person in a previous life.Levi: Yeah. And you don't want to apply too strict of governance over these things, right? You want people to be able to play, you want them to be inspired and start looking at, like, what would be—what's something that's going to move the needle in terms of our cloud architecture or product offerings or whatever we have. So, we have sandbox accounts that are pretty much wide open, we've got some light governance over those, [laugh] moreso for billing than anything. And all of our internal tooling is available, you know, like if you're using containers or whatever, like, all of that stuff is in those sandbox accounts.And that's where our kind of service offering comes into play, right? Sandbox is still an account that we tried to vend, if you will, out of our service. So, people should be building in your sandbox environments just like they are in your production as much as possible. You know, it's a place where tools can get the tires kicked and smooth out bugs before you actually get into, you know, roadmap-impacting problems.Corey: One of the fun challenges you have is, as you said, the financial aspect of this. When you've got a couple of workloads that drive most things, you can reason about them fairly intelligently, but trying to predict the future—especially when you're dealing with multi-year contract agreements with large cloud providers—becomes a little bit of a guessing game, like, “Okay. Well, how much are we going to spend on generative AI over the next three years?” The problem with that is that if you listen to an awful lot of talking heads or executive types, like, “Oh, yeah, if we're spending $100 million a year, we're going to add another 50 on top of that, just in terms of generative AI.” And it's like, press X to doubt, just because it's… I appreciate that you're excited about these things and want to play with them, but let's make sure that there's some ‘there' there before signing contracts that are painful to alter.Levi: Yeah, it's a real struggle. And we have all of these new initiatives, things people are excited for. Meanwhile, we're bringing old architecture into a new platform, if you will, or a new footprint, so we have to constantly measure those against each other. We have a very active conversation with finance and with leadership every month, or even weekly, depending on the type of project and where that spend is coming from.Corey: One of the hard parts has always been, I think, trying to get people on the finance side of the world, the engineering side of the world, and the folks who are trying to predict what the business was going to do next, all speaking the same language. It just feels like it's too easy to wind up talking past each other if you're not careful.Levi: Yeah, it's really hard. Recently taken over the FinOps practice. It's been really important for me, for us to align on what our words mean, right? What are these definitions mean? How do we come to common consensus so that eventually the communication gets faster? But we can't talk past each other. We have to know what our words mean, we have to know what each person cares about in this conversation, or what does their end goal look like? What do they want out of the conversation? So, that's been—that's taken a significant amount of time.Corey: One of the problems I have is with the term FinOps as a whole, ignoring the fact entirely that it was an existing term of art within finance for decades; great, we're just going to sidestep past that whole mess—the problem you'll see is that it just seems like that it means something different to almost everyone who hears it. And it's sort of become a marketing term more so that it has an actual description of what people are doing. Just because some companies will have a quote-unquote, “FinOps team,” that is primarily going to be run by financial analysts. And others, “Well, we have one of those lying around, but it's mostly an engineering effort on our part.”And I've seen three or four different expressions as far as team composition goes and I'm not convinced any of them are right. But again, it's easy for me to sit here and say, “Oh, that's wrong,” without having an environment of my own to run. I just tend to look at what my clients do. And, “Well, I've seen a lot of things, and they all work poorly in different ways,” is not uplifting and helpful.Levi: Yeah. I try not to get too hung up on what it's called. This is the name that a lot of people inside the company have rallied around and as long as people are interested in saving money, cool, we'll call it FinOps, you know? I mean, DevOps is the same thing, right? In some companies, you're just a sysadmin with a higher pay, and in some companies, you're building extensive cloud architecture and pipelines.Corey: Honestly, for the whole DevOps side of the world, I maintain we're all systems administrators. The tools have changed, the methodologies have changed, the processes have changed, but the responsibility of ‘keep the site up' generally has not. But if you call yourself a sysadmin, you're just asking him to, “Please pay me less money in my next job.” No, thanks.Levi: Yeah. “Where's the Exchange Server for me to click on?” Right? That's the [laugh]—if you call yourself a sysadmin [crosstalk 00:11:34]—Corey: God. You're sending me back into twitching catatonia from my early days.Levi: Exactly [laugh].Corey: So, you've been paying attention to this whole generative AI hype monster. And I want to be clear, I say this as someone who finds the technology super neat and I'm optimistic about it, but holy God, it feels like people have just lost all sense. If that's you, my apologies in advance, but I'm still going to maintain the point.Levi: I've played with all the various toys out there. I'm very curious, you know? I think it's really fun to play with them, but to, like, make your entire business pivot on a dime and pursue it just seems ridiculous to me. I hate that the cryptocurrency space has pivoted so hard into it, you know? All the people that used to be shilling coins are now out there trying to cobble together a couple API calls and turn it into an AI, right?Corey: It feels like it's just a hype cycle that people are more okay with being a part of. Like, Andy Jassy, in the earnings call a couple of weeks ago saying that every Amazon team is working with generative AI. That's not great. That's terrifying. I've been playing with the toys as well and I've asked it things like, “Oh, spit out an IAM policy for me,” or, “Oh, great, what can I do to optimize my AWS bill?” And it winds up spitting out things that sound highly plausible, but they're also just flat-out wrong. And that, it feels like a lot of these spaces, it's not coming up with a plausible answer—that's the hard part—is coming up with the one that is correct. And that's what our jobs are built around.Levi: I've been trying to explain to a lot of people how, if you only have surface knowledge of the thing that it's telling you, it probably seems really accurate, but when you have deep knowledge on the topic that you're interacting with this thing, you're going to see all of the errors. I've been using GitHub's Copilot since the launch. You know, I was in one of the previews. And I love it. Like, it speeds up my development significantly.But there have been moments where I—you know, IAM policies are a great example. You know, I had it crank out a Lambda functions policy, and it was just frankly, wrong in a lot of places [laugh]. It didn't quite imagine new AWS services, but it was really [laugh] close. The API actions were—didn't exist. It just flat-out didn't exist.Corey: I love that. I've had some magic happen early on where it could intelligently query things against the AWS pricing API, but then I asked it the same thing a month later and it gave me something completely ridiculous. It's not deterministic, which is part of the entire problem with it, too. But it's also… it can help incredibly in some weird ways I didn't see coming. But it can also cause you to spend more time chasing that thing than just doing it yourself the first time.I found a great way to help it—you know, it helped me write blog posts with it. I tell it to write a blog post about a topic and give it some bullet points and say, “Write in my voice,” and everything it says I take issue with, so then I just copy that into a text editor and then mansplain-correct the robot for 20 minutes and, oh, now I've got a serviceable first draft.Levi: And how much time did you save [laugh] right? It is fun, you know?Corey: It does help because that's better for me at least and staring at an empty page of what am I going to write? It gets me past the writer's block problem.Levi: Oh, that's a great point, yeah. Just to get the ball rolling, right, once you—it's easier to correct something that's wrong, and you're almost are spite-driven at that point, right? Like, “Let me show this AI how wrong it was and I'll write the perfect blog post.” [laugh].Corey: It feels like the companies jumping on this, if you really dig into what we're talking about, it seems like they're all very excited about the possibility of we don't have to talk to customers anymore because the robots will all do that. And I don't think that's going to go the way you want to. We just have this minor hallucination problem. Yeah, that means that lies and tries to book customers to hotel destinations that don't exist. Think about this a little more. The failure mode here is just massive.Levi: It's scary, yeah. Like, without some kind of review process, I wouldn't ship that straight to my customers, right? I wouldn't put that in front of my customer and say, like, “This is”—I'm going to take this generative output and put it right in front of them. That scares me. I think as we get deeper into it, you know, maybe we'll see… I don't know, maybe we'll put some filters or review process, or maybe it'll get better. I mean, who was it that said, you know, “This is the worst it's ever going to be?” Right, it will only get better.Corey: Well, the counterargument to that is, it will get far worse when we start putting this in charge [unintelligible 00:16:08] safety-critical systems, which I'm sure it's just a matter of time because some of these boosters are just very, very convincing. It's just thinking, how could this possibly go the worst? Ehhh. It's not good.Levi: Yeah, well, I mean, we're talking impact versus quality, right? The quality will only ever get better. But you know, if we run before we walk, the impact can definitely get wider.Corey: From where I sit, I want to see this really excel within bounded problem spaces. The one I keep waiting for is the AWS bill because it's a vast space, yes, and it's complicated as all hell, but it is bounded. There are a finite—though large—number of things you can see in an AWS bill, and there are recommendations you can make based on top of that. But everything I've seen that plays in this space gets way overconfident far too quickly, misses a bunch of very obvious lines of inquiry. Ah, I'm skeptical.Then you pass that off to unbounded problem spaces like human creativity and that just turns into an absolute disaster. So, much of what I've been doing lately has been hamstrung by people rushing to put in safeguards to make sure it doesn't accidentally say something horrible that it's stripped out a lot of the fun and the whimsy and the sarcasm in the approach, of I—at one point, I could bully a number of these things into ranking US presidents by absorbency. That's getting harder to do now because, “Nope, that's not respectful and I'm not going to do it,” is basically where it draws the line.Levi: The one thing that I always struggle with is, like, how much of the models are trained on intellectual property or, when you distill it down, pure like human suffering, right? Like, this is somebody's art, they've worked hard, they've suffered for it, they put it out there in the world, and now it's just been pulled in and adopted by this tool that—you know, how many of the examples of, “Give me art in the style of,” right, and you just see hundreds and hundreds of pieces that I mean, frankly, are eerily identical to the style.Corey: Even down to the signature, in some cases. Yeah.Levi: Yeah, exactly. You know, and I think that we can't lose sight of that, right? Like, these tools are fun and you know, they're fun to play with, it's really interesting to explore what's possible, but we can't lose sight of the fact that there are ultimately people behind these things.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Panoptica.  Panoptica simplifies container deployment, monitoring, and security, protecting the entire application stack from build to runtime. Scalable across clusters and multi-cloud environments, Panoptica secures containers, serverless APIs, and Kubernetes with a unified view, reducing operational complexity and promoting collaboration by integrating with commonly used developer, SRE, and SecOps tools. Panoptica ensures compliance with regulatory mandates and CIS benchmarks for best practice conformity. Privacy teams can monitor API traffic and identify sensitive data, while identifying open-source components vulnerable to attacks that require patching. Proactively addressing security issues with Panoptica allows businesses to focus on mitigating critical risks and protecting their interests. Learn more about Panoptica today at panoptica.app.Corey: I think it matters, on some level, what the medium is. When I'm writing, I will still use turns of phrase from time to time that I first encountered when I was reading things in the 1990s. And that phrase stuck with me and became part of my lexicon. And I don't remember where I originally encountered some of these things; I just know I use those raises an awful lot. And that has become part and parcel of who and what I am.Which is also, I have no problem telling it to write a blog post in the style of Corey Quinn and then ripping a part of that out, but anything that's left in there, cool. I'm plagiarizing the thing that plagiarized from me and I find that to be one of those ethically just moments there. But written word is one thing depending on what exactly it's taking from you, but visual style for art, that's something else entirely.Levi: There's a real ethical issue here. These things can absorb far much more information than you ever could in your entire lifetime, right, so that you can only quote-unquote, you know, “Copy, borrow, steal,” from a handful of other people in your entire life, right? Whereas this thing could do hundreds or thousands of people per minute. I think that's where the calculus needs to be, right? How many people can we impact with this thing?Corey: This is also nothing new, where originally in the olden times, great, copyright wasn't really a thing because writing a book was a massive, massive undertaking. That was something that you'd have to do by hand, and then oh, you want a copy of the book? You'd have to have a scribe go and copy the thing. Well then, suddenly the printing press came along, and okay, that changes things a bit.And then we continue to evolve there to digital distribution where suddenly it's just bits on a disk that I can wind up throwing halfway around the internet. And when the marginal cost of copying something becomes effectively zero, what does that change? And now we're seeing, I think, another iteration in that ongoing question. It's a weird world and I don't know that we have the framework in place even now to think about that properly. Because every time we start to get a handle on it, off we go again. It feels like if they were doing be invented today, libraries would absolutely not be considered legal. And yet, here we are.Levi: Yeah, it's a great point. Humans just do not have the ethical framework in place for a lot of these things. You know, we saw it even with the days of Napster, right? It's just—like you said, it's another iteration on the same core problem. I [laugh] don't know how to solve it. I'm not a philosopher, right?Corey: Oh, yeah. Back in the Napster days, I was on that a fair bit in high school and college because I was broke, and oh, I wanted to listen to this song. Well, it came on an album with no other good songs on it because one-hit wonders were kind of my jam, and that album cost 15, 20 bucks, or I could grab the thing for free. There was no reasonable way to consume. Then they started selling individual tracks for 99 cents and I gorged myself for years on that stuff.And now it feels like streaming has taken over the world to the point where the only people who really lose on this are the artists themselves, and I don't love that outcome. How do we have a better tomorrow for all of this? I know we're a bit off-topic from you know, cloud management, but still, this is the sort of thing I think about when everything's running smoothly in a cloud environment.Levi: It's hard to get people to make good decisions when they're so close to the edge. And I think about when I was, you know, college-age scraping by on minimum wage or barely above minimum wage, you know, it was hard to convince me that, oh yeah, you shouldn't download an MP3 of that song; you should go buy the disc, or whatever. It was really hard to make that argument when my decision was buy an album or figure out where I'm going to, you know, get my lunch. So, I think, now that I'm in a much different place in my life, you know, these decisions are a lot easier to make in an ethical way because that doesn't impact my livelihood nearly as much. And I think that is where solutions will probably come out of. The more people doing better, the easier it is for them to make good decisions.Corey: I sure hope you're right, but something I found is that okay we made it easy for people to make good decisions. Like, “Nope, you've just made it easier for me to scale a bunch of terrible ones. I can make 300,000 more terrible decisions before breakfast time now. Thanks.” And, “No, that's not what I did that for.” Yet here we are. Have you been tracking lately what's been going on with the HashiCorp license change?Levi: Um, a little bit, we use—obviously use Terraform in the company and a couple other Hashi products, and it was kind of a wildfire of, you know, how does this impact us? We dove in and we realized that it doesn't, but it is concerning.Corey: You're not effectively wrapping Terraform and then using that as the basis for how you do MDM across your customer fleets.Levi: Yeah. You know, we're not deploying customers' written Terraform into their environments or something kind of wild like that. Yeah, it doesn't impact us. But it is… it is concerning to watch a company pivot from an open-source, community-based project to, “Oh, you can't do that anymore.” It doesn't impact a lot of people who use it day-to-day, but I'm really worried about just the goodwill that they've lit on fire.Corey: One of the problems, too, is that their entire write-up on this was so vague that it was—there is no way to get an actual… piece of is it aimed at us or is it not without very deep analysis, and hope that when it comes to court, you're going to have the same analysis as—that is sympathetic. It's, what is considered to be a competitor? At least historically, it was pretty obvious. Some of these databases, “Okay great. Am I wrapping their database technology and then selling it as a service? No? I'm pretty good.”But with HashiCorp, what they do is so vast in a few key areas that no one has the level of certainty. I was pretty freaking certain that I'm not shipping MongoDB with my own wrapper around it, but am I shipping something that looks like Terraform if I'm managing someone's environment for them? I don't know. Everything's thrown into question. And you're right. It's the goodwill that currently is being set on fire.Levi: Yeah, I think people had an impression of Hashi that they were one of the good guys. You know, the quote-unquote, “Good guys,” in the space, right? Mitchell Hashimoto is out there as a very prominent coder, he's an engineer at heart, he's in the community, pretty influential on Twitter, and I think people saw them as not one of the big, faceless corporations, so to see moves like this happen, it… I think it shook a lot of people's opinions of them and scared them.Corey: Oh, yeah. They've always been the good guys in this context. Mitch and Armon were fantastic folks. I'm sure they still are. I don't know if this is necessarily even coming from them. It's market forces, what are investors demanding? They see everyone is using Terraform. How does that compare to HashiCorp's market value?This is one of the inherent problems if I'm being direct, of the end-stages of capitalism, where it's, “Okay, we're delivering on a lot of value. How do we capture ever more of it and growing massively?” And I don't know. I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think anyone's thrilled with this outcome. Because, let's be clear, it is not going to meaningfully juice their numbers at all. They're going to be setting up a lot of ill will against them in the industry, but I don't see the upside for them. I really don't.Levi: I haven't really done any of the analysis or looked for it, I should say. Have you seen anything about what this might actually impact any providers or anything? Because you're right, like, what kind of numbers are we actually talking about here?Corey: Right. Well, there are a few folks that have done things around this that people have named for me: Spacelift being one example, Pulumi being another, and both of them are saying, “Nope, this doesn't impact us because of X, Y, and Z.” Yeah, whether it does or doesn't, they're not going to sit there and say, “Well, I guess we don't have a company anymore. Oh, well.” And shut the whole thing down and just give their customers over to HashiCorp.Their own customers would be incensed if that happened and would not go to HashiCorp if that were to be the outcome. I think, on some level, they're setting the stage for the next evolution in what it takes to manage large-scale cloud environments effectively. I think basically, every customer I've ever dealt with on my side has been a Terraform shop. I finally decided to start learning the ins and outs of it myself a few weeks ago, and well, it feels like I should have just waited a couple more weeks and then it would have become irrelevant. Awesome. Which is a bit histrionic, but still, this is going to plant seeds for people to start meaningfully competing. I hope.Levi: Yeah, I hope so too. I have always awaited releases of Terraform Cloud with great anticipation. I generally don't like managing my Terraform back-ends, you know, I don't like managing the state files, so every time Terraform Cloud has some kind of release or something, I'm looking at it because I'm excited, oh finally, maybe this is the time I get to hand it off, right? Maybe I start to get to use their product. And it has never been a really compelling answer to the problems that I have.And I've always said, like, the [laugh] cloud journey would be Google's if they just released a managed Terraform [laugh] service. And this would be one way for them to prevent that from happening. Because Google doesn't even have an Infrastructure as Code competitor. Not really. I mean, I know they have their, what, Plans or their Projects or whatever they… their Infrastructure as Code language was, but—Corey: Isn't that what Stackdriver was supposed to be? What happened with that? It's been so long.Levi: No, that's a logging solution [laugh].Corey: That's the thing. It all runs together. Not it was their operations suite that was—Levi: There we go.Corey: —formerly Stackdriver. Yeah. Now, that does include some aspects—yeah. You're right, it's still hanging out in the observability space. This is the problem is all this stuff conflates and companies are terrible at naming and Google likes to deprecate things constantly. And yeah, but there is no real competitor. CloudFormation? Please. Get serious.Levi: Hey, you're talking to a member of the CloudFormation support group here. So, I'm still a huge fan [laugh].Corey: Emotional support group, more like it, it seems these days.Levi: It is.Corey: Oh, good. It got for loops recently. We've been asking for basically that to make them a lot less wordy only for, what, ten years?Levi: Yeah. I mean, my argument is that I'm operating at the account level, right? I need to deploy to 250, 300, 500 accounts. Show me how to do that with Terraform that isn't, you know, stab your eyes out with a fork.Corey: It can be done, but it requires an awful lot of setting things up first.Levi: Exactly.Corey: That's sort of a problem. Like yeah, once you have the first 500 going, the rest are just like butter. But that's a big step one is massive, and then step two becomes easy. Yeah… no, thank you.Levi: [laugh]. I'm going to stick with my StacksSets, thank you.Corey: [laugh]. I really want to thank you for taking the time to come back on and honestly kibitz about the state of the industry with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Levi: Well, I'm still active on the space normally known as—formerly known as Twitter. You can reach out to me there. DMs are open. I'm always willing to help people learn how to cloud better. Hopefully trying to make my presence known a little bit more on LinkedIn. If you happen to be over there, reach out.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:30:16]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me again. It's always a pleasure.Levi: Thanks, Corey. I always appreciate it.Corey: Levi McCormick, Director of Cloud Engineering at Jamf. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, and along with an insulting comment that tells us that we completely missed the forest for the trees and that your programmfing is going to be far superior based upon generative AI.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

In this episode, Sara Mannix, the founder of successful marketing agency Mannix Marketing Inc., discusses the evolution of SEO and the changing landscape of digital marketing. She highlights the key factors that have remained constant, such as the power of focus and niche expertise. Sara also talks about the shift towards a holistic approach to marketing and shares strategies used to market hard-to-reach industries, including the challenges faced in the hospitality industry.Sara Mannix is the Founder and President of Mannix Marketing Inc., an award-winning digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, PPC, and web design. With over 27 years of experience in marketing and tourism, she leads Mannix Tourism, a destination marketing agency focused on helping communities thrive, and tourism businesses achieve their goals. Here are a few of the topics we'll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market: SEO has evolved from “search engine positioning” to a holistic approach focused on success metrics. The success of SEO depends on understanding the lifetime value of customers and targeting the right audience. Niche industries can utilize thought leadership and targeted marketing to generate conversions. Cross-functional learning enables the application of successful strategies from one industry to another. Niche expertise in the hospitality industry provides a deep understanding of specific challenges and solutions. Having a niche helps in clearly defining goals and delivering a guaranteed return on investment. Agencies struggling with their pipeline can benefit greatly from partnering with niche digital marketing experts. Resources: Mannix Marketing Inc. Podcast Chef Connect with Sara Mannix:LinkedInConnect with our host, Brian Mattocks: LinkedIn Email Quotables: 02:39 -  “I said, well, at the bottom of every website that we do, I put website design and development by Mannix Marketing, and it links back to us. And I think that makes a difference. So the links have changed. It's not just about having a link on any website, it's about having, you know, relevant content on relevant sites. That was true even before Google. Because Google really made it much more about the quality of the link.” 04:45 - “So I think the businesses that lend themselves to paid search and SEO and that type of lead gen are typically businesses with shorter turnaround times. I need this item, or I need this expertise, and I'm gonna search for it. Right. Where can I find it? Right. And that has a shorter span. And a lot of experts think, well, it's only word of mouth for my business, or it's this or that. And I always tell people, if it's a big purchase, and they are the type of people who want it within the next three months, they're going to research it on the internet as well.” 20:10 -  “I think it's one of those paradoxical things, like what is the saying about attorneys, like someone who represents themselves in court as a fool for a client. I think in many ways you almost can't do your own marketing. The blind spots are just too big. Yeah. Which is probably an unpopular opinion.” 06:29 - Brian: “So how do you deal with some of those hard to market kind of items or how to hard to market services with the clients that you represent?”.. Sara: “Yeah, so we actually have a client very similar. They do massive heating, heating and cooling systems that go on top of billion buildings that are worth millions of dollars. Right. And those numbers are very low for somebody who doesn't know who they are and who are searching for it. But when you're selling something that's a million dollars, and you're number one in search, they actually do SEO, and they have such great ROI because if there's 50 people a year searching for it, and they find them, and they sell a million dollar cooling refrigerant building Right, right. Solution, they've paid for their SEO, and their paid search for the next seven years.” 12:41 - Brian: “So what I'm hearing is that anyone willing to pay or anyone with a pulse and a checkbook is not a sufficient information for you to target them for SEO. Is that right?”.. Sara: “That's true.”.. Brian: “I have the number of clients that I've worked with in the marketing space where I'm like, so who's a great client for you? And they're like, ah, anybody will pay.”.. Sara: “We like, we have specific industries that we do really well, but we have really narrowed down on, and we have been in business for 30, 26 years, so we have done many industries. So, but if I were only a five-year-old agency, I would not recommend that, it's a nightmare. And it's just too much. You can't do everything. Well, you can't, right. We don't say we do everything well, we say we do SEO well, right. And we can do SEO well for anybody, but do we want to do it for everybody? No, no.”.. Brian: “You can go horizontal, or you can go vertical, but you can't really go both. Right.”

Kasim sits down with Matthew Stafford of Build Grow Scale™ as he shares the same eCommerce website optimization practices he applied to help a business earn half a million dollars in just 48 hours! One topic Matthew shares is how your slow website is affecting your sales and business. The longer your website takes to load, the higher the chances of visitors bouncing off. You don't want to lose potential customers, do you? With faster page loading times, you can boost your customer retention by up to 60%! Because Google rewards fast-loading sites with organic traffic. To learn more expert eCommerce website optimization tips, watch the full interview here: •

The Stats: Progress Report, 2023, How Am I Actually Doing? In this episode Nick dives into and shares the stats from his recent results of running social media, a new website and everything he's helped implement in his new job and student ministry. How is it actually going? What's going well? What needs tweaked? And what have we learned? See Nick Sip his Coffee, don't just hear it: https://www.youtube.com/@clasonnick Daily TikTok Clips: https://www.tiktok.com/@Clasonnick Shownotes & Transcripts for this Episode: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/047 SHOWNOTES Building a Digital Strategy from Scratch https://www.hybridministry.xyz/011 The Results PDF https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vNimYieoP8N8gbDX-cxQssRrez5Lmo-f/view?usp=share_link 6 Part Social FRAMEWORK https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLngXlSr64YaIbzg_DNJrTrCtBHQnxcOVo My Student Ministry's Website/Hub crosscreekchurch.com/students Q&A Link Brady Response to Theology in the Raw Podcast https://podtail.com/podcast/pro-church-tools-with-brady-shearer/christian-author-urges-churches-to-not-use-tiktok-/ Can you Be Discipled Completely Online? VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1-U_mfQEoI&t=7s AUDIO: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/042 TIMECODES 00:00-04:03 Intro 04:03-13:37 What is the Current State of our Current Social Media and Generation Z Demographics? 13:37-17:20 How are we doing on TikTok? 17:20-19:18 How are we doing on YouTube? 19:18-21:20 How are we doing on Instagram? 21:20-22:33 How are we doing on Facebook? 22:33-26:05 What this means for my social media moving forward? TRANSCRIPT Nick Clason (00:01): Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid and Ministry podcast. I, as always am your host, Nick Clason, sip my coffee. If you're on the YouTube stream, you get to see here and listen to this beauty rest of y'all said to be with you. Sorry that you had to endure that, uh, coffee pause, but thrilled to be with you. And in today's episode we have, um, a little bit of a recap. And so I, I linked a couple of things down in the show notes, but you'll notice, um, and if you were around, um, or have been around for a minute, you'll know that, well, I just recently started a new job and I say recently, um, within the last, you know, 11 months or nine months or so, started in September. So whenever this is airing, you can do the math on that, right? Nick Clason (00:53): And, um, I dropped an episode, episode 11, um, a little bit, just honestly a little bit of a filler episode. I was trying to limp myself through, uh, thinking I was gonna get a co-host back. Never did. May he rest in peace. He's not actually dead, but, um, he's dead to this podcast and I miss him. But, um, we have moved on and, and gone on to greater things. Anyway, um, the episode was flushing out a digital strategy. And so in that episode, I spent a lot of time talking about website, email, seo. And then in, um, our, one of our more recent runs of episodes, we dropped the complete six part social media framework, seven episodes with an intro. And so I have linked that playlist on YouTube, uh, that playlist to YouTube. It's also on our podcast catcher, just, um, you know, in order for seven weeks in a row. Nick Clason (01:44): So you can go back and listen to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You can see them in your feed here either way. Um, but I wanted to drop both of those because basically, um, that's what I have been on this podcast saying, you should do this, you should do that. Here's why. Here's the strategy behind those things. And now I am going to take those things and I am going to report them to you how they're going. So the first part, um, of that was, you know, website and email. I'll just be very clear, I don't have any analytics to go off of that. We use Church Community Builder and we send all of our emails through that and for two reasons. Number one, I don't care enough. And number two, um, someone has told us that we are unable to track open and click rates. I don't know that that's entirely true, but again, I don't care enough and I haven't dove into that, just being completely frank. Nick Clason (02:30): Um, I know I should, but I haven't, haven't really had time. So I don't have any analytics on that. The other thing is our website. I can show you what we came up with. I'm not, uh, personally a huge fan of it. Um, there are limitations and constraints, um, both by our website builder and by the way that our website is built and fleshed out to the rest of the church that make ours, um, less than what we would hoped and less than optimal. Um, but you know, if you've ever worked in church any bit of time, you know that there's a just a game to play with getting along with the other people. So, um, I can, I'll link our website to, in the show notes. You can check it out and see, um, if you know what I said in episode 11 matches what we have now, I don't think it does. Nick Clason (03:13): Um, so I'm just gonna give that full disclosure. You can look at and like, this stinks and I can be like, yeah, I know. Um, but anyway, uh, all that to be said, I am gonna dive into our stats on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. But before I do, like I said, so thrilled to have you, if you wouldn't mind dropping a rating or a review or a like, or a subscribe on YouTube, that would be incredible. We're also trying to start gathering some questions for a couple coup a couple future q and a episodes. So if you don't mind, head to our website, link to that in the show notes as well, um, with just some, uh, questions and things that you have about regarding social media, running, social media, digital ministry, any of those types of things we would love to answer them. Nick Clason (03:53): But without any further ado, let's dive into this episode called Progress Report 2023. How am I actually doing? Let's go. What is the current state of our social media and our Generation Z demographics? First of all, let's look at some overall social media data. So what we know is that we have 4.7 billion people that are using social media worldwide. That is 59% of the population. And when you look at that through the lens of the Great Commission, go therefore and preach the gospel to the entire world, making disciples of all nations baptized them, the name of the father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Like you see that, that social media is actually an opportunity to preach the gospel to all nations, at least 59% of the population. In addition to that two hours and 29 minutes is the average daily time spent using social media. Nick Clason (04:51): And 73% of customers, according to a, um, a company called Wise Owl prefer to watch a video than they do prefer to read a text-based post. This is like marketing. So this is like a company saying like they'd rather watch a text ad than l read a, uh, or they'd rather watch a video ad than read a text ad. And then, um, 96% of people in the world have ever watched an explainer type of video. And finally, people are two times more likely to share video content than other content. So that's social media worldwide. Here's what we have about Gen Z. And if you've been on this podcast or listened to us any length of time, you've heard these before, but Generation Z is the first generation in history to use their mobile device more than any other device. So more than any other device, I should say combined. Nick Clason (05:44): Okay? So Gen Z is using their mobile device at a alarmingly high rate. They are not just digital natives, like they are becoming digitally dependent. And, um, I shared this I think on a recent episode as well, but Jen Alpha behind them is going to be even more digitally dependent. The mobile device is the key to all of this, and I know if you're listening, you're thinking that's bad. We need to get them away from it and uh, it might be bad. Um, I don't know that we're getting anybody away from it. So I think the question needs to shift to be like instead of how do we get people away from it? Because let's be honest right now, if you're listening to this, you're using your mobile device right now, if you're on a road trip, let's be honest, you're probably using your mobile device as your GPS today. Nick Clason (06:27): You're probably looking at your calendar on your mobile device. And are all of those things possible? Can you buy an old school GPS and um, use a paper daytimer and listen to a podcast just on your computer while you're sitting in the office? Technically, yes, but it's not very convenient, right? Your mobile device is your one stop shop, your hub for almost everything in your life. And so it's not just about social media, it is the fact that it is a lifeline. It is a lifeblood. It is everything that you do and that you use. And so the problem with that is a lot of times we try to disciple teens, gen Z, young people away from their phones when what we need to be doing is help produce within them good digital hygiene and good coping mechanisms and good, uh, skills with interacting with their phone and using, learning how to grow in their faith while having a phone as a part of their life as opposed to just discarding it and getting away from it. Nick Clason (07:25): Because yeah, we can, you know, just scale back and go to, uh, flip phones. But two things. One, probably most people are not going to opt into that. And two, it's actually more expensive and more inconvenient to do that through the cell phone companies. So how do we help move people through and, and help them grow in discipleship? I just think, I honestly think that is a sign of a time, a thing that any of us in church ministry leadership, youth ministry, whatever your role is in church staff, that's something that we're going to have to be prepared to do. That's a conversation that we need to be willing to have. And I just think that pulling back and just saying no thanks to it is not very, um, it is just, is not good stewardship of what God has given us. In fact, what I'll do is I'll link, uh, an episode to, um, one of the pro church tool shows that Brady Shearer, he actually did a response episode to, uh, a guy who was on Preston Sprinkles podcast talking about the dangers of technology. Nick Clason (08:24): And I thought that him and his co-host Alexander Mills had really, really great thoughts and responses to it, and it lines up a lot with what I think. So I'll link that episode in the show notes, if you're interested in that, go check them out. They're amazing. Love everything that they do. But go check that out. Okay. Um, further data on Gen Z, millennials and subsequently Gen Z I should say, have said that a hybrid version of church will suit their needs going forward in a post pandemic world. That comes from Bara's recent study came out about a year or so ago on Bara's six findings of the hybrid and future of the church that, um, I was already thinking about doing this podcast, but I hadn't launched it yet. So that came out right around when I launched this podcast. And, and I love that word hybrid. Nick Clason (09:06): Um, and, and Barna used that word hybrid and it's just, it's, I've, I've latched onto a lot of the data out of that thing. And so, uh, hybrid is one of the means and measures going forward that Gen Z and millennials prefer. Um, I just think we have to do that in such a way that we don't lose the good elements of in-person ministry or in-person community, um, and give them, you know, like a framework to help them grow in their faith but not become too dependent upon technology. And I just think that's a tricky balance to walk and I think that you and I are the leaders that God has chosen to help navigate that. Finally, greater than 80% of 18 to 29 year olds, which is the youngest age data available legally, cuz you can't survey anyone under the age of 18. Um, greater than 80% use at least one social media app regularly, which is the highest of all the age breakdowns between 18 29, 30 to, you know, 39, whatever the breakdowns are. Nick Clason (10:01): Um, and we can just assume that it's gonna be higher in generations younger than the age of 18. Um, and moving forward. So all that being said, social media, cell phone usage, and hybrid ministry, not really going anywhere. That's a backdrop basis for why we do this. Why I'm so passionate about hybrid ministry. If you go back and listen to the intro of episode 11, I say I'm in the buckle of the Bible Belt, Dallas, Texas, I'm at a church that barely shut down for covid and I'm in a ministry that is thriving with an in-person moment. They're not clamoring, begging, or looking for hybrid. So why did we lean into it? This is the reason why, right? Like this is why we went for some of these things. We pushed the chips in on the middle because, well, right now it may not be a priority, it may not be on the forefront of people's minds. Nick Clason (10:50): It is the currency, it is the, the native tongue of generation Z and subsequently soon to be generation alpha. And so we wanna at least be out there doing some stuff, trying some stuff. Listen, I'll be the first to say, and this is the report is gonna yield this a little bit. I don't know for sure if what I'm doing is the best way to reach disciple, preach the gospel to generation Z and generation alpha. However, the fact that we're doing things makes whatever potential future shift, um, possible, makes us be able to adapt quicker because we have cameras, we have infrastructure, we have someone thinking about it. We have, we're posting regularly, we can watch some of those trends. So rather than just sit back and wait for the picture, perfect thing, we're gonna go out there and we're gonna try some stuff and we're gonna tweak and adapt along the way. Nick Clason (11:43): And we are like, I have some shifts coming and I'm gonna let you know about those at the end of the episode or in a future episode. So all that to be said, like this is why we're doing it in person is important, it matters, it's meaningful. But episode, I believe it's 42. Uh, can you be discipled exclusively online? I don't think the answer is an either or a both. And my my conclusion is that if someone really wants to learn and hone in on some of their skills, they can do that. And I gave several examples of things that I have learned without ever having any sort of in-person experience or moment. Um, my wife included, like, there are a lot of ways that you can learn and you can dive deep in all sorts of topics. And the Bible should not, does not have to be excluded from that. Nick Clason (12:30): Like, that is very much a, a possibility, um, of things that we can do. And the beautiful thing is, as a church, if we offer some of those moments and some of those learnings, we have to go with that. We compare with online stuff, we compare in-person moments, we compare authentic community, family feelings, and we confuse those two things together. That's where hybrid really has its opportunity to, to make its most like impact. I think you don't have to be either or both. And like the reason in episode 42, can you be discipled exclusively online? The reason that I don't have a relationship with any of the people from the Oklahoma City Thunder podcast, it's because I don't live in Oklahoma City. I've never had an opportunity to get to know them. I'm three hours away now in Dallas, but before that I've been like 12 hours or 15 hours away from Oklahoma City. Nick Clason (13:20): Online was the only way, it was the only path forward for learning the only path forward for education. And, and so I took it, okay? But now as a church, we can offer these things online that also supplement and go right along with what we're doing in person. All right, so how are we doing on TikTok In just 11 years, from 2011 to 2022, TikTok grew from estimated zero users to around 1 billion estimated users. That is the fastest, most skyrocketed, um, growth. It's behind Facebook at 2.9 billion. YouTube at 2.2 billion, Instagram at 1.4 billion. And then TikTok is at 1 billion. Obviously we're assuming that that's going to continue to move and grow. And so I wanna share some of our individual personalized data. And I'll be honest, TikTok has adjusted some of their algorithm. There's a lot of people even on the TikTok four U page lamenting that shift in talking and chatting through why people's views are stuck at two 300. Nick Clason (14:20): And we're squarely there. I'm just gonna lay it out for you fully, you know, completely, honestly. Um, but, but all that being said, okay, um, we started at our TikTok account in mid-September, maybe October. Um, so somewhere around there. And whenever you're listening to it, I'm recording this on May the third. And so I have the most up-to-date data based on May the third. I also shifted our TikTok account, um, the second day of March, I believe. So we, uh, right around two now at this point, um, shifted it to a business profile account, okay? And so we have the ability to have some creator tools and some deeper analytics that only really date back to March. And so we have, um, lifetime data, which we have, we are following 18 accounts. We have 236 followers, and we have 7,473 likes. Not amazing, honestly, it's not, um, most I will say though of our followers are completely organic. Nick Clason (15:18): And so you gotta think in, uh, a church that runs its student ministry, about 200 people. Um, we have reached basically 200 and, uh, 36 completely random people. Um, and TikTok followers are not the same as YouTube followers. They don't, they, they don't respond the same. Um, I've heard that from other like creators and stuff like that. All that being said, you just gotta think like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, would you as a pastor or would you as a social ministry or social media manager want the desire to have an audience, 236 people, um, that, that commit to follow you? That doesn't even include views and likes and those types of things, right? Just followers. Would you want that? And most of us would, would say yes. And so well, I might be like, man, that's not amazing. I know I'm aware of it, right? Nick Clason (16:06): Like I'm running it actively. Um, it's, it's still also not nothing, right? Okay, so what about since we converted to a business profile. So here's some of the stuff that we have. Video views 34,184, we have 308 profile views. We have 2,827 likes, we have 84 comments and we have 118 shares. Furthermore, if you dive into just specifically last week's content and analytics, um, here's what I'll do. I will link this report. I won't bore you with this, but I'll, I'll just pull out, um, at a quick glance. I haven't even like really dove into it deeply. Yeah, I think the highest view that we had was just like 269, um, with a couple of comments and the like, and you know, like 22 or something like that likes, and, and that was me filming a game of some of our students playing a game called App Store Showdown. Nick Clason (16:57): So you can see that, like, it doesn't require you being all up on trends. Like, I recorded a game, I did some edit, some brief editing, and I made, you know, I had 10 questions on it or whatever, and I made 10 slides and then I'm just sprinkling 'em out, scheduling 'em out throughout the month. So not super difficult. That is our most recent up to date TikTok Analytics. All right, so let's talk about YouTube. What is it go looking like on YouTube? You'll know that I'm a big proponent of YouTube. I think that shorts are much more advantageous to use right now. And I also think that if you post, um, messages or any sort of like spiritual content than all of your short form content, because by the way I should have said this earlier, everything we're doing is short form content on all of these platforms. Nick Clason (17:46): Like, there's barely any other strategy around anything else. And so if you have those, having something longer on YouTube allows you to push your content, um, and push your people or anyone that stumbles across any of your videos to follow you for longer form stuff. YouTube is the second or third, depending on who you talk to, largest search engine in the world. And if it's considered third, it's only behind Google Images. So it's Google, Google images, and then YouTube. If Google, if you consider Google images a part of Google, then it's the second, right? Because Google and Google images are the same. And then YouTube is the second. So our analytics, we have 126 current subscribers in the year 2023, which is our YouTube channel's only been around since January of, uh, first of 2023. We have gotten, um, 52,432 views in our videos. We've had 291 hours of watch time and our subscribers are up to, uh, up by 125, cuz I think I subscribed before it launched in in January. Nick Clason (18:50): Um, so 126 subscribers. Um, our top performing long form video has gotten 56 views, four hours of watch time, um, I think 18 subscribes. And then our, our analytics, our channel analytics is that we have 32,000 unique viewers, 42, um, returning viewers, and then, uh, plus 80 on subscribers from people who have, uh, come across our stuff on you. All right, so what about Instagram? While Instagram is skewing older and older being used primarily by millennials, there's still 62% of us teens that claim to be users of Instagram. Our Instagram, like most of you, you probably have had an Instagram account for a while, and that's the same with us. We inherited an Instagram account of all the things. TikTok was new, YouTube was new, and our Facebook page is uh, also a retread. But the main thing we're doing on Facebook is our parent group, which is also new. Nick Clason (19:49): So Facebook, Instagram, something that has already existed. Everything else completely brand new. So all the data I have been, I have been sharing with you is from things that, um, are completely brand new. So we inherited an Instagram account, so these stats are gonna be a little more leveled off. Two reasons. One, we already had a pretty big following on there, so we're not gonna see some of that skyrocketed type growth. And secondly, um, it's, it's skewing older and it's being used less and less by current Gen Z teenagers. So we've had 1,829 profile visits. Um, in the year 2023, we have 785 Instagram followers. Um, I have age demographic breakdown, but the highest, honestly 20% is 35 to 44 year old women. So we just got a all moms on there, right? Um, we do have 18 to 24 year olds and it doesn't go younger than that. Nick Clason (20:40): Um, as a high, that just might be also cuz teenagers have to lie about their age to get on there. Um, and then Instagram reach is 122,872. Um, they say that that's a 0% change though, so we're pretty much holding steady. Uh, that being said, we have reached, since January 31st to April 30th, we have reached 40,900. We have, uh, 576 accounts engaged and we have 785 total followers. So I say all that to say like, while Instagram is slower and whatever, there are still valuable data happening here on Instagram. 32% of users on Facebook are teenagers. That's not a lot. Is it worth doing? It's not a lot. It's also not nothing. And, um, you can very seamlessly link your Instagram and Facebook. And so I don't even go to Facebook. I literally post on Instagram and also double post on Facebook. And so, like I shared a couple episodes ago, um, the lottery ticket vibes, um, of just posting it in four places, sometimes some's gonna hit and sometimes it's gonna hit over on Facebook. Nick Clason (21:49): And so our page and profile data, which are the things that have existed, but we've, um, recently revitalized a little bit. We've had 656 page visits, that's up 283.6%. We have, uh, reached 26, um, on our post reach tw uh, I'm not, I'm not, I'm sorry, not 26. 23,000. Um, our Facebook page reach is 37,803. Um, but probably the best thing I think that we have going on in the last 60 days, we've added 80 total members to our parent Facebook page and none of that, zero of that is from organic growth. That is all from like people in our church. We send out an email, they click, they join our Facebook group. All right, so in conclusion, uh, I'm not stopping, right? Like we're gonna keep barreling forward. I've been posting three times a day, um, five days a week on all of these platforms. Nick Clason (22:45): I do think one of the things I want to do is I have been focusing a little bit more just, you know, full disclosure on quantity, uh, as opposed to quality now that I'm trying to put crappy stuff out there, but by posting three times a day, 15 different posts a week, like that just becomes a lot. And it's hard for every single one of those to be really good and really meaningful. And so I wanna start spending a little bit more time on the edit, um, which is just going to have to ultimately reduce the number I'm doing. Uh, that being said, I don't know that I'm gonna see much of a depreciable drop off from three to two. And so really like I'm trying to do like one spiritual post a day and one fun or interesting post a day. Like I said, I'm not just like some consultant out there trying to like get rich tell you a bunch of stuff and not care about the results. Nick Clason (23:32): Like I am a youth pastor. I am trying to live into these hybrid moments. And so I just wanted to share with you, I pulled some of these results for the first time, uh, for a work thing and I wanted to share with y'all. I mean, here's the thing, right? Like none of these numbers are outlandish. And the reality is like, I, I don't think they are. Maybe you heard them and you're like, wow, that sounds crazy. Like I'd love that. Let me just encourage you, lean in, like you can do this. Like nothing I've done in my personal opinion is that insane, that difficult, that crazy, that hard to, to come by. So just wanna encourage you, uh, you can get these same results cuz we have been very much middle of the road with our results. Nothing viral, nothing crazy. So just go for it, lean in, make it happen. Nick Clason (24:14): You can do it. Hey, as always, so excited to have y'all with us for this episode. If you're not subscribed to the YouTube channel or us on podcast, please do that or consider a rating or a review share with a friend. Help us get the word out. That would be phenomenal. We would love it. Um, we also wanna let you know about our 100% completely free ebook. Um, there are also some free downloads in this episode, the report, the analytics, um, other episodes and show notes and things that we've talked through. And go check all of those things out. That's at hybridministry.xyz/047 And until next time, and as always, don't forget, stay hybrid.

We are excited to be the first podcast in the world to release an in-depth interview on the new SOTA in commercially licensed open source models - MosiacML MPT-7B!The Latent Space crew will be at the NYC Lux AI Summit next week, and have two meetups in June. As usual, all events are on the Community page! We are also inviting beta testers for the upcoming AI for Engineers course. See you soon!One of GPT3's biggest limitations is context length - you can only send it up to 4000 tokens (3k words, 6 pages) before it throws a hard error, requiring you to bring in LangChain and other retrieval techniques to process long documents and prompts. But MosaicML recently open sourced MPT-7B, the newest addition to their Foundation Series, with context length going up to 84,000 tokens (63k words, 126 pages):This transformer model, trained from scratch on 1 trillion tokens of text and code (compared to 300B for Pythia and OpenLLaMA, and 800B for StableLM), matches the quality of LLaMA-7B. It was trained on the MosaicML platform in 9.5 days on 440 GPUs with no human intervention, costing approximately $200,000. Unlike many open models, MPT-7B is licensed for commercial use and it's optimized for fast training and inference through FlashAttention and FasterTransformer.They also released 3 finetuned models starting from the base MPT-7B: * MPT-7B-Instruct: finetuned on dolly_hhrlhf, a dataset built on top of dolly-5k (see our Dolly episode for more details). * MPT-7B-Chat: finetuned on the ShareGPT-Vicuna, HC3, Alpaca, Helpful and Harmless, and Evol-Instruct datasets.* MPT-7B-StoryWriter-65k+: it was finetuned with a context length of 65k tokens on a filtered fiction subset of the books3 dataset. While 65k is the advertised size, the team has gotten up to 84k tokens in response when running on a single node A100-80GB GPUs. ALiBi is the dark magic that makes this possible. Turns out The Great Gatsby is only about 68k tokens, so the team used the model to create new epilogues for it!On top of the model checkpoints, the team also open-sourced the entire codebase for pretraining, finetuning, and evaluating MPT via their new MosaicML LLM Foundry. The table we showed above was created using LLM Foundry in-context-learning eval framework itself!In this episode, we chatted with the leads of MPT-7B at Mosaic: Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist, and Abhinav Venigalla, Research Scientist who spearheaded the MPT-7B training run. We talked about some of the innovations they've brought into the training process to remove the need for 2am on-call PagerDutys, why the LLM dataset mix is such an important yet dark art, and why some of the traditional multiple-choice benchmarks might not be very helpful for the type of technology we are building.Show Notes* Introducing MPT-7B* Cerebras* Lottery Ticket Hypothesis* Hazy Research* ALiBi* Flash Attention* FasterTransformer* List of naughty words for C4 https://twitter.com/code_star/status/1661386844250963972* What is Sparsity?* Hungry Hungry Hippos* BF16 FPp.s. yes, MPT-7B really is codenamed LLongboi!Timestamps* Introductions [00:00:00]* Intro to Mosaic [00:03:20]* Training and Creating the Models [00:05:45]* Data Choices and the Importance of Repetition [00:08:45]* The Central Question: What Mix of Data Sets Should You Use? [00:10:00]* Evaluation Challenges of LLMs [0:13:00]* Flash Attention [00:16:00]* Fine-tuning for Creativity [00:19:50]* Open Source Licenses and Ethical Considerations [00:23:00]* Training Stability Enhancement [00:25:15]* Data Readiness & Training Preparation [00:30:00]* Dynamic Real-time Model Evaluation [00:34:00]* Open Science for Affordable AI Research [00:36:00]* The Open Approach [00:40:15]* The Future of Mosaic [00:44:11]* Speed and Efficiency [00:48:01]* Trends and Transformers [00:54:00]* Lightning Round and Closing [1:00:55]TranscriptAlessio: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio partner and CTO-in-Residence at Decibel Partners. I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx, writer and editor of Latent Space.Swyx: Hey, and today we have Jonathan and Abhi from Mosaic ML. Welcome to our studio.Jonathan: Guys thank you so much for having us. Thanks so much.Swyx: How's it feel?Jonathan: Honestly, I've been doing a lot of podcasts during the pandemic, and it has not been the same.Swyx: No, not the same actually. So you have on your bio that you're primarily based in Boston,Jonathan: New York. New York, yeah. My Twitter bio was a probability distribution over locations.Swyx: Exactly, exactly. So I DMd you because I was obviously very interested in MPT-7B and DMd you, I was like, for the 0.2% of the time that you're in San Francisco, can you come please come to a podcast studio and you're like, I'm there next week.Jonathan: Yeah, it worked out perfectly. Swyx: We're really lucky to have you, I'll read off a few intros that people should know about you and then you can fill in the blanks.So Jonathan, you did your BS and MS at Princeton in programming languages and then found your way into ML for your PhD at MiT where you made a real splash with the lottery ticket hypothesis in 2018, which people can check up on. I think you've done a few podcasts about it over the years, which has been highly influential, and we'll talk about sparse models at Mosaic. You have also had some side [00:01:30] quest. You taught programming for lawyers and you did some law and privacy stuff in, in DC and also did some cryptography stuff. Um, and you've been an assistant professor at Harvard before earning your PhD.Jonathan:  I've yet to start.Swyx: You, you yet to start. Okay. But you just got your PhD.Jonathan:. I technically just got my PhD. I was at Mosaic which delayed my defense by about two years. It was, I was at 99% done for two years. Got the job at Harvard, Mosaic started, and I had better things to do than write my dissertation for two years. Swyx: You know, you know, this is very out of order.Jonathan: Like, oh, completely out of order, completely backwards. Go talk to my advisor about that. He's also an advisor at Mosaic and has been from the beginning. And, you know, go talk to him about finishing on time.Swyx: Great, great, great. And just to fill it out, Abhi, you did your BS and MS and MIT, you were a researcher at Cerebras, and you're now a research scientist at Mosaic. Just before we go into Mosaic stuff, I'm actually very curious about Cereus and, uh, just that, that space in general. Um, what are they doing that people should know about?Abhinav: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think the biggest thing about CEREUS is that they're really building, you know, kind of the NextGen computing platform beyond, like GPUs.Um, they're trying to build a system that uses an entire wafer, you know, rather than cutting up a wafer into smaller chips and trying to train a model on that entire system, or actually more recently on many such wafers. Um, so it's, and it's really extraordinary. I think it's like the first time ever that kind of wafer scale computing has ever really worked. And so it's a really exciting time to be there, trying to figure out how we can map ML workloads to work, um, on a much, much bigger chip.Swyx: And do you use like [00:03:00] a different programming language or framework to do that? Or is that like..Abhinav: Yeah, so I mean, things have changed a bit since I was there.I think, um, you can actually run just normal tensor flow and pie torch on there. Um, so they've built a kind of software stack that compiles it down. So it actually just kind of works naturally. But yeah.Jonathan : Compiled versions of Python is a hot topic at the moment with Mojo as well. Swyx: And then Mosaic, you, you spearheaded the MPT-7B effort.INTRO TO MOSAIC [00:03:20]Abhinav: Uh, yeah. Yeah, so it's kind of like, it's been maybe six months, 12 months in the making. We kind of started working on LMs sort of back in the summer of last year. Um, and then we came with this blog post where we kind of profiled a lot of LMs and saw, hey, the cost of training is actually a lot lower than what people might think.Um, and then since then, you know, being inspired by kind of, you know, meta's release, so the LLaMA models and lots of other open source work, we kind of started working towards, well, what if we were to release a really good kind of 7 billion parameter model? And that's what MPT is. Alessio:You know, we mentioned some of the podcasts you had done, Jonathan, I think in one of them you mentioned Mosaic was not planning on building a  model and releasing and obviously you eventually did. So what are some of the things that got you there that maybe obviously LLaMA you mentioned was an inspiration. You now have both the training and like inference products that you offer. Was this more of a research challenge in a way, uh, that you wanted to do?Or how did the idea come to be?Jonathan: I think there were a couple of things. So we still don't have a first class model. We're not an open AI where, you know, our businesses come to use our one great model. Our business is built around customers creating their own models. But at the end of the day, if customers are gonna create their own models, we have to have the tools to help them do that, and to have the tools to help them do that and know that they work we have to create our own models to start. We have to know that we can do something great if customers are gonna do something great. And one too many people may have challenged me on Twitter about the fact that, you know, mosaic claims all these amazing numbers, but, you know, I believe not to, you know, call out Ross Whiteman here, but, you know, I believe he said at some point, you know, show us the pudding.Um, and so Ross, you know, please let me know how the pudding tastes. But in all seriousness, like I think there is something, this is a demo in some sense. This is to say we did this in 9.5 days for a really reasonable cost, straight through 200, an intervention. 200 K. Yep. Um, you can do this too.Swyx: Uh, and just to reference the numbers that you're putting out, this is the, the last year you were making a lot of noise for trading GPT 3 under 450 K, which is your, your initial estimate.Um, and then it went down to a 100 K and stable diffusion 160 k going down to less than 50 K as well.Jonathan: So I will be careful about that 100 K number. That's certainly the challenge I've given Abhi to hit. Oh, I wouldn't make the promise that we've hit yet, but you know, it's certainly a target that we have.And I, you know, Abhi may kill me for saying this. I don't think it's crazy. TRAINING AND CREATING THE MODELS [00:05:45] Swyx: So we definitely want to get into like estimation math, right? Like what, what needs to happen for those big order magnitude changes to in, in infrastructure costs. But, uh, let's kind of stick to the MPT-7B story. Yeah. Tell us everything.Like you have, uh, three different models. One of them. State of the art essentially on context length. Let's talk about the process of training them, the, uh, the decisions that you made. Um, I can go into, you know, individual details, but I just wanna let you let you rip.Abhinav: Yeah, so I mean, I think, uh, we started off with the base model, which is kind of for all practical purposes, a recreation of LLaMA 7B.Um, so it's a 7 billion perimeter model trained on the trillion tokens. Um, and our goal was like, you know, we should do it efficiently. We should be able to do it like, kind of hands free so we don't have to babysit the runs as they're doing them. And it could be kind of a, a launching point for these fine tune models and those fine tune models, you know, on, on the one hand they're kind of really fun for the community, like the story writer model, which has like a 65,000 length context window and you can even kind of extrapolate beyond that. Um, but they're, they're also kind of just tr inspirations really. So you could kind of start with an MPT-7B base and then build your own custom, you know, downstream. If you want a long context code model, you could do that with our platform. If you wanted one that was for a particular language, you could do that too.But yeah, so we picked kind of the three variance chat and instruct and story writer just kind of like inspirations looking at what people were doing in the community today. Yeah. Alessio: And what's the beginning of the math to come up with? You know, how many tokens you wanna turn it on? How many parameters do you want in a bottle? 7 billion and 30 billion seem to be kind of like two of the magic numbers going around right now. Abhinav: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, I think like there's sort of these scaling laws which kind of tell you how to best spend your training compute if that's all you cared about. So if you wanna spend $200,000 exactly in the most efficient way, there'd be a recipe for doing that.Um, and that we usually go by the Chinchilla laws. Now for these models, we actually didn't quite do that because we wanted to make sure that people could actually run these at home and that they [00:07:30] were good for inference. So we trained them kind of beyond those chinchilla points so that we're almost over-training them.I think there's like a joke going on online that they're like long boy and that that came up internally because we were training them for really, really long durations. So that 7B model, the chinchilla point might be 140 billion tokens. Instead, we trained a trillion, so almost seven times longer than you normally would.Swyx: So longboi was the code name. So is it, is it the trading method? Is it the scaling law that you're trying to coin or is it the code name for the 64 billion?Jonathan: Uh, 64. It was just an internal joke for the, for training on way more tokens than you would via chinchilla. Okay. Um, we can coin it long boy and it, it really stuck, but just to, you know, long boys filled with two ELs at the beginning.Yeah. Cause you know, we wanted the lLLaMA thing in there as well. Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our darn CEO we have to rein him in that guy, you know, you can't, yeah. I'm gonna take away his Twitter password at some point. Um, but you know, he had to let that one out publicly. And then I believe there was a YouTube video where someone happened to see it mentioned before the model came out and called it the Long G boy or something like that.Like, so you know, now it's out there in the world. It's out there. It's like Sydnee can't put it back inSwyx: There's a beautiful picture which I think Naveen tweeted out, which, um, shows a long boy on a whiteboard.Jonathan: That was the origin of Long Boy. In fact, the legs of the lLLaMA were the two Ls and the long boy.DATA CHOICES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF REPETITION [00:08:45]Swyx: Well, talk to me about your data choices, right? Like this is your passion project. Like what can you tell us about it?Jonathan: Yeah, I think Abhi wanted to kill me by the end for trying to use all the GPUs on data and none of them on actually training the model. Um, at the end of the day, We know that you need to train these models and [00:09:00] lots of data, but there are a bunch of things we don't know.Number one is what kinds of different data sources matter. The other is how much does repetition really matter? And really kind of repetition can be broken down into how much does quality versus quantity matter. Suppose I had the world's best 10 billion tokens of data. Would it be better to train on that a hundred times or better to train on a trillion tokens of low quality, fresh data?And obviously there's, there's a middle point in between. That's probably the sweet spot. But how do you even know what good quality data is? And. So, yeah, this is, nobody knows, and I think the more time I spent, we have a whole data team, so me and several other people, the more time that we spent on this, you know, I came away thinking, gosh, we know nothing.Gosh, if I were back in academia right now, I would definitely go and, you know, write a paper about this because I have no idea what's going on.Swyx: You would write a paper about it. I'm interested in such a paper. I haven't come across any that exists. Could you frame the central question of such a paper?THE CENTRAL QUESTION: WHAT MIX OF DATA SETS SHOULD YOU USE? [00:10:00]Jonathan: Yeah. The central question is what mix of data sets should you use? Okay. Actually I've, you know, you had mentioned my law school stuff. I went back to Georgetown Law where I used to teach, um, in the midst of creating this model, and I actually sat down with a class of law students and asked them, I gave them our exact data sets, our data mixes, um, like how many tokens we had, and I said, Create the best data set for your model.Knowing they knew nothing about large language models, they just know that data goes in and it's going to affect the behavior. Um, and I was like, create a mix and they basically covered all the different trade-offs. Um, you probably want a lot of English language [00:10:30] text to start with. You get that from the web, but do you want it to be multilingual?If so, you're gonna have a lot less English text. Maybe it'll be worse. Do you wanna have code in there? There are all these beliefs that code leads to models being better at logical reasoning, of which I've seen zero evidence. Rep. It's not, um, I mean, really made a great code model, but code models leading to better chain of thought reasoning on the part of language or code being in the training set leading to better chain of thought reasoning.People claim this all the time, but I've still never seen any real evidence beyond that. You know, one of the generations of the GPT three model started supposedly from Code Da Vinci. Yes. And so there's a belief that, you know, maybe that helped. But again, no evidence. You know, there's a belief that spending a lot of time on good sources like Wikipedia is good for the model.Again, no evidence. At the end of the day, we tried a bunch of different data mixes and the answer was that there are some that are better or worse than others. We did find that the pile, for example, was a really solid data mix, but you know, there were stronger data mixes by our evaluation metrics. And I'll get back to the evaluation question in a minute cuz that's a really important one.This data set called c4, which is what the original T five model was trained on, is weirdly good. And everybody, when I posted on this on Twitter, like Stella Beaterman from Luther mentioned this, I think someone else mentioned this as well. C4 does really well in the metrics and we have no idea why we de-duplicated it against our evaluation set.So it's not like it memorized the data, it is just one web scrape from 2019. If you actually look at the T five paper and see how it was pre-processed, it looks very silly. Mm-hmm. They removed anything that had the word JavaScript in it because they didn't want to get like no JavaScript [00:12:00] warnings. They removed anything with curly braces cuz they didn't wanna get JavaScript in it.They looked at this list of bad words, um, and removed anything that had those bad words. If you actually look at the list of bad words, words like gay are on that list. And so there's, you know, it is a very problematic, you know, list of words, but that was the cleaning that leads to a data set that seems to be unbeatable.So that to me says that we know nothing about data. We, in fact used a data set called mc four as well, which is they supposedly did the same pre-processing of C4 just on more web calls. The English portion is much worse than C4 for reasons that completely escape us. So in the midst of all that, Basically I set two criteria.One was I wanted to be at least as good as mc four English, like make sure that we're not making things actively worse. And mc four English is a nice step up over other stuff that's out there. And two was to go all in on diversity after that, making sure that we had some code, we had some scientific papers, we had Wikipedia, because people are gonna use this model for all sorts of different purposes.But I think the most important thing, and I'm guessing abhi had a million opinions on this, is you're only as good as your evaluation. And we don't know how to evaluate models for the kind of generation we ask them to do. So past a certain point, you have to kinda shrug and say, well, my evaluation's not even measuring what I care about.Mm-hmm. So let me just make reasonable choices. EVALUATION CHALLENGES OF LLMs [0:13:00]Swyx: So you're saying MMLU, big bench, that kind of stuff is not. Convincing for youJonathan: A lot of this stuff is you've got two kinds of tasks. Some of these are more of multiple choice style tasks where there is a right answer. Um, either you ask the model to spit out A, B, C, or D or you know, and if you're more [00:13:30] sophisticated, you look at the perplexity of each possible answer and pick the one that the model is most likely to generate.But we don't ask these models to do multiple choice questions. We ask them to do open-ended generation. There are also open-ended generation tasks like summarization. You compare using things like a blue score or a rouge score, which are known to be very bad ways of comparing text. At the end of the day, there are a lot of great summaries of a paper.There are a lot of great ways to do open form generation, and so humans are, to some extent, the gold standard. Humans are very expensive. It turns out we can't put them into our eval pipeline and just have the humans look at our model every, you know, 10 minutes? Not yet. Not yet. Maybe soon. Um, are you volunteering Abhi?Abhinav: I, I, I just know we have a great eval team who's, uh, who's helping us build new metrics. So if they're listening,Jonathan:  But it's, you know, evaluation of large language models is incredibly hard and I don't think any of these metrics really truly capture. What we expect from the models in practice.Swyx: Yeah. And we might draw wrong conclusions.There's been a debate recently about the emergence phenomenon, whether or not it's a mirage, right? I don't know if you guys have opinions about that process. Abhinav: Yeah, I think I've seen like this paper and all and all, even just kind of plots from different people where like, well maybe it's just a artifact of power, like log scaling or metrics or, you know, we're meshing accuracy, which is this a very like harsh zero one thing.Yeah. Rather than kind of something more continuous. But yeah, similar to what Jonathan was saying about evals. Like there there's one issue of like you just like our diversity of eval metrics, like when we put these models up, even like the chat ones, the instruct ones, people are using 'em for such a variety of tasks.There's just almost no way we get ahead of time, like measuring individual dimensions. And then also particularly like, you know, at the 7B scale, [00:15:00] um, these models still are not super great yet at the really hard tasks, like some of the hardest tasks in MMLU and stuff. So sometimes they're barely scoring like the above kind of random chance, you know, like on really, really hard tasks.So potentially as we. You know, aim for higher and higher quality models. Some of these things will be more useful to us. But we kind of had to develop MPT 7B kind of flying a little bit blind on, on what we knew it was coming out and just going off of like, you know, a small set of common sensor reasoning tasks.And of course, you know, just comparing, you know, those metrics versus other open source models. Alessio: I think fast training in inference was like one of the goals, right? So there's always the trade off between doing the hardest thing and like. Doing all the other things quickly.Abhinav: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, even at the 7B scale, you know, uh, people are trying to run these things on CPUs at home.You know, people are trying to port these to their phones, basically prioritizing the fact that the small scale would lead to our adoption. That was like a big, um, big thing going on. Alessio: Yeah. and you mentioned, um, flash attention and faster transformer as like two of the core things. Can you maybe explain some of the benefits and maybe why other models don't use it?FLASH ATTENTION [00:16:00]Abhinav: Yeah, absolutely. So flash attention is this basically faster implementation of full attention. Um, it's like a mathematical equivalent developed by like actually some of our collaborators, uh, at Stanford. Uh, the hazy research. Hazy research, yeah, exactly.Jonathan: What is, what, what, what's the name hazy research mean?Abhinav: I actually have no idea.Swyx: I have no clue. All these labs have fun names. I always like the stories behind them.Abhinav: Yeah, absolutely. We really, really liked flash attention. We, I think, had to integrate into repo even as [00:16:30] as early as September of last year. And it really just helps, you know, with training speed and also inference speed and we kind of bake that into model architecture.And this is kind of unique amongst all the other hugging face models you see out there. So ours actually, you can toggle between normal torch attention, which will work anywhere and flash attention, which will work on GPUs right out of the box. And that way I think you get almost like a 2x speed up at training time and somewhere between like 50% to a hundred percent speed up at inference time as well.So again, this is just like, we really, really wanted people to use these and like, feel like an improvement and we, we have the team to, to help deliver that. Swyx: Another part, um, of your choices was alibi position, encodings, which people are very interested in, maybe a lot of people just, uh, to sort of take in, in coatings as, as a given.But there's actually a lot of active research and honestly, it's a lot of, um, it's very opaque as well. Like people don't know how to evaluate encodings, including position encodings, but may, may, could you explain, um, alibi and, um, your choice?Abhinav: Yeah, for sure. The alibi and uh, kind of flash attention thing all kind of goes together in interesting ways.And even with training stability too. What alibi does really is that it eliminates the need to have positional embeddings in your model. Where previously, if you're a token position one, you have a particular embedding that you add, and you can't really go beyond your max position, which usually is like about 2000.With alibies, they get rid of that. Instead, just add a bias to the attention map itself. That's kind of like this slope. And if at inference time you wanna go much, much larger, they just kind of stretch that slope out to a longer, longer number of positions. And because the slope is kind of continuous and you can interpret it, it all works out now.Now one of [00:18:00] the, the funny things we found is like with flash attention, it saved so much memory and like improved performance so much that even as early as I kind of last year, like we were profiling models with, with very long context lines up to like, you know, the 65 k that you seen in release, we just never really got around to using it cuz we didn't really know what we might use it for.And also it's very hard to train stably. So we started experimenting with alibi integration, then we suddenly found that, oh wow, stability improves dramatically and now we can actually work together with alibi in a long context lens. That's how we got to like our story writer model where we can stably train these models out to very, very long context lenses and, and use them performantly.Jonathan: Yeah.Swyx: And it's also why you don't have a firm number. Most people now have a firm number on the context line. Now you're just like, eh, 65 to 85Abhinav: Oh yeah, there's, there's a, there's a big age to be 64 K or 65 k. 65 k plus.Swyx: Just do powers of twos. So 64 isn't, you know. Jonathan: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. But we could, I mean, technically the context length is infinite.If you give me enough memory, um, you know, we can just keep going forever. We had a debate over what number to say is the longest that we could handle. We picked 84 cakes. It's the longest I expect people to see easily in practice. But, you know, we played around for even longer than that and I don't see why we couldn't go longer.Swyx: Yeah. Um, and so for those who haven't read the blog posts, you put the Great Gatsby in there and, uh, asked it to write an epilogue, which seemed pretty impressive.Jonathan: Yeah. There are a bunch of epilogues floating around internally at Mosaic. Yeah. That wasn't my favorite. I think we all have our own favorites.Yeah. But there are a bunch of really, really good ones. There was one where, you know, it's Gatsby's funeral and then Nick starts talking to Gatsby's Ghost, and Gatsby's father shows up and, you know, then he's [00:19:30] at the police station with Tom. It was very plot heavy, like this is what comes next. And a bunch of that were just very Fitzgerald-esque, like, you know, beautiful writing.Um, but it was cool to just see that Wow, the model seemed to actually be working with. You know, all this input. Yeah, yeah. Like it's, it's exciting. You can think of a lot of things you could do with that kind of context length.FINE-TUNING FOR CREATIVITY [00:19:50]Swyx: Is there a trick to fine tuning for a creative task rather than, um, factual task?Jonathan: I don't know what that is, but probably, yeah, I think, you know, the person, um, Alex who did this, he did fine tune the model explicitly on books. The goal was to try to get a model that was really a story writer. But, you know, beyond that, I'm not entirely sure. Actually, it's a great question. Well, no, I'll ask you back.How would you measure that? Swyx: Uh, God, human feedback is the solve to all things. Um, I think there is a labeling question, right? Uh, in computer vision, we had a really, really good episode with Robo Flow on the segment. Anything model where you, you actually start human feedback on like very, I think it's something like 0.5% of the, the overall, uh, final, uh, uh, labels that you had.But then you sort augment them and then you, you fully automate them, um, which I think could be applied to text. It seems intuitive and probably people like snorkel have already raised ahead on this stuff, but I just haven't seen this applied in the language domain yet.Jonathan: It, I mean there are a lot of things that seem like they make a lot of sense in machine learning that never work and a lot of things that make zero sense that seem to work.So, you know, I've given up trying to even predict. Yeah, yeah. Until I see the data or try it, I just kind shg my shoulders and you know, you hope for the best. Bring data or else, right? Yeah, [00:21:00] exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Alessio: The fine tuning of books. Books three is like one of the big data sets and there was the whole.Twitter thing about trade comments and like, you know, you know, I used to be a community moderator@agenius.com and we've run into a lot of things is, well, if you're explaining lyrics, do you have the right to redistribute the lyrics? I know you ended up changing the license on the model from a commercial use Permitted.Swyx: Yeah let's let them. I'm not sure they did. Jonathan: So we flipped it for about a couple hours. Swyx: Um, okay. Can we, can we introduce the story from the start Just for people who are under the loop. Jonathan: Yeah. So I can tell the story very simply. So, you know, the book three data set does contain a lot of books. And it is, you know, as I discovered, um, it is a data set that provokes very strong feelings from a lot of folks.Um, that was one, one guy from one person in particular, in fact. Um, and that's about it. But it turns out one person who wants a lot of attention can, you know, get enough attention that we're talking about it now. And so we had a, we had a discussion internally after that conversation and we talked about flipping the license and, you know, very late at night I thought, you know, maybe it's a good thing to do.And decided, you know, actually probably better to just, you know, Stan Pat's license is still Apache too. And one of the conversations we had was kind of, we hadn't thought about this cuz we had our heads down, but the Hollywood writer Strike took place basically the moment we released the model. Mm-hmm.Um, we were releasing a model that could do AI generated creative content. And that is one of the big sticking points during the strike. Oh, the optics are not good. So the optics aren't good and that's not what we want to convey. This is really, this is a demo of the ability to do really long sequence lengths and.Boy, you know, [00:22:30] that's, that's not timing that we appreciated. And so we talked a lot internally that night about like, oh, we've had time to read the news. We've had time to take a breath. We don't really love this. Came to the conclusion that it's better to just leave it as it is now and learn the lesson for the future.But certainly that was one of my takeaways is this stuff, you know, there's a societal context around this that it's easy to forget when you're in the trenches just trying to get the model to train. And you know, in hindsight, you know, I might've gone with a different thing than a story writer. I might've gone with, you know, coder because we seem to have no problem putting programmers out of work with these models.Swyx: Oh yeah. Please, please, you know, take away this stuff from me.OPEN SOURCE LICENSES AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS [00:23:00]Jonathan: Right. You know, so it's, I think, you know, really. The copyright concerns I leave to the lawyers. Um, that's really, if I learned one thing teaching at a law school, it was that I'm not a lawyer and all this stuff is a little complicated, especially open source licenses were not designed for this kind of world.They were designed for a world of forcing people to be more open, not forcing people to be more closed. And I think, you know, that was part of the impetus here, was to try to use licenses to make things more closed. Um, which is, I think, against the grain of the open source ethos. So that struck me as a little bit strange, but I think the most important part is, you know, we wanna be thoughtful and we wanna do the right thing.And in that case, you know, I hope with all that interesting licensing fund you saw, we're trying to be really thoughtful about this and it's hard. I learned a lot from that experience. Swyx: There's also, I think, an open question of fair use, right? Is training on words of fair use because you don't have a monopoly on words, but some certain arrangements of words you do.And who is to say how much is memorization by a model versus actually learning and internalizing and then. Sometimes happening to land at the right, the [00:24:00] same result.Jonathan: And if I've learned one lesson, I'm not gonna be the person to answer that question. Right, exactly. And so my position is, you know, we will try to make this stuff open and available.Yeah. And, you know, let the community make decisions about what they are or aren't comfortable using. Um, and at the end of the day, you know, it still strikes me as a little bit weird that someone is trying to use these open source licenses to, you know, to close the ecosystem and not to make things more open.That's very much against the ethos of why these licenses were created.Swyx: So the official mosaic position, I guess is like, before you use TC MPC 7B for anything commercial, check your own lawyers now trust our lawyers, not mosaic's lawyers.Jonathan: Yeah, okay. Yeah. I'm, you know, our lawyers are not your lawyers.Exactly. And, you know, make the best decision for yourself. We've tried to be respectful of the content creators and, you know, at the end of the day, This is complicated. And this is something that is a new law. It's a new law. It's a new law that hasn't been established yet. Um, but it's a place where we're gonna continue to try to do the right thing.Um, and it's, I think, one of the commenters, you know, I really appreciated this said, you know, well, they're trying to do the right thing, but nobody knows what the right thing is to even do, you know, the, I guess the, the most right thing would've been to literally not release a model at all. But I don't think that would've been the best thing for the community either.Swyx: Cool.Well, thanks. Well handled. Uh, we had to cover it, just causeJonathan:  Oh, yes, no worries. A big piece of news. It's been on my mind a lot.TRAINING STABILITY ENHANCEMENT [00:25:15]Swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you've been very thoughtful about it. Okay. So a lot of these other ideas in terms of architecture, flash, attention, alibi, and the other data sets were contributions from the rest of the let's just call it open community of, of machine learning advancements. Uh, but Mosaic in [00:25:30] particular had some stability improvements to mitigate loss spikes, quote unquote, uh, which, uh, I, I took to mean, uh, your existing set of tools, uh, maybe we just co kind of covered that. I don't wanna sort of put words in your mouth, but when you say things like, uh, please enjoy my empty logbook.How much of an oversell is that? How much, you know, how much is that marketing versus how much is that reality?Abhinav: Oh yeah. That, that one's real. Yeah. It's like fully end-to-end. Um, and I think.Swyx: So maybe like what, what specific features of Mosaic malibu?Abhinav: Totally, totally. Yeah. I think I'll break it into two parts.One is like training stability, right? Knowing that your model's gonna basically get to the end of the training without loss spikes. Um, and I think, you know, at the 7B scale, you know, for some models like it ha it's not that big of a deal. As you train for longer and longer durations, we found that it's trickier and trickier to avoid these lost spikes.And so we actually spent a long time figuring out, you know, what can we do about our initialization, about our optimizers, about the architecture that basically prevents these lost spikes. And you know, even in our training run, if you zoom in, you'll see small intermittent spikes, but they recover within a few hundred steps.And so that's kind of the magical bit. Our line is one of defenses we recover from Las Vegas, like just naturally, right? Mm-hmm. Our line two defense was that we used determinism and basically really smart resumption strategies so that if something catastrophic happened, we can resume very quickly, like a few batches before.And apply some of these like, uh, interventions. So we had these kinds of preparations, like a plan B, but we didn't have to use them at all for MPT 7B training. So, that was kind of like a lucky break. And the third part of like basically getting all the way to the empty law book is having the right training infrastructure.[00:27:00]So this is basically what, like is, one of the big selling points of the platform is that when you try to train these models on hundreds of GPUs, not many people outside, you know, like deep industry research owners, but the GPUs fail like a lot. Um, I would say like almost once every thousand a 100 days.So for us on like a big 512 cluster every two days, basically the run will fail. Um, and this is either due to GPUs, like falling off the bus, like that's, that's a real error we see, or kind of networking failures or something like that. And so in those situations, what people have normally done is they'll have an on-call team that's just sitting round the clock, 24-7 on slack, once something goes wrong.And if then they'll basically like to try to inspect the cluster, take nodes out that are broken, restart it, and it's a huge pain. Like we ourselves did this for a few months. And as a result of that, because we're building such a platform, we basically step by step automated every single one of those processes.So now when a run fails, we have this automatic kind of watch talk that's watching. It'll basically stop the job. Test the nodes cord in anyone's that are broken and relaunch it. And because our software's all deterministic has fast resumption stuff, it just continues on gracefully. So within that log you can see sometimes I think maybe at like 2:00 AM or something, the run failed and within a few minutes it's back up and running and all of us are just sleeping peacefully.Jonathan: I do wanna say that was hard one. Mm-hmm. Um, certainly this is not how things were going, you know, many months ago, hardware failures we had on calls who were, you know, getting up at two in the morning to, you know, figure out which node had died for what reason, restart the job, have to cord the node. [00:28:30] Um, we were seeing catastrophic loss spikes really frequently, even at the 7B scale that we're just completely derailing runs.And so this was step by step just ratcheting our way there. As Abhi said, to the point where, Many models are training at the moment and I'm sitting here in the studio and not worrying one bit about whether the runs are gonna continue. Yeah. Swyx: I'm, I'm not so much of a data center hardware kind of guy, but isn't there existing software to do this for CPUs and like, what's different about this domain? Does this question make sense at all?Jonathan: Yeah, so when I think about, like, I think back to all the Google fault tolerance papers I read, you know, as an undergrad or grad student mm-hmm. About, you know, building distributed systems. A lot of it is that, you know, Each CPU is doing, say, an individual unit of work.You've got a database that's distributed across your cluster. You wanna make sure that one CPU failing can't, or one machine failing can't, you know, delete data. So you, you replicate it. You know, you have protocols like Paxos where you're literally, you've got state machines that are replicated with, you know, with leaders and backups and things like that.And in this case, you were performing one giant computation where you cannot afford to lose any node. If you lose a node, you lose model state. If you lose a node, you can't continue. It may be that, that in the future we actually, you know, create new versions of a lot of our distributed training libraries that do have backups and where data is replicated so that if you lose a node, you can detect what node you've lost and just continue training without having to stop the run, you know?Pull from a checkpoint. Yeah. Restart again on different hardware. But for now, we're certainly in a world where if anything dies, that's the end of the run and you have to go back and recover from it. [00:30:00]DATA READINESS & TRAINING PREPARATION [00:30:00]Abhinav: Yeah. Like I think a big part, a big word there is like synchronous data pluralism, right? So like, we're basically saying that on every step, every GP is gonna do some work.They're gonna stay in sync with each other and average their, their gradients and continue. Now that there are algorithmic techniques to get around this, like you could say, oh, if a GP dies, just forget about it. All the data that's gonna see, we'll just forget about it. We're not gonna train on it.But, we don't like to do that currently because, um, it makes us give up determinism, stuff like that. Maybe in the future, as you go to extreme scales, we'll start looking at some of those methods. But at the current time it's like, we want determinism. We wanted to have a run that we could perfectly replicate if we needed to.And it was, the goal is figure out how to run it on a big cluster without humans having to babysit it. Babysit it. Alessio: So as you mentioned, these models are kind of the starting point for a lot of your customers To start, you have a. Inference product. You have a training product. You previously had a composer product that is now kind of not rolled into, but you have like a super set of it, which is like the LLM foundry.How are you seeing that change, you know, like from the usual LOP stack and like how people train things before versus now they're starting from, you know, one of these MPT models and coming from there. Like worship teams think about as they come to you and start their journey.Jonathan: So I think there's a key distinction to make here, which is, you know, when you say starting from MPT models, you can mean two things.One is actually starting from one of our checkpoints, which I think very few of our customers are actually going to do, and one is starting from our configuration. You can look at our friends at Rep for that, where, you know, MPT was in progress when Refl [00:31:30] came to us and said, Hey, we need a 3 billion parameter model by next week on all of our data.We're like, well, here you go. This is what we're doing, and if it's good enough for us, um, hopefully it's good enough for you. And that's basically the message we wanna send to our customers. MPT is basically clearing a path all the way through where they know that they can come bring their data, they can use our training infrastructure, they can use all of our amazing orchestration and other tools that abhi just mentioned, for fault tolerance.They can use Composer, which is, you know, still at the heart of our stack. And then the l l M Foundry is really the specific model configuration. They can come in and they know that thing is gonna train well because we've already done it multiple times. Swyx: Let's dig in a little bit more on what should people have ready before they come talk to you? So data architecture, eval that they're looking, etc.Abhinav: Yeah, I, I mean, I think we'll accept customers at any kind of stage in their pipeline. You know, like I'd say science, there's archetypes of people who have built products around like some of these API companies and reach a stage or maturity level where it's like we want our own custom models now, either for the purpose of reducing cost, right?Like our inference services. Quite a bit cheaper than using APIs or because they want some kind of customization that you can't really get from the other API providers. I'd say the most important things to have before training a big model. You know, you wanna have good eval metrics, you know, some kind of score that you can track as you're training your models and scaling up, they can tell you you're progressing.And it's really funny, like a lot of times customers will be really excited about training the models, right? It's really fun to like launch shelves on hundreds of gfs, just all around. It's super fun. But then they'll be like, but wait, what are we gonna measure? Not just the training loss, right? I mean, it's gotta be more than that.[00:33:00]So eval metrics is like a, it's a good pre-req also, you know, your data, you know, either coming with your own pre-training or fine-tune data and having like a strategy to clean it or we can help clean it too. I think we're, we're building a lot of tooling around that. And I think once you have those two kinds of inputs and sort of the budget that you want, we can pretty much walk you through the rest of it, right?Like that's kind of what we do. Recently we helped build CR FM's model for biomedical language a while back. Jonathan: Um, we can. That's the center of research for foundation models. Abhi: Exactly, exactly.Jonathan: Spelling it out for people. Of course.Abhinav: No, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. No, you've done more of these than I have.Um, I think, uh, basically it's sort of, we can help you figure out what model I should train to scale up so that when I go for my big run company, your here run, it's, uh, it's predictable. You can feel confident that it's gonna work, and you'll kind of know what quality you're gonna get out before you have to spend like a few hundred thousand dollars.DYNAMIC REAL-TIME MODEL EVALUATION [00:34:00]Alessio: The rap Reza from rap was on the podcast last week and, uh, they had human eval and then that, uh, I'm Jon Eval, which is like vibe based. Jonathan: And I, I do think the vibe based eval cannot be, you know, underrated really at the, I mean, at the end of the day we, we did stop our models and do vibe checks and we did, as we monitor our models, one of our evals was we just had a bunch of prompts and we would watch the answers as the model trained and see if they changed cuz honestly, You know, I don't really believe in any of these eval metrics to capture what we care about.Mm-hmm. But when you ask it, uh, you know, I don't know. I think one of our prompts was to suggest games for a three-year-old and a seven-year-old. That would be fun to play. Like that was a lot more [00:34:30] valuable to me personally, to see how that answer evolved and changed over the course of training. So, you know, and human eval, just to clarify for folks, human human eval is an automated evaluation metric.There's no humans in it at all. There's no humans in it at all. It's really badly named. I got so confused the first time that someone brought that to me and I was like, no, we're not bringing humans in. It's like, no, it's, it's automated. They just called it a bad name and there's only a hundred cents on it or something.Abhinav: Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's for code specifically, right?Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. It's very weird. It's a, it's a weird, confusing name that I hate, but you know, when other metrics are called hella swag, like, you know, you do it, just gotta roll with it at this point. Swyx: You're doing live evals now. So one, one of the tweets that I saw from you was that it is, uh, important that you do it paralyzed.Uh, maybe you kind of wanna explain, uh, what, what you guys did.Abhinav: Yeah, for sure. So with LLM Foundry, there's many pieces to it. There's obviously the core training piece, but there's also, you know, tools for evaluation of models. And we've kind of had one of the, I think it's like the, the fastest like evaluation framework.Um, basically it's multi GPU compatible. It runs with Composer, it can support really, really big models. So basically our framework runs so fast that even Azure models are training. We can run these metrics live during the training. So like if you have a dashboard like weights and biases, you kind of watch all these evil metrics.We have, like, 15 or 20 of them honestly, that we track during the run and add negligible overhead. So we can actually watch as our models go and feel confident. Like, it's not like we wait until the very last day to, to test if the models good or notJonathan: That's amazing. Yeah. I love that we've gotten this far into the conversation.We still haven't talked about efficiency and speed. Those are usually our two watch words at Mosaic, which is, you know, that's great. That says that we're [00:36:00] doing a lot of other cool stuff, but at the end of the day, um, you know, Cost comes first. If you can't afford it, it doesn't matter. And so, you know, getting things down cheap enough that, you know, we can monitor in real time, getting things down cheap enough that we can even do it in the first place.That's the basis for everything we do.OPEN SCIENCE FOR AFFORDABLE AI RESEARCH [00:36:00]Alessio: Do you think a lot of the questions that we have around, you know, what data sets we should use and things like that are just because training was so expensive before that, we just haven't run enough experiments to figure that out. And is that one of your goals is trying to make it cheaper so that we can actually get the answers?Jonathan: Yeah, that's a big part of my personal conviction for being here. I think I'm, I'm still in my heart, the second year grad student who was jealous of all his friends who had GPUs and he didn't, and I couldn't train any models except in my laptop. And that, I mean, the lottery ticket experiments began on my laptop that I had to beg for one K 80 so that I could run amist.And I'm still that person deep down in my heart. And I'm a believer that, you know, if we wanna do science and really understand these systems and understand how to make them work well, understand how they behave, understand what makes them safe and reliable. We need to make it cheap enough that we can actually do science, and science involves running dozens of experiments.When I finally, you know, cleaned out my g c s bucket from my PhD, I deleted a million model checkpoints. I'm not kidding. There were over a million model checkpoints. That is the kind of science we need, you know, that's just what it takes. In the same way that if you're in a biology lab, you don't just grow one cell and say like, eh, the drug seems to work on that cell.Like, there's a lot more science you have to do before you really know.Abhinav: Yeah. And I think one of the special things about Mosaic's kind of [00:37:30] position as well is that we have such, so many customers all trying to train models that basically we have the incentive to like to devote all these resources and time to do this science.Because when we learn which pieces actually work, which ones don't, we get to help many, many people, right? And so that kind of aggregation process I think is really important for us. I remember way back there was a paper about Google that basically would investigate batch sizes or something like that.And it was this paper that must have cost a few million dollars during all the experience. And it was just like, wow, what a, what a benefit to the whole community. Now, like now we all get to learn from that and we get, we get to save. We don't have to spend those millions of dollars anymore. So I think, um, kind of mosaical science, like the insights we get on, on data, on pre-screening architecture, on all these different things, um, that's why customers come to us.Swyx: Yeah, you guys did some really good stuff on PubMed, G B T as well. That's the first time I heard of you. Of you. And that's also published to the community.Abhinav: Yeah, that one was really fun. We were like, well, no one's really trained, like fully from scratch domain specific models before. Like, what if we just did a biomed one?Would it still work? And, uh, yeah, I'd be really excited. That did, um, we'll probably have some follow up soon, I think, later this summer.Jonathan: Yeah. Yes. Stay tuned on that. Um, but I, I will say just in general, it's a really important value for us to be open in some sense. We have no incentive not to be open. You know, we make our money off of helping people train better.There's no cost to us in sharing what we learn with the community. Cuz really at the end of the day, we make our money off of those custom models and great infrastructure and, and putting all the pieces together. That's honestly where the Mosaic name came from. Not off of like, oh, we've got, you know, this one cool secret trick [00:39:00] that we won't tell you, or, you know, closing up.I sometimes, you know, in the past couple weeks I've talked to my friends at places like Brain or, you know, what used to be Brain Now Google DeepMind. Oh, I R I P Brain. Yeah. R i p Brian. I spent a lot of time there and it was really a formative time for me. Um, so I miss it, but. You know, I kind of feel like we're one of the biggest open research labs left in industry, which is a very sad state of affairs because we're not very big.Um, but at least can you say how big the team is actually? Yeah. We were about 15 researchers, so we're, we're tiny compared to, you know, the huge army of researchers I remember at Brain or at fair, at Deep Mind back, you know, when I was there during their heydays. Um, you know, but everybody else is kind of, you know, closed up and isn't saying very much anymore.Yeah. And we're gonna keep talking and we're gonna keep sharing and, you know, we will try to be that vanguard to the best of our ability. We're very small and I, I can't promise we're gonna do what those labs used to do in terms of scale or quantity of research, but we will share what we learn and we will try to create resources for the community.Um, I, I dunno, I just, I believe in openness fundamentally. I'm an academic at heart and it's sad to me to watch that go away from a lot of the big labs. THE OPEN APPROACH [00:40:15]Alessio: We just had a live pod about the, you know, open AI snow mode, uh, post that came out and it was one of the first time I really dove into Laura and some of the this new technologies, like how are you thinking about what it's gonna take for like the open approach to really work?Obviously today, GPT four is still, you know, part of like that state-of-the-art model for a [00:40:30] lot of tasks. Do you think some of the innovation and kind of returning methods that we have today are enough if enough people like you guys are like running these, these research groups that are open? Or do you think we still need a step function improvement there?Jonathan: I think one important point here is the idea of coexistence. I think when you look at, I don't know who won Linux or Windows, the answer is yes. Microsoft bought GitHub and has a Windows subsystem for Linux. Linux runs a huge number of our servers and Microsoft is still a wildly profitable company.Probably the most successful tech company right now. So who won open source or closed source? Yes. Um, and I think that's a similar world that we're gonna be in here where, you know, it's gonna be different things for different purposes. I would not run Linux on my laptop personally cuz I like connecting to wifi and printing things.But I wouldn't run Windows on one of my surfers. And so I do think what we're seeing with a lot of our customers is, do they choose opening IR mosaic? Yes. There's a purpose for each of these. You have to send your data off to somebody else with open eyes models. That's a risk. GPT four is amazing and I would never promise someone that if they come to Mosaic, they're gonna get a GPT four quality model.That's way beyond our means and not what we're trying to do anyway. But there's also a whole world for, you know, domain specific models, context specific models that are really specialized, proprietary, trained on your own data that can do things that you could never do with one of these big models. You can customize in crazy ways like G B T four is not gonna hit 65 K context length for a very long time, cuz they've already trained that [00:42:00] model and you know, they haven't even released the 32 K version yet.So we can, you know, we can do things differently, you know, by being flexible. So I think the answer to all this is yes. But we can't see the open source ecosystem disappear. And that's the scariest thing for me. I hear a lot of talk in academia about, you know, whatever happened to that academic research on this field called information retrieval?Well, in 1999 it disappeared. Why? Because Google came along and who cares about information retrieval research when you know you have a Google Scale, you know, Web Scale database. So you know, there's a balance here. We need to have both. Swyx: I wanna applaud you, Elaine. We'll maybe edit it a little like crowd applause, uh, line.Cuz I, I think that, um, that is something that as a research community, as people interested in progress, we need to see these things instead of just, uh, seeing marketing papers from the advertising GPT 4.Jonathan: Yeah. I, I think I, you know, to get on my soapbox for 10 more seconds. Go ahead. When I talk to policymakers about, you know, the AI ecosystem, the usual fear that I bring up is, Innovation will slow because of lack of openness.I've been complaining about this for years and it's finally happened. Hmm. Why is Google sharing, you know, these papers? Why is Open AI sharing these papers? There are a lot of reasons. You know, I have my own beliefs, but it's not something we should take for granted that everybody's sharing the work that they do and it turns out well, I think we took it for granted for a while and now it's gone.I think it's gonna slow down the pace of progress. In a lot of cases, each of these labs has a bit of a monoculture and being able to pass ideas [00:43:30] back and forth was a lot of what kept, you know, scientific progress moving. So it's imperative not just, you know, for the open source community and for academia, but for the progress of technology.That we have a vibrant open source research community.THE FUTURE OF MOSAIC [00:44:11]Swyx: There's a preview of the ecosystem and commentary that we're, we're gonna do. But I wanna close out some stuff on Mosaic. You launched a bunch of stuff this month. A lot of stuff, uh, actually was, I was listening to you on Gradient descent, uh, and other podcasts we know and love.Uh, and you said you also said you were not gonna do inference and, and, and last week you were like, here's Mosaic ML inference. Oops. So maybe just a, at a high level, what was Mosaic ml and like, what is it growing into? Like how do you conceptualize this? Jonathan: Yeah, and I will say gradient, when graded dissent was recorded, we weren't doing inference and had no plans to do it.It took a little while for the podcast to get out. Um, in the meantime, basically, you know, one thing I've learned at a startup, and I'm sure abhi can comment on this as well, focus is the most important thing. We have done our best work when we've been focused on doing one thing really well and our worst work when we've tried to do lots of things.Yeah. So, We don't want to do inference, we don't want to have had to do inference. Um, and at the end of the day, our customers were begging us to do it because they wanted a good way to serve the models and they liked our ecosystem. And so in some sense, we got dragged into it kicking and screaming. We're very excited to have a product.We're going to put our best foot forward and make something really truly amazing. But there is, you know, that's something that we were reluctant to do. You know, our customers convinced us it would be good for our business. It's been wonderful for business and we are gonna put everything into this, but you know, back when grading dissent came out, I [00:45:00] was thinking like, or when we recorded it or focused, oh God, like focus is the most important thing.I've learned that the hard way multiple times that Mosaic, abhi can tell you like, you know, I've made a lot of mistakes on not focusing enough. Um, boy inference, that's a whole second thing, and a whole different animal from training. And at the end of the day, when we founded the company, our belief was that inference was relatively well served at that time.There were a lot of great inference companies out there. Um, training was not well served, especially efficient training. And we had something to add there. I think we've discovered that as the nature of the models have changed, the nature of what we had to add to inference changed a lot and there became an opportunity for us to contribute something.But that was not the plan. But now we do wanna be the place that people come when they wanna train these big, complex, difficult models and know that it's gonna go right the first time and they're gonna have something they can servee right away. Um, you know, really the rep example of, you know, with 10 days to go saying, Hey, can you please train that model?And, you know, three or four days later the model was trained and we were just having fun doing interesting, fine tuning work in it for the rest of the 10 days, you know. That also requires good inference. Swyx: That's true, that's true. Like, so running evals and, and fine tuning. I'm just putting my business hat on and you know, and Alessio as well, like, uh, I've actually had fights with potential co-founders about this on the primary business.Almost like being training, right? Like essentially a one-time cost.Jonathan: Who told you it was a one time cost? What, who, who told you that?Swyx: No, no, no, no. Correct me. Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. Let me correct you in two ways. Um, as our CEO Navine would say, if he were here, when you create version 1.0 of your software, do you then fire all the engineers?Of [00:46:30] course not. You never, like, MPT has a thousand different things we wanted to do that we never got to. So, you know, there will be future models.Abhinav: And, and the data that's been trained on is also changing over time too, right? If you wanna ask anything about, I guess like May of 2023, we'll have to retrain it further and so on.Right? And I think this is especially true for customers who run like the kind of things that need to be up to date on world knowledge. So I, I think like, you know, the other thing I would say too is that, The malls we have today are certainly not the best malls we'll ever produce. Right. They're gonna get smaller, they're gonna get faster, they're gonna get cheaper, they're gonna get lower latency, they're gonna get higher quality.Right? And so you always want the next gen version of MPT and the one after that and one after that. There's a reason that even the GPT series goes three, four, and we know there's gonna be a five. Right? Um, so I I I also don't see as a, as a one-time cost.Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. And I, if you wanna cite a stat on this, there are very, very

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Subscribe to Changelog++: https://changelog.com/podcast/519/discussFeaturing Shawn Wang – Twitter, GitHub, Website Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn Notes and Links AI Notes Why “Prompt Engineering” and “Generative AI” are overhyped Multiverse, not Metaverse The Particle/Wave Duality Theory of Knowledge OpenRAIL: Towards open and responsible AI licensing frameworks Open-ish from Luis Villa ChatGPT for Google The Myth of The Infrastructure Phase ChatGPT examples in the wild Debugging code TypeScript answer is wrong Fix code and explain fix dynamic programming Translating/refactoring Wasplang DSL AWS IAM policies Code that combines multiple cloud services Solving a code problem Explain computer networks homework Rewriting code from elixir to PHP Turning ChatGPT into an interpreter for a custom language, and then generating code and executing it, and solving Advent of Code correctly Including getting #1 place “I haven't done a single google search or consulted any external documentation to do it and I was able to progress faster than I have ever did before when learning a new thing.” Build holy grail website and followup with framework, copy, repsonsiveness For ++ subscribers Getting Senpai To Notice You Moving to Obsidian as a Public Second Brain Transcript**Jerod Santo:** Alright, well we have Sean Wang here again. Swyx, welcome back to the show.**Shawn Wang:** Thanks for having me back on. I have lost count of how many times, but I need to track my annual appearance on the Changelog.**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that twice this year on this show, and then once on JS Party at least, right?**Shawn Wang:** Something like that, yeah. I don't know, it's a dream come true, because, I changed careers into tech listening to the Changelog, so every time I'm asked on, I'm always super-grateful. So yeah, here to chat about all the hottest, latest things, right?**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.**Jerod Santo:** That's right, there's so much going on right now. It seems like things just exploded this fall. So we had Stable Diffusion back in late August; it really blew up at the end of August. And then in September is when we had Simon Willison on the show to talk about Stable Diffusion breaking the internet. You've been tracking this stuff really closely. You even have a Substack, and you've got Obsidian notes out there in the wild, and then of course, you're learning in public, so whenever Swyx is learning something, we're all kind of learning along with you... Which is why we brought you back on. I actually included your Stable Diffusion 2.0 summary stuff in our Changelog News episode a couple of weeks back, and a really interesting part of that post that you have, that I didn't talk about much, but I touched on and I want you to expand upon here is this idea of prompt engineering, not as a cool thing, but really as a product smell. And when I first saw it, I was like, "No, man, it's cool." And then I read your explainer and I'm like, "No, he's right. This is kind of a smell."**Adam Stacoviak:** "Dang it, he's right again."**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. We just learned about prompt engineering back in September, with Simon, and talking about casting spells and all this, and now it's like, well, you think it's overhyped. I'll stop prompting you, and I'll just let you engineer an answer.**Jerod Santo:** Well, so I don't know if you know, but the Substack itself got its start because I listened to the Simon episode, and I was like, "No, no, no. Spellcasting is not the way to view this thing. It's not something we glorify." And that's why I wrote "Multiverse, not Metaverse", because the argument was that prompting is -- you can view prompting as a window into a different universe, with a different seed, and every seed is a different universe. And funny enough, there's a finite number of seeds, because basically, Stable Diffusion has a 512x512 space that determines the total number of seeds.So yeah, prompt engineering [unintelligible 00:04:23.23] is not my opinion. I'm just reporting on what the AI thought leaders are already saying, and I just happen to agree with it, which is that it's very, very brittle. The most interesting finding in the academic arena about prompt engineering is that default GPT-3, they ran it against some benchmarks and it came up with like a score of 17 out of 100. So that's a pretty low benchmark of like just some logical, deductive reasoning type intelligence tests. But then you add the prompt "Let's think step by step" to it, and that increases the score from 17 to 83... Which is extremely -- like, that sounds great. Like I said, it's a magic spell that I can just kind of throw onto any problems and make it think better... But if you think about it a little bit more, like, would you actually use this in a real work environment, if you said the wrong thing and it suddenly deteriorates in quality - that's not good, and that's not something that you want to have in any stable, robust product; you want robustness, you want natural language understanding, to understand what you want, not to react to random artifacts and keywords that you give.Since then, we actually now know why "Let's think step by step" is a magic keyword, by the way, because -- and this is part of transformer architecture, which is that the neural network has a very limited working memory, and if you ask a question that requires too many steps to calculate the end result, it doesn't have the working memory to store the result, therefore it makes one up. But if you give it the working memory, which is to ask for a longer answer, the longer answer stores the intermediate steps, therefore giving you the correct result.**Jerod Santo:** [06:00] Talk about implementation detail, right?**Shawn Wang:** It's yeah, it's leaking implementation detail, it's not great, and that's why a lot of the thought leaders - I think I quoted Andrej Karpathy, who was head of AI at Tesla, and now he's a YouTuber... [laughter] And Sam Altman, who is the CEO of -- yeah, he quit Tesla to essentially pursue an independent creator lifestyle, and now he's a YouTuber.**Jerod Santo:** I did not know that.**Adam Stacoviak:** All roads lead to creator land, you know what I'm saying? You'll be an expert in something for a while, and eventually you'll just eject and be like "I want to own my own thing, and create content, and educate people around X."**Shawn Wang:** So at my day job I'm a head of department now, and I work with creators, and some of them have very valuable side hustles... And I just had this discussion yesterday, of like "Why do you still have a job if you're an independent creator? Like, isn't total independence great." And I had to remind them, "No. Like, career progression is good. You're exposed to new things etc." but that's just me trying to talk him out of quitting. [laughter] No, I have a serious answer, but we're not here to talk about that.**Jerod Santo:** Right.**Shawn Wang:** So I'll read out this quote... So Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, says "I don't think we'll still be doing prompt engineering in five years. It's not about figuring out how to hack the prompt by adding one magic word to the end that changes everything else. What will matter is the quality of ideas and the understanding that you want." I think that is the prevailing view, and I think as people change models, they are understanding the importance of this.So when Stable Diffusion 1 came out, everyone was like, "Alright, we know how to do this. I'm going to build an entire business on this" etc. And then Stable Diffusion 2 came out and everything broke. All the [unintelligible 00:07:40.21] stopped working, because they just expected a different model, and you have to increase your negative prompting, and people are like "What is negative prompting?" etc. These are all new techniques that arise out of the model, and this is going to happen again and again and again, because you're relying on a very, very brittle foundation.Ultimately, what we want to get people to is computers should understand what we want. And if we haven't specified it well enough, they should be able to ask us what we want, and we should be able to tell them in some capacity, and eventually, they should produce something that we like. That is the ultimate alignment problem.We talk about AI a lot, and you hear about this alignment problem, which is basically some amount of getting it to do what we want it to do, which is a harder problem than it sounds until you work with a programmer, and try to give them product specs and see how many different ways they can get it wrong. But yeah, this is an interesting form of the alignment problem, and it interestingly has a very strong tie with Neuralink as well, because the problem, ultimately, is the amount of bandwidth that we can transfer from our brain to an artificial brain. And right now it's prompts. But why does it have to be prompts? It could be images. That's why you have image-to-image in Stable Diffusion. And it could also be brain neural connections. So there's a lot in there; I'll give you time to pick on whatever you respond to...**Jerod Santo:** Well, I went from -- so I was super-excited about prompting after talking with Simon a few months back, and I was super-excited about Stable Diffusion. And I went from like giddy schoolboy who's just like "Gonna learn all the spells" very quickly to like aggravated end user who's like "Nah, I don't want to go to this other website and copy and paste this paragraph of esoterica in order to get a result that I like." And so I wonder what's so exciting about the whole prompt engineering thing to us nerds, and I think maybe there's like a remnant of "Well, I still get to have esoteric knowledge" or "I still get to be special somehow if I can learn this skill..."[09:46] But in reality, what we're learning, I think, by all the people using ChatGPT - the ease of use of it, as opposed to the difficulty of getting an image out of Stable Diffusion 1.0 at least, is quite a bit different. And it goes from aggravating and insider baseball kind of terms, keywords, spells, to plain English, explain what you want, and maybe modify that with a follow-up, which we'll get into ChatGPT, but we don't necessarily have to go into the depths of that right now... But I changed very quickly, even though I still thought prompt engineering was pretty rad... And then when you explain to me how Stable Diffusion 2 completely broke all the prompts, I'm like, "Oh yeah, this is a smell. This doesn't work. You can't just completely change the way it works on people..." That doesn't scale.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. And then think about all the businesses that have been built already. There haven't been any huge businesses built on Stable Diffusion, but GPT-3 has internal models as well. So Jasper recently raised like a 1.5 billion valuation, and then ChatGPT came out, basically validating Jasper... So all the people who bought stock are probably not feeling so great right now. [laughs]That's it. So I don't want to overstate my position. There are real moats to be built around AI, and I think that the best entrepreneurs are finding that regardless of all these flaws. The fact that there are flaws right now is the opportunity, because so many people are scared off by it. They're like, "AI has no moats. You're just a thin wrapper around OpenAI." But the people who are real entrepreneurs figure it out. So I think it's just a really fascinating case study in technology and entrepreneurship, because here's a new piece of technology nobody knows how to use and productize, and the people who figure out the playbook are the ones who win.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Are we back to this -- I mean, it was like this years ago, when big data became a thing... But are we back to this whole world where -- or maybe we never left, where "Data is the new oil", is the quote... Because to train these models, you have to have data. So you could be an entrepreneur, you could be a technologist, you could be a developer, you could be in ML, you could be whatever it might take to build these things, but at some point you have to have a dataset, right? Like, how do you get access to these datasets? It's the oil; you've got to have money to get these things, you've got to have money to run the hardware to enable... Jerod, you were saying before the call, there was speculation of how much it costs to run ChatGPT daily, and it's just expensive. But the data is the new oil thing - how does that play into training these models and being able to build the moat?**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. So one distinction we must make there is there is a difference between running the models, which is just inferences, which is probably a few orders of magnitude cheaper than training the models, which are essentially a one-time task. Not that many people continuously train, which is nice to have, but I don't think people actually care about that in reality.So the training of the models ranges between -- and let's just put some bounds for people. I love dropping numbers in podcasts, by the way, because it helps people contextualize. You made an oblique reference to how much ChatGPT costs, but let's give real numbers. I think the guy who did an estimate said it was running at $3 million a month. I don't know if you heard any different, but that's...**Jerod Santo:** I heard a different estimate, that would have been more expensive, but I think yours is probably more reliable than mine... So let's just go with that.**Shawn Wang:** I went through his stuff, and I was like, "Yeah, okay, this is on the high end." I came in between like one to three as well. It's fine. And then for training the thing - so it's widely known or widely reported that Stable Diffusion cost 600k for a single run. People think the full thing, including R&D and stuff, was on the order of 10 million. And GPT-3 also costs something on the order of tens of millions. So I think that is the cost, but then also that is training; that is mostly like GPU compute. We're not talking about data collection, which is a whole other thing, right?[13:46] And I think, basically, there's a towering stack of open source contributions to this data collective pool that we have made over time. I think the official numbers are like 100,000 gigabytes of data that was trained for Stable Diffusion... And it's basically pooled from like Flickr, from Wikipedia, from like all the publicly-available commons of photos. And that is obviously extremely valuable, because -- and another result that came out recently that has revolutionized AI thinking is the concept of Chinchilla Laws. Have you guys covered that on the show, or do I need to explain that?**Adam Stacoviak:** Chinchilla Laws misses the mark for me. Please tell. I like the idea though; it sounds cool, so please...**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, they just had a bunch of models, and the one that won happened to be named Chinchilla, so they kind of went with it. It's got a cute name. But the main idea is that we have discovered scaling laws for machine learning, which is amazing.So in the sort of classical understanding of machine learning, you would have a point at which there's no further point to train. You're sort of optimizing for a curve, and you get sort of like diminishing returns up to a certain point, and then that's about it. You would typically conclude that you have converged on a global optimum, and you kind of just stop there. And mostly, in the last 5 to 10 years, the very depressing discovery is that this is a mirage. This is not a global optimum, this is a local optimum... And this is called the Double Dissent Problem. If you google it, on Wikipedia you'll find it... Which is you just throw more data at it, it levels off for a bit, and then it continues improving. And that's amazing for machine learning, because that basically precipitated the launch of all these large models. Because essentially, what it concludes is that there's essentially no limit to how good these models are, as long as you can throw enough data at it... Which means that, like you said, data is the new oil again, but not for the old reason, which is like "We're gonna analyze it." No, we're just gonna throw it into all these neural nets, and let them figure it out.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, I think there's a competitive advantage though if you have all the data. So if you're the Facebooks, or if you're the Google, or X, Y, or Z... Instagram, even. Like, Instagram ads are so freakin relevant that --**Jerod Santo:** Apple...**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, Apple for sure.**Jerod Santo:** TikTok...**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Gosh... Yeah, TikTok. Yeah, the point is, these have a competitive advantage, because they essentially have been collecting this data, would-be to analyze, potentially to advertise to us more, but what about in other ways that these modes can be built? I just think like, when you mentioned the entrepreneurial mind, being able to take this idea, this opportunity as this new AI landscape, to say, "Let me build a moat around this, and not just build a thin layer on top of GPT, but build my own thing on all together", I've gotta imagine there's a data problem at some point, right? Obviously, there's a data problem at some point.**Shawn Wang:** So obviously, the big tech companies have a huge headstart. But how do you get started collecting this data as a founder? I think the story of Midjourney is actually super-interesting. So between Midjourney, Stability AI and OpenAI, as of August, who do you think was making the most money? I'll give you the answer, it was Midjourney.**Jerod Santo:** Oh, I was gonna guess that. You can't just give us the answer...**Shawn Wang:** Oh... [laughs]**Jerod Santo:** I had it.**Shawn Wang:** But it's not obvious, right? Like, the closed source one, that is not the big name, that doesn't have all the industry partnerships, doesn't have the celebrity CEO, that's the one that made the most money.**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. But they launched with a business model immediately, didn't they? They had a subscription out of the box.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, they did. But also, something that they've been doing from the get-go is that you can only access Midjourney through Discord. Why is that?**Jerod Santo:** Right. Because it's social, or... I don't know. What do you think? That's my guess, because they're right in front of everybody else.**Shawn Wang:** Data.**Adam Stacoviak:** Data.**Jerod Santo:** Oh...**Adam Stacoviak:** Please tell us more, Shawn.**Shawn Wang:** Because the way that you experience Midjourney is you put in a prompt, it gives you four images, and you pick the ones that you like for enhancing. So the process of using Midjourney generates proprietary data for Midjourney to improve Midjourney. So from v3 to v4 of Midjourney they improved so much that they have carved out a permanent space for their kind of visual AI-driven art, that is so much better than everyone else because they have data that no one else has.**Jerod Santo:** [17:55] That's really cool.**Adam Stacoviak:** And that's relevance, or is it like quality takes? What is the data they actually get?**Shawn Wang:** Preference, right?**Jerod Santo:** What's good.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. Literally, you type in a prompt, unstructuredly it tells you -- they give you four low-res images, and you have to pick one of the four to upscale it. By picking that four, they now have the data that says "Okay, out of these four, here's what a human picks." And it's and it's proprietary to them, and they paid nothing for it, because it's on Discord. It's amazing.**Jerod Santo:** That is awesome.**Shawn Wang:** They didn't build a UI, they just used Discord. I don't know if Discord knows this, or cares... But it's pretty freakin' phenomenal...**Jerod Santo:** That's pretty smart.**Shawn Wang:** ...because now they have this--**Adam Stacoviak:** It's the ultimate in scrappy, right? It's like, by any means necessary. That's the ultimate binding that's necessary, right? You'll make a beat however you can to put up the track and become the star.**Jerod Santo:** Right.**Adam Stacoviak:** That's amazing.**Jerod Santo:** That's really cool.**Shawn Wang:** So just to close this out, the thing I was saying about Chinchilla was "More data is good, we've found the double descent problem. Now let's go get all the data that's possible." I should make a mention about the open source data attempts... So people understand the importance of data, and basically Luther.AI is kind of the only organization out there that is collecting data that anyone can use to train anything. So they have two large collections of data called The Stack and The Pile, I think is what it's called. Basically, the largest collection of open source permissively-licensed text for you to train whatever language models you want, and then a similar thing for code. And then they are training their open source equivalents of GPT-3 and Copilot and what have you. But I think those are very, very important steps to have. Basically, researchers have maxed out the available data, and part of why Open AI Whisper is so important for OpenAI is that it's unlocking sources of text that are not presently available in the available training data. We've basically exhausted, we're data-constrained in terms of our ability to improve our models. So the largest source of untranscribed text is essentially on YouTube, and there's a prevailing theory that the primary purpose of Whisper is to transcribe all video, to get text, to train the models... [laughs] Because we are so limited on data.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. We've helped them already with our podcasts. Not that it mattered, but we've been transcribing our podcasts for a while, so we just gave them a leg up.**Shawn Wang:** You did.**Adam Stacoviak:** And that's open source on GitHub, too. They probably -- I mean, ChatGPT knows about Changelog. They know that -- Jerod, I don't know if I told you this yet, but I prompted that; I said "Complete the sentence "Who's the hosts of the Changelog podcast?" "Well, that's the dynamic duo, Jerod Santo and Adam Stacoviak." It knows who we are. I mean, maybe it's our transcripts, I don't know, but it knows...**Jerod Santo:** Please tell me it called us "the dynamic duo"... [laughs]**Adam Stacoviak:** I promise you!**Jerod Santo:** It said that?**Adam Stacoviak:** I promise you it said that. "The dynamic duo..."**Jerod Santo:** Oh, [unintelligible 00:20:34.05]**Adam Stacoviak:** It actually reversed the order. It said Adams Stacoviak first and then Jerod Santo... Because usually, my name is, I guess, first, because - I have no clue why it's ever been that way, but... It said "The dynamic duo, Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo..."**Jerod Santo:** That's hilarious.**Adam Stacoviak:** ...hosts of the Changelog Podcast.**Jerod Santo:** It already understands flattery.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it does. Well, actually, the first prompt didn't include us, and I said "Make it better, and include the hosts." And that's all I said, was "Make it better and include the hosts." So in terms of re-prompting, or refining the response that you get from the prompts - that to me is like the ultimate human way to conjure the next available thing, which is try again, or do it better by giving me the hosts, too. And the next one was flattery, and actually our names in the thing. So... It's just crazy. Anyways...**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, so that is the big unlock that ChatGPT enabled.**Jerod Santo:** Totally.**Shawn Wang:** Which is why usually I take a few weeks for my takes to marinate, for me to do research, and then for me to write something... But I had to write something immediately after ChatGPT to tell people how important this thing is. It is the first real chat AI, which means that you get to give human feedback. And this theme of reinforcement learning through human feedback is - the low-res version of it was Midjourney. Actually, the lowest-res version of it was TikTok, because every swipe is human feedback. And being able to incorporate that into your -- and same for Google; every link click is a is human feedback. But the ability to incorporate that and to improve the recommendations and the generations is essentially your competitive advantage, and being able to build that as part of your UI... Which is why, by the way, I have been making the case that frontend engineers should take this extremely seriously, because guess who's very good at making a UI?**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for sure.**Shawn Wang:** But yeah, ChatGPT turns it from a one-off zero-shot experience where you prompt the thing, and then you get the result, and it's good or bad, that's about the end of the story - now it's an interactive conversation between you and the bot, and you can shape it to whatever you want... Which is a whole different experience.**Break:** [22:31]**Adam Stacoviak:** "Complete the sentence" has been a hack for me to use, particularly with ChatGPT. "Complete the sentence" is a great way to easily say "Just give me somebody long, given these certain constraints."**Jerod Santo:** Well, that's effectively what these models are, right? They're auto-complete on steroids. Like, they are basically auto-completing with a corpus of knowledge that's massive, and guessing what words semantically should come next, kind of a thing... In layman's terms; it's more complicated than that, of course, but they are basically auto-completers.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. On that note though, we have a show coming out... So we're recording this on a Friday, the same day we release the same podcast, but it's the week before. So we had Christina Warren on, and so I was like "You know what? I'm gonna use ChatGPT to give me a leg up. Let me make my intro maybe a little easier, and just spice it up a little bit." So I said "Complete the sentence "This week on the Changelog we're talking to Christina Warren about..." and then I ended the quote, and I said "and mention her time at Mashable, film and pop culture, and now being a developer advocate at GitHub." And I've gotta say, most of, 50% of the intro for the episode with Christina is thanks to ChatGPT. I don't know if I break the terms of service by doing that or not, but like -- do I? I don't know. If I do, sue me. I'm sorry. But... Don't sue me. Don't sue us. We'll take it down. We'll axe it out.**Jerod Santo:** We'll rewrite it.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, we'll rewrite it. But, I mean, it's basically what I would have said. So...**Shawn Wang:** There's a nice poetry -- there's a YouTuber who's been on this forever, Two Minute Papers, and what he often says is, "What a time to be alive." And this is very much what a time to be alive. But not just because we're seeing this evolve live, but because we get to be part of the training data. And there was a very interesting conversation between Lex Fridman and Andrej Andrej Karpathy; he was inviting him on to the show... He said, "Our conversation will be immortalized in the training data. This is a form of immortality, because we get to be the first humans essentially baked in." [laughter]**Jerod Santo:** Essentially baked in... Hello, world.**Shawn Wang:** Like, 100-200 years from now, if someone has the Changelog podcast, they will keep having Jerod and Adam pop up, because they're in the goddamn training data. [laughs]**Jerod Santo:** They're like "Come on, these guys have been dead for a long time."**Adam Stacoviak:** [26:05] Let them go. Give them their RIP. [laughter]**Shawn Wang:** Which is poetic and nice. Yeah.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it is a good time to be alive... I think it is interesting, too... I just wonder -- I mean, this might be jumping the shark a little bit, but I often wonder, at what point does humanity stop creating? And at some point, 100 years from now, or maybe more, I don't know, we're gonna be -- maybe sooner, given how fast this is advancing, that we'll create only through what was already created. "At what point is the snake eating the snake?" kind of thing. Like, is there an end to human creativity at some point, because we are just so reliant, at some point, shape, or form, on [unintelligible 00:26:45.20] because of training data, and this just kind of like morphing to something much, much bigger in the future?**Shawn Wang:** So I have an optimistic attitude to that... This question basically is asking, "Can we exhaust infinity?" And so my obvious answer is no. There is a more concrete stat I can give you, which is I think - this is floating around out there. Don't quote me on the exact number, but apparently, 10% of all Google searches every single year have never been asked before. And Google's been around for like 20 years.**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a big percentage.**Shawn Wang:** It's still true. So it's on that order; it might be like 7%, it might be 13%.**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, is it trending down though? Is it trending down? Is it 10% per year, but is it like trending down to like 8%?**Jerod Santo:** Is it because we put the year in our searches? [laughter]**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's true, Jerod. Good one.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. But anyway, so that's what the SEO people talk about when they talk about long tail... The amount of infinity is always bigger than our capability of creating to fill it.**Jerod Santo:** I mean, I feel like if you look at us in an abstract way, humans, we are basically taking in inputs and then generating outputs. But that's creativity, right? So I think what we're just doing is adding more to the inputs. Now we have computers that also take in inputs and generate outputs, but like, everything's already a remix, isn't it? Our life experience and everything that goes into us, and then something else produces a brand new thing, which isn't really new, but it's a remix of something else that we experienced... So I feel like we're just going to keep doing that, and we'll have computer aid at doing that, and the computer eventually maybe will just do the actual outputting part, but we somehow instruct it. I'm with Swyx on this one; I don't think there's going to be an end to human creativity, as the AI gets more and more output... What's the word? When you're just -- not notorious. What's it called when you just can't stop outputting stuff?**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know.**Jerod Santo:** Prolific!**Adam Stacoviak:** Prolific.**Jerod Santo:** As the AI gets more and more output-prolific, and overwhelms us with output, I think we're still going to be doing our thing.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. It's the ultimate reduction in latency to new input, right? Think of 100 years ago - creative folks were few and far between. They had miles between them, depending on your system; maybe it's kilometers. No offense. But there's distance of some sort of magnitude, and the lack of connection and shared ideas. So that's the latency, right? And now, the latency to the next input is just so small in comparison, and will get reduced to basically nothing. So we'll just constantly be inputting and outputting creativity, we'll just become like a creative [unintelligible 00:29:31.17] system with zero latency, nonstop creativity... Go, go, go...**Shawn Wang:** Well, I think this is where you start -- I don't know about you, but I feel a little bit uncomfortable with that, right? Entropy is always increasing in the universe; we're contributing to increasing noise and not signal. And that is a primary flaw of all these language models, is just they are very confidently incorrect. They have no sense of physics, no sense of logic; they will confidently assert things that are not true, and they're trained on sounding plausible, rather than being true.**Jerod Santo:** Right. They're kind of like me when I was in college, you know?**Shawn Wang:** Exactly. [laughter]**Jerod Santo:** [30:10] Just so much confidence, but wrong most of the time. [laughs]**Shawn Wang:** Exactly. Which happens to Galactica, which is this sort of science LLM from Meta, where Yann LeCun, who is one of the big names in tech, was like "This thing will generate papers for you." And within three days, the internet tore it apart, and they had to take it down. It was a very, very dramatic failure, this kind of tech... Because you're talking about biology, and science, and medicine, and you can't just make stuff up like that. [laughs]**Jerod Santo:** Right. So like in the world where chat GPT operates today, which is really in the world of fiction, and kind of BS-ing, for lack of a better term, like writing intros to a podcast - you know, like, it doesn't have to be correct necessarily; it can be like close enough to correct, and then you can massage it, of course, you can cherry pick to get the one that you like... But when the rubber hits the road, like on serious things, like science, or "How many of these pills do I need to take?" I guess that is also -- that's health science. So science, and other things... It's like, it can't be correct 60% of the time, or 80%, or even like 95%. It's gotta reach that point where you actually can trust it. And because we're feeding it all kinds of information that's not correct, de facto... Like, how much of the internet's wrong? Most of it, right?**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, medicine though has evolved too, and it hasn't always been correct, though it's also very serious... You'd get advice from a doctor 10-15 years ago, they'd say it with full confidence and full accuracy, but it's only based on that current dataset.**Jerod Santo:** But you can sue them for malpractice and stuff, right? Like, how do we take recourse against--**Adam Stacoviak:** You can if they actually have malpractice; they can be wrong, because it's as much science as possible to make the most educated guess. It's malpractice when there's negligence; it's not malpractice when they're wrong.**Jerod Santo:** A good doctor will actually go up to the fringe and say, "You know what - I'm not 100% sure about this. It's beyond my knowledge."**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. For sure.**Jerod Santo:** "Here's what you can do. Here's the risks of doing that." Whereas the chat bots, the ChatGPT thing is like, "The answer is 7", and you're like, "It actually was 12." And it's like, "Ah, shoot..." [laughter]**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think when there's mortality involved, maybe there's going to be a timeframe when we actually begin to trust the future MedGPT, for example; I don't know if that's a thing in the future, but something that gives you medical results or responses based upon data, real data, potentially, that you get there, but it's not today.**Jerod Santo:** Well, I think this goes back to the data point that you made, and I think where we go from like the 95 -- I'm making up numbers here, but like 95% accuracy, to get it to like 98.5%, or 99%. Like, that's gonna require niche, high-value, high-signal data that maybe this medical facility has, because they've been collecting it for all these years. And they're the only ones who have it. And so maybe that's where you like carve out proprietary datasets that take these models from a baseline of accuracy, to like, in this particular context of health it's this much accuracy. And then maybe eventually you combine all those and have a super model. I don't know... Swyx, what do you think?**Shawn Wang:** I love the term super-model. I think the term [unintelligible 00:33:23.10] in the industry is ensemble. But that just multiplies the costs, right? Like if you want to run a bank of five models, and pick the best one, that obviously 6x-es your cost. So not super-interesting; good for academic papers, but not super-interesting in practice, because it's so expensive.There's so many places to go with this stuff... Okay, there's one law that I love, which is Brandolini's Law. I have this tracking list of eponymous laws... Brandolini's law is people's ability to create bulls**t far exceeds the ability of people to refute it. Basically, if all of these results of this AI stuff is that we create better bulls***t engines, it's not great. And what you're talking about, the stuff with like the 90% correct, 95% correct - that is actually a topic of discussion. It's pretty interesting to have the SRE type conversation of "How many nines do you need for your use case, and where are we at right now?" Because the number of nines will actually improve. We are working on -- sorry, "we" as in the collective human we, not me personally...**Adam Stacoviak:** [34:32] The royal we, yes.**Shawn Wang:** The role royal we... Like, humanity is working on ways to improve, to get that up. It's not that great right now, so that's why it's good for creativity and not so much for precision, but it will get better. One of the most viral posts on Hacker News is something that you featured, which is the ability to simulate virtual machines instead of ChatGPT-3, where people literally opened -- I mean, I don't know how crazy you have to be, but open ChatGPT-3, type in LS, and it gives you a file system. [laughter]**Jerod Santo:** But that only exists -- it's not a real file system, it's just one that's [unintelligible 00:35:00.05]**Shawn Wang:** It's not a real file system, for now. It's not a real set file system for now, because they hallucinate some things... Like, if you ask it for a Git hash, it's gonna make up a Git hash that's not real, because you can verify [unintelligible 00:35:10.25] MD5. But like, how long before it learns MD5? And how long before it really has a virtual machine inside of the language model? And if you go that far, what makes you so confident that we're not in one right now? [laughs]**Jerod Santo:** Now I'm uncomfortable... That actually is a very short hop into the simulation hypothesis, because we are effectively simulating a brain... And if you get good enough at simulating brains, what else can you simulate?**Adam Stacoviak:** What else WOULD you want to simulate? I mean, that's the Holy Grail, a brain.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. So Emad Mostaque is the CEO of Stability AI. He's like, "We're completely unconcerned with the AGI. We don't know when it'll get here. We're not working on it. But what we're concerned about is the ability to augment human capability. People who can't draw now can draw; people who can't write marketing texts or whatever, now can do that." And I think that's a really good way to approach this, which is we don't know what the distant future is gonna hold, but in the near future, this can help a lot of people.**Adam Stacoviak:** It's the ultimate tool in equality, right? I mean, if you can do --**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, that's a super-interesting use case. So there was a guy who was like sort of high school-educated, not very professional, applying for a job. And what he used ChatGPT to do was like "Here's what I want to say, and please reward this in a professional email." And it basically helped to pass the professional class status check. Do you know about the status checks? All the other sort of informal checks that people have, like "Oh, we'll fly you in for your job interview... Just put the hotel on your credit card." Some people don't have credit cards. And likewise, when people email you, you judge them by their email, even though some haven't been trained to write professionally, right? And so yeah, GPT is helping people like that, and it's a huge enabler for those people.**Adam Stacoviak:** Hmm... That is -- I mean, I like that idea, honestly, because it does enable more people who are less able... It's a net positive.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. I mean, I seem generally capable, but also, I have RSI on my fingers, and sometimes I can't type. And so what Whisper is enabling me to do, and Copilot... So GitHub, at their recent GitHub Universe, recently announced voice-enabled Copilot... And it is good enough for me to navigate VS Code, and type code with Copilot and voice transcription. Those are the two things that you need; and they're now actually good enough that I don't have to learn a DSL for voice coding, like you would with Talon, or the prior solutions.**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, it's the ultimate -- if you're creative enough, it's almost back to the quote that Sam had said, that you liked... Well, I'm gonna try and go back to it; he says "At the end, because they were just able to articulate it with a creative eye that I don't have." So that to me is like insight, creativity; it's not skill, right? It's the ability to dream, which is the ultimate human skill, which is - since the beginning of time, we've been dreamers.**Shawn Wang:** [38:01] This is a new brush. Some artists are learning to draw with it. There'll be new kinds of artists created.**Adam Stacoviak:** Provided that people keep making the brush, though. It's a new brush...**Shawn Wang:** Well, the secret's out; the secret's out that you can make these brushes.**Jerod Santo:** Right.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, but you still have to have the motivation to maintain the brush, though.**Jerod Santo:** What about access, too? I mean, right now you're talking about somebody who's made able, that isn't otherwise, with let's just say ChatGPT, which is free for now. But OpenAI is a for profit entity, and they can't continue to burn money forever; they're gonna have to turn on some sort of a money-making machine... And that's going to inevitably lock some people out of it. So now all of a sudden, access becomes part of the class, doesn't it? Like, you can afford an AI and this person cannot. And so that's gonna suck. Like, it seems like open source could be for the win there, but like you said, Swyx, there's not much moving and shaking in that world.**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I haven't stopped thinking about what Swyx said last time we talked, which was above or below the API, which is almost the same side of the coin that we talked about last time, which is like, this the same thing.**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Well, ChatGPT is an API, isn't it?**Shawn Wang:** Nice little callback. Nice. [laughter]**Adam Stacoviak:** I really haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Every time I use any sort of online service to get somebody to do something for me that I don't want to do, because I don't have the time for it, or I'd rather trade dollars for my time, I keep thinking about that above or below the API, which is what we talked about. And that's what Jerod has just brought up; it's the same exact thing.**Shawn Wang:** Yep, it is. One more thing I wanted to offer, which is the logical conclusion to generative. So that post where we talked about why prompt engineering is overrated - the second part of it is why you shouldn't think about this as generative... Because right now, the discussion we just had was only thinking about it as a generative type of use case. But really, what people want to focus on going forward is -- well, two things. One is the ability for it to summarize and understand and reason, and two, for it to perform actions. So the emerging focuses on agentic AI; AI agents that can perform actions on your behalf. Essentially, hooking it up to -- giving it legs and legs and arms and asking it to do stuff autonomously.So I think that's super-interesting to me, because then you get to have it both ways. You get AI to expand bullet points into prose, and then to take prose into bullet points. And there's a very funny tweet from Josh Browder, who is the CEO DoNotPay, which is kind of like a --**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I'm a fan of him.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. Fantastic, right? So what DoNotPay does is they get rid of annoying payment UX, right? Like, sometimes it was parking tickets, but now they are trying to sort of broaden out into different things. So he recently tweeted that DoNotPay is working on a way to talk to Comcast to negotiate your cable bill down. And since Comcast themselves are going to have a chat bot as well, it's going to be chat bots talking to each other to resolve this... [laughter]**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow, man...**Jerod Santo:** It's like a scene out of Futurama, or something...**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. So I'm very excited about the summarization aspects, right? One of the more interesting projects that came out of this recent wave was Explained Paper, which is - you can throw any academic paper at it and it explains the paper to you in approachable language, and you can sort of query it back and forth. I think those are super-interesting, because that starts to reverse Brandolini is law. Instead of generating bulls**t, you're taking bulls**it in, getting into some kind of order. And that's very exciting.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. 17 steps back, it makes me think about when I talk to my watch, and I say "Text my wife", and I think about like who is using this to their betterment? And I'm thinking like, we're only talking about adults, for the most part. My kid, my son, Eli - he talks to Siri as if like she knows everything, right? But here's me using my watch to say "Text my wife." I say it, it puts it into the phone... And the last thing it does for me, which I think is super-interesting for the future, as like this AI assistant, is "Send it" is the final prompt back to me as the human; should I send this? And if I say no, Siri doesn't send it. But if I say "Send it", guess what she does? She sends it. But I love this idea of the future, like maybe some sort of smarter AI assistant like that. I mean, to me, that's a dream. I'd love that.**Shawn Wang:** [42:21] Yeah, I was watching this clip of the first Iron Man, when Robert Downey Jr. is kind of working with his bot to work on his first suit... And he's just talking to the bot, like "Here's what I want you to do." Sometimes it gets it wrong and he slaps it on the ahead... But more often than not, he gets it right. And this is why I've been -- you know, Wes Boss recently tweeted -- this is actually really scary. "Should we be afraid as engineers, like this is going to come for our jobs?" And I'm like, "No. All of us just got a personal junior developer." That should excite you.**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And it seems like it's particularly good at software development answers. You'd think it's because there's lots of available text... I mean, think about like things that it's good at; it seems like it knows a lot about programming.**Shawn Wang:** I have a list. Do you want a list?**Jerod Santo:** Yeah.**Shawn Wang:** So writing tutorials - it's very good. Literally, tables of contents, section by section, explaining "First you should npm install. Then you should do X. Then you should do Y." Debugging code - just paste in your error, and paste in the source code, and it tells you what's wrong with it. Dynamic programming, it does really well. Translating DSLs. I think there'll be a thousand DSLs blooming, because the barrier to adoption of a DSL has just disappeared. [laughs] So why would you not write a DSL? No one needs to learn your DSL.**Adam Stacoviak:** What is this, Copilot you're using, or ChatGPT, that you're--**Shawn Wang:** ChatGPT-3. I have a bunch of examples here I can drop in the show notes. AWS IAM policies. "Hey, I want to do X and Y in AWS." Guess what? There's tons of documentation. ChatGPT knows AWS IAM policies. Code that combines multiple cloud services. This one comes from Corey Quinn. 90% of our jobs is hooking up one service to another service. You could just tell it what to do, and it just does it, right? There a guy who was like, "I fed my college computer network's homework to it, and they gave the right result", which is pretty interesting.Refactoring code from Elixir to PHP is another one that has been has been done... And obviously, Advent of Code, which - we're recording this in December now. The person who won -- so Advent of Code for the first 100 people is a race; whoever submits the correct answer first, wins it. And the number one place in the first Advent of Code this year was a ChatGPT guy. So it broke homework. Like, this thing has broken homework and take-home interviews, basically. [laughs]**Jerod Santo:** Completely. It's so nice though; like, I've only used it a little bit while coding, but it's two for two, of just like drilling my exact questions. And just stuff like "How do you match any character that is not an [unintelligible 00:44:43.28] regular expression?"**Shawn Wang:** Oh, yeah. Explaining regexes.**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That was my question. Like, I know exactly what I want, but I can't remember which is the character, and so I just asked it, and it gave me the exact correct answer, and an example, and explained it in more detail, if I wanted to go ahead and read it. And it warned me, "Hey, this is not the best way to test against email addresses... But here it is." So I was like, "Alright..." This is a good thing for developers, for sure.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. But you can't trust it -- so you have a responsibility as well. You can't write bad code, have something bad happen, and go, "Oh, it wasn't my fault. It was ChatGPT."**Jerod Santo:** Well, you can't paste Stack Overflow answers into your code either.**Shawn Wang:** You have the responsibility. Exactly.**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I mean, you can, but you're gonna get fired, right? Like, if the buck stops at you, not at the Stack Overflow answer person, you can't go find them and be like, "Why were you wrong?" Right? It stops at you.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. So I think the way I phrased it was -- do you know about this trade offer meme that is going around? So it's "Trade offer - you receive better debugging, code explanation, install instructions, better documentation, elimination of your breaking of flow from copy and pasting in Stack Overflow - you receive all these benefits, in exchange for more code review." There is a cost, which is code review. You have to review the code that your junior programmer just gave you. But hey, that's better and easier than writing code yourself.**Jerod Santo:** [46:04] Yeah, because you've got a free junior programmer working for you now. [laughter]**Shawn Wang:** There's a guy that says, "I haven't done a single Google search or consulted any external documentation for the past few days, and I was able to progress faster than I ever had when delivering a new thing." I mean, it's just... It's amazing, and Google should be worried.**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's what I was gonna say - is this an immediate threat to Google? Now, I did see a commenter on Hacker News - Swyx, I'm not sure if you saw this one - from inside of Google, talking about the cost of integration?**Shawn Wang:** Yes. Yeah, I've read basically every thread... [laughter] Which is a full-time job, but... This is so important. Like, I don't do this for most things, right? Like, I think this is big enough that I had to drop everything and go read up on it... And not be an overnight expert, but at least try to be informed... And that's all I'm doing here, really. But yeah, do you want to read it up?**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So in summary, they were responding... This is on a thread about ChatGPT, and they say -- this is a Googler, and they say "It's one thing to put up a demo that interested nerds can play with, but it's quite another thing to try to integrate it deeply in a system that serves billions of requests a day, when you take into account serving costs, added latency, and the fact that average revenue on something like a Google search is close to infinitesimal (which is the word I can't say out loud) already. I think I remember the presenter saying something like they'd want to reduce the cost by at least 10 times before it could be feasible to integrate models like this in products like Google search. A 10x or even 100x improvement is obviously an attainable target in the next few years, so I think technology like this is coming in the next few years."So that's one insider's take on where Google stands. Obviously, Google has tons of resources dedicated to these areas of expertise, right? It's not like Google's asleep at the wheel, and is going to completely have their lunch eaten by OpenAI. But right now, there's a lot of people who are training new habits, right? They're like, "I'm not gonna use Google anymore. I'm gonna start using OpenAI." I think it's something on the order of one million users in their first few days have signed up... How long can Google potentially bleed people before it becomes an actual problem? I don't know. I don't know the answer to these things.**Shawn Wang:** So there's one way in which you can evaluate for yourself right now, and I think that's the most helpful, constructive piece of advice that we can give on this podcast, which is -- we're covering something that is moving very live, very fast. Everything that we say could be invalidated tomorrow by something new. But you could just run ChatGPT-3 alongside of all your Google searches. That's a very, very simple way to evaluate if this would replace Google for you; just run it twice, every single time. And so there's a Google extension - and I'll link it - [unintelligible 00:48:47.04] ChatGPT Google extension; I'll put it in the show notes. And yeah, I have it running; it's not that great. [laughs] Surprisingly. So ChatGPT is optimized for answering questions. Sometimes I don't put questions in there. I just put the thing I'm looking for, and Google's pretty good at that, it turns out... [laughs]**Jerod Santo:** Right. See, because you are an expert-level Google prompt engineer, right? Like, you know how to talk to Google.**Shawn Wang:** We have optimized to Google prompting, yes.**Jerod Santo:** Exactly.**Shawn Wang:** If I need to search within a certain date range, I know how to do that in Google. I can't do that in ChatGPT-3. If I need to look for PDFs, I know how to do that. If I want to look for Reddit, and constrain the site to Reddit, I know how to do that. ChatGPT-3 has no concept of attribution, no concept of date ranges, and stuff like that.**Jerod Santo:** Right.**Shawn Wang:** But yeah, it is just like better at some things, and worse at other things, and that is the nature of all new technology. It just has to be better at one thing, that you cannot get anywhere else, and it has a permanent hold in your mind. Whenever you need that thing done, you will turn to ChatGPT-3, or any other new technology.[49:53] I love this sort of meta philosophy about technology adoption, because all new toys just generally are worse than the things that they replace, except in one area, and that's the area needs to matter. And if it does matter, it will win, because they will fix the bugs.**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, oftentimes with disruption, that area is cost; like acquisition cost. Sometimes it's convenience, and maybe I guess sometimes it's accuracy. There's different metrics, but it's got to be the one that matters. If it's marginally better at things that don't matter, you're not going to disrupt. But if it's a lot better at one thing that matters a lot, even if everything else sucks, you'll use that thing.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, exactly. So it's interesting, because -- you know, Google has a few things going for it. By the way, it has one of the largest training repositories of text that no one else has, which is Gmail. But the most impressive thing it's being able to ship with Gmail is the little autocomplete, like, "Looks good", Okay", the little buttons that you see in the smart replies.**Jerod Santo:** Do you guys ever use those? Do you ever click on those?**Shawn Wang:** I use that. I use that. Save some typing.**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, well, I used to actually use Gmail directly to compose my emails, or respond. I would tap to complete all the time, if the response was like, "Yeah, I was gonna say that."**Shawn Wang:** There's a billion little ways that AI is built into Google right now, that we just take for granted, because we don't feel it, because there's no prompts. [laughter]**Jerod Santo:** We need a prompt!**Adam Stacoviak:** Even if OpenAI did eat Google's lunch, Google would just acquire it, or something...**Shawn Wang:** You would think so...**Jerod Santo:** Maybe...**Shawn Wang:** But I would say that probably OpenAI is not for sale. Like, they have this world-conquering ambition that would just not let them settle for anything less than global domination... Which is a little bit scary, right?**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I think they're probably going the distance, is their plan, it seems like...**Shawn Wang:** Well, if anything, Microsoft should have bought them when they had the chance, because that was Bing's opportunity, and I don't think that ever came to pass... Probably because Sam Altman was smart enough not to do that deal. But yeah, so let's take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion. What would you feel if Google started autocompleting your entire email for you, and not just like individual, like two or three words? You would feel different, you would feel creeped out. So Google doesn't have the permission to innovate.**Adam Stacoviak:** I wouldn't freak out if I opted in, though. If I was like, "This technology exists, and it's helpful. I'll use that." Now, if it just suddenly started doing it, yeah, creeped out. But if I'm like, "Yeah, this is kind of cool. I opt into this enhanced AI, or this enhanced autocompletion", or whatever, simplifies the usage of it, or whatever.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah, so there's actually some people working on the email client that does that for you. So Evan Conrad is working on EveryPrompt email, which is essentially you type a bunch of things that you want to say, and you sort of batch answer all your emails with custom generated responses from GPT-3. It's a really smart application of this tech to email that I've seen. But I just think, like, you would opt in; the vast majority of people never opt into anything.**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, most people don't opt in.**Shawn Wang:** Like, that's just not the default experience. So I'm just saying, one reason that Google doesn't do it is "Yeah, we're just too big." Right? That is essentially the response that you read out from that engineer; like, "This doesn't work at Google scale. We can't afford it. It would be too slow", whatever. That's kind of a cop out, I feel like... Because Google should be capable. These are the best engineers in the world, they should they should be able to do it.**Jerod Santo:** Well, he does say he thinks it's coming in the next few years. So he's not saying it's impossible, he's saying they're not there yet. And I will say, I'm giving ChatGPT the benefit of my wait time that I do not afford to Google. I do not wait for Google to respond. I will give ChatGPT three to five seconds, because I know it's like a new thing that everyone's hitting hard... But like, if they just plugged that in, it would be too slow. I wouldn't wait three to five seconds for a Google search.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. By the way, that's a fascinating cloud story that you guys have got to have on - find the engineer at OpenAI that scaled ChatGPT-3 in one week from zero to one million users?**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, totally.**Adam Stacoviak:** [53:58] Well, if you're listening, or you know the person, this is an open invite; we'd love to have that conversation.**Shawn Wang:** Yeah. I've seen the profile of the guy that claimed to [unintelligible 00:54:04.00] so that he would know... But I don't know who would be responsible for that. That is one of the most interesting cloud stories probably of the year. And Azure should be all over this. Azure should be going like, "Look, they handled it no problem. This is most successful consumer product of all time come at us", right?**Jerod Santo:** That's true. They should.**Shawn Wang:** They're the number three cloud right now. This is like their one thing, this is their time to shine. They've got to do it.**Jerod Santo:** And does anybody even know that Azure is behind OpenAI? I'm sure you can find out, but like, is that well known? I didn't know that.**Shawn Wang:** Oh, it's very public. Microsoft invested a billion dollars in OpenAI.**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Did you know that, Adam?**Adam Stacoviak:** No.**Jerod Santo:** So I'm trying to gauge the public knowledge...**Shawn Wang:** What we didn't know was that it was at a valuation of $20 billion, which... So OpenAI went from like this kind of weird research lab type thing into one of the most highly valued startups in the world. [laughs]**Jerod Santo:** Do you think Microsoft got their money's worth?**Shawn Wang:** I think so... It's awash right now, because --**Jerod Santo:** Too early.**Shawn Wang:** ...they probably cut them a lot of favorable deals for training, and stuff... So it's more about like being associated with one of the top AI names. Like, this is the play that Microsoft has been doing for a long time, so it's finally paying off... So I'm actually pretty happy for that. But then they have to convert into like getting people who are not [unintelligible 00:55:21.00] onto this thing.**Break:** [55:26]**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the long-term play here though? I mean, if Microsoft invested that kind of money, and we're using ChatGPT right now, we're willing to give it extra seconds, potentially even a minute if the answer is that important to you, that you wouldn't afford to Google... Like, what's the play for them? Will they turn this into a product? How do you make billions from this? Do you eventually just get absorbed by the FAANGs of the world, and next thing you know now this incredible future asset to humanity is now owned by essentially folks we try to like host our own services for? Like, we're hosting Nextcloud locally, so we can get off the Google Drives and whatnot... And all this sort of anti-whatever. I mean, what's the endgame here?**Shawn Wang:** Am I supposed to answer that? [laughs]**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you have an answer? I mean, that's what I think about...**Jerod Santo:** Let's ask ChatGPT what the endgame is... No, I mean, short-term it doesn't seem like OpenAI becomes the API layer for every AI startup that's gonna start in the next 5 or 10 years, right? Like, aren't they just charging their fees to everybody who wants to integrate AI into their products, pretty much? That's not an end game, but that's a short-term business model, right?**Shawn Wang:** That is a short-term business model, yeah. I bet they have much more up their sleeves... I don't actually know. But they did just hire their first developer advocate, which is interesting, because I think you'll start to hear a lot more from them.[58:12] Well, there's two things I will offer for you. One, it's a very common view or perception that AI is a centralizing force, right? Which is, Adam, what you're talking about, which is, "Does this just mean that the big always get bigger?" Because the big have the scale and size and data advantage. And one of the more interesting blog posts - sorry, I can't remember who I read this from - was that actually one of the lessons from this year is that it's not necessarily true, because AI might be a more decentralized force, because it's more amenable to open source... And crypto, instead of being decentralized, turned out to be more centralized than people thought.So the two directions of centralized versus decentralized - the common perception is that AI is very centralized, and crypto very decentralized. The reality was that it's actually the opposite, which is fascinating to me as a thesis. Like, is that the end game, that AI eventually gets more decentralized, because people want this so badly that there are enough researchers who go to NeurIPS to present their research papers and tweet out all this stuff, that diffuses these techniques all over the place? And we're seeing that happen, helped in large probably by Stability AI. The proof that Stability as an independent, outsider company, like not a ton of connections in the AI field, did this humongous achievement I think is just a remarkable encouragement that anyone could do it... And that's a really encouraging thing for those people who are not FAANG and trying to make some extra headroom in this world. So that's one way to think about the future.The second way to think about who monetizes and who makes the billion dollars on this... There's a very influential post that I was introduced to recently from Union Square Ventures, called "The myth of the infrastructure phase", which is directly tackling this concept that everyone says "When you have a gold rush, sell picks and shovels", right? And it's a very common thing, and presumably AI being the gold rush right now, you should sell picks and shovels, which is you should build AI infrastructure companies. But really, there are tons of AI infrastructure companies right now, they're a dime a dozen; really, they're all looking for use cases, and basically, the argument, the myth of the infrastructure phase is that technology swings back and forth between app constraint and infra constraint. And right now, we're not infrastructure-constrained, we're app-constrained. And really, it's the builders of AI-enabled products like TikTok that know what to do with the AI infrastructure tha

Kris Rivenburgh explains that Title III of the ADA doesn't have a 15 or more employees exception. Title I of the ADA applies to employers of 15 or more employees, but the titles in the Americans with Disabilities Act are standalone titles. Because Google only showed a snippet of Title I for many popular search results, many people - including law firms - had this information wrong on their websites. Kris offers accessibility services including WCAG 2.1 AA manual audits and remediation at https://accessible.org. Kris also wrote the book on ADA compliance for digital assets. You can find out more about The ADA Book at https://ADABook.com. Transcript: https://adabook.com/less-than-15-employees-small-businesses-title-iii/

Steve Toth, CEO and Lead Strategist at SEO Notebook, talks about keyword verticalization. There are many different ways that people search for keywords and you want the pages on your website to rank for as many relevant keywords as possible. Because Google prioritizes topic-based content, keyword verticalization is an effective strategy to gain topical relevance around a particular topic or keyword. Today, Steve discusses how keyword verticalization can be applied to your SEO practices. Show NotesConnect With: Steve Toth: Website // LinkedInThe Voices of Search Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

American Invents Act Has Destroyed Innovation - Cops want to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused - Hackers Hide Malware in Stunning Images Taken by James Webb Space Telescope - TikShock: Don't get caught out by these 5 TikTok scams - Ukrainian Police Bust Crypto Fraud Call Centers Well, the birds are coming home to roost. Well, not the chickens in this case, but this is called the death warrant for American ingenuity. We'll start by talking through this great article from this week's newsletter. [Automated transcript follows.] Well, I hate to say this, but in reality, we are looking at some very, very bad times for inventors, and I've had some of these problems myself before, but last September, there were scores of patent holders who demonstrated in six cities across the US. [00:00:34] They had on these black t-shirts that said homo sapiens, inventor. Endangered species. They were protesting America's decade of stolen dreams. Great article here in the American thinker. It was in my newsletter this year, or excuse me this week, but, uh, but here here's weirdly what happened here. Back in 2011, president Obama pushed through Congress and signed into law. [00:01:04] What they called the America invents act. Now just like the inflation reduction act is going to increase inflation, right? It's all double speak. Isn't it? The American invents act turned over the patent process basically to the biggest Democrat party donors. Big business billionaires, right? Because that's who really is funding them, the Hollywood millionaires, these massive billionaires, Zuckerbergs and, and others. [00:01:35] And what happened here? Is they changed the whole patent law and the basis for it. They flipped the table here, basically. Here's the idea behind the patent law that we've had in place in the United States for well, over a century and patents that are guaranteed in the cons. It used to be that you, if you were first to invent something, if you could show that you were first to invent something, you could file a patent and gain that patent. [00:02:14] Well, what happened is because of all of the donations that went into the Democrats in 2011, from these big, big companies that were lobbying. A, and this is part of the reason I have a huge problem with all this money going to Washington DC, frankly, because it just attracts rodents like these big companies that want to use the law to control you, to gain profit for them. [00:02:39] And really in this case, squash. Potential patent holders. You see there have been piracy for years in the patent field. And this happened to me. I spent a year of my life designing some software, writing some software that emulated an older computer system and allowed you to take. Any of that software and run it on the new system. [00:03:05] And it would run exactly the same way. And a lease on the new hardware was cheaper than just a maintenance contract on the old stuff. Plus it was faster, used less electricity, had more options, et cetera. Right. It was, it was really something, frankly, and I was invited to their headquarters to show them a little bit about. [00:03:27] Did, and, and I was so excited because they wanted to start selling it, right. So they need to understand a little bit better. So I went to the headquarters and met with them, you know, of course paid my own way. Flew down there, stayed in the hotel, rented a car, you know, all the stuff that you have to do. [00:03:43] And then nothing happened afterwards. Wouldn't return phone calls. It just, all of a sudden went silent. And then about a year and a half later Tata, they had an alternative product out on the. . Yeah, and they tried to emulate what I had done, but they did a very, very poor job at it. That's patent theft, that's piracy in this particular case, uh, if you are an inventor, you've probably experienced that sort of thing before, you know, you can put employees all of the non-disclosure agreements you want to have in place, but in reality, good luck enforcing those, especially against a big company. [00:04:25] Well, piracy went on steroids because of president Obama's America and events act. They, as part of that established something, they called the patent trial and appeal board. And it's just gone downhill ever since. So a professor that has more than 40 patents, I'm gonna read a little quote of his, this includes some inventions used in the space shuttles, by the way, which by the way, my invention was used with the space shuttle. [00:04:57] Um, so Dan brown invented something called the bionic wrench. I have one of those. I bought one of those some years back, this is a one size fits all wrench that does not strip bolt corners like it does if you're trying to use vice scripts or some pair of pliers, right. Because you're just too lazy to go and get the right socket size or box wrench or whatever it is. [00:05:22] That's the right size. It very, very. And professor brown says that Sears stole his idea for this bionic wrench right down to the marketing pitch. And then Sears, according to him, went out and hired a Chinese company to make it. And all of a sudden now, what kind of invention does he have? How's he gonna battle somebody like that? [00:05:49] I know a guy who is, uh, completely unethical. You know, I've done many shows from the consumer electronic show and it's really kind of cool, cuz I would get in depth with the inventors and, and explain what they were doing on the air. It was really neat all the way around. It was just a whole lot of fun. [00:06:08] And I met a guy there who was going to the consumer electronic show to find cool new consumer electronics. He thought might be popular. And then he'd go and talk to the people who were exhibiting that wonderful new electronics and say, Hey, I'm interested in, in selling your stuff. I have, you know, retail space and, uh, you know, kiosks in the mall. [00:06:33] What can, uh, what kind of deal can we work out here? Well, you know, first I, can I, let me get a, I, I need a copy of, uh, of your device here. I want a copy of it so I can mess with it and see, see if we really wanna follow through on. Oh, and I, I don't want to carry it around the floor of the consumer electronic show. [00:06:51] So I need you to ship it to me. So they'd ship 'em off. They might be a little speaker. They might be a charger. They might be who knows what? And consumer electronics is pretty broad. And if he liked it, he wouldn't buy it from them. He sent them over to his contacts in China. And had them reverse engineered and make the same thing with his brand label on it. [00:07:16] And he'd sell it in the stores. Now, when it comes to software and a lot of consumer electronics patents, aren't really a big deal because things. Changed so quickly. Right? And if you're a small guy, it's very hard to file a patent. And that's how president Obama sold this American Bens act to us. I remember this very, very clearly where he said, Hey, listen, this is gonna make the patent process way more streamlined, way easier for the small guys to be able to get patents, uh, not only applied for, but actually get them out to market. [00:07:52] And it's just gonna be an absolutely wonderful. It, it isn't because what happens now? Is big companies are not investing in research and development. That is true across the board. Now you might say, Hey Craig, well, how about big companies? How about Tesla? That's R and D. How about SpaceX? That's R and D. [00:08:14] Yes, but they are R and D companies. They're not big companies out there like Facebook, does Facebook try and come up with this or that new invention? Well, yeah, they kind of do from time to time, but most of the time what's been happening is corporate America looks for a winner. And then tries to buy the winner. [00:08:35] Microsoft has been doing that forever. Microsoft in court has lost cases because of what they did to inventors. And now it's been codified in law for over 10 years. So our American ingenuity, which is what we rely on in order to grow our economy, the ingenuity, the, the brain skills, the science, the true science that we have gives us a major competitive advantage because that particular, uh, type of intellectual property has a much higher profit margin than something like manufacturing a widget. [00:09:14] When you get right down to it, that's where the real money is. so a very interesting article and I would suggest you take a little bit of time to read it. If you've ever thought about patenting something, if you had a great idea, it used to be, you know, this is kind of the, the, uh, old wives tale. If you will, if you've got a great idea, you think you might wanna patent it, write it all out, take all of your notes, do it in a, a, a workbook that you can. [00:09:43] Alter right. You can't tear out pages or things. Uh, mail it to yourself in a Manila envelope and make sure you put stamps on it. And then the post office is going to date, stamp it for you or send it to your attorney even better. Right. And your attorney's gonna go ahead and keep that on file. And then when it's time to file the patents, you can say, Hey, look, it here's the proof. [00:10:06] I invented this in April of 2019. It doesn't matter because if some other company sees what you're doing or comes up with a similar or the same idea, and that company has the money to have the lawyers that know patent law inside out and backwards and can go ahead and file that patent claim. You've lost it. [00:10:31] you know, as early as the constitutional convention of 18 or 1787, our founding fathers recognize the need to promote innovation and we have to be promoting it. We've gotta get rid of this Obama era law. Absolutely. We've gotta go from first to file, which is what it has been for a decade. The first person to file you. [00:10:54] And move back to the way it was intended, the way it worked for well over a hundred years where it is a first to invent, it's very, very important for all of us, for economy, et cetera. The, the third law of Congress was a patent act of 1790. It it's just man, have we come a long way, stick around. We'll be right back online. [00:11:19] Craig peterson.com. [00:11:22] You know, we've had firewalls in our cars for a very long time for a very good reason. Right? You wanna keep the engine stuff out of the passenger compartment? The same thing is true. When we're talking about our networks, we're using firewalls to keep things out. [00:11:39] Firewalls are there to keep things out. And we have firewalls in our homes. [00:11:44] If you've got an internet service provider, you've probably got a firewall right there. Something that you don't even think about, right. It's just, there's gonna protect. You, it might, it's providing some services. You might be familiar with them. It's obviously doing a network address translation for you in this day and age. [00:12:06] Pretty much everything is especially with the internet transition that's been going on for years now from, um, IP four to IP six, but, uh, the firewall. is critical for every person and every business out there. But when we get into the configurations of firewalls, frankly, they are really a touchy subject. [00:12:29] You know, every network security professional has their own preferred hardware and software, uh, use Cisco. As a rule, Cisco has some great stuff. What I like the best about the Cisco equipment that we use in software and install at our clients is it is one pane of glass. It's a single vendor that covers everything from endpoint security. [00:12:54] In other words, security on your desktop, through the network itself, the switches, the firewalls, the email filters Absolut. Everything is there and is taken care of by all of the Cisco gear. It it's really quite something to look. I saw, in fact, a survey just last week at businesses who are trying to consolidate, there's just too many vendors in there selling this piece of endpoint, that piece of endpoint. [00:13:25] And, you know, that's part of the problem that I see happen pretty frequently, which is people look at Gartner report. Gartner, of course, a research company. They've got a lot of great research out there that I've used before. I've had Gartner on the radio show before, as well as some of their competitors talking about trends. [00:13:44] Well, There is something known as the upper right quadrant in those Gartner reports where they are rating various vendors for various pieces of software. So there might be for instance, a report on firewalls and the upper right hand cor quadrant is kind of what you want, cuz it's new, it's innovative. It, it innovative. [00:14:06] It's uh, really cool and wonderful. And it's the best. Since life spread. So they go out and they buy that cuz it's upper, right. Gartner quadrant. And then man, they find out, uh, okay, so now we need desk desktop, desktop. Okay. So they find the or buy actually the Gartner report for five to 10 grand. That's like a page long is crazy how expensive these things are. [00:14:32] They then look at that and say, okay, so the best desktop is vendor Y so let me see, we got X for the firewall. We've got Y for the endpoint and then, oh, they need switches. So let's go to the Gartner report. Who's in the upper right quadrant here for switches. Oh, it's uh, vendor Z. Okay. So we got Z. So now all of a sudden. [00:14:51] You end up with all of these different pieces of hardware, different pieces of software that have limited offerability at best interoperability at best. Right? So the, this day and age, when we're talking about cybersecurity, There are so many legitimate attacks every day. I mean, thousands of attacks going on even against a single business. [00:15:18] And there are hundreds potentially of false alarms every day. So how do you deal with that? That that's a good question. So, uh, a lot of businesses turn to companies like mine now, you know, full disclosure, I've been doing internet security work for businesses since, uh, early 1990s. So whew, 30 years now. [00:15:40] And I've been doing internet work for even longer than that, helping to develop it. So they'll go and they'll say, Hey, we need a managed security services provider. Uh, there's a big problem with that. And I, I was watching, uh, Yellowstone that TV show and I, it was a great little example of what we're seeing in the world today. [00:16:05] And Frank, frankly, we've seen forever obviously. And that is if there's a demand for something, all of a sudden, a lot of people will be hanging up shingles. and if they know, if that vendor knows more than you do, or is able to kind of turn, twist your ear and convince you to buy from them, you'll buy from them. [00:16:26] We saw that man around the year, 2000, all of the people who were trying to sell web services that had no idea what they're doing now, we're seeing all kinds of people trying to sell network services, security services that have little idea of what they're doing. We support. These companies that call themselves manage security services providers, where we actually go in, we design the system, we build the system and we implement the system. [00:16:53] We run the system and the third party here builds the client. Right. Cuz it's their client. And you know, that's all fine. It's so well and good, but what should you be looking. Particularly if you are a business, if you want to have a managed firewall, which is, I think important again, it's kind of a long tail thing to have a firewall vendor and, uh, this vendor and a managed vendor, and now it can get to be a headache pretty quickly. [00:17:23] But if you're going to focus on one thing, It's probably the firewall and your end points. Right? So maybe it's two things. So here's what a managed firewall service provider should be able to offer you. First of all, firewall system health and alerting. Software life cycle management, which means your updates, your patches, service, and incident management. [00:17:48] Whenever there's an alarm, they should know about it and they should be handling it. Security policy implementation your reporting, your analysis, your remediation, some of that is required by these various regulations and laws that are out there. You. To do it, uh, you know, without getting in a lot of detail right now, um, network monitoring, uh, the traffic monitoring, you know, the idea here behind any kind of managed service is to bring in a true expert rather than just completely outsourcing. [00:18:24] So you're partnering with someone. One of the things I've, I've bated my head against the wall for, for decades now, is that the it department. Thinks that they're up to snuff to be able to do something, or maybe they just want to do it because it's gonna be wonderful for them on the resume for the next job. [00:18:45] Right. Uh, man, I've seen that a lot of times when, when you are looking at all of this stuff and you've got an it department, maybe you're better off bringing in a very narrow expert to support your it department rather than fight against your it depart. good questions here. Uh, bottom line, they should have better expertise than what you have. [00:19:11] And you've got to read between the lines between your it staff that are currently doing it and the other vendors reducing the burden on your staff. So that maybe what they can do is. Focus more on things that are, uh, revenue generating that are more important to your business. You'll get faster incident response with any luck here. [00:19:33] With service level agreement, proactive security from the managed security services providers, or just regular service providers. Your burden on updates is going to be lower, improved manufacturer support. Because a lot of times, like we do my company mainstream, we have direct connections to the manufacturer. [00:19:56] Our case is usually Cisco because of the volume or services that we have and the equipment that we buy from them, uh, easier to scale there. There's a whole bunch of things, right. Uh, But be careful. One of the things you gotta watch out for too is where are their service people, their support people physically located, and are they us citizens? [00:20:20] A lot of the regulations. In fact, pretty much everyone. I can't think of an exception require us persons to be the ones in control of your network and data. So lots to consider. But keep that all in mind. I think it's an important thing to understand. Stick around. We'll be right back. And in the meantime, visit me online. [00:20:42] Craig peterson.com and sign up for my free newsletter. [00:20:49] The best way to secure a system is something, you know, and something you have, well, many systems have been securing themselves with your phone, right? They send you a text message, but it turns out that that isn't working well. [00:21:05] Having an SMS message sent to you in order to authenticate who you are, has turned out to be well, a problem we've seen over the last few years, people who have things like cryptocurrency who have a cryptocurrency wallet who are keeping their money, if you will, in this wallet and are using. [00:21:30] SMS to verify who they are. So here's how that works. You log into a website using a username or perhaps an email address. Again, it should not be asking for an email address for a login because you probably use the same email address or maybe two or three. And. Have for what? 50, a hundred different sites, maybe a thousand, I've got 3000 records, uh, logins on my one password account. [00:22:02] Okay. So there's a lot of them. They really should be letting you set up your own username so that it can be unique. For every single website that you go to. So, but anyway, that aside, you've got your username, which may be your email address. You've got a password and we've talked about passwords before. [00:22:21] Hopefully you're following the current guidelines, which are, don't worry about random characters, make sure it is long. And that means. A past phrase. So you string three or four words together. You put some digits, some special characters in between the words, maybe, you know, one word is all upper case. You, you play with it a little bit, but it's easy to remember. [00:22:48] So if someone then gets your email address and they get your password, they can potentially log into a website. Correct. And that website might be your bank account. It might be your work account. We've had a lot of problems lately. The FBI is saying that about every 12 hours, they're filing a new report of a company that got their intellectual property stolen. [00:23:22] one of the ways the bad guys steal it is they'll log to your RDP server, your Microsoft remote desktop server, using your credentials that you used at another website. It's that easy. It really is. They might be trying to log in via a VPN again, the same thing. So how do you secure this? How do you secure this? [00:23:47] Well, how to secure this properly? That's where the something you have comes into play. We all have a smartphone of some sort, even if it's not considered a smartphone, it can still receive text messages. So what a lot of these companies did is they asked their underpaid it people to set it up so that when you enter in your username and your password, it then sends you a text message. [00:24:16] Usually with a six digit text message and you then have to type that into the website as well. Seems pretty good. Doesn't it? Well, and, and in 30 it is pretty good. There are however, a few problems. Those people I mentioned who have cryptocurrency accounts and have been using this SMS methodology, which is SMS, of course, text messages have found that sometimes their phones have been hijack. [00:24:48] easy enough to do. And if they know you have a fair amount of cryptocurrency, it's probably worth their effort to spend a few hours to try and get into your account. And they have been getting into your account and people notice, Hey, wait a minute, I'm a kid. They do phone calls or text messages. What's what's with that. [00:25:07] And you found out that they have dismissed you, they have stolen your. Your, uh, SIM card, basically, even though they don't have to physically have hold of it. And there's a number of ways that they do that there's a new scam or newer scam that's out right now that the fishers are using. And that is they're sending out these SSMS, these text messages that are trying to get people to respond. [00:25:34] So how do they get people to respond? Well, In this case, they're primarily going after this company called Octo Octo post. And, uh, there's a number of different types of Octos out there, but anyways, they are trying to get you to. Do something you shouldn't do let me just put it that way. Right. So what they're trying to do is get you to, uh, enter in your username and your password. [00:26:04] Okay. Well, that's been around for a long time. Craig, you're telling me we've had fake bank account, uh, bank website. So they'll send you an email and in it, they'll say, Hey, I need you to go right now. to our bank page and, uh, authorize this $2,000 transaction that wasn't you. And so now you're freaking out, you click on the link, you go to the bank, you try and log in and the login doesn't work well. [00:26:31] That can be because what the fishers did is a made a webpage that looked like the bank's web page. And when you went there and entered in your username and password, you just gave it to the crooks. That's happened a lot. Well, there's a company called Octa O K T a. That is an authentication company. And what the bad guys have done is they have registered domains similar to a company. [00:26:59] So for instance, they went after CloudFlare, which is a huge, um, company they're number one, I think they have like 80% of all of the protection for denial of service and caching a business on the internet. It's just amazing. Cloudflare's huge. And I've used them and continue to use them for some customer. [00:27:19] So, what they did is they found a whole bunch of people that worked for CloudFlare sent them a message. And, and here's what it said. It said alert, your CloudFlare schedule has been updated. Please tap cloudflare-okta.com to view. The changes. So you go there, it looks like a regular Okta login page and they go ahead and ask user name and password, but CloudFlare is smart. [00:27:47] They're using Okta. So they're sending an SMS message to the user to make sure it's really, them turns out what was really happening is yeah, it was sending that guy a text message and it was using telegram. To relay that his response back to the hackers. So now the hackers have your username, they have your password and they have your six digit login key. [00:28:15] That's supposedly unique that supposedly went to you. And in this case, they didn't even have to bother a hijacking your SIM card. In this case, they just sent you that text message. So it's been causing some serious problems. They've been going after all kinds of different companies out there, uh, food service company, DoorDash you've heard of them. [00:28:37] Right? August 25th, they said that there was a sophisticated fishing attack on a third party vendor that allowed a attackers to gain access to some, a door dashes internal company. Tools DoorDash said, intruders stole information on a small percentage of users that have since been notified, big deal, or what a tech crunch, by the way, reported that the incident was linked to the same fishing campaign that targeted Twilio. [00:29:07] That also, as we just mentioned, targeted cloud. So we have to be careful with this. We cannot be using SMS text messages to authenticate ourselves. Some banks now allow you to use one time passwords from things like one password or others. However, some banks don't turn off the SMS, the text messages for authentication, which they really should be doing. [00:29:36] And the other thing I wanna let you know is I like UBI. Y U B ico.com. Yubico check them out. I'm not making a dime off of this, but they have a physical token. That you either have to plug in or the connects via Bluetooth. That is something you have that authenticates you to all major popular websites out there, and many of the tools. [00:30:03] So if you have any questions, just email me, me@craigpeterson.com gimme a few days, but I'll get back to you. [00:30:12] Have you heard about fog reveal? They it's almost invisible when you search for it online, but it's something that police departments have started using. And they're trying to keep all of this secret. So we're gonna tell you what's happening there and got a few others too. [00:30:29] Great little article that was in the newsletter this week. [00:30:32] Hopefully you got my free newsletter, but it is about fog reveal. This is an ours Technica. Often some of these ours Technica stories are carried in multiple places online. It's kind of interesting because we know to some degree what the federal government's doing to collect information on people, they go to open source. [00:30:57] Sources of information. In other words, things that are put out there publicly online, so they might search you your Facebook information or what you've been saying on Twitter, uh, or more, they go to data brokers that anybody can go to. And those data brokers have more information. They probably. Bought records from the states and they know from each individual state what property you own. [00:31:25] If you have a car, if there's liens on it, any mortgages that you might have, right. Putting all of the stuff together. It's kind of an interesting problem, frankly, but that's a, again, they say it's legitimate. Now the federal government is not allowed to collect this information. So they just go to third party data aggregators. [00:31:45] And remember again, If you have apps on your phone, if you have an Android phone, this does not apply to iPhones. Generally it does apply to iPhone apps. However, but, and this is part of the reason I say never, ever, ever use Android. Okay guys, I, I just. Blows my mind. I, I was talking to an old friend of mine. [00:32:09] Uh, he was the, the CTO in fact for the state of New Hampshire. And he was telling me that, uh, you know, we were talking and telling me, yeah, yeah, I got an Android phone. He says, don't you just love Android? And he knows that I do cybersecurity. He knows I've been in it. He hired my company to do a bunch of different tasks for the state, right over the years, we still do business with the state and he's using Android. [00:32:41] He's probably listening right now. BU get a little note from him, but, uh, it, it, it's a problem to use Android any. Those free apps that you're using, that Google maps app that you're using. And of course you can use that on iOS as well is tracking you. They know where you live because they know where your smartphone stays at night. [00:33:04] They know all of this stuff. How do you think the FBI is able to seize a smartphone at a Hardee's drive through. they know where you are. Well, they have some more access to information as it turns out. Uh, one Marilyn based Sergeant, according to the article wrote in a department, email TDY, the benefit of quote, no court paperwork and quote before purchasing the software. [00:33:37] And the Sergeant said the success lies in secre. interesting. So the electronic frontier foundation, FF, who I have supported over the years and the associated press got together. Now, the associated press won a Pulitzer center for crisis reporting, uh, award, I think. But anyways, the Pulitzer center for crisis reporting also got involved here. [00:34:05] So she had these three different organizations trying to figure out. what could, or what would be considered local places best kept secret. So they went online. They started doing some searching, trying to figure this out. And according to ours, Technica, the reporting revealed the potentially extreme extent of data surveillance of ordinary people being tracked and made vulnerable just for moving about. [00:34:38] Small town America. So it isn't just the big cities where you're tracked anymore. Reports showed how police nearly two dozen agencies. One record shows the total figure could possibly be up to 60. Use Google maps, like technology called frog reveal. now this is licensed by fog. I, I keep saying frog it's fog licensed by fog data science, and it gives state and local police a power to surveil. [00:35:10] Hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices. And if that doesn't scare you, I don't know what does now FF, the electronic frontier foundation found that fog reveal gets its data from veal. That's the same data source the feds use. neither companies disclosing the nature of their business relationship. [00:35:33] Okay. They fog, reveal. Didn't say what Tel is providing and vice versa, right? Yeah. But it really appears that fog reveal is getting data location services to local police at its steep discount. So it's making it more affordable for smaller police departments and private security companies to access major amounts of data and trace devices across months or even years. [00:36:03] isn't that something. So typically FF found that police agencies license the software annually for costs as low as six grand to nine grand. Some agencies spend even more on this tech to track people as they are moving and exactly where they are. Again, think being in a Hardee's drive through having the FBI show up. [00:36:27] Knowing you're there. Uh, ours reviewed one annual contract in Anaheim, California. That was for more than $40,000. So it took months for these three organizations that are used to digging into this sort of stuff, uh, to figure this out, took more than a hundred public records requests to gather thousands of pages of evidence to trying to compile a picture of how local law enforcement. [00:36:55] Is using and mining the location data. Now, to me, this is scary because we look at abuses of power. Through the years and I it's happened again and again and again, we are smelling more and more like Venezuela than we are free us. It's frankly scary, scary to me, but I'm talking about it cuz I think it's important. [00:37:21] That I bring this to light to everybody else out there. Okay. Now fog data science, managing partner, Matthew Brodrick told the associated press that fog reveal has been critical to police to save time and money on investigations, suggesting police who are under-resourced and investigation suffered from reliance on outdated. [00:37:44] Outdated tech now that's true. Isn't it? But isn't it also true that, uh, that's why we have some of these policies and procedures in place. That's why the Supreme court Miranda decision has some policies and procedures. That's why a warrant, a search warrant is supposed to be specific in what they're looking for and where it is located. [00:38:11] We don't allow these broad warrants that the king used to issue, but we are doing that nowadays. It seems against political enemies and that's where it starts really, really scaring me. It isn't that I think that the, the current administration it, or even the next administration in Washington, DC, is going to be rounding up its enemies and putting them up against a. [00:38:38] But when would it happen? Well, it would happen if everything were in place for it to happen. What's one of the most important things for fastest regime. It's to have a citizenry where they know everything about everyone. It, it reminds me of the Soviet era. Show me the man. I'll show you the crime. There's a great book out there right now. [00:39:04] I think it's called, um, three felonies. a day, I think is what the name of it is. But the, it points out how every last one of the people that call ourselves Americans in the United States of America, every one of us commits at least three felonies a day. Now a lot of these things are just absolutely crazy. [00:39:26] You know, there's been a lot of jokes about, oh, did you chair the label off of that pillow? Well, you can cuz you're the consumer, right? It's. The people that are selling it that are in distribution chain that cannot tear that off by law. Okay. But in reality, there is a lot of stuff that could be used against you. [00:39:46] So it it's like when they say, uh, you know, give me this, or why don't you answer that question? It's none of their business. You have a right to be secure in your papers right now, if they have a warrant that's specific, then you need to surrender it. But hopefully the warrant's actually issued by real court. [00:40:08] Some of these agencies now, uh, like the IRS have their own courts that are paid for by the agency. The judges are working for the agency. So you really think they're gonna be fair. I wonder, I wonder. Okay. Couple more things. Next up these pictures taken by the James web space telescope. Have you seen these? [00:40:35] It is amazing. I've seen them side by side with our latest or, you know, our previous high tech pictures. And we're seeing what maybe galaxies that we never could see before. It's just absolutely crazy. Well, guess what bad guys have seen them as. And they are embedding malware inside of some of these amazing images taken by the James web space telescope. [00:41:05] If you can believe this, by the way, they're writing them in go. Uh, so the Phish and emails, they've got a Microsoft office attachment. That's the entry point for the attack chain when you open it, it retrieves and obfuscated, VBA, macro, which in. Auto executed. all of a sudden there is a macro that is de obfuscated and run on your computer. [00:41:34] So be careful careful with that again. And good news. Microsoft is now turning off the execution of macros by default. Double check your machine, making sure that macros are blocked by default. So, yay. Okay. So they are, by the way, changing campaigns to rogue link and ISO files because of the blocked macros. [00:41:56] But, uh, it's good that Microsoft is doing that. Thank goodness. And you Ukraine, the police busted a crypto fraud call center. In fact, more than. And they're also shattering two more Russian bot farms. So we shouldn't be getting as many of those, uh, phone messages from the, uh, the bad guys scammers as we used to get. [00:42:20] Thank you, Ukraine. All right. Online Craig peterson.com. Get that newsletter and stay on top. [00:42:29] Well, we got some election news here from our friends at Google and at Twitter, they are taking opposite directions about exactly how they're gonna handle news postings about the elections. This is an interesting thing. [00:42:46] The federal election commission is the branch of the us government that monitors elections. [00:42:53] It does things like impose fines for misuse of funds. It sets some of the standards for funds and for their use. And. and one of the things it looks at is what are called in kind contributions. This is where someone might, uh, for instance, run a whole bunch of ads on behalf of a candidate. And those ads are coordinated with the campaign and that is illegal. [00:43:24] You're not supposed to do that. And because it's illegal, you know, they try and stop it. But most of the time they end up finding after the fact. And that's part of the reason they want campaigns to be filing their financial reports fairly frequently so they can catch it quite quickly. Well, There have been many complaints from the G O P about what has happened with some of the campaign finance stuff, where you have someone like Facebook or Twitter or Google, who seems to be meddling with the election. [00:44:02] They are running ads for your competition. They are really screening the results from people's searches. And from that those results they're, they're benefiting. There was a study down in orange county here a few years back where they looked at. Google results that were related to the elections going on in orange county and found that the Google results were tainted in such a way that it dramatically favored the Democrats that were running in those districts in orange county, California. [00:44:39] Pretty interesting when you get right down to it. So the GLP says, wait a minute, now that sort of thing is worth millions, tens of millions of dollars, because if they were going to run TV ads, for instance, to get as many eyeballs, to get as much attention to convince people that this is the way they should vote, that would cost them tens of millions of dollars. [00:45:02] So how much is it worth? Where do you go to really straighten things out in order to ultimately make fairness work and well, you know, that's kind of what the federal election commission's supposed to do. Well, here's, what's happening with the next elections. The federal elections commission has decided that Google. [00:45:28] Getting rid of their anti spam measures for. Candidates does not violate a ban on contributions on inkind contributions. So this is an interesting approach because Google's saying, Hey, listen, we want to allow pretty much any political message to come right through to Google Gmail users, inboxes, and not filter those. [00:45:59] Which I frankly think is a smart move on their part. Now some of these campaigns get pretty crazy. They're sending money requests all of the time. It it's been crazy to watch both sides do this and both sides complain about the other side, doing it. But at least by getting rid of these spam rules for the politicians, their messages are gonna get through. [00:46:24] I think that's ultimately a very good thing. So what kind of messages are gonna get through how and why? Well, ultimately they're saying we're gonna let all of them through. and what that means for you. If you already get some of these messages from the politicians, it means your mailbox. At least if it's a Google Gmail box, you are going to be seen even more during elections. [00:46:51] And I think this is gonna go on for very long time. Because Google doesn't want to get caught in the middle. When we're talking about these in kind contributions. If this were to be done for the Republicans or were to be done just for the Democrat, can you imagine the noise that would be made? By both sides and in kind contributions where the Republicans tens of millions of dollars Googled get dull tied up in some of these, uh, you know, lawsuits that would really be inevitable. [00:47:23] Bottom line. Well, Republicans have accused. Google of giving Democrats an advantage in its algorithms. And, and as I said, there have been studies on that that have proved that they have. The big question is why. And there's an article in ours, Technica talking about a meeting that happened in may 20. 22 between Senate Republicans and Google's chief legal officer. [00:47:52] And he said that the most forceful rebuke came from Senator Marco Rubio from Florida who claimed that not a single email from one of his addresses was reaching inboxes. And the Washington post, which of course is a mouthpiece for the Democrat party reported in late July. That the reason it was getting blocked was that a vendor had not enabled an authentication tool that keeps messages from being marked to spam. [00:48:21] Now, if that's true, The Washington post accidentally reported the truth here. And it might be true. I had a company call me up this week. They had their Google ads account banned, and they were trying to figure out the details of why and what happened. And I went in and we solved that problem, and I noticed that they had. [00:48:44] Properly configured their email. There's there's gets technical here. I have a paper we've put together on this, a special report talking about what's called D K I M. These, uh, SPF records DMAR records and how they should all be set up and why I need to use them. So this company was doing marketing. [00:49:04] Obviously they had a Google, Google ad account. They were sending out emails, but because they had not properly and fully configured their email. They were not getting delivered at the rate that they could get delivered. Now that's kind of a very, very big deal when you get right down to it. And the Washington post is saying, well, that's what happened to center to Rubio. [00:49:26] Now there's other things that might happen too. There are. Keywords that are used. There's software called spam assassin. That's very, very common. I have used it since it came out decades ago. I can't even remember how long spam Assassin's been out there, but it looks for certain things in the emails. , it looks for a lot of graphical content, a lot of HTML, even a lot of links and it kind of, it gauges, you know, this is likely spam on this scale. [00:49:56] And typically if the, the score is higher than five or eight, or in some cases, some people said as high as 15, that email is bounced. Well, one of the real big checks as to whether or not this is legitimate email is to check and see. Who is the domain? Does that domain have these special keys that tell us? [00:50:19] Yes, indeed. This did come from us. In other words, in this case did come from Marco Rubio or in the case of my client, it came from their company.com. And is it signed encrypted so that we know that nobody's kind of playing a man in the middle thing, trying to mess things up on us. And they say, okay, well that's a really good score. [00:50:40] So we will, we'll lower that spam score. And, and that's how that game is played. So what by Google doing what it. Talking about doing it's really gonna help out because I have of every company I've checked for email, email deliveries, we've got a, a new customer that is a startup and you know, what do they know? [00:51:02] They they're very narrow. Right? They understand their. Basic technology and their email again, was set up kind of like apparently Senator Rubio's email was set up and, and didn't have these things. And just like this company that I helped this week, they didn't have it set up properly. And, uh, they had experts who supposed experts who had set it up, but both cases, right. [00:51:26] It was outsourced. Yeah. You know how that goes. Now, some Gmail users submitted comments to the federal elections commission and they were criticizing Google's plan cuz they did not want to get more spam. Okay. And there were more than 2,500 comments. You can find them by the way, online, all of the stuff is a matter. [00:51:48] Public record and they call it the docket. And so there's a page out for this particular docket and the commissions through Republicans and Democrat commissioner voted for the order appro Google's plan. I think this is a very, very good deal. And it's really kind of the opposite of what Twitter is planning on doing Twitter has. [00:52:12] essentially announced that it's going to. In the elections. Yeah. So you got Google on the one side saying our hands are clean. We're staying away from this. We don't want anything to do with this. Thank you very much. We love you, but, uh, forget about it. We're just gonna let all the emails. Through, Twitter's saying that it's going to have its wonderful sensors who have been proven right. [00:52:39] Every time he said with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, and they're gonna have those wonderful sensors that, you know, they're sitting in the basement and, and eating pizza and drinking Coke or red bull. I, I still kinda understand why somebody that's 30, whatever years old needs, energy drinks, you know, come on, come on. [00:53:00] Uh, but anyways, They're they're saying that they, Twitter is going to be the determiner as to whether or not something that is posted on Twitter is correct. Or if it should be censored or if it should be blocked entirely. And they're admitting that they're gonna shadow ban conservative content, they don't like isn't that. [00:53:25] So. Yeah. Uh, that's from the gateway pundit good article. And you'll find it in this week's newsletter. Uh, I think it went out Monday this week and you can follow the link through to these articles on Google and Twitter and the elections or any of the others that we have out there. So stick around, we'll be right back and make sure you sign up. [00:53:46] If you didn't already get that newsletter. Absolutely free. Craig, Peter son.com/subscribe. [00:53:59] I'm not sure a week goes by where I don't hear from a listener saying that somehow Facebook is tracking what they're talking about because all of a sudden ad starts showing up. And they're related to things that they've been talking about. [00:54:16] Meta is the owner of Facebook and Instagram and, and some other things like WhatsApp, which is part of the reason I don't trust WhatsApp, but we've had, I don't know how many complaints from people saying that Facebook is listening in to what they're talking. [00:54:36] And people are kind of wondering, well, wait a minute. Is it listening in on my phone calls? Is it listening when and how? It's a very, very good question. Now Facebook says in a statement that Facebook does not use your phone's microphone to inform ads or to change what in the newsfeed. Some recent articles have suggested that we must be listening to people's conversations in order to show them. [00:55:06] Ads. This is not true. We show ads based on people's interests and other profiled information, not what you're talking out loud about. We only access your microphone if you've given our app permission. And if you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio, this might include recording a video or using in an optional feature. [00:55:30] We introduced two years ago to include music. Or other audio in your status updates. So there it is. There's the official word from our friends over at Facebook. But do you notice there's a little bit of an out in there, right? Facebook does not use your phone microphone to inform ads or change what you see in your news. [00:55:55] Doesn't use your microphone. So there's a study out right now. That is from an X Google engineer. And this article is in the guardian and they are talking about what he found. So, let me explain the background on some of this technology. First, if you are an app developer, if, if you're a developer of any software of any kind you use libraries and these libraries do things like search for a specific set of characters called a string or in search. [00:56:31] Them or move things around or open a connection to another machine. So rather than having implement the whole T C P I P stack and ethernet underneath it and, and all of the operating system work that you'd have to do with all of the interrupts and the buffer fills and reading, toggling. As switches in the hardware, doing all of that sort of stuff. [00:56:52] You just make one library call and say, listen, and you give the port and TA anybody who tries to connect you. It just comes right through. It's all taken care of for you, right? That's what libraries are all about. And they've become much more complex, more recently libraries nowadays can do things like provide you with a full web browser. [00:57:16] Many of the applications that we use on a daily basis, these apps in our phones, particularly, but it's also true with some of the apps on our computers are actually. Just web browsers. They're web browsers that talk to a server out on the internet and yeah, there might be wrapped in various things, but oftentimes if you're trying to pay within an app, it'll go to a third party site. [00:57:44] And part of the beauty of that is. Becomes a, a service to them. They don't have to worry about coding it all up. Right. They don't have to worry about taking your money, keeping everything safe. Am I using really good algorithms here to encrypt it can bad guys hack in? No, no, no. There's, they're just calling this routine that spins up a little web browser. [00:58:07] Inside the application and uses a secure connection to talk to the web server somewhere who cares? Not mine. I'm just the app developer, right? I'm letting you play your farming game or whatever it might be. That makes sense to you guys. So it makes their life much, much easier. Why bother if you've got a website that does everything, why bother coding it all up from scratch in an app? [00:58:34] They don't people don't. Why would. Well, we've seen that again. And again, for instance, look at Microsoft's latest browser out there, edge, not the original edge, but the latest edge, you know how Microsoft is, right. They call it the same thing, even though it's entirely different. Uh, yeah. How many versions of windows where they're like 20 at one point, right? [00:58:56] Different ones or different architectures and just crazy. But now the edge browser is. Built on chromium, which is Google Chrome, which is built on Apple's libraries to manipulate, draw things, et cetera. So you're running your edge browser on your Microsoft windows, computer. You're actually running code libraries. [00:59:21] If you will, from Google and from apple. And that way, if you're developing a browser like edge, you don't have to worry about every little nit bitty thing. That's all taken care of by other programmers who are making a smaller piece of code. Now that's been the whole Unix philosophy forever, by the way. [00:59:42] Instead of having these monolithic applications. That could be just full of bugs and security problems. You just have nice small, easy to maintain, easy to research applications and let other people worry about the little pieces, which is really kind of cool. It's great. Many browsers in fact are based right there on chromium and they modify it around a little bit. [01:00:07] Microsoft added all kinds of spyware to it. Well, it turns out. According to this research from an ex Google engineer that both Facebook and Instagram apps have been taking advantage of this in-app browser technology. And what they're doing is users who click on links inside the Facebook app or inside the Instagram at gram act are actually taken to the webpages. [01:00:39] Using an in-app browser controlled by Facebook or Instagram rather than sending you to your default browser. So if you are using iOS, your default browser might be safari, which is a rather safe. Browser and good for privacy, or you might have decided you wanna use the Chrome browser on iOS or maybe Firefox or brave, or one of dozens of different browsers that are out there. [01:01:10] No, no, it's not gonna use those. It's not gonna use your default browser. It's going to use the in-app browser. And what it's doing with that in-app browser now is here's a quote from him. The Felix Crouse, he's a privacy researcher founded an app development tool that was acquired by Google in 2017. He says, quote, the Instagram app injects their tracking code into. [01:01:37] Website shown, including when clicking on AB ads, enabling them to monitor all user interactions. Like every button that you press, every link you taped, every piece of text that you select or highlight any screenshot you take, any forms, you fill out any user forms, things like passwords addresses, credit card numbers. [01:02:06] Are all seen by the Instagram app? Yes, indeed. So in the statement, of course, uh, medicated that injecting a tracking code, obeyed users preferences on whether or not they allowed apps to follow them. And there was only used to aggregate data before being applied for targeted advertis. Now, this is interesting because according to Crouse, this code injection, uh, was tracked and he was able to look at doing, doing it right for normal browsers. [01:02:42] His test code detected no changes, but for Facebook and Instagram, it finds up to 18 lines of code added by. App into the webpage. So there you go. JavaScript injection and more from our friends at Facebook and Instagram. So they are tracking you, but apparently. They're not listening to your microphone, but they're watching you as you cruise around the web thinking you're using your browser, but no, no. [01:03:18] You're using theirs. Hey, stick around Craig peterson.com. [01:03:24] Cell phone security is something I've talked about for a long time. And you guys know my basics here. If you've been a listener for really any length of time, when it comes to smartphones, we're gonna get into this in more detail, particularly after this raid. [01:03:41] Well, of course everyone's heard, I'm sure about the rate on Trump's property, Mar Lago. [01:03:48] There was something else that happened right. About the same time. And that was representative. Perry Scott Perry was traveling with his in-laws, uh, who are described as elderly. They were on vacation. He's a Republican representative in the house of Congress from Pennsylvania. And he told the Fox news people that three FBI agents approached him, issued him a warrant and demanded he hand over his. [01:04:24] He said they made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would've made arrangements for them to have my phone, if that was what they wanted. He says I'm outraged. Although not surprised that the FBI. Under the direction of Merrick Garland's DOJ would seize the phone of a sitting member of Congress. My, my phone contains info about my legislative and political activities, personal private discussions with my wife, family constituents, and friends. [01:04:53] None of this is the government's business. Now that's really an interesting point. And, and it brings up the discussion about our smart devices, you know, what should we be doing with our phones and, and what is it frankly, that our phones have in them. Now, just think about that for a minute. Scott Perry rec he, he not recommended. [01:05:21] He mentioned that he had all kinds of records. That were in that phone. You do too. You've got your contacts. Of course. The phone contains information about who you called, where you went, cuz it's got a GPS tracker, but even if GPS is turned off, it's still tracking which cell towers you've connected to. [01:05:43] Uh, we've got all kinds of email in our phones, which are gonna contain business documents, private documents, attorney, client, privilege documents, all kinds of stuff there. And we have the fourth amendment, which protects the right of privacy against unreasonable searches and seizures by the go. Now, in this case, obviously the government got a warrant we could argue about, you know, how legitimate is the warrant and should they have issued it, et cetera. [01:06:16] Right. That that's not what I'm talking about. This is not a political show. In reality. What we're talking about here is the technology. The technology we're using to store this information, this personal information, what should we be using? What shouldn't we be using? How should we use it? Right. All of that sort of stuff. [01:06:38] Well, okay, so we've established that there was not apparently a fourth amendment violation here. There, there might have been, we don't know. We may never know. It doesn't really matter, but if someone gets a hold of your smartphone or your tablet or your computer, what information does it have on there? [01:07:01] And we also have a right under the fifth amendment. against self-incrimination. So if someone's thumbing through our phone, what are they gonna find? People plead the fifth amendment all of the time, because they don't want to get trapped in one of these traps where maybe you don't remember the date. [01:07:24] Right. And all of a sudden you're in a perjury trap because you said something that wasn't true. Well, you know, our, our memories aren't the best, particularly when we're on vacation, we've been drinking a little bit, right. if someone finds your phone, opens it up, someone steals your phone and opens it up. [01:07:44] Someone gets a warrant for your phone and opens it up. What's in there. Now some people have in the past said, okay, what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and I'll wipe my phone remotely and they've done it. Right? The police have had the phone in evidence and in evidence locker and somebody remotely went ahead and wiped their phone. [01:08:04] The police are onto. And what the police have been doing more recently is they put it into a special bag that blocks any sort of signals coming in or out as well as the room. Right. It's kind of a fair date cage anyways, and that way, bad guys, good guys who, if the phones are stolen, they can't remotely wipe them, which is a good thing here, frankly. [01:08:30] But what are we ultimately trying to protect from? That's the question, right? It it's, who's gonna have your phone and what are you trying to protect it from personally? I'm not someone who truly trusts the government. I'm a firm believer in our constitution and our bill of right. Ultimately governments become corrupt. [01:08:52] It happens every time. And even if the whole government isn't corrupt, there's guaranteed to be people within the government, within their bureaucracy, the deep state, if you will, who are out there to get you right. makes sense to you. Makes sense to me. I don't know, but our phones, our smartphones, our computers have a lot of stuff in them. [01:09:14] I've talked on the show before how you should not be taking them to China. If you go to China, because of the evil made. T where they are grabbing your phones. They are duplicating them. Same thing with Russian travelers. Not as much as has been happening in China, but it's happened in Russia, probably a lot now with the whole war thing. [01:09:36] Right. But you shouldn't be taking them because they can be duplicated just like rep Scott. But Scott Perry's phone was duplicated. Now the, the FBI apparently said, well, we're not gonna look through well, why you're duplicating it then. And you know, maybe it's just to preserve evidence. I really don't know, but the bad guys can get at your phone employers if they own your phone can get at your phone and they can get a lot of data out of that. [01:10:06] What do you do? Well, bottom line, if you are traveling internationally, you're gonna wanna make sure to wipe your phone and just bring along maybe a, a basic little flip phone. Uh, cetera. Now there is software that we use. For instance, we use one password and duo in order to keep track of all of our stuff, right. [01:10:31] Our personal information. And. That's the two factor authentication stuff that we use, and we can tell it, Hey, we're traveling out of the country and we will only need these passwords. And it goes ahead and wipes out the password database so that we're not carrying a whole bunch of stuff with us that might be compromised by, uh, a government agency right within what is it? [01:10:54] The USS 50 miles of the border. They can confiscate and examine anything that you have, even if you're not trying to cross the border. and they'll do that at airports. They'll do that at a whole bunch of places. And then you've got the employer side and then you've got the bad guy side. Look at what happened to Khai with the Saudis right here. [01:11:16] He was, uh, you know, a journalist. We could argue that I suppose, but he's a journalist. He is abducted and he is murdered by the Saudis. They get their hands on the phone and they decrypt the. this has happened and it'll happen again. So Apple's done something here that I think is a good step in the right direction. [01:11:40] Apple, of course I've recommended for a long time. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever use Android. Okay. Don't. Use it, Google's using it to track you. You're losing your privacy and the security. Isn't very good. Particularly if your phone's more than three years old, apple has come up with this new lockdown mode on their phones and the lockdown mode is meant for. [01:12:09] People who are really under thumb, you know, people living in Russia or Ukraine, or you name it, Iran, all of these countries that are really out to get their citizens and it it's coming out in iOS. You'll see it there. You probably don't want to use it as a regular person, cuz it does block some of the things you can do, but it also locks it down against these Israeli based companies that have been selling software and hardware to break into cell phones. [01:12:44] So consider iPhones. And if you are one of these people, who's at a high risk consider lockdown mode. [01:12:51] I warned last week about using the ring camera as well as Google's camera. We've got some more news about that today. I was right. A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion and a new toolkit released. Talk about it all now. [01:13:08] Well, quite, quite a time, you know, I, I remember when I first started doing the radio show, uh, 22 years ago, now it started right there year 2000 Y two K and I, I was, uh, wondering, you know, am I gonna have enough stuff to talk about? [01:13:27] and my wife, who was just the most amazing person had been helping me and we subscribed to a bunch of newspapers. Yeah. There used to be newspapers back then. And she went through and was clipping articles that we thought might be good, that people might want to, uh, to hear about. And so she had all. Files. [01:13:49] And we, we subscribe to like four or five different newspapers, including the trashy ones like USA today, just so we knew what was going on out there. We had the financial times and the London times and New York times, and we got just files and files worth of stuff. And didn't take us long to realize, Hey, wait a minute. [01:14:14] There is so much tech news out there and stuff to talk about, uh, that weren't, we don't have to worry about that. So we canceled our subscriptions to all of these different things. I, I have actually a subscription to the New York times still, cuz they gave me a buck a week, which is not a bad deal for the online version because the old gray lady still does have some good text stories. [01:14:39] Some of the other stuff obviously is a problem, but, uh, yeah, tech stories anyways. Now we do a lot of this stuff online, the research, and I put it together and send it out in my newsletter every week. And man, did we have a lot of you guys reading it on Monday was the most, most, uh, red newsletter of mine. [01:15:01] The insider show notes newsletter. Of any of them ever. It was really great. It was like I had a, almost a 50% open rate there within the first day. So that's cool. Thank you guys. And obviously you really value it or you would not have opened that newsletter and click through you. See what I do? Is, uh, you probably know, I appear on radio stations all over the place and I I'm also of course have my own radio show here and elsewhere, and my podcasts, which are on every major podcast platform out there. [01:15:40] And I've been doing this for so long this week. What am I at here? Show? Number, I think it's like 1700. I'm trying to remember weeks. Okay. That's weeks of shows and, uh, we, we have never hit the same stuff twice, which is really rather cool. One of the things I brought up and this was in, uh, a recent show is about. [01:16:09] These ring cameras. And I warned everyone not to use ring and went through the whys. So if you have my newsletter from. A few weeks back, you can just probably search your email box

Tune in as we discuss how to structure your team, whether you need contractors or employees, how to show up as a leader, and all kinds of other really cool things related to HR. No matter what stage of business you're in or your business model, this is a goodie.For the full show notes and access to resources mentioned in this episode, visit https://www.easyscaling.com/blog/episode12 My guest is Kira La Forgia. With a decade of experience in People Operations in the corporate world, Kira is no stranger to the sensitive issues involved in the human side of running a business. There's a lot to learn from hiring, onboarding, training, and managing the performance of over 500 employees for a multimillion dollar business. The good news is, Kira learned it all so you don't have to. Kira founded Paradigm to bridge the gap between corporate HR policies and the modern needs of online entrepreneurs. Because Google might have almost all the answers, but it doesn't have what your unique business needs.Topics discussed:Why your approach to team depends on your business modelPros and cons of using contractors vs hiring employeesWhen you HAVE to hire an employeeAll the boring but important things around compliance and policiesDifficult conversations and how we can learn from them as business ownersThe mindset shift required for having employees versus contractorsUsing personality types as an excuse or crutch vs opportunity for growthThe importance of knowing what kind of business you're buildingLinks/Resources Mentioned:Kira's Membership (that I'm in): Set to ScaleConnect with Jordan Schanda King:Website: easyscaling.comInstagram: @jordanschandakingFacebook: Easy Scaling with Jordan Schanda KingConnect with this week's guest, Kira La ForgiaWebsite: www.The-paradigm.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/theparadigmm/ *some links above are affiliate links which means I will get a small commission if you make a purchase with my link, but you will not pay any extra. I personally use and recommend these products!

1. Quick Updates - Meta Provides New Insights Into How its Video Distribution Algorithms Work Meta Invites Applications for the Third Phase of its ‘Community Accelerator' Program Instagram Best Practices For Recommended Content Twitter Shares New Insight into the Value of Utilizing Ad Format Combinations in Your Tweet Marketing Google Updates Privacy Threshold For Analytics Search Queries Report Danny Sullivan at Google Tweets That “Helpful Content” Is WIP 2. Twitter ‘Circles' Option Is Available To All Users - Because sometimes your Tweets aren't for everyone add up to 150 people to yours and use it. “Before you post on Twitter, you'll now see an option to share your Tweet with either your circle or your full followers list. Circles can contain up to 150 people, and you can adjust who's in and who's out at any time. Don't worry, no one will be notified of any changes you make to your circle.” Members of Circle will be alerted that their tweets are only viewable by those in the group via a green indicator attached to each Circle tweet.3. Microsoft Ads Re-extends RSA Migration To Feb. 2023 - In April,2022 Microsoft extended the original June 30 deadline to August 29. Now Microsoft has announced that they are extending that deadline to February 1, 2023. Microsoft says the extension is in response to advertisers need for more time. Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) will continue to serve with RSAs but advertisers will no longer be able to create new or edit existing ETAs.You can read the announcement here.4. Google Wants You To Add Product Information To Your Business Profiles! - Google has added a new section for products to the Google Business Profile guidelines. The section says "If you run a retail business, you can show nearby shoppers what you sell by adding your in-store products to your Business Profile at no charge." You can either add products to your Business Profile manually through the Product Editor or with Pointy - a hardware device that is free from Google and sits in the middle of  your barcode scanner and point of sale system so that it can add your products to Google.Products submitted via Product Editor or Pointy must adhere to the Shopping Ads Policy. Google does not allow content related to regulated products and services, including alcohol, tobacco products, gambling, financial services, pharmaceuticals and unapproved supplements, or health/medical devices. Submitting products that violate Google's policy may result in removal of the entire product catalog, including products that aren't in violation.You can read the guidelines over here.5. 4 New Features In Google Shopping Campaign - Google just announced four new features for advertisers to implement in their ad campaigns and merchant feeds.  Conversion value rules for store sales and store visits - Advertisers can now set store visits or sales default values at the campaign level. Before this update, Google Ads applied conversion value rules equally to all conversion actions. In addition to setting specific conversion values for store visits and sales, you can select the values at the campaign level. If you're running multiple campaigns promoting store visits, you can assign a higher value to one than the other. Additionally, you can set rules for store visits or sales on the conditions of geographic location, audiences, or devices. The ability to adjust values by location or device means you can increase the value of store visits for customers in New York versus customers in other areas, for example. You can set conversion value rules by logging in to your Google Ads account and navigating to Measurement > Conversions > Value rules. Then, click create conversion value rule and fill in the required information. Product-specific insights - Product-specific insights are available at the account level and help advertisers spot underperforming offers, identify products with missing feed attributes, and compare bidding with your top competitors. Product insights work on shopping and Performance Max campaigns and are intended to leverage ads performance data to optimize products and provide visibility on what actions to take to fix issues. Deals Content API - The Deals Content API is intended to make uploading and managing deals easier at scale. Merchants and advertisers can now add their sales and promotions to their listings via the Content API, which makes it even easier for merchants to upload and manage their deals at scale. Shipping & Returns Annotations - Merchants will now be able to list the expected delivery date (dynamic) (“Delivery by XX/YY”) and free returns right on their ads. Advertisers can also easily add their return policies. 6. Google Publishes 6 SEO Tips For E-commerce Websites - Alan Kent, a Developer Advocate at Google, shared six SEO tips that combine structured data and Merchant Center to get the most out of your website's presence in search results. Ensure Products Are Indexed - Googlebot can miss pages when crawling a site if they're not linked to other pages. On ecommerce sites, for example, some product pages are only reachable from on-site search results. You can ensure Google crawls all your product pages by utilizing tools such as an XML sitemap and Google Merchant Center. Creating a Merchant Center product feed will help Google discover all the products on your website. The product page URLs are shared with the Googlebot crawler to use as starting points for crawls of additional pages potentially. Check Accuracy Of Product Prices Search Results - If Google incorrectly extracts pricing data from your product pages, it may list your original price in search results, not the discounted price. To accurately provide product information such as list price, discounts, and net price, it's recommended to add structured data to your product pages and provide Google Merchant Center with structured feeds of your product data. This will help Google extract the correct price from product pages. Minimize Price & Availability Lag - Google crawls webpages on your site according to its own schedule. That means Googlebot may not notice changes on your site until the next crawl. These delays can lead to search results lagging behind site changes, such as a product going out of stock. It would be best if you aimed to minimize inconsistencies in pricing and availability data between your website and Google's understanding of your site due to timing lags. Google recommends utilizing Merchant Center product feeds to keep pages updated on a more consistent schedule. Ensure Products Are Eligible For Rich Product Results - Eligibility for rich product results requires the use of product structured data. To get the special rich product presentation format, Google recommends providing structured data on your product pages and a product feed in Merchant Center. This will help ensure that Google understands how to extract product data to display rich results. However, even with the correct structured data in place, rich results are displayed at Google's discretion. Share Local Product Inventory Data - Ensure your in-store products are found by people entering queries with the phrase “near me.” First, register your physical store location in your Google Business Profile, then provide a local inventory feed to Merchant Center. The local inventory feed includes product identifiers and store codes, so Google knows where your inventory is physically located. As an additional step, Google recommends using a tool called Pointy. Pointy is a device from Google that connects to your in-store point-of-sale system and automatically informs Google of inventory data from your physical store. The data is used to keep search results updated. Sign Up For Google Shopping Tab - You may find your products are available in search results but do not appear in the Shopping tab. If you're unsure whether your products are surfacing in the Shopping tab, the easiest way to find out is to search for them. Structured data and product feeds alone aren't sufficient to be included in the Shopping tab. To be eligible for the Shopping tab, provide product data feeds via Merchant Center and opt-in to ‘surfaces across Google.' For more on any of the above tips, see the full video from Google.7. Google Shares Insights On Factors That Determine Which Content Is Indexed - Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt from Google recently published a podcast discussing what's known as a crawl budget and what influences Google to index content. Gary Illyes said that the concept of a crawl budget was something created outside of Google by the search community and most sites don't need to worry about the crawl budget. According to Gary, part of the calculation for a crawl budget is based on practical considerations like how many URLs does the server allow Googlebot to crawl without overloading the server. Another interesting point that was made was how, in relation to crawling, there are different considerations involved. There are limits to what can be stored so, according to Google, that means utilizing Google's resources “where it matters.” It all boils down to the  issue of “spending our resources where it matters.”Because Google can't index everything, it tries to index only the content that matters and how frequently it is updated. "Google can infer from a site overall which areas they might need to crawl more frequently. E.g. if there's a blog subdirectory & there are signals that it's popular/important, then Google might want to crawl there more." " And it's not just update frequency, it's also about quality. E.g. if G sees a certain pattern is popular (folder), & people are talking about it & linking to it, then it's a signal that ppl like that directory,"Listen to the podcast here.

You can find tons of blogs, podcasts, and videos with hacks for improving your local search SEO. But, ultimately, Google is controlling those algorithms and rankings. Because Google maintains around ... Read More

 We are going on a website and after some time a window is covering the site and demanding our name. And that is very aggressive and for sure not promoting. What I don't like, that other people do to me I don't do to other people. And so we should do it also on the Internet (Jerry Banfield, Udemy founder) The Build Listing Marketing Strategy is not working anymore. Because people open in average only 2% of their emails.Only the buyer's list is selling. You need to build up a buyer list and the “for free list” is not working since 2014. |(Ask Gerry Roberts) This fancy and stupid approach with this down falling subscriber window to get attention will reduce the chance to convert people to buyers.I personally hate such sites.You build up a modern website with this fancy Javascript design and you get punished….Google has changed his algorithms and promote fast, small mobile-friendly pages. Check your website with https://gtmetrix.com and with google https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/Because Google found out that the mobile phone is dominating the Internet. Most of the Internet users will not have a high Internet speed for their mobile phones in the next years. If your website needs too much time to open up, the user will not wait and stop to load your site.My experience:I had the server of Inmotion Host, the server slowed down. My website was not visible anymore from Google. I optimized my website for speed and changed the server (Siteground Hosting in Singapore)  for only $36/year including https. After a half year, I am on a high rank for google in Asia, America, and Germany for the Google search: Rudi Zimmerer. I have 3 times more views than ever before. My website is mobile phone friendly and not fast enough for mobile phones (google is complaining). I want 100 viewers/day for a particular created website for mobile phone users.The owners of websites are getting cheated from great website designs. For instance: Optinmonster…. Alone the name tells me everything, Optinmonster or how to crunch the customer. Why not, “Optionvampire”, how to suck out the customer. And such great website designs are very slowly. Forget them!!!Our customer is a dear person to us and we love to help him, said Jeff Walker (Internet strategist, P. L. Formula).   The customer wants genuine problem-solving articles and not your promoting self-image. This means you serve with great articles and only then you can also promote yourself. See my website https://ask-rudy.com It is even with a language translation button that needs quite a lot of time to load. Most of my visitors are from Latin America, Ukraine, Russia. Get Google Analytics for your website to make that research… I hope I have served you…My video: Get rid of your Internet EGO  https://youtu.be/fKoHzPTD-eEMy Audio on Podcast: RELAX WITH MEDITATION or see link in the end. My Audio: https://divinesuccess.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/Podcast.A/Get-rid-of-your-Internet-EGO.mp3

Kevin first gives his take on the slap heard across the world and then welcomes guest Mike Shields, Founder of Shields Strategic Consulting, host of Next in Marketing Podcast, and former writer and editor at Business Insider, Digiday, Adweek, and Wall Street Journal. They discuss how the world of online gaming is changing our society, a few important questions to ask as we possibly head into the Metaverse, and how to get to the point where we don't have a detachment from reality while consuming these things. They also discuss collusion in our browsers, how we protect where our first-party data really goes, and their predictions for Facebook investing heavily in Meta, while ignoring a traditional ad model.   Takeaways: [:44] Will Smith slapping Chris Rock was not okay, and thank goodness it wasn't Martin Lawrence! [5:52] How has online gaming changed? [8:08] Is there real money in the Metaverse? [9:45] Mike thinks the internet is getting better but is not sure if there will be a full VR replacement. [11:33] Mike gives his thoughts on the possibility that there will be multiple rooms in the Metaverse. [18:18] While we are in the initial phases of Metaverse with gaming, how do we get it to come together and make it more real? [30:36] Because Google is getting a ton of heat from regulators, they're going to get rid of the cookie, which affects 1,000s of companies and millions of websites. [32:08] There are so many efforts to try and figure out what we do about targeting the open web and how to replace the cookie, but the money is going to the guys who have first-party data. [37:08] Mike speaks to the allegations of Google manipulating markets. [45:02] Is there a lack of diversity in thought now on social media? If so, what can we do about it?   Quotes: “They know how to mine people's data and how to ratchet up anger and emotions to keep you around.” — Kevin “It's interesting to me that as a tool for engaging with people, we eliminate all forms of constructive notes on our engagement.” — Kevin “There are so many efforts to try and figure out what we do about targeting the open web and how to replace the cookie, but the money is going to the guys who have first-party data.” — Mike “It doesn't make any sense from an ad serving perspective to serve 10 million ads once when you can serve one ad 10 million times.” — Kevin “I think the virtual goods thing will be big, but I don't know if it's going to be for everyone.” — Mike   Mentioned in This Episode: Mike Shields: Twitter | LinkedIn | Substack Google May or May Not Have Screwed the Entire Internet Microsoft Activision Blizzard Cocaine and Waffles

City pages do work for roofing company SEO in 2022. Roofers can rank in various areas by publishing local landing pages for each city. At Roofing Webmasters, we've utilized this strategy for our clients for over a decade. We even once published city pages for the entire state of Texas. As a result, the client ranked #1 for 90% of city-related queries on foam roofing. In today's Roofing SEO Podcast, Nolen and Jason discuss the evolution of city pages, how Google indexes them in 2022, and how you can maximize their performance to generate more local roofing leads. How Many City Pages Can Roofers Publish? Five years ago, most roofing companies could publish unlimited city pages and rank for all of them on Google search results. However, as Google's algorithm has grown more sophisticated, other factors dictate how many city pages a roofing website can publish. 20 City Pages For a typical roofing website, we now recommend about 20 city pages. But, again, the key is providing a helpful website with a good user experience. For example, if a roofer has only ten service pages and thousands of city pages, the site might appear to have spam-like tendencies and get filtered on SERPs. 50-60 City Pages Some websites can still publish 50-60 local landing pages and index them all. Google will consider your authority, tenure, and overall website value to determine whether or not your city pages index. Of course, the city pages' quality also plays a role in whether they can rank. 100+ City Pages When you surpass 100 city pages, you have to be very careful with your site's overall quality. People in the SEO industry generally fear a duplicate content penalty, but that's not proven to exist. The real problem with publishing 100+ similar location pages is decreased content value. It's not about duplication; it's about depreciation and negative user experience. 1,000+ City Pages We mentioned that one of our clients had location pages for every city in Texas. That's more than 1,000 city pages, including towns and municipals. While this strategy is complicated to implement in 2022, it may work under particular circumstances. We discuss the factors that help you rank for many city pages throughout the podcast. Factors That Influence Location Page Value The more valuable your location page is, the more you can index on your website. However, keep in mind that in Google's eyes, value comes from a variety of factors, some of which expand beyond the individual location page. Below, we outline several factors that influence city page value. Website Authority Like most SEO strategies, location pages work best with websites with authority. You can measure authority with 3rd party metrics like Moz Domain Authority, Majestic Trust Flow, and AHRefs Domain Rating. None of these metrics come from Google but are based on Google's presumed formula for assigning website authority. Content Quality The quality of your content, not just on the location pages but overall, will influence how many pages you can publish. For example, a roofing company with 20+ unique service pages can typically rank for more locations. If you establish your website as one that provides value to Google searchers, you have more leeway when publishing new pages. Service Uniqueness Our foam roofing client is an excellent example of uniqueness which gives you a lot more latitude to publish hundreds and even thousands of city pages. Because Google's index lacks pages specializing in foam roofing in cities across the U.S., it will be more interested in your pages. Unique services like foam roofing are more scarce than general roof repair. DataPins DataPins is a local SEO tool that allows roofing contractors to pin their jobs using the DataPins web app on their mobile devices. Roofers can take up to six job pictures and tag the city and service. As a result, you validate your city pages with a digital hand raise and geo-coordinates every time you complete a job.  As almost all of your competitors' city pages sit in the index untouched, your city pages continuously add new and unique content, strengthening their overall value. Furthermore, your pin captions which may mention things like GAF shingles, also appear on the city pages, producing exclusive long-term keywords that no competitor has ever mentioned. The post Do City Pages Work for Roofing Company SEO? (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

So I check my email the other day and there's an email from Russell Brunson's executive assistant… No guarantee that I'll get picked…  But I got to tell the following story.  Russell Brunson's thesis as I interpret it.  Learn how to generate organic traffic.  Then make your offer to that organic traffic.  Then when your offer is converting you start spending money on adds to scale your offer.   In my opinion publishing counts if your publishing to a Blog, Youtube channel or a podcast.  Why?  You're building influence.  You're building credibility.  You're creating long form content that you can repurpose.  You can direct the traffic to wherever you like.  It's SEO searchable and indexable.  And it provides safety from the Google Slap, Zuckerberg, etc.  Side note, I have been constantly publishing to my Table Rush Talk Show in podcast land for over a year.  450 + episodes.  Listen to them at www.tablerush.net. I do have a lot of people wanting me to make them an offer.  Now I get to work on an offer that converts!  Start publishing to a platform.  Pick one, and start publishing!Administrative: (See episode transcript below)WATCH this episode here: Table Rush Talk Show.Check out the Tools For A Good Life Summit here: Virtually and FOR FREE https://bit.ly/ToolsForAGoodLifeSummitStart podcasting!  These are the best mobile mic's for IOS and Android phones.  You can literally take them anywhere on the fly.Get the Shure MV88 mobile mic for IOS,  https://amzn.to/3z2NrIJGet the Shure MV88+ for  mobile mic for Android  https://amzn.to/3ly8SNjSee more resources at https://belove.media/resourcesEmail me: contact@belove.mediaFor social Media:      https://www.instagram.com/mrmischaz/https://www.facebook.com/MischaZvegintzovSubscribe and share to help spread the love for a better world!As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.Transcript: Mischa Zvegintzov This episode is called Russell Brunson asked me to to submit a story. Russell Brunson asked me to submit a story. How exciting is that? Yeah, this is going to be about that. I'm just all asunder, you know. Now I've said it before. I'm gonna say it again. That's me opening a soda. I swear it's a soda. There you go. You just gotta let it rip. You just gotta let it fly. But again, this episode is Russell Brunson asked me to submit a story for his newsletter. There we go. That's a good title. Russell Brunson asked me to submit a story for his newsletter. That's what I'm going to talk about on this. On this episode. It's very exciting. The, the culmination of a lot of hard work. And, yeah, we don't know where the success points are going to come from. So listen in. It's gonna be a fun episodeMischa Zvegintzov So as many of you know, or maybe you don't know, because you're new to the table rush talk show via the YouTube so you're watching this on YouTube. And I've started publishing on YouTube. relatively recently, you can always go to www.tablerush.net to the show notes, go to table rush dotnet. Subscribe. First, though, go to www.tablerush.net. That's where all these episodes are in podcast land. I believe I have 450 episodes plus or minus 20. But I've been doing very consistently for a year a little bit more than a year of publishing every day. And and, you know, building an audience. Some days, it's some days, there's lots of episode downloads. Some days, there aren't so many. As I'm on YouTube, and this is brand new, YouTube's fledgling for me the fledgling YouTube in endeavor. Not a ton of downloads yet, you know, and I'm working to, to, hopefully generate some more visibility for this for the table rush talk show YouTube channel. But it's a lot of times as a fledgling content creator, it can feel like you're talking into the void can absolutely feel like you're talking into the void. Do you get a ton of good feedback from people? The eventers universe gives me nuggets now and then do confirm what I'm up to. I'll tell you one of the really cool things for me right now is that I do have a lot of people, you know, wanting me to make an offer. And when I say make an offer, like offer up a product or a service, you know, like an expert service. And for me it is going to be it seems like the universe is having it be towards podcasting towards helping people podcast publishing to their podcasts every day. Because it's so powerful, and I'm working. This is why that's important. And I'm in the 2CC X Russell Bronson's 2C CX and it's his coaching program. And one of the things he's his his thesis is you generate organic traffic, you learn how to generate organic traffic, if you're already generating organic traffic and interest in what you're doing great, generate organic traffic, then you make your offer to that organic traffic. And then when that offer converts through your offer, through your organic traffic, then use then you start applying ad directed traffic to it then you start spending money on your advertising. And you scale that offering. Because you know, it works, you know, it converts. And then you can start printing money in effect and impacting the world, printing money is fun impacting the world's perhaps funner. But, or you get a combination of both.Mischa Zvegintzov So a lot of people skip the publishing side of things. And in the to cc X Russell and the coaches are very specific about the type of the type of publishing so there's you publish to a blog, you publish to a YouTube channel, such as this, the table would rush talk show, subscribe below, or a podcast. Again, www.tablerush.net, type in your computer table, Rush dotnet. And you can go to all my table rush talk show, podcast episodes, and actually, you can hear what it was before it was the table rush, talk show, go listen to some old episodes, maybe 400 previous. Super fun, it was a totally different name of the of the podcast in the talk show.Mischa Zvegintzov But I've been diligently putting out this content. Now I'm in the space of repurposing the content, to start driving more looks likes follows more attention towards towards my content. And then the next part, the next step of generating organic traffic is to start getting in front of other people's audiences. So you start putting yourself out there, hey, I'd like to be a guest on your podcast, hey, I'd like to be interviewed for your blog, hey, I'd like to be interviewed for your YouTube channel, you start getting in front of other people's audiences, talking about what you're doing. And then you're generating more organic traffic. So a lot of people skip the generating of the organic traffic, and they want to go straight to paid ads. And you can end up spending a lot of money trying to figure out if your offer converts. And so publishing to your platform, is very critical. Publishing to a platform consistently, is very critical. And the other thing it does, I actually have it on my notes over here, hey, I'm kind of prepared. Oftentimes, I'm not prepared. Is that is that hold? Please, let me find it. Where is it the benefits, it has something to do with.Mischa Zvegintzov So the reason you're publishing, not only to generate organic traffic, but you're building influence, you're building credibility, you're building a body of work that you can point to, and then you're creating long form long form content. And then you can repurpose that long that that content. And then also, from your platform, you can direct traffic to wherever you want. So if you build an audience that's coming to your platform that's SEO searchable, by the way, and indexable. That's what's the, that's part of the other most powerful bit of publishing to a platform of a blog, YouTube channel or a podcast is that it's indexable. And, and SEO searchable. And that, it which is like saying that they can easily find you, and they can easily buy from you for free. You're not having to pay for that traffic so they can easily they can for free, easily find you and easily buy from you. And again, a lot of people skip this step. So I've been Oh, and one other thing, or a couple other things. It's security from a Google slap. Because Google can change their algorithms. They can change their pricing structures, they can do all sorts of things. And then you're all the sudden your efficient advertising becomes inefficient. There's the Zuckerberg price increase, right Facebook, tweaks their pricing model or their algorithms. And then there's Apple Apple playing games. So Apple decides, hey, we're gonna change the way we do stuff. If the way that we interact with Facebook can drive prices up, so it provides insulation from that, that provides diversity from that. If you can control and create your own traffic, there's massive benefits. But again, a lot of people don't do it. They skip the publishing part. And so I've been publishing like mad. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for making it this far. I'm going to get to the excitement of Russell asking me to tell a story. The other day, well, I can have insecurity about what I'm doing about all this publishing. I'm like, am I talking into the void? What's going on? I come home, I'm at home the other day, I'm about to go home. I'm about to go grocery shopping. And they compulsively check my phone. You know, we all do it. Or a lot of us do it. I'm about to walk out the door. I checked my phone, and in and I see an email, there's an email, and it's from Russell Brunson, Russell Bronson's executive assistant. And I'm like, wait, wait, for doubletake, I stopped, I look at it again. We want you to submit a story. This is just the other day a few weeks ago. I'm like, What is this right?Mischa Zvegintzov Is this for me? Wait, what? This doesn't make any sense. So I closed the door, leave the car running, you know, keys in the car, whatever, forget about the car. So we could have jumped at it and drove away. I had i i Come run into the computer, I sit down and and I printed out the email and I get this great copy of this email. Hey, you know, my name is blank. I'm Russell Bronson's executive assistant, I'm writing to inform you that you have been hand selected from the coaching program and, and or the inner circle mastermind as a as a potential feature guest author in the what are Dan Kennedy and Russell Bronson's magnetic marketing monthly periodicals, you may or may not have heard of Russell Brunson, you may or may not have heard of the magnetic marketing periodicals, or Dan Kennedy, but in the niche and realm where I play. These are big names. That's like, that's like, wait, what I mean, I was like, wait, what? And so I just submitted that I wrote the story. Of course, there's no guarantee, but it was a great little God shot a great little nugget from the universe. Keep at it, you know, I've got some visibility, people are paying attention to what I'm doing. And some fun validation. And so I got a good write a great article about just what I told you about the importance of publishing that, you know, you can generate organic traffic, you can test your offers on that organic traffic, and when you have an offer that converts, then you can scale it, throw advertising revenue at it, and, you know, scale it up. That's super exciting.Mischa Zvegintzov And then, you know, there's all the, all the other collateral benefits of publishing, consistently. You know, insulation from Google slaps from Zuckerberg pricing increases from Apple fighting with the other social media platforms. And then, you know, you're you're building influence, you're building credibility, you're creating a body of work that you can point to, you're creating long form content, you can repurpose that content, it's indexable. And it's SEO searchable, which is like saying that people can easily find you and buy from you for free. And that's very powerful. So if you're publishing to social media every day, which can be powerful or tick tock tick tock is all the rage people are driving great traffic with tick tock, but you're subject to the whims of those platforms. That's it, I am done. Thank you for listening if you've made it this far, so excited. I got my article into Russell Brunson and Dan Kennedy and the magnetic Marketing Marketing periodicals. We will see if, if I get I get to be published. But I just want to encourage you, keep working hard. Keep publishing. Keep trying. Keep putting your creativity out there your work out there. Take the messy action. You never know. And I will end with this will end end with this. Start publishing to a platform, take a platform, blogging, YouTubing podcasting, start publishing every day. Peace out

Back from the Pop-up Pilates tour and their 7,000 mile road trip, Brad and Lesley share highlights and insights from the adventure, plus the benefits of exploring short-term identities. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co . And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe.In this episode you will learn about:Life in the tour vanCelebrating winsThe sense of loss that leads to loss of identity Giving permission to be something you aren't good at yetExploration for your next purpose Writing out your brilliant ideasEpisode References/Links:AGENCY MINI: Profitablepilates.com/miniThor Challgrens Website: https://www.yourturntofly.com/lesley  OPC Flashcards:OPC Flashcards are on AmazonOPC Flashcards are on our site  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox.  ResourcesWatch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube!Lesley Logan websiteBe It Till You See It PodcastOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley LoganOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTubeProfitable Pilates Social MediaInstagramFacebookTik TokLinkedIn Episode Transcript:Lesley Logan 0:01  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world. And the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity. And it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and be it till you see it. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Welcome back to the Be It Till You See It interview recap where my co-host in life Brad and I are going to dig into the permissive combo I had with Thor Challgren, in our last episode. If you haven't yet listened to that episode, feel free to pause us now. Go back and listen to that one and then come back and join us. Okay, well, this is our first time recording in the studio again.Brad Crowell 1:04  Yeah, we're back in Vegas. And yeah, right there. Yeah, we're back in Vegas. Didn't say yes. Yeah. Vega (Lesley: Yea, No...)Lesley Logan 1:19  So we've been back for a bit. We actually got back late on well, not late. We actually made it in time for dinner on the fifth. But this is our first interview recap back in the studio. And so thank you all for following along on the tour. Brad wrote an update to our van up like, what do you call it?Brad Crowell 1:37  Well, we've got two things. We've got the van build. (Lesley: Yeah.) And then we had the tour. I haven't actually wrote a blog post about the tour itself. I have written are the third van build, a blog. And that's on onlinepilatesclasses.com/blog. If you feel like reading along, yeah, it's fun. It's aLesley Logan 1:58  It's all about how we're building out the van and what we're not going to do. We are gonna do. Yeah, we got done. So we stayed warm. It was really a lot of fun. The tour was actually a lot of fun. It wasBrad Crowell 2:08  We drove, are you ready for this? 7000 miles, (Lesley: 7,000) And 106 hours behind the wheel.And that's also only if you use Google Maps from city to city. That doesn't include the times we got lost, had to make a U-turn.Yeah. Drove around town because we were there for a day or three. Yeah, you know, so...Lesley Logan 2:28  We definitely spent more time behind the wheel than I think. (Brad: Yeah, I mean, it was uhh) I also don't think it counts the hour and a half extra traffic jam that we had to somehow avoid that I never saw in Florida.Brad Crowell 2:40  Yeah, we'll give you 108. (Lesley: Thank you) cuz definitely like DC, Richmond. Both of those were just like, the worst. And then. (Lesley: Oh my god. The trip from...) Yeah. Miami from Miami toYeah, the trip from your parents to Wilmington, right. For hours, y'all the time never got less. Oh, it was the weirdest thing. It was like time stopped. And we're like, we're still driving, right? How come the How come Google Maps hasn't changed our arrival. Like it still says one hour, 51 minutes, we're gonna like ehhh. Lesley Logan 3:09  I like used the time remaining to determine when I get to say I get to switch. So I like it take over and I'm like, Okay, I'm going to half that. And then I'm going to ask to switch over and it wasn't changing. And I was like, this is pissing me off. Because Google is keeping me behind the wheel longer than I should be behind the wheel. I'm upset. But anyways.Brad Crowell 3:27  We obviously shared the driving, there's not a chance I could have done 106 hours by myself. (Lesley: Nor I) Generally, Lesley was driving in the morning and I drive in the evening. But anyway, if we got a chance to see you on the tour, just wanted to reiterate how amazing it was to see you in person. We love that the chances that we get to to reconnect with you in real life and you know, give each other hug that is one of our favorite things. Being on the road is something that Lesley and I are both very passionate about. Thanks for coming out.Lesley Logan 3:58  Thank you for everyone. Oh my gosh, the time each time we were in at lead classes in Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, ahh it was just so fun. And you you really brightened the trip becauseBrad Crowell 4:11  We would have added Philly to that list, but we didn't actually have the class. So we still love you Philly as well.I'm just gonna be, here's why. Y'all, I didn't know it until the 18th. But somewhere along the drive, I contracted COVID and I was asymptomatic. So thanks to the vaccine and my booster. Like, my body was like, rocking it. And because somebody reached out and said that they test positive, we got tests, and I'm not even kidding. I'm gonna like paint the picture. We've now gone through like all these states, seen all these people. One third of the drive. We're like 2600 miles into the drive right?We're in Philly. We've been in his parents house for several days now. I was in a car with them for over an hour the night before, we were Plus in in the car with me for a weekLesley Logan 4:56  For a week. And so then I was like, Oh, we got it. No worries. We'll Just get tested because that's what you do. Like, it's not a big deal, we'll just go get tested. And I was sitting there looking at this test and I and I was like watching it. And I'm not even kidding when the line went on that, like I was positive. I was like, oh my god, this is worse than like watching a pregnancy test. (brad laughs) And of couse and like also in that moment, I just felt like the weight of this like the world because, and maybe anyone who's tested positive, like, every single person we saw I unknowingly exposed to this virus right before the holidays. (Brad: Right.) And so we had to sit there and text, everybody. We're talking people with elderly parents, we're talking our pregnant assistant like I, and luckily it had by the time I found out we had been many days since then. So they literally test and get back to us and, and tell us that they were officially negative. And that was every single negative. Brad Crowell 5:50  At least there was that? Yeah, it was that but it affected our Christmas plans. My grandparents are older, you know, all the things.Lesley Logan 5:57  And also, I had exposed everybody. So now everybody's on their new isolation time. So I had to mask up. So we canceled, Philly. We canceled this pop up we were gonna do in New York for business. That was private, a little event. And luckily, it happened at the beginning. And I was asymptomatic. And no one got COVID from from me. SoBrad Crowell 6:16  Yeah (Lesley: We stayed that way) and technically three days before Christmas, you text you tested negative two days in a row. So you know, I mean, there's we still could have been around the fam, but just out of an abundance of caution. We didn't.Lesley Logan 6:29  Yeah, so at any rate, Philly, next time.Brad Crowell 6:32  Yeah, we'll be back. Don't worry. I live there. So.Lesley Logan 6:35  He's lives there. But anyways, I just say that because if you've tested positive during this time, it I really did feel like I like, like I let people down. And I, I felt like this morality issue. And I just want to say like, if you do all the best that you all the things, you follow all the rules, and you still get it. Like, just like give yourself a break. And like, I focus on what I could do, what I could do is I worked on our flashcards I put a mask on when I was around the family and like, you know, I drink lots of water, and I just gave myself so much permission to sleep. I was like, I should sleep more.Brad Crowell 7:07  Yeah, you slept a lot that week. I did. And so even though I mean, you know, you you had a relatively mild case. And that was, you know, fortunate. I mean, I know that you're, you know, vaccinated and boosted. So I think that it's something to do with it. You know, but, you know, it was a shock, because you weren't like showing any signs. So that was very, very strange.Lesley Logan 7:30  Yeah. So anyways, Philly, you will have us back, we know it, and then to just to those of you give yours, like focus on the possibilities. And that's what I did do. And it got me through those few days of like being locked in a dungeon. But it wasn't really a dungeon.Brad Crowell 7:42  And we lucked out in that. We were about two days before the rush to buy all the COVID tests. Lesley: yeah!) So we were able to buy half dozen tests and like keep them on reserve for the rest of the tour. So we were showing up at those places we could confidently say, we literally just tested before we got out of the car, you know, we're good to go. And that way we could, you know, see people and keep other things. So (Lesley: It was great.) So anyway, wow, that was a, I'm telling you it was such an incredible experience to like I've never done a road trip quite like that. 7000 miles, and we'veLesley Logan 8:17  It was our longest longest road trip. That was for sure. Brad Crowell 8:20  Yeah, we went from Vegas up along. I 80. Across the, you know, the states to Philly and then from Philly down to Miami. And then from Miami, up through Dallas and then Albuquerque back to Vegas. Lesley Logan 8:35  Yeah, that Panhandle takes a frickin long time.Brad Crowell 8:38  Yeah, we were in Florida forever. It's what it felt like,Lesley Logan 8:40  I was like, California is bigger. Why is this taking longer? (Brad: right) Anyways? Okay, really, really quickly. We are. If you're listening to this, when it comes out the days and ability to sign up for agency mini are running out. Brad Crowell 8:54  Limited, very limited. We are going to be starting. This should beLesley Logan 8:58  We start, we start on January 23. And January 22 is the last day to sign up if there is space.Brad Crowell 9:04  Right. So that means there's five more days. Lesley Logan 9:06  Yeah, so profitablepilates.com Brad Crowell 9:08  Oh, wait, hold on. Just kidding. There are two more days, two more days.Lesley Logan 9:11  Haha. So that's it. That's it two more days. So profitablepilates.com/mini it this is the only time will last time we'll do it until the fall of 2022. And that just means you'd be postponing your goals for a year. I don't know why'd you do that. And on the 30th I am hosting a free webinar that is gonna be really exciting. It's for anyone who's running a business, especially our Pilates folks out there. I really want to help you see how you can actually have your dream schedule, and then also how you can actually make that happen. And we'll be talking about our scheduling tool. So you'll go to profitablepilates.com/scheduling. Okay, well, I mean, let's get into it. But yeah, I think we I think the audience question was what was your favorite part of the tour trip? I feel like...Brad Crowell 9:56  We covered that. We covered it. So thanks for the question. (Brad: Thanks for the question.)Send your questions into the Be It pod on Instagram. Or, your bold moments, we do want to shout out (brad: Yeah) your bold moments. SoIf you if you had something where you're celebrating a win, and it was a Be It, you know moment for you. We want to hear about it. Share it to us on the on Instagram. Yeah. (Lesley: Okay.) Let's move on, let's talk about Thor Challgren. Okay Thor, like a lot of you. And that's very intentional. Alright, YouTube could see what Lesley's holding up there. If you if you're listening, sorry, you're gonna have to go over to YouTube. Okay, Thor, like a lot of you. And I say you, because this is not applicable to Lesley or me, knows what it's like to have your identity taken away, when your kids leave for college. (Lesley: Yeah) sorry, we're doing we don't have that. But if your kids left for college and your whole life, you've been a parent. And then all sudden, they're they're out of the house. And you know, you got the empty ness thing happening or anything associated with that, then I'm sure you can connect with Thor on this. As a recovering girl, strip Girl Scout troop leader, to a now certified life coach, and podcast host of Your Turn To Fly. Thor helps individuals discover their passion for the next season of their life and give themselves permission to change. Lesley Logan 11:25  Yeah, I know, we don't have kids, we don't understand empty nest. Although, you know, sometimes I wonder if the dogs aren't here if then I'm like it's so nice.Brad Crowell 11:35  Well, look, I mean, you know, he talks a lot about the idea of loss, and, and his experience of his oldest daughter going to college, creating a sense of loss for him. And that's, you know, I, because I can't directly relate, but I have a feeling we're gonna experience a sense of loss if and when one of the dogs you know, moves on. (Lesley: Yeah.) So you know, it's definitely relatable.Someday Gaia will actually be the age we think she is. So I know,I know her birthday. Now. She's I know how old she is today, finally. Lesley Logan 12:10  All right, well, anyways, I want to talk about something I loved. He said he talked about, he had a lot of things that were just really great. It's kind of hard for me to pick just one thing. But I really loved the giving yourself permission to be something you aren't good at yet. And I say that I love this because a that's why the podcast was even born. But b, this isn't I've had to do a lot like throughout growing our companies, to even being a pod this be this podcast host. Like I really had to give myself permission to like, just do the best that I could. And like, even to the point like, you know, constructive criticism was coming in. I was like, not right now. I'm really focusing on permission that I'm actually good at this and I could do it. Give me let me get some reps under my belt. And then I'll take the feedback. But I think that a lot of times, we get stuck on being in the beginning. And we get frustrated with ourselves and what we're are not able to do yet because we're not good at it yet, that we don't even get to the point to even being it. And I just love the idea of permission like I'm giving myself permission to do the thing to be the thing that I am not actually good at yet. So it couldn't be more Be It Till You See It.Brad Crowell 13:19  I really liked I thought I thought it was incredibly powerful when Thor said "I have to I had to give myself permission to be greater than a father."Lesley Logan 13:38  I was that not the most powerful thing? Brad Crowell 13:40  Yeah, and that was very counterintuitive is the wrong word. But I think countercultural maybe. (Lesley: yeah) you know, like we like the epitome of success is being a parent and that's the way that it's being defined that you know, when you're a parent, it's the greatest thing you can do, all that kind of stuff. And I think that our association with that concept is exactly why when his daughter went to college, he experienced a sense of loss. Because if that's the best and greatest and the only thing that he can do with his life is be a stay at home dad. What happens when he's not anymore? Right?Lesley Logan 14:19  Right. Well, and that's like so when Thor and I were talking you'll have to excuse August just really going out his neck right there with his foot. But when we when Thor and I were talking when he said that to me, I was like "you have to be on the podcast", like period like end of story because I work with so many moms and and I know that as a non mom saying like "you actually have to come first". "You actually have to focus on the things that you find that fill your cup up too." Because not only are you an like you're a role model for your children, right? But also like at some point they are going to grow up and leave the nest and then what? Right and then what are you doing? So giving yourself that permission is just so key. And I just really loved how he, I loved how he went through it. And he figured this out. And now he's on this mission to help others.Brad Crowell 15:08  Yeah, I mean, he talked about like, well, I got, you know, easily 30 years left in my life. So is the best, quote, unquote, best moment of my life, like, gonna be in the past? (Lesley: Right) You know, what is that? What does that mean? And, and I think, I think what's really difficult, too, when looking at this is, you know, we've, we've all seen movies where, like, you know, there's a character in the movie, who's, you know, greatest moment in life was when they were the quarterback in high school, and now they're, like, 40, and they're still talking about that. And it's like, the, that was like, the culmination of success for them. And like, you know, as viewers, we go, yeah, that's a bummer that that's, that's all that guy like, that's, that's he's stuck in that moment. And I think the thing that's difficult is we do exactly the same thing with parenting. Right? You know, yeah.Lesley Logan 16:02  Oh, that well, and that's, and like, you just say, like, the culture is like, this is a greatest thing you'll ever do. Is every, the greatest you'll ever do is be a parent and, and as a non parent, I think it's important to want to be a parent and do the best that you can, because those are little humans, that are going to be adults someday. But I also think like, your children seeing that you're doing things that fill your cup first, that take care of you, that you aspire to be, it gives them permission to do a lot more. It just really does. I saw something on Instagram today, where someone shared a story about how like, their niece and nieces were like, Oh, it's so cool that you have this job. I am not able to do that, because I'm gonna grow up to be a mom. And she took her aside and was like, "Hey, let me just tell you, that you actually can be both things." (Brad: Right.) And, and so I just, I really enjoyed Thor's like, mission of sharing this, because this that, that, yes, it is so important that if you are a parent that you are like loving all that and doing the things. But that is not all you are, and it can and you can have it you can be the greatest parent and then have another great chapter and another great chapter after that, like we don't just have one great moment in our lives.Brad Crowell 17:14  Well, I think that rolls right into my, (Lesley: yeah) you know, one of the action items that I thought was really awesome, was his thought on what comes next after you've, you know, reached the culmination of that self identity. Right. And he talked about the idea of short term identities and mini purposes. You know, because he was like, "Well, yeah, I used to introduce myself, as, you know, oh, yeah, I'm a stay at home dad, you know, I'm full time taking care of the girls." And he said, "Well, it was really hard for me to introduce myself, because I didn't know how I didn't know what to say I didn't know who I was." And he said, so until I began, like, today, Thor works with people who are in the same position as him, right? And he's a life coach. But before that, before he had that, to, and was able to say that, he decided, "I'm going to learn how to cook. And I'm going to introduce myself as a gourmet chef." And he said, I didn't, I didn't plan to have a career in being a chef, you know, as a chef, but I wanted a new identity. And I know, I knew that it wasn't going to be a forever identity. So I thought, Alright, I'm going to give myself permission to be, you know, to create a short term identity. I thought that was really clever. I thought it was in a good way to help like, reorient and dive into some new things, explore some things. It also takes the pressure off of finding like the next thing. Yes, yeah, that's actually huge. Lesley Logan 18:47  And so he could be a mini purpose as opposed to like, finding my next great adventure and like yeah,Brad Crowell 18:55  All right, now that I've sent all the kids off to college, I'm going to found a country what, what's next?Lesley Logan 19:01  And I think for so many, like, I think we can also just bringing this back to like, the world we live in now. You know, in 20. In March 2020, a lot of people's identity shifted. Like a lot of people (Brad:Yes) either had to switch careers, or they went from teaching in a studio to teaching online or they went from having a job to not having a job or they went from being a parent whose kids went to school to being a homeschooling parent. (Brad: Yep) So a lot of identity shifting happen there. And I think like having that like having permission to have these identity, like short term identities or mini purposes is like a fun way to dabble in what's next, without having to go well, this is it. This is it. Brad Crowell 19:38  Yeah, yeah, that's true. You know, if you treat it as a short term thing, then you don't have to worry about this like, like this life altering decision. That's like, "oh, shoot. Well, I guess I'm," I mean, it'd be like, just imagine, you got to decide if you want to move to another country. Ya know or something like that or like, you know, we were you know that that is like, oh my god, there's like real huge, crazy ramifications. I'd literally be getting rid all my stuff moving. I'd be figuring all that out. Well, we don't I think that we take that kind of a huge decision. And we apply that to everyday things we do in life. Yeah. And that is obviously overkill. Like it doesn't need to be this momentous decision that we're making, it could be. "I'm going to try this for a month" and make it you know, just test it out and figure out if I'm in, you know, and if you love it, hey, this is cool. It's something worth continuing to explore. If you hate it, no big deal.Lesley Logan 20:43  Yeah, you can change your mind everyone, like I like this. We could keep talking about this short because I have so much to say like, it was like when I was dating before I met you, I was like, I am not going to date the type. I always dated him at a date different types of like, think of it like straight jeans and bootcut jeans and low rise jeans and high rise jeans and boyfriend jeans. And like, I was just thinking like, everyone has a type of jean they feel like they fit into but like maybe you should try other jeans. And like once you found those skinny jeans, I found those skinny jeans and they're skinny in their mind, but I love them. So you win. But I also tried those on I didn't like "Oh, I'm gonna date Brad," like we took a long time. So enjoy short term identities play with it you have many purposes. I think that's going to give so many people a lot of permission, which is what he's all about. So okay, well, yeah.Brad Crowell 21:31  All right. Well, let's talk about the be it action items that you discuss with Thor. What bold, executable, intrinsic or targeted action items, can we take away from your convo. And I know we already talked about giving yourself permission. And specifically about being, quote on quote, greater than a father. And that's a hard thing to embrace. Because of the way we you know, the story we tell ourselves around that. But what I thought was super complimentary. And he kind of said it as like a side note was, "be willing to uncover the places where you might not yet be willing to believe that you can be greater than a father," you know, or, or greater than a parent, whatever.Lesley Logan 22:19  It's when he was like talking about the questions he asks himself, right. Like, he's like, he's like, Well, like, why don't I think this is true? Who doesn't think that instead of like, not, he doesn't do as an I? He did, like, who doesn't think I can do this? (Brad:Yeah) Like, yeah, so I be and he went, he's, like, willing to go to those places and uncover what it is that you're not willing to believe. Because it's an exploration, it can really help you give yourself that permission.Brad Crowell 22:41  Yeah. And I loved his his idea of like, writing out like, what is the worst that could happen? You know, if, you know, and then he left a line, you know, if blank, you know, did or didn't happen, or whatever, you know, the worst that could happen is I think is the way he phrased it. Yeah, so you know, that there's a lot of inflection in this conversation, like, analyzing of oneself.Lesley Logan 23:06  Yeah. And like, just to go like with that all of you are like, Oh, what's the worst that could happen? Like, our friend Lisa Brooks, who we should definitely have on the pod? (Brad: Totally.) She follows that up with and then what? (Brad: And then what?) And then what's going to add that in here? Because until we have our own like, and then what? Like, so if the worst case scenario happens, and then what? Yeah, I really I really liked I also just liked his, his a executable, a suggestion for us all, which is grab pen and paper and just write out the vision. I think a lot of us think put it off to like, "oh, oh, it's a great idea. I'll think about I'll do that next time. Or I'll do that later. Or that's indicative of time." And I shared a personal story about one of the things that we did, and actually, as this episode is out, I already did the first weekend with our members and like, it's just really incredible. So what I challenge you to do, and I really did love that he challenged you to do this is like, taking that messy action. Grabbing a piece of paper and just writing down this brilliant idea that you have and if nothing else, it's out of your brain and it's somewhere you can go back to when and if you have the time. But I think a lot of people don't think that they're creative and a lot of people don't think they have ideas but you do you have them all the time you just bury them away, you shove them off or you say, "I'll think about that later, I don't have time to think about that." But just write it down or, or voice text it to yourself. Brad Crowell 24:22  Yeah. And the reason that he enjoyed writing it down. And this this I thought was the powerful piece of it. Take five minutes and get started was effectively what he's saying. And why? Because he found that it changes the energy that you have around the thing, right? Because again, we treat these things as these massive, crazy things that "oh my god is gonna take a whole year for me to put this thing together," you know, or do this thing or this idea or whatever. And he said if you just take five minutes you start writing things out around it. You may find that suddenly it doesn't seem as intimidating. It's not quite as massive of a project as you imagined it was. You know, this, like fear of getting started. You can like, you know, get over that hurdle in five minutes by just grabbing a pen and paper and beginning to write it down and starting to do it. (Lesley: Yeah.) So I thought that was amazing. Because, you know, definitely I love the idea of writing it down. But why? Why? Because it can help take that fear away. That fear of getting started, it can help you kind of like suddenly sort through the big mountain that we're making it.Yeah, agreed. He's great. I just really enjoy him. He's just got a love for life and love for people. And yeah, I hope you all take him up on his freebie. It is in the show notes. And he's a hell of a voice. I was very soothing.Lesley Logan 25:51  I know. I know. I, I, Yourturntofly.com/lesley by the way, it's L E S L E Y. So spell it right. Get on it. Okay. I am Lesley Logan.Brad Crowell 26:02  And I'm Brad Crowell. Lesley Logan 26:03  Thank you so much for joining us today. How are you going to use these tips in your life we want to know. Tag us, and also Thor, on Instagram with your takeaways. And just know that every time you do that, it's like a little touch. You know, it's like a little love note to us. And we just it makes us go oh, this is why we're doing this. But also it allows me to like personally, thank you. And I'm gonna thank you right now, but I'll thank you in a DM because I really, we really are so freakin grateful. (Brad: Yeah) for you. Yeah, this podcast is just like so growing and thriving because of your downloads every time you listen, it actually makes a most amazing difference. So thank you so much. Please leave a review over at Apple with how much you love us. And until next time, Be It Till You See It. Brad Crowell 26:44  Bye for now. Lesley Logan 26:47  That's all I got for this episode of the beat until you see a podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the beat pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others be until you see it. Have an awesome day. 'Be It till You See It' is a production up 'As The Crows Fly Media'.Brad Crowell 27:20  It's written produced, filmed and recorded by your host Lesley Logan and me, Brad Crowell. Our associate producer is Amanda Frattarelli. Lesley Logan 27:31  Kevin Perez at Disenyo handles all of our audio editing. Brad Crowell 27:35  Our theme music is by Ali at APEX Production Music and our branding by designer and artist Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 27:44  Special thanks to our designer Jirah Mandal for creating all of our visuals (which you can't see because this is a podcast) and our digital producer, Jay Pedroso for editing all the video each week so you can.Brad Crowell 27:56  And to Angelina Herico for transcribing each of our episodes, so you can find them on our website. And finally to Meridith Crowell for keeping us all on point and on timeTranscribed by https://otter.aiSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In today's episode we're talking about how your content can help you in search. Are you answering the questions your audience has about your products and services? Because Google, the number one search engine, is in the business of finding answers for people, do you have the answers? Learn more at https://www.delosinc.com/220.

 Find out how to work your way online and gain more exposure with the top search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing Learn why Search Engine Optimization is more than just looking for the right keywords Understand what you should be avoiding when wanting to gain more traction, more traffic, and more clients to your website Resources/Links: Wanting to Find Out How to Stay On The Top Online and Bring Traffic Into Your Website? Learn how to make the most out of Search Engine Optimization and rank up your site online: www.ThisIsMySouthBay.com Summary Have you been trying to get more traffic into your website but just end up struggling and putting in more money? Do you feel like your competitors are getting your clients while you're being the world's best-hidden gem? Are you ready to change your online exposure and rank up on the search engine rankings with the power of Search Engine Optimization? Eric Seropyan is the owner of This Is My South Bay, a digital marketing agency located in the South Bay region of Los Angeles. His agency specializes in helping small-to-midsize businesses gain exposure online with a variety of digital marketing strategies. They are an agency that focuses on driving traffic to their clients' websites utilizing the power of search engines and optimizing websites to be ranked organically. In this episode, Eric shares what Search Engine Optimization can do for you and your business online and how to change Google's way of seeing you. He also talks about what are the things you should stop doing when wanting to rank up in the search engine rankings. Check out these episode highlights: 01:18 – Eric's ideal client: “. Our ideal client is someone that has a product or service that they're looking to market on a local level through Google, Yahoo, Bing search engines.” 01:35 – Problem Eric helps solve: “The problem we solve is basically to create some kind of structure in order to get the search engine's attention. And that involves some creativity. It involves consistency and know-how.” 02:04 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Eric: “So there are a lot of people that have tried this, to try to do SEO on their own. They've tried to farm it out overseas. They've tried to, you know, people that they know, their relatives, and so on.” 02:53 – Common mistakes that people make before they find Eric's solution: “The big one is that, especially with Search Engine Optimization, you don't pay for the traffic that Google sends over to you. So Google is not obligated to do anything for you. So you have to think of Search Engine Optimization almost like a long game.” 04:44 – Eric's Valuable Free Action (VFA): “You want to make sure that you do some sort of keyword research. So that you're not just targeting keywords that you don't know what you're targeting. And so there's a free tool called ‘Google Webmaster Tools'.” 05:44 – Eric's Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out Eric's Website: www.ThisIsMySouthBay.com 06:46 – Q: What do I need to do to get ranked? A: You want to avoid anything to do that is not organic. So for instance, if you're doing a link-building campaign, you need to make sure that it's not, you know, suddenly, you don't have 1000 links coming in when you didn't have anything with reputation management. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “You have so many competitors out there that have already claimed that real estate online with Google, you have to consistently and proactively go after that.” -Eric SeropyanClick To TweetTranscript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland 00:10 Welcome, everyone, to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. My name is Tom Poland beaming out to you from little Castaways Beach in Queensland, Australia. And just across the other side of the pond is Eric. Eric, good day, sir! A very warm welcome from down under. How you doin'? Eric Seropyan 00:24 Thank you, Tom. Thanks for having me. I'm doing well. Tom Poland 00:27 Hands across the water from across that little stretch, or that swimming pool, we call the Pacific Ocean. For those of you who don't know Eric Seropyan, he owns This Is My South Bay. It's a digital marketing agency located in the South Bay region of Los Angeles. His agency specializes in helping small-to-medium-sized businesses that, you, listener, gain exposure online with a variety of digital marketing strategies. They're an agency that focuses on driving traffic to their client's websites using the power of search engines and optimizing websites to be ranked organically. And this is the practice, of course, which we know as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It's a very powerful lead generator. It could be the answer to your marketing prayers. And Eric is going to share with us, in less than seven minutes, “How to Start Your SEO Journey”. Eric, our seven minutes starts now. Sir, who's your ideal client? Eric Seropyan 01:18 Alright, so we'll do this in seven minutes. Our ideal client is someone that has a product or service that they're looking to market on a local level through Google, Yahoo, Bing search engines. Tom Poland 01:32 Perfect! Thank you, sir. And, question number two, what's the problem you solve for them? Eric Seropyan 01:35 The problem we solve is basically to create some kind of structure in order to get the search engine's attention. And that involves some creativity. It involves consistency and know-how. Tom Poland 01:50 Perfect! Thank you, sir. Question three and we've got six and a half minutes left still. Tell us some of the typical symptoms that folks who need your service are going to be experiencing in their business. Kind of their- that's kind of like, you know, a heads up on what's going on so they know they should be reaching out? Eric Seropyan 02:04 Sure. So there are a lot of people that have tried this, to try to do SEO on their own. They've tried to farm it out overseas. They've tried to, you know, people that they know, their relatives and so on. And they've just been frustrated with results. And so, you know, the symptom is that it's just not working. They've spent money. They've spent effort. And you know, their phone's not ringing, or the orders aren't coming in online. As opposed to their competitors, they're doing well. Tom Poland 02:32 That's a pretty easy symptom to notice, right? All this hard work, all this money, and just sort of hearing crickets still. So let's go on to this bridge then, to some of the mistakes that folks are making. We've got five and a half minutes left. Question number four, what are some of the common mistakes that folks make, in trying to get traffic to their website, that you've noticed that maybe we could save some people from frustration? Eric Seropyan 02:53 The big one is that, especially with Search Engine Optimization, you don't pay for the traffic that Google sends over to you. So Google is not obligated to do anything for you. So you have to think of Search Engine Optimization almost like a long game. You know, I have a lot of people that will reach out to me like the week before Mother's Day, and they want a Mother's Day campaign, and it's just not enough time to, you know, get Google's attention. Because you have so many competitors out there that have already claimed that real estate online with Google, you have to consistently and proactively go after that. And that takes, again, time and effort and creativity and consistency to do. Tom Poland 03:37 So often the things that take the longest bear the most fruit and are the ones that are repeatable. Okay, thank you for that. Eric Seropyan 03:43 And that's SEO is something that, over time, will be, probably, you know, our clients' biggest revenue generator, but it just takes time to do. Tom Poland 03:54 You got to get there. Is it also true that once you are there, it's actually harder to get knocked off that position? Eric Seropyan 03:59 Exactly. Once you have things set up, it's difficult for a competitor just to spin up a site, and go, and within weeks or months, just knock you off. It just doesn't work that way. Because Google is almost vouching for you when it ranks you on a search engine. So it's making sure that you know, the user is going to have a good user experience. And a lot of times in life, the great equalizer is time. Tom Poland 04:23 Right! As someone once said, “You don't have to be successful to start, but you have to start to be successful.” Eric Seropyan 04:29 Exactly. Tom Poland 04:30 So question number five, and we've got three and a half minutes left. What's one valuable free action, kind of like a top tip, that someone could- it's a step in the right direction towards effective SEO, not going to get them there to the end of the journey, but it might start the ball rolling? Eric Seropyan 04:44 You want to make sure that you do some sort of keyword research. So that you're not just targeting keywords that you don't know what you're targeting. And so there's a free tool called “Google Webmaster Tools”. You can go in there and you can see, you know, what's happening. The second one is “Google Analytics”. It's a free tool that every website should have. It's free. It's plugged into the backend of your website. So you can see where the traffic is coming in from, you know, what platforms, what part of the city, that country, the world, how long they're staying, how many pages they're staying. You know, all kinds of data that I could spend probably two hours explaining. Tom Poland 05:22 Right. So Google Webmaster Tools, and I imagine you can Google search that, folks, and find it! And Google Analytics for your website, all sorts of free information you can get there. Talking of free, question number six, and we've got two and a half minutes left, a valuable free resource. Where could people go, perhaps on your website, or blog or podcast, or somewhere to find out more about what you do and maybe even get some more top tips? Eric Seropyan 05:44 Sure, if anyone is interested, they could go to my website. It's ThisIsMySouthBay.com. I'm in the South Bay part of Los Angeles. I've grown up there. I live there. But we have clients from around the country and in different countries as well. There are two things they can do. They can put in their email address and their website address and we'll send them a free Search Engine Optimization Report on their website. If they have any questions on SEO strategies or anything like that, they can click on the “Book Now” button and book a 15 minutes appointment with me. And we'll go over I'll answer any questions that they might have. Tom Poland 06:21 Ideal! So folks, if you're interested in Google sending traffic to your website, so you can generate larger email lists and generate sales and new clients, www.ThisIsMySouthBay.com. Get the free website analytics report, book a 15-minute call. Go from there. Question number seven, sir. We've got 70 seconds left. Eric, what's the one question I should have asked you, but didn't? Eric Seropyan 06:46 I guess the question that, you know, I get asked, I sure get asked a lot is, you know, we're trying to get Google's attention in a nice way. Again, they're not obligated to rank us or our clients. But a question that often is not asked is, you know- we get asked, you know, “What do I need to do to get ranked?” The question in reverse would be, “What do I do that upsets Google that I don't get ranked?” Tom Poland 07:11 And can you share a couple of things in less than 35 seconds? Eric Seropyan 07:14 Absolutely! You want to avoid anything to do that is not organic. So for instance, if you're doing a link-building campaign, you need to make sure that it's not, you know, suddenly, you don't have 1000 links coming in when you didn't have anything with reputation management. I have clients that don't have any Yelp reviews or Google reviews, suddenly they have 500, and they don't have any after that. Tom Poland 07:37 God, that's so suspicious. Eric Seropyan 07:37 So you want to make sure that everything looks organic. Tom Poland 07:40 Perfect. Eric, thank you so much for your time and insights. Eric Seropyan 07:43 Thank you for having me. Tom Poland 07:43 Cheers. Tom Poland 07:42 Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we're doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It's very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.

Meet Claire Claire is a personal brand strategist and the CEO and Co-Founder of Claire Bahn Group. She has been helping high-achieving entrepreneurs, investors, founders, and executives create their best personal brand for over 10 years. As an entrepreneur and influencer with over 70,000 followers on social media, she has learned the importance of creating and maintaining your personal brand. Claire helps entrepreneurs leverage their personal brand to develop the authority, influence, and trust they need to exceed their business goals.  Can you share what personal branding is and why it matters to you so much? Basically, there are so many different nuances of personal branding. But really your basic personal brand is essentially what people think about you when they do a Google search on you or they meet you for the first time in person. It's literally someone's initial reaction to you, and how they feel about you whether they want to work with you and that sort of thing. So that's your baseline personal brand. How can entrepreneurs and SMBs boost revenue by showcasing their subject expertise and leveraging their authority? I always look at personal branding from an aspect like when we sign on a client, we take a strategic approach to personal branding. We look at social media as well as Google, SEO in blogs, and SEO in videos. Because Google and YouTube are search engines, you can find out what people are actively looking for and the type of questions that people are actively asking and wants to know answers for. They want to find experts to help them find a solution to the problem that they're currently having. So ultimately, one of the best possible ways that someone can build that know, like, and trust with an ideal client is to create content, whether it's a long-form blog or a video or both that specifically answers a question that somebody is looking for. So ideally, you want someone to do a Google search on a certain subject, and they find something that you created, and they're like, "Wow, I really liked this person." So many times people find me that exact way because they search a topic that I'm an expert in, and they find a piece of content that I created or video that I created and they're like, "Oh, wow, Claire really knows her stuff." So that's ultimately how you really build ROI, you get customers that are committed and trust you, and value your input. The goal is to hopefully work with them, but trust has to be one and it's not something that everyone gives for free. For small and medium-sized businesses, is it important to have the individual or the owner of the organization versus building up the brand of the company itself? People connect with people and people want a connection, especially when you have you know certain younger demographics. They want to know your values, what you stand for and that is done through people. If you think of some of the very well-known, multibillion-dollar corporations, those CEOs branded themselves. Think of Elan Musk! Tesla's cool, but Elon Musk is cooler, if you think about it, right? He has more followers on social media than Tesla does, because when Elon says things it has so much more weight. So if you just think about these real-world examples, you see exactly why it's more important that the person be branded and then they talk about their business because the people are going to have that know, like, and trust factor, not a business. Why does ignoring personal branding negatively affect your ROI? If you really think about everything that I've talked about like if someone does a Google search on you, specifically. They're like, okay, who's this person, should I work with them, and there's nothing there, they're definitely not going to want to work with you. You should have some information, especially if you are an expert, which most people that have their own businesses are an expert in something, right? So you kind of wonder why can't I find content about you? What's wrong with you? Then the next part of that is, what if I do find content about you, and it's bad? So this is how can negatively affect you, either not finding any information so people don't believe that you are actually the expert that you say you are or the second thing is that they do find information about you and it's not great information. Whether it's negative information, or you really did not do a good job of creating content that was very helpful, and it negatively impacted what people think about you. You want to put effort into really engaging and answering questions and things that people are actually searching for. It's not one of those things where you can just kind of like punt, and it'll work, you actually really have to put in the effort and answer people's questions. So that's the return is you can help people but it also helps build your business too. But it's a long-term game.  Can you share with our listeners one of the favorite networking experiences that you've had? I admit that sometimes networking is scary, and I actually did a blog talk giving some tips on how to make it not so scary. But I think ultimately, one of the biggest things is, if there's a group that you are being very strategic with your networking, I would kind of go on to LinkedIn, find who you want to really connect with, and have a way to connect with them. Say something like, "Hey, I read your article on this and I really just wanted to come over and say hi," and have you have your brand statement really quick write your little kind of like blurb about me. I think that's one of the biggest things in making networking easier, especially if there are people that you want to connect with is do your homework first. That's actually one thing that a friend of mine taught me and it's such a valuable thing. If you know there are strategic relationships that you want, go and do a little bit of homework.  How do you stay in front of and best nurture the relationships that you have? Connecting with people on social media, connecting with them on LinkedIn, which is obviously a very professional network. I think you can always nurture the relationship through whether it's inviting them on your podcast, inviting them onto a video podcast. Just staying connected by essentially asking for their input on something. Everyone again, loves a compliment and I think that is a really key thing. Don't ask for favors, ask for advice on things. Connecting with people like that is really great. I think if you do have a platform, invite them to be on your platform. That is a really great way to stay connected with people and there could be an end game strategy with it, but it doesn't feel and come off as salesy. I definitely don't think it's a good thing to hard-sell people in the social sphere or when you are networking, it's so much better when you just really show up and are committed to sharing your expertise and giving value. The relationships that you create through that are so much stronger than immediately going straight for the sale. I think that would be one of the biggest things. Stay connected, ask for their advice and if you have a platform, bring them onto that platform, but don't sell. What advice would you offer that business professional is really looking to grow their network? There are so many networking groups. For me, I've asked friends, and I, you know, asked the group that I know for their advice. Find out from other people, other networking opportunities that they would suggest whether it's in your area in person or online. There are so many events that are online as well, that I have found and you can just ask your network. There are also so many Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups that you can join, you can find out about other networking opportunities in those groups as well. So there are just so many ways to do it, but I don't think it's a bad thing to ask. Just ask people because people want to give their advice. They want to be helped. just asked people to ask your network put out a post saying. So ask your network or you can also just put it out there on social media and a lot of times people will respond, and they'll have great information. If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of or differently with regards to your professional career? You talk about this a lot, but networking is so important. So I would say probably more networking, pushing myself to be uncomfortable rather than always staying safe, and not maybe doing that networking event because it's scary. So I think pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and doing more networking. We've all heard of the six degrees of separation. Who would be the one person that you'd love to connect with and do you think you could do it within the sixth degree? I've kind of liked the way that Rachel Hollis has navigated a lot of stuff. She's definitely gotten herself in some sticky situations over the years, but she's somebody that I what she's done with her personal brand and it's very much evolved. Neil Patel is another marketer who has done great things so I definitely think I could connect with those people through six degrees because I'm in that kind of marketing and influencer space, but those are people that I think are learning kind of more about their story would be really cool. Any final word of advice you'd like to offer our listeners with regards to growing and supporting your network? It kind of goes back to even your personal brand. There are so many people like you mentioned, that won't put themselves out there and won't commit to networking with people, they won't commit to doing their personal brand. When you actively do it, and you commit to it and you do it and you show up, you're really going to be in a smaller group of people. I think that's one of the most important things to think about. There are so many people that won't have the follow-through, that won't commit to going all the way with whatever it is whether it's building that personal brand, networking, and committing to so many networking events or opportunities. Just commit and do it! You don't have to bite off the biggest chunk, just find the events that you want and commit to going all-in because so many people don't. That's what's going to differentiate you from somebody else is that follow through and that commitment, and that's a lot of what you said earlier about networking and just being true and following through. It really will benefit you in so many ways.   Connect with Claire   Website: https://clairebahn.com/  Free Masterclass Course: https://clairebahn.com/personal-branding-masterclass

Hey guys! I recorded this podcast episode in my car. Improving your website performance is not a one-time project.

Anything which evolves today will change after some time. This is the law of nature and we can't avoid it. Change or updates brings new improvements and optimize performance. It's always a better version of the older one. But why we are talking about the change? Because Google has migrated the old search console to a new search console and launched the beta version last year. Are you interested to know the latest developments in the new search console? Continue to read the blog ...

There's no end to new platforms popping up and claiming to be the next great source of traffic to your business. First there was Yahoo. Then Google. Then Facebook. Then Twitter. Then Instagram. Then TikTok. Then… well, the list goes on and it will forever be growing too. So, how do you decide which one to test and how to gauge the success or failure of these new exciting ways to spend your marketing dollars to generate business? Luckily Ryan is here is to break it all down for us. TRANSCRIPT: Jon MacDonald : Hey Ryan, welcome to another episode of Drive and Convert. Today we're going to talk about shiny new traffic sources. Right. There's no end to the new platforms popping up and they're always claiming to be the next great source of traffic for your business. So, we're going way back first though is with Yahoo, then Google then Facebook then Twitter then Instagram now everyone's on TikTok. I mean I'm not but everybody is supposedly. Definitely feeling old these days based on these stats. Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Me neither. Jon MacDonald : But look, the list goes on and on. And I'm sure I've left a lot off of that list over the history and it will forever be growing too, right? So, what I'd love to get schooled on today from you is how do you decide which one to test? And how do you gauge the success or failure of each of these new and exciting shiny objects to spend your marketing dollars on to generate revenue? It's a lot, right? But look, with so many social networks and traffic sources popping up seemingly every week, how do you know if it's a good place to spend money? Ryan Garrow: The real answer is, always it depends. But that's always the answer we give everybody no matter what we're talking about in the digital marketing world. It's my least favorite answer but it has to be the one you give every time and with context. And when you're looking at all of these wonderful platforms and companies that you can spend money on the ads, I think the first step is to really understand what the platform is. Who's on it? What are they trying to do? What's their goal of being on that platform? Because we all really understand Google and that was always a pretty easy one. Like I'm on Google to find something either information or a product that's why I'm there. And it makes a lot of sense logically saying, "I get it, if I am selling that product or I provide an answer to that I want to show when they're searching for that." There's a lot of intent there. If you're selling houses you might not necessarily want to spend a lot of time on TikTok, generally. TikTok is skewing. It's getting older, I think, as young people blow platforms open like in Facebook and Instagram did and then older people take them over because I think they're being cool by getting on them. Jon MacDonald : I saw a stat today about Facebook that something like 70% of people over 60 are on Facebook, which is the highest user percentage base. It's crazy. Ryan Garrow: Oh, [crosstalk 00:02:57]. Jon MacDonald : We used to tell our customers you want to convert older folks and high income, you would advertise on Microsoft Bing. Because they're using Internet Explorer out of the box and not changing the default search engine, right? So- Ryan Garrow: Correct. Jon MacDonald : ... But now it's definitely Facebook too. Like it's crazy. Ryan Garrow: What's sad, well I'm not going to say sad, but you have to advertise through Facebook to really target Instagram. You have to use that Facebook ads platform like Joyful Dirt, which hopefully I'll be able to bring this back later to talk about one of my issues with the Joyful Dirt brand. But Joyful Dirt doesn't have anything going on on Facebook really. Instagram because we're targeting millennial plant moms generally, I mean obviously anybody can buy the product, but we get very little and to no interaction on Facebook and it doesn't work when we market on there. But at least you're understanding that, right? If you are selling arthritis cream you want to be on Facebook. And we've got a company that sells arthritis cream and does really well on Facebook. So understanding who's on it, where it's going, and then also just how they're interacting. If it's short-form video like TikTok, then if you're not prepared to make short-form video you're probably not going to be tremendously successful in that space. Do you have a personality? Like if you're just a brand throwing ads up randomly on TikTok with no face to the brand, I can't imagine it's going to do well. And I think in early on you've got these platforms that you have to really get into the platform, I think, and understand how you're interacting. And so if I was going to spend my money on TikTok step one is I would go join TikTok. Like I'm not there, I don't want to be there but that would be understand who's there. And in theory until you get in there you won't even know that, you have to get in there and start watching TikTok. You know I was never a Snapchat person either, I just wait for Instagram to copy their stuff and then I'll see if I like it. But again, understanding where the ads are being put there can really help you figure out does this conceptually make sense for my brand? Jon MacDonald : So I'm hearing from you if I could summarize two things, one is know who your target audience is and where they're at and what platform and then that's a good place. And then B is test it, right? You really don't have a choice you just need to test it. Throw some money at it and see what sticks if you think you have a good understanding of your consumers being on those channels. Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Like once you can advertise in there and decide that this is based on who's on it, who my demographic is or target market is go spend some money. And it could be that you're trying to open up a new audience, so it's you're testing it for that. Like if you want to sell to teenage kids TikTok may be a great place to start pushing into. Jon MacDonald : That's great. Okay. Ryan Garrow: I mean it's gradually older, but. Jon MacDonald : Yeah. So how do you test the traffic then? Ryan Garrow: Well, once you're on the platform and you've seen what it looks like, my lens that I look through is I want a light money on FIRE budget. And I have to be comfortable with it just not working, because we don't know. It's a new traffic source for you, it's a younger platform often, because we're talking about the shiny new ones that haven't matured like a... If you're not advertising on Google and Facebook I probably don't recommend that you start looking at the shiny new ones yet. Jon MacDonald : Right. Yeah, start with the basics. Ryan Garrow: Yeah, start with the basics. And then, okay great. It makes sense to do this so you need to have a budget in mind that if it goes horribly wrong and you lose it all and you get no results, it's not going to sink your business. If you're doing a hundred thousand a month in revenue you're not going to go onto a brand new channel for the first month probably and spend $50,000. It just doesn't line up, doesn't make sense unless there's some crazy reason that you believe in your core that that's there. Jon MacDonald : Maybe you like lighting money on fire. Ryan Garrow: True. Maybe you do. And I've got a great thing I can sell you, I'm sure, somewhere that's going to run 50,000 bucks. And so have that budget first. Jon MacDonald : Mm-hmm (affirmative). Ryan Garrow: Then you need to make sure that you can track the traffic. Just by going off on advertising there you have to be able to tag the ads to make sure that when they go to your website or wherever your call to action is, Google Analytics can see that traffic coming in and then tell you if they took the right action after they came to the site. And that's not always the easiest. If you have a profile, let's pick on Snapchat, and you're driving traffic from Snapchat already, does your ad set allow you to do UTM parameters in the URL when you're sending traffic over? Because you want to be able to differentiate organic traffic from that platform and the ad stuff or the traffic from that. Even a lot of companies don't even do that with Instagram and Facebook still. And just look at the different, is it coming from the organic Instagram interactions? Or is it actually coming from an ad that I placed? So be able to track it, and then watch it carefully as it's coming through. Either your marketing team or you as the business owner probably has a good gauge of traffic as it's coming from a new source pretty quickly. And so that's where that light money on fire you have to have some patience to let it do some of the stuff. If there's an algorithm that's helping run your ads for you. Facebook's does some great algorithms in their space, Pinterest has some going. You have to give it enough to do something as far as the budget's concerned. Going out with $5 is probably not going to give you a good test and you also have to give it some time. It's just that data collection to really see it churn and see, is it improving after seven days? Or is it staying the same? Or is it getting much worse? Because maybe you have to make some changes. Jon MacDonald : Now that's a great segue to my next question which is, how do you have the right expectations, right? So you're saying give it a week or so at least, but what are the right expectations I should be having? Obviously if I'm setting the money on fire is what you're suggesting here, my expectations are pretty low, right? Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Jon MacDonald : Maybe I'll stay warm. But other than that, I think it's interesting. I should expect to learn probably, right? Ryan Garrow: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon MacDonald : What else should I be expecting here? How do I set those right expectations? Ryan Garrow: Generally, and again I can't give the specifics for every potential business listening to this, but generally newer platforms are not going to generate profitable sales initially. And so what you're often looking for is new users, new sources of traffic, people that you're not reaching in other platforms. Because if you're already reaching everybody on Google and Facebook, why would you go try to target those same people if you're already capturing them at a rate or at a cost that makes sense? So you're trying to move generally up the funnel, and when you move up funnel or find a different source of traffic don't expect it out of the gate to be profitable. It can happen and nothing is impossible lightning can strike, and you can be profitable out of the gate. And if that happens continue dumping money on it and figuring out what's causing it to work and try to analyze why and how this happened. And so, have low expectations for it. You're trying to see trend lines going in the direction you need marketing budget to get to. And so if the first week it's you spent, I'm going to just use random numbers, if you spent a thousand dollars in the first week and it drove $200 in sales on your site, great. Week two, did that $2,000 generate more revenue than the previous week? Are we starting to see a trend line in the same direction? Or did that extra thousand dollars a week to generate $50 in sales? What is that conversion rate of the traffic? Be paying attention, do you have to go to the homepage on that? I mean, where are you driving? What's the call out that you have within the ad that you're running? Jon MacDonald : So what we're looking at here, Ryan, in reality is not even trying to break even, but you're paying to acquire a new customer that then you're looking for the lifetime value, right? And that's really where you're paying to acquire that new contact, that new customer. And then at that point you can continue to sell to them and continue to market to them and that's where you're going to make your money. Ryan Garrow: Yes. I mean often in these, right? It's the expectation is not out of the gate head profit. And if you have that I think your chances of success are higher. Your chances of having the patience necessary, you see a platform out. I think often I talk to business owners or marketing teams that all marketing needs to drive a profit, and if it's not driving profit why are we doing it? And I think that's very shortsighted of a lot of business owners and marketing teams and saying, "Look..." Billboards for the last hundred years have not had direct attribution to what's going on or the sales that are coming, but people still did it. And there was still value there that people knew about or saw. And so sometimes on these new platforms it may be a branding play. But can you start seeing the impact? Or if you're in the data enough? I have a really good feeling in the businesses I'm involved in when something is working. I might not see the data yet but I can say, "Ooh, this is definitely moving the needle for the brand. I don't necessarily know yet how or why, but I'm going to continue doing it." And then the opposite is true sometimes as well like, "This is just not working." And the marketing team may be like, "Well, how do you know?" I'm like, "I don't see the data telling me that yet, but my gut's telling me that." So I'll let me be. If the marketing team has faith I'll let them continue on for a little bit and say, "Okay, I'm going to trust your instincts on this and go against mine, but let's see what happens." You can't always run a business, I don't think, on gut you have to have data. And with a new platform that you have no experience in you have nothing to base your gut on to get the data. Jon MacDonald : Yeah, you have a gut feeling. Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald Founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. Jon MacDonald : Well let me ask you this then, what have you seen work? Looking at these expectations, when has it worked out well for you? Ryan Garrow: Well, new platforms like Instagram. I think the Instagram rollout and execution, thankfully it was coming from Facebook that already had a very solid marketing program built out at the time that they started doing ads on Instagram. And they did it at a small level saying, "Hey, we're going to let some people into the beta. We're going to start it here." But at the initially Instagram was not a driver of valuable traffic for marketing initially. I mean, we had some clients that started on Instagram initially and quickly and it was bad. It was pure branding, there was not people on Instagram that were used to seeing ads. So, I think you have to be aware of where you are on that adoption and on the maturity of a platform as well. Because it took Instagram a while to get people to understand that I'm going to see ads and they're going to be targeted to me and I'm going to take action on them. Innately at the beginning of the platform it was I'm scrolling through a feed, I'm laughing, I'm seeing my friends, and seeing pictures rather than words on Facebook. I mean initially I thought Instagram is stupid. I like reading and nobody's going to like that pictures and then I'm like, "Well, I'm..." Now I don't even get on Facebook and I'm on Instagram because I like images. Jon MacDonald : You and the rest of the world as it turns out, right? Ryan Garrow: Exactly. Jon MacDonald : Look, I buy a lot of stuff that I find in discover via advertising on Instagram. It's just the reality is I hear about products on Instagram and I end up... I mean I just bought one last night that popped up, it was the weirdest thing. It was a hose reel. And I was like- Ryan Garrow: Our lives are so exciting. Jon MacDonald : ... I know. But I'm like, "You know what? I just spent all weekend with one of those crank hose wheels that's without wheels on it and it's really cumbersome to move. And it's just a huge issue and I can never get the hose long enough. And here it's one that attaches to the wall and bolts in and then it pivots and you can pull on the hose and it auto retracts and it's a 90 foot hose. And I'm like, "This is awesome." Like it was a hundred dollars, a hundred and change, and I was like, "That is going to make my life so much better. For that a hundred dollars I am not going to have to mess around with this hoses ever again. I mean, I'm sold." Ryan Garrow: Oh, yeah. Jon MacDonald : And it was like a 10-second ad of this guy working this hose that's attached to the side of his house and I was like, "That needs to be me." Right? And if I saw a text ad I would have never bought that, never clicked on it. But I saw the video of the guy using it and I'm like, "Yeah, I just had that problem the other day." Now how I knew I had that problem that's a whole nother episode maybe. But I will say- Ryan Garrow: It's listening. Jon MacDonald : ... I know. I will say I was complaining about it quite a bit. But not on Facebook and not on Instagram, so I don't know. But look, I think that it can work well, right? What about what have you seen not work though? Right? You've tried a lot of these things, you've tested a lot how do you know when a test is going poorly? Ryan Garrow: Obviously being in the marketing world I want to know and see and experience a lot of things on my own, so I know what the platform is doing. And so the last one I tested personally was Pinterest last year, because Pinterest fits all the buckets for me. For Joyful Dirt there's plant people all over Pinterest. There's some big influencers there, there's a lot of interaction on plant pictures, there's a lot of interest on Pinterest for when to plant certain parts of my garden, what kind of light do I need for this plant? So all of it lined up I'm like, "Okay. Well, if my target market is women between the ages of 25 and 45, my wife is in that demographic and she loves Pinterest." I go to Pinterest for meals so I was like, "Okay, this is just logically checking all of the boxes for me." And by being an early adopter in a platform I know there can be some pretty significant advantages if you understand the algorithm early enough you can really step on the gas and your competition may never catch up. So I was pretty excited about Pinterest. Jon MacDonald : Mm-hmm (affirmative). Ryan Garrow: Called Pinterest up, I got a rep I was like, "Okay, I've got my budget. And for me at the size of Joyful Dirt last year my light money on FIRE budget was about $3,000." And then Pinterest was like, "Yeah, you got to go at 5,000." I was like, "No, I'm going to give you 3,000 and you can tell me based on your knowledge of the platform, your Pinterest. And so, you want me to be successful because I can spend more money with you, and I will spend a hundred thousand dollars a month with you if it's working and not a problem." Jon MacDonald : Right. Ryan Garrow: And they're like, "Okay." So I was like, "How long do you think we should run?" Like, "Well, we like to see a couple hundred dollars a day for 14 days." I'm like, "If you say so." I was like, "Why?". And then we went back and forth and I was like, "Look, I'm going to know pretty quickly if it's working. I see data, we're going to tag ads. I'm confident that if it's working I'm going to know quick. But I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and you help me and we'll design." So we went back and forth. 22 days in we had spent $2,700, tested different ads, we'd done some things, we'd seen a lot of impressions, we had a hundred dollars in sales. And I'm like, "This platform is not working for me. I am not seeing the traffic coming to the site that is engaging well with our content on the site." The images were getting clicked, I mean it's just I could tell that their platform... And this was November of 2020. And so people were on Pinterest, it was holiday season, it was impulse purchase can be... I mean we're only $15 so that's not a difficult impulse purchase for our target market. So my expectations were high and the reality was bad. I still believe Pinterest has a huge potential for a lot of brands. I personally just think it doesn't have the maturity as an ad platform yet. It's got the eyeballs, it's got the people but as people are searching and scrolling Pinterest they're not yet thinking the same way that they are on Instagram. So I don't know how that changes, I don't know how Instagram got us to think that but for whatever reason like you I will click and buy things on Instagram that I think are cool. And that it's easy. Jon MacDonald : Well I think it's different, Instagram you're open to discovering new things because you're just scrolling through a feed. Pinterest, do you have the search intent, right? In the sense that you're setting up, you're looking for inspiration around something specific. And I don't know that people are going to be on Pinterest looking for inspiration around fertilizer. Right? Ryan Garrow: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon MacDonald : And I think that might be the difference. Yes, they're related in terms of like, "Hey, I want to know what house plant I should get for this. Oh, the fertilizer that might work well." I could see that perhaps, but I don't think people go there with the buying intent, to buy off of there, right? They're more like, "Hey, I'm putting together a new living room decor and I'm going to pull some Pins and one of them is going to be the plant that I want to use." Right? Ryan Garrow: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon MacDonald : And so I think it's a different mode. And that's where I've heard from folks it doesn't work as well for advertising, but that's interesting. I mean, what I love about talking to about all this stuff is you have the real world examples, right? You've done it, and so for your own brands and for thousands of clients so it helps. So let me ask you this then, generally somebody comes to you at Logical position and they say, "You know I'm looking to get into this shiny new platform or source of traffic." How do you advise them? What do you tell them right upfront? I mean, you've given a lot of good advice already today, but I'm coming to you and I say, "Hey, there's a new platform I really want to do something with it. What do you think I should do?" Ryan Garrow: Yeah. 99% of the time? I will say, "No! Do not do that!" And it's not because the platform might not be good for them, it's often they haven't maxed out what they could or should be doing on Google and Facebook SEO. I look at most marketing like most people in a funnel. And so when there is search intent on Google they are trying to find that product to purchase and you're not in front of them. Why would you go off and try to convince somebody that's never heard of you, may not even be considering that product that you sell to come to your site and buy something? It doesn't make any sense. So for most of these shiny new platforms it's larger brands that are going to pave the way. They have the budget to go light on fire and spend a million dollars figuring it out. And the platform will mature and generally they go downstream. Like the first advertisers on Facebook and Instagram, which is our most recent memories of successful platforms, were large brands. They went on there, we want a brand, we want to be in front of people, the Coca-Colas, the AT&Ts of the world they did it. The platform matured and went downstream and allowed smaller advertisers to take advantage of all that algorithm, that learning that happened early on, and generally make it work for them. Most business owners at Logical Position that are bringing up Pinterest, for example, because it's still is a very buzzy platform now. Recently I IPOed last year, I bought some of that because I do believe in the platform. Business owners are always trying to find where can I get some new source of traffic that my competitors don't have so I don't have to compete on Google? Because Google maybe is not as profitable as it was five years ago for my brand. So oh, all I need to do is go spend my 5,000 on Pinterest and that's going to get me the cheap traffic because there's less competition. No, probably not. And most business owners have bad goals, and you and I talk to lots of business owners all day every day. And- Jon MacDonald : We have a great episode about that, setting bad goals. Ryan Garrow: ... Yeah. You have bad goals. And so, spend down at the bottom of the funnel until you have maxed out and you are breaking even on new customers. At least get to that point. And you're like, "Okay. From the search intent, let's move up a level and say the audience of my target market on Facebook and Instagram I need to max that out and make sure that I'm capturing all the people in the algorithm that has more history. And we can validate that it works well for a lot of other brands, there's proof there, take care of that piece." And then, "Hey, have you actually worked on raising your organic rankings on Google and Bing and Yahoo where people have the search intent that you could shoot or could be getting a higher percentage of that traffic at the bottom of the funnel?" For most brands, they should be doing some of that before they go try something way at the top of the funnel, trying to drive Pinterest traffic or TikTok or Snapchat. So most people don't even need to be looking at these, but they do. And so my message today is stop. Don't go waste your money. I didn't even follow my own advice at Joyful Dirt. And that is I'm not perfect, I will make mistakes but my job is to learn quickly and pivot. I also wanted to a degree understand Pinterest myself so I can be advising people that it's not there yet for most of you. Jon MacDonald : Great. Well, this has been really informative and really helpful. So I've learned a lot. If there's a whole new shiny object out there for driving traffic, you generally recommend letting others figure it out a little bit before you jump in. At least figure it out yourself if you were going to test it out and jump in, but always be testing it, right? Start with a small amount and then figure out from there. Set the right expectations. You're going to light money on fire and that's okay. You're going to try to otherwise go for the branding and get that new-to-file customer that you're looking for the lifetime value not just that initial sale, and then go from there. And generally unless you're a large brand, you might want to just avoid those shiny new platforms and figure it out a little bit. There's always going to be room there a little bit in, doesn't have to be as mature as Google, right? Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Jon MacDonald : So, this has been informative. I appreciate it as always getting schooled by Professor Garrow over here. And I look forward to learning more next time. Thanks for your time. Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Thank you, Jon. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com

Traffic sources can come from a number of places, but for most companies the largest source is Google. And things can get confusing when it comes to organic traffic versus paid ads.There are a number of things that can affect organic traffic and paid traffic in Google, and it can get confusing quickly. Today Ryan clears things up and tells you what does and doesn't work in Google, and focuses on what you can do with on-site SEO to improve your organic rankings. The site mentioned for checking your organic rankings: www.semrush.com TRANSCRIPT: Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow. Jon: Hey Ryan. So traffic to a website comes from many different channels and avenues, as we all know. And for most companies though, that largest source is always Google, the infamous Google traffic source. Now, from previous conversations with you, I know that Google shopping, spend and traffic can have a really positive impact on organic traffic in Google. Which always has blown my mind when I've heard that, because I heard from you recently too, that there are several types of search engine optimization that can have an impact on paid search. Not just on on-page. So this really confused me, because I thought Google kept everything separate. You can't spend money to grow rankings within Google. You can buy your spot with an ad, maybe do some stuff around shopping to get surface there. But I wasn't aware that those two really correlated with organic. So I'm looking forward to hearing about how search engine optimization can help your paid search. And I guess more simply, what are you talking about? Can you fill me in on this? Ryan: Yeah. So I don't want to confuse people kind of with the title or how we're putting this out there, but you can't spend money on paid search to have Google increase your rankings. That's been a myth disproved multiple times over, and Google has been very, I think, above board in how that works. But we do know that spending more on shopping, where people discover your product more, they will come back and buy through organic and direct, and those channels will start producing more revenue. But what people I think overlook are the fact that there are two types of SEO that people need to be aware of. And you should always as a business owner be investing or planning to invest in both SEO and paid search. I don't think one is greater than the other necessarily long-term, but you need to have both. And the type of SEO that people talk about or think about when they say SEO is what we've been doing generally for 20 years, building our rankings in authority with back links that are of high quality, putting content out on the internet that Google recognizes as valuable and they will give you more authority. You spend now on SEO with that's either your time or money, hiring people to do that. And then four to six months you see the results in increased traffic. That's generally what people think about with SEO. What they tend to overlook is the SEO that gets results actually within two weeks of you doing it. And that's the on-site SEO work. And so there's things you can do on your site to improve it that when Google re-indexes that you will move up in rankings. And this type of SEO will help organic traffic, but also have an oversized impact on paid search. And so because it dabbles both of those buckets I like to focus on that SEO before I even go to the SEO that people normally think about. And so on-site SEO at its simplest form is improving your category pages for Google. Jon: Okay. So you're talking content, better imagery, things of that sort? Ryan: Yeah. The content, the tags, the titles, things on that site that Google indexes and sees have a lot of benefits around your website and traffic generally. And so, if you do a search for your product, and so if you sell Nike shoes and that's the broad search that has lots of traffic, you will notice on Google most of the organic results are for categories of Nike shoes. It's not one specific Nike shoe like a shopping ad would be. Because Google, based on that search, knows that you don't know which specific model you're looking for or if you're looking for men's or women's. You're looking for Nike shoes. And so often the high volume terms are going to be category pages that Google is going to be indexing and sending traffic to until people get more and more specific with their searches. And that's how people generally move down a funnel, is I gradually do my research... Forgot, okay. Now I know I need to be searching for men's Nike shoes. Then I see that page. I'm like, "Oh, I need to be searching for men's Jordan Nike shoes." And then I'm like, "I really want to search for Jordan 4 men's shoes." And then that's when I'm getting to more and more specific and even adding color onto that, and people will do that through a search funnel. But the biggest advantage is saying, "All right, I have this category page and I need to have a description on that page about what's on that page that Google can see." And it doesn't necessarily matter for searchers because if I'm searching for Nike shoes and I'm on a page of Nike shoes, I can see they're Nike, I can see they're shoes. I don't need to read that text to see it. And so putting that on there though will have an outsized impact on quick increase in rankings. And so I like to start this by telling people to go to SEMrush, or some site like that to be able to see what is Google doing with your organic site, how are you average ranking on there? There's some wonderful reports on SEMrush. It's the one I use because it's probably simple enough that we to dive into very, very quick. I don't get super deep on a lot of my analysis. I get high-level and figure out some strategy and then move off of that. But SEMrush has some great things they've done from an organic perspective. They scraped these results pages, and they know generally where you're ranking. Obviously you rank in different parts of the country differently, and search intent and my previous search history is going to impact my organic results. But generally we know that hey, you're ranking here on this keyword. And SEMrush also brings in the average volume of searches a month. And so to start to see where your site could have a quick impact on this, you go to SEMrush, click on your organic rankings, sort it by volume. And you'll start seeing where your site is ranking. So if you're ranking on number 70 for a term with 10,000 searches, you're still getting zero traffic because you're stuck somewhere on page seven. But it'll also show you which page is ranking there. And when you see that you're like, "Oh, this page is ranking for that. And I'm seeing the term 'Nike shoes' goes to my Nike shoe page. That's great." You can click it actually in SEMrush and pull it up. Very simple. And you can see there's nothing on that page other than my title that says, "Nike shoes," in text that the search engine can scrape and understand. And so you take those category pages and you write that paragraph of text. You maybe make sure that your title is short and appropriate for that search. You make sure the H tags on the site are appropriate for that, and it's not including random other characters or doesn't have your brand first. It doesn't have sizes first maybe, if you're looking at shoes. That information on your site will raise the ranking within two weeks. And it really depends on your competitors on what they've done or what they're doing. But within two weeks, you can assume that you're going to have more value to Google. They're going to raise you up there. And that's by no means a bad thing when you're getting quick results on SEO. Jon: Yeah. So if you're looking at all of this and I'm hearing from you that okay, do onsite for sure. But how does this affect paid search? I understand that you can't buy your listings. You can buy optimization of these pages, which is search engine optimization, and that could help you. But how is this going to affect your paid search? To me, it doesn't feel like it would. So that's what was kind of shocking. So yeah. Tell me more about that. Ryan: For Google ads, if you're running text ads there's something that Google has called the Google quality score. That basically gives you three components. It says if you do well here, we're going to let you pay less than your competitors for the same search. So there's always a value having a higher quality score. It's one to 10 and there's three components. There's the expected click through rate. That's always relative to your competitors. And so somebody may come to me and think, "Well, I have a 7% click through rate. That's great. Right?" And I'm like, "No. There's no way of knowing that." It's based on your competitors and what are they getting. If Google knows that compared to your competitors you're getting a 7% click through rate on the same search term and they're getting a 10% click through rate, guess who Google wants coming up higher? Jon: Right. Just because it's more relevant to the searcher, and that's what they're understanding. And that's going to drive more money for Google in the end because more people will click on it. Ryan: Exactly. Jon: Okay. Yep. Ryan: Google makes decisions for themselves. They have shareholders, they need to make money, and that's fine. It's their platform. So the higher click-through rate is good. And then the ad relevance, so they're saying, "All right, does your ad have instances of the keyword that was searched in it?" We generally, horrible broad stroke, shoot for about three times in the ad, and the rest of the text in the ad doesn't have an oversized impact on the actual click rate. It's just you have it for Google, you're playing the game to get ranked higher. And then the other piece is the landing page and the quality of that landing page based on the search query. So Google can't see the actual image itself and decide is this image what they searched for. They can see the tags you put on the image, but the actual physical image AI is not actually determining is that actually what they searched for. And so that piece of content you're putting on your category or in Shopify, the collection page is telling Google what's on that page. And if you have that keyword in that content, Google is going to think this is a more relevant page to what they're searching and give you a benefit by lowering your cost per click through the increase of quality score. And it's a very easy thing to tie together and see the changes because quality score is reset every time somebody searches and every time your ad shows. And so if you make a change on the site to that description, today, and you see that I have a quality score of seven and you can break down the quality score components using columns in Google ads. And if you haven't done that before, you can get to all your keywords in the list in Google ads, that you're showing a text ad for, go to columns and ad quality score, and you can see, "All right, what's my click expect to click through rate, what's my ad relevance. And what's my landing page quality?" Jon: Okay. Ryan: And it'll tell you. You can either get below average, average above average. There's only three pieces to it. If you've got a lot of keywords, I like to push it down into an Excel pivot table. So I download it, put pivots on it- Jon: You love your pivot tables. Ryan: I love pivot tables. If you're running Google ads and you don't use pivot tables, you're wasting a lot of time. We still use Excel a lot in Google ads, but that can find really quick your below average landing page quality scores. And you can focus on those first, saying, "Okay, for whatever reason, this landing page, I'm getting dinged." And it's the largest component. It has about six of your 10 points associated with it. So moving from below average to above average can give you a significant boost and you're probably getting zero or very little traffic if you have a below average landing page score, Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, the podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. Jon: Optimizing your site increases your quality score, which then helps you get more visitors and makes your ads more effective because it's going to be ranked higher in that list. So if you're on the search results page and there's three items, the one that comes first has the higher quality score. It's not just how much you bid, or is it how much you bid and the quality score? What other factors might come in there? Ryan: It's both. Jon: Okay. Ryan: Yeah. Google keeps a little bit of a black box in play. But they say it's the ad rank, which generally we know is the bid and the quality score going into play. And so the highest on the list is not always bidding the most. You could actually pay less per click and being ranked higher, generally. I guess it's not always the case, but generally the higher up you are in rank on that first page of Google, the more you're the more clicks you're going to get. The higher your click-through rate. And you obviously want more of the traffic if you're bidding on the keyword. And so improving the site experience for a Google perspective, and we're not talking about... Unfortunately sometimes for Google is not always best for the user. But you got to get the traffic to be able to determine if it's good for the user. So get the traffic from Google by increasing what Google thinks of the site. And often it's a pretty simple implementation to get this text on there. It's not tremendously complicated. I don't think you need to have a master's degree in onsite SEO to be able to do this. I've done it on a lot of my own sites and it's just having something there is better than nothing. And using general logic is saying, "Okay, I'm writing this for the search engines, not necessarily the user. So I want to make sure I have the right density." It's got to read in normal English because people are still going to see it, even if they're not reading it. But just get it on the site. And most small sites that don't have this are going to be on Shopify, just from a numbers perspective. We know they have over a million people using it. And so on Shopify this is the Collections page. And when you're putting that description in on your collections, in fact, I was just talking to a company that I'm helping advise in this area, and the business owner had all the descriptions already put on there, but they weren't showing on their Shopify site. Well that's interesting. And so we've dug into it and it's the theme. The Shopify theme she's using doesn't pull those descriptions in by default. And so some themes do it and some don't. So if you put it in there and your theme doesn't have that when you go to the collection page, you need to get a developer to force that theme to show it. And if you have a choice, put it below the product results on that category or collection page. If you don't have a choice, just get it on there. It's going to be fine. I haven't seen a meaningful increase or decrease yet on putting that continent in there on conversion rate. Jon: I was going to say, is there a... Thinking about my conversion rate hat, of course, as always, is there a better consumer experience when you think about that? Is having that content higher on the page, lower on the page near the products, things of that sort. Does that seem to matter? Ryan: I haven't seen it, but obviously I haven't done as much broad research on that. That's probably something in your bucket of skillset to look at that. And all right, on these Shopify sites where it defaults to above the fold or above the product results, do we see a change one way or the other when we move it below? My gut tells me I want to see the products first and most of the time when I go to a site, I'm not reading a bunch of texts when I'm searching for a product. I want to go right to the products and see which product makes sense based on the images I'm seeing and the titles of those products. But there probably needs to be some testing for most sites around that. But I would say if you don't have it there above or below, you're probably not getting very much traffic on it from a paid perspective. So you just need to get it, even if it's above the products, because now you don't even have- Jon: Done is better than perfect. Ryan: Yes. That's most of my method of business based on my business partners. We're just going to do it and we're going to make choices as we go, because if we're not moving forward, we're not going to make any decisions at all. Jon: And this is slightly unrelated, but I would say that a lot of our success at The Good has been purely because we just keep making decisions. And we know we're going to make bad ones along the way, but we're doing the best we can. You just keep moving forward, just keep taking those steps. And that, really, I think has been a competitive advantage. Or at least over just business in general, it's really helped us. And I think that's, that's a challenge I see. We talk a lot about all of these different optimizations you can do, and just getting it done, taking that step is 99% better than a lot of your competition. Ryan: For sure. Jon: A lot of them just aren't even taking the steps that we're talking about. So even if you don't take all of them, just take one. Like go to SEMrush today and look at these organic results and have a list of these opportunities and then fix them. And you're going to be 99% ahead, being armed with that data and having a good understanding of what to do next. And even if you're not running ads, because then when do run ads, you'll be well ahead of the game. Ryan: Yeah, exactly. I think it's always better to take two steps forward and one step back than it is to try to plan the best step perfectly the first time out. I know I'm going to make mistakes in business. That's fine. I don't care. As long as it's not a crippling business killing decision, I'm willing to make all of those. Jon: Which 99 out of a hundred couldn't be. They're small enough decisions that you just got to do it. And if you go to SEMrush and you follow their instructions or the recommendations, is there a chance that that kills your business? Unlikely. It's very unlikely. So what do you have to lose? You just got to put the time in and do it. Ryan: Exactly. And that's for most business owners, it's going to come down to a time-money thing. If you've got more time than money, which smaller businesses generally do, you're going to do some of this work yourself and figured out the hard way. If you've got a little more money than that, you're going to hire an agency to go do some of that work for you. And that's what I advise a lot of businesses to start. I was like, "Look, if you've not done this before, and you're really worried about making a bad mistake, hire an agency to do very small amounts." So you can see the model that they're using. And I even tell them, Logical Position for a thousand bucks, we will put six category pages together for you and do the work from the titles, descriptions, all that stuff. And you can then see, "Oh, that's actually not that complicated I see it where you put it in there, I see how it got on there. I see the keywords you used. Great. I can go build out the next 15 of these to help those all increase and then by that time, I might have enough money to pay for more paid search because I'm seeing organic traffic increase." Jon: This is why I tell people all the time when I send them to Logical Position, it pays to work with a partner that is large enough that they have an SEO focused team and a paid team because these things work together so well. And they need to be talking to each other. You can't just go off and do these SEO things and then not have your paid team aware of it. Because as we found out today, that's going to affect your quality score. And so not only could you get some increase in organic rankings pretty quickly by doing some basic SEO stuff, if you're not doing that, but then you can also do some off-site stuff that builds for a longer term. You were saying about four to six months, roughly. And then on top of that, you can be affecting your quality score. So what I've learned today is, okay, you still can't pay Google to list higher organically. Okay, that's a bummer, but I get it. I assumed that was the case. And so second, what I've learned is I need to get a better quality score if I'm ever going to run ads, because you need to make sure that quality score is high because I'm not going to pay a thousand bucks a click. But if I have a better quality score, I might pay a little less than that. Ryan: Some of your settings, you may get close. Jon: Let's just bury that one and keep it buried. Jon likes to waste money with his spend. But that's what I get for not talking to my friends before doing that. So look, I think there's a lot of great things here around things that every business of any size could be doing to really get more out of their paid media spend. Ryan: And just business in general, best practices, laying a solid foundation to build on for a brand. I think it's an easily overlooked one for a lot of brands that can have house sized impact for that time. I mean, writing a description might take you five minutes if you're the business owner and that five minutes could produce massive dividends on both SEO and paid search. Jon: On that, we'll leave it. It sounds like folks have some tasks to do that are pretty simple. Just need to put the time in to make it happen. Or if they don't have the time to give you a call and have your team at Logical Position make it happen for them. Ryan: Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Let me know how I can help. Jon: All right, thank you there, Ryan. Appreciate it. Ryan: Thanks John. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

There was a recent story published by Timber.fm's Amanda Cupido about podcasting. Near the end of that piece, she interviews Gabe Bender, who is Google Podcast's product lead. Bender hints to some big changes coming to Google Podcasts involving search and discovery.  He didn't specifically say what is coming up, let's take a look between the lines of what he said. Google will make features that are basically the same to what they have with YouTube. This means podcasts are going to become extremely searchable when a Google Search user (your potential listener) types in their search terms. Like Google video search results or YouTube search results.  And, while you're using Google Podcasts to listen to your podcast, Google will be recommending more podcasts to you as you're listening.  It will be very much like the ‘next up' areas you see on YouTube. Because Google will start to show podcast results in search, this will impact all listeners that use Google for search. Not just listeners that use Google Podcasts to listen to their favorite podcasts. I don't doubt Google will start to incorporate autotranscriptions they are already doing behind the scenes, to include podcasts in search results.  This autotranscription option is already available in the Chrome browser, when you change your accessibility options  A popup screen shows the real time transcription of any audio played in your Chrome browser.  So Google will be taking search even deeper, based on what's said IN your podcast, not just what's written in your podcast descriptions, summaries and webpages. The SEO concept of “page rank” will likely be applied to podcasts. That means the more external sources that reference your podcast, like web page backlinks, videos and video interviews, other podcasts mentions and podcast interviews, blog mentions, blog interviews, guest blogging—the higher your podcast will appear in search results for the topic that is referenced. This is SEO 101 for Google. There will be personalization, like YouTube.  First, search results and the ‘next up' area in Google Podcasts will take into account anything Google knows about what you listen to.   Second, Google Podcasts will surround you with other people that listen to similar things so that it can suggest podcasts, or specific podcast episodes, to you that other people in your cluster listen to.  Think community. Podcast search engine optimization. If all this happens as Bender seems to suggest it will, a new kind of expertise will become important. Podcast search engine optimization. Just as SEO consultants today help companies get their web pages to appear organically higher in Google results, that's where we at Circle270Media Podcast Consultants will be continuing to help podcasters appear organically higher in Google's podcast search results.  The methods will be similar: get on other podcasts shows and web pages to mention your show, and other references and links I mentioned earlier.  Include searchable terms. Not just in episode summaries, but in the words you say during your show. And probably WHERE you mention those searchable terms within your episode. This could amount to a huge overall of what you do with each and every podcast episode. Or at least a refinement of what you do, if you are already implementing an SEO strategy to your podcast and podcast content. Let's talk about what podcasting can do for your business in the next 12-months. Whether you're B2C or B2B, we can create a content marketing strategy that will work for you. Connect with me if you would like to talk more about this. My calendar is available on my Circle270Media Podcast Consultants http://www.circle270media.com/ (business website) at circle270media.com Subscribe to my free daily Open The Mic Newsletter. It's chock full of podcast news you may have missed, as well as social media, sales, and audio...

Larger companies get most of the press and excitement with their 6 and 7 figure marketing budgets, but the majority of clients we work with are smaller. And smaller companies have to do things a little differently than the big guys. What impact does a small budget have on driving traffic? How should small budget brands compete online? https://www.logicalposition.com/ TRANSCRIPT: Jon: Hey Ryan. So we get companies contacting us all the time, that don't have large, six or seven figure marketing budgets, and many times, those large clients get most of the press and excitement, but the majority of companies that end up investing in marketing are going to be smaller, and smaller companies have to do things a little bit differently. I want to ask you today, what impact does a small budget have on driving traffic and how do those small budget brands compete online? They obviously want to compete, they have to compete in order to grow, and I want to know what's the magic, how do they make that happen? I'm excited to talk to you about this today, and I guess I'll start pretty broad, in e-commerce, is there such a thing as too small of a budget? Ryan: Across the board as a broad general rule, no, but if you're really going to do something with your budget, then yes. I mean, you have to have enough budget to start moving things around and collecting data. And I think that initial starting budget, if you're a smaller business, is going to be important to determine how quick you can grow, how aggressive you can be, where are you going to find that opportunity to take the next step in the digital marketing evolution of your business? And I challenged a lot of business owners in this space, as I'm talking to smaller ones all the time. Like for example, yes, you can start with $100 a month budget, it's your money, and you can market it however you want, invest it however you want. But if you're e-commerce, you're e-commerce so that you can sell everywhere and have your online store open all the time, even when you're sleeping. And so if that's the case, $100 is not going to get you very far in marketing across the internet. And so if you're going to do something that small, you really need to be hyper, hyper, hyper-focused, which does limit your potential and opportunities to find little pockets where you can really dominate or win. And so I would generally say less than $1,000, there may be better places for your money than trying to drive traffic with it online. Jon: Interesting. I was going to ask, and maybe you've just answered, but I'd love your take on this too, if I only have $1,000 a month to spend, is it worth doing it or am I just throwing my money away, when we're talking about driving traffic through traditional paid media sense? Ryan: That's a difficult one because most business owners that are coming up with this $1,000 and you're smaller, that's a meaningful number to them probably, but they probably don't have the expertise to really make that $1,000 do as much as it can. And so you probably have to bring an expert in, and that costs money as well, because most people in the digital marketing world are not working for free. And so you have to figure in an expert generally, and I'll probably come back to that point, but for most businesses, I would say that you have to look at it through a lens of time and money. Jon: Okay. Ryan: Anybody can learn how to do digital marketing. You have to be able to study, you have to be able to go in and make some mistakes and learn it, but anybody can figure it out. It's definitely not the most complex thing you could be learning. But if you have more time, then you should be doing some of that work yourself and learning it and getting it to it like, "Can I get some basic things done?" If you have more money, than you need to hire people and your budget should probably be a little bit higher to be able to invest and push traffic. Jon: So we should be saying, when we say budget for today's conversation, should I be thinking about it as budget including the expert or budget just in what you would spend to drive traffic in these channels? Ryan: I think businesses should be looking at it together, but I think most business owners are thinking about, "Okay, I can spend $1,000 to drive traffic. Let's go put that on Google and make it work." I do believe though, the Googles in particular and I'll focus on Google for right now, but Google in particular has done some pretty cool things helping small e-commerce businesses get going. If you've got a feed and you're on a smaller platform, like if you're on Shopify, it's very, very simple to get up and running on Shopify and get your products going to Google. And then there's what Google is calling smart shopping campaigns that allow a business really to say, "Google, here's how much I'm willing to spend per day, and here's the goal I need to get out of it." It does not take an expert to get that up and running. And in fact, I tell companies, do not pay an agency to manage smart shopping campaigns because there's nothing to do. It can be a small piece of an overall structure, in fact, we at Logical Position do use smart campaigns in a small piece of a campaign occasionally, but we have to do a lot more work in the reporting and strategy on that type of client, to be able to justify charging management fees on smart campaigns. Jon: Okay. That makes sense. Ryan: Small budgets use more automation, I think, is the name of the game. Use things that are set up to make sure you don't just waste a bunch of money, and I think that's where a lot of small businesses, what keeps them from starting often is that fear of, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to go waste money trying to drive traffic because I don't know how to do it right." Doing some research, I think, can help keep that option to a minimum, that is just going to go out there and be a big waste. Jon: Let's say a company hasn't driven traffic on Google. How do they decide what that starting budget should be? Ryan: This generally comes down to, what's the business doing as a whole? If you're doing $100,000 a month on your website and you haven't been spending money, you probably have a larger amount you could start with then if I'm only doing $1,000 a month in sales. It's a threshold there of starting to look at it, but I generally say, in e-commerce, at least $1,000 to start with on Google. And then start thinking about it through a lens of, "I know I'm not going to be starting out at the gate if I'm doing it myself in a perfect world scenario." So there's going to be some learnings. I look at it through the lens of what's my light money on fire threshold, to let me get things going, and I've done this with new platforms on some of my brands. Nobody knew what they were doing yet, across the entire platform. Pinterest is being one of them. A couple years ago, it was just wide open. Nobody knew what it was going to do. I think they're getting some more structure in place and it's driving better traffic, but I went onto it saying, "Look, I don't know what it's going to do." My light money threshold at that point was, I think about 2,500 bucks, so I talked to Pinterest like, "Look, we can go a thousand a day for two and a half days if you want, or we can go $100 a day for about a month. I'm okay with either, whichever one you think is going to work better for me." And that was my light money on fire threshold, that I wasn't going to be mad, I was just like, "Yeah, that did suck, but I got some learnings." Pinterest didn't work for us at that point in time on that business, we'll continue to be revisiting it. But all that to come back around to it can't be a budget that if it doesn't work, it's going to tank your business, because there's a lot of unknowns if you haven't been on Google before, to how is your website going to convert, what traffic is going to work best for you. Because you'll take the same product with the same price for the same search query, going to two different sites and it's going to convert and there's going to be a different return on ad spend. And so with all of that unknown, anybody that tells you they know exactly what you're going to get by putting $1,000 out there, they're lying to you because there's no data to tell you one way or another. There's no way to know. Jon: Okay. So don't bet the farm. Ryan: Don't bet the farm, but it should probably make you a little uncomfortable. Jon: Okay. Ryan: When I'm looking at business decisions and I want to grow, and you know me, I tend to be on the aggressive side of things, I want what I'm risking to make me a little uncomfortable. I don't want it to be an easy decision or an easy thing to be like, "Okay." Could I have wasted $100 to test Pinterest? Yeah, but that was not an uncomfortable thing. 2,500 from me was a little bit uncomfortable. Partners and I talked through it and we're like, "Okay, if it returns nothing, that's not going to be great. But again, we're not going to lose the business because of a mistake if it doesn't work." So a little bit of uncomfort, I think, is good. Jon: Okay. So then let's say I have a thousand bucks, where do I start, Facebook, Google, something else? Ryan: I think generally it's going to come down to those two for most businesses to start off with. I think other platforms generally are younger and they are less proven and therefore generally higher up in the funnel. Like if you're going to jump right on TikTok or Snapchat for marketing and you haven't done Google or Facebook, I think it's going to be difficult to know if that platform is actually working for you, if you haven't gone to more advanced ones yet. And so when I talk to a business owner or a marketing team that's looking at deciding between both of those two to start, the easy way of looking at it as if there is existing market for your product, I generally say go to Google because you're going to capture people towards the bottom of the funnel as they're looking for your product. If you're creating a brand new category, there's not a lot of people searching for it on Google and so you're going to have to figure out how to create that and find the right audiences on Facebook and convince people to start trying you to build that search volume. So for example, last week I talked to a guy, his company makes edible bubbles and I'm like, "I have never heard of this before.'. Jon: Isn't that bubblegum? Ryan: Yeah. This is for kids going out and playing and blowing bubbles, he makes edible bubbles. And I had no idea my kids would want that until he sent me some samples and they're actually pretty cool. Jon: That's awesome. Ryan: But they actually make them for bars. Someday when we get to go back to a bar, they make these bubbles you can blow on top of a drink, and a lot of times they infuse them with smoke for presentations. Jon: That's cool. That's a great idea. Ryan: So really cool stuff, but there's not a target market yet that they know to search for that. So I, before last week, never would have even considered searching for the term edible bubble or edible bubble for a drink or bar drink presentation bubbles, that's just not even there. And so for that type of business, you've got to go on Facebook, you've got to target bartenders, you've got to target moms with kids, with the kid bubble one. And there's some really cool targeting on Facebook, and if you've got a good visual and some good offers, I think Facebook can work really well. For other businesses, Facebook generally will hit top of funnel like that, and so the return, again, generalizations, is going to be a little bit lower than if you had run some bottom funnel, Google stuff to figure out where people are searching for your product and what are your advantages and all of that. Jon: So we're talking the difference between perhaps intent versus awareness? Ryan: Yes. Like if there's already people searching with intent for your products or services, I would go capture them first. It's going to be a little more expensive per click, possibly, there's generally going to be more competition, but it's an existing demand that you're tapping into. You've just got to figure out how you're going to compete there. If you're creating a brand new product that nobody's ever searched before, you probably can't even spend your money on Google on search terms, you're going to be on broad match keywords on Google wasting money. Jon: Right. No, that definitely makes sense, then Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, the podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. Ryan Garrow, of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization and website design services, to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. Jon: What other things tactics do the smaller budgets need to be aware of? What else would you consider? Ryan: Some of the tactics I talked about when looking at smaller budgets on advertising and driving traffic, don't even have to do with the tactics to drive the traffic. A lot of small businesses, even over the last year with COVID and a lot of brick and mortar moving into online, a lot of them haven't thought about what is my advantage online? If you are selling the exact same product at the exact same price, and you have no discernible advantage over a competitor, what are you doing? Try to figure out, before you go spend money, why somebody is going to buy from you. And you can't really tell me that your advantage online is going to be because you have really smart salespeople inside, or you have a lot of knowledge in your industry, because that's not going to come across in Google shopping. Nobody cares how much you know, they don't know how much people know when they're just going to a website and transacting. And so you've got to figure out what that advantage looks like first. Why should somebody buy from you versus a competitor, if they've never met either one of you and all they're doing is seeing your website because the internet is the great equalizer and small companies can't compete with big companies, if they're better at certain things. Better at converting, if all of your competitors are stuck on really ancient Yahoo stores that are 20 years old, and you're going to come in there with a Shopify or a big commerce site, that's really easy to convert on. That can be a significant advantage, even if everything else is the same. Jon: It's funny, you say that, a friend and I were just talking about that and we were laughing, saying a great business model would be to just go to find a index of all the remaining Yahoo stores making over a million dollars a year and just replicate that on a better platform, with better usability and you would print money. Ryan: Why are we doing a podcast? Let's go get a list and start making business. But it's true. I think we still have 50 clients on Yahoo and some of them are, I think, are on the RTML, that really old coding platform, that if you're not 50, you've never even heard of that. And I only heard about it because we have clients on it. Jon: Yeah. Look, I mean, I think a lot of these stores take the approach of, if it's not broke, don't fix it. And they're still printing money, so why change it? I think they're going to ride that till the end. So somebody will come along and end them by doing something better, but you got to find it first. Talking about that is one of the things that the platform could be, one thing that these smaller companies are doing wrong. But thinking about smaller budgets, if they're sending traffic to their site, what do most of these smaller budgets do wrong? What mistakes are they making with their small budgets? Ryan: I think a lot of them, if they do have some advantages and they do have a reason to market, a lot of them make the mistake of not being aggressive enough. I think I've mentioned this probably multiple times, but a lot of small business owners really watch their P and L and all line items going in and out of the business, which is good. But when they come to Google ads, it can quickly become a very large line item and they want to focus on, hey, I need to increase profits, so we need to start cutting this budget and controlling Google, because if I control something in the middle of my P and L, the bottom gets bigger. And unfortunately, something like a Google ads or Facebook ad, is generally driving top line number that does translate into bottom line number, but if you eliminate what's driving that top line, it can really have an opposite effect of what you're intending. And so it's really a paradigm shift. If you're looking at your budget like a line item, you start looking at it as you're investing in getting new customers and then what are you going to do with it? Don't see Google ads or Facebook ads as a cost necessarily, unless you're purposely losing money and you have to control that piece, but that's a whole different story and most small businesses are not doing that, so I won't dive into that necessarily now. But then trying to figure out, okay, once you've got a customer, what are you going to do with them? Because Google and Facebook, they're a marketing channel and you're going to have to give some or all of that initial order margin to the platform to get the customer. And that allows you to compete and capture more market share, but if that margin is going to the platform, it's not going to you, the business owner or marketing teams future budgets. So you've got to do lifetime value, figure out what you're going to be doing to bring them back. So many times small businesses are thinking about, I've got to get customers, I've got to get customers, so I've got a market. Okay, good, you do have to do that, but you can't keep trying to do that without focusing on the customers you do have. What happened to the customers from last month, what are you doing with them? If you're not emailing them, if you don't have a loyalty program, you're essentially wasting all of this effort that you're doing to successfully bring new customers into the brand. And so that's where I see most struggles, because then they'll just be like, "Oh, Google was terrible. It took all my profit and then I had nothing." Jon: Well, we've talked about this several times on the show, of understanding that it's okay on that first sale to break even, and your customer acquisition costs might be high on that first sale, but you have to have a longer term game plan in place. Is it a subscription type product that you're going to use, if you have a consumable, is it something where you're able to continue to market to them afterwards, but you're doing it in a way that is going to continue to drive down the customer acquisition, but up the lifetime value over time? That definitely makes a lot of sense. So, okay, we've heard a lot of disadvantages to being small here today, but there's still a fact that most brands are going to be in that small budget. What are the advantages, what's the positive side, the glass half full here, what's the advantages to being smaller advertisers? Ryan: Yep. There's no secret that having more money can have more advantages in advertising, I mean, that's just basic marketing 101. But what I've seen through a lot of small businesses and having my own that compete against much larger brands, is you inherently have more flexibility. In fact, we were just laughing before we got on and started recording, about politics in larger companies, having all these things that you have to wade through to get things approved, or to do things, where you can't move quickly into new markets, because there's all these layers of approval. Small businesses, hopefully don't have that problem. And it's like, if you see an opportunity, you can just go do it and there's not a lot of people that have to sign off on. It's like, no, I'm going to go capitalize on that change in the market or that area that hasn't been attacked by larger brands. And so that can be a huge advantage, but I still think a lot of small businesses don't think of it that way and look at it, hey, I can afford to make mistakes and learn from them very, very quickly and pivot and adjust. And I can test new products on my site, I can test things on my site as a small business that I don't have to go to a web dev team. I can make quick little changes on my Shopify site to say, "Hey, let's see if this works or not. Let's run it for a week and if it doesn't work, flip it back." So much opportunity to test and so few small businesses actually taking advantage of that. I mean, I can't say the number of times that we've tested small things, even on Joyful Dirt, as we're moving very quickly and say, "Hey, let's test this or test this." That many of them work. I mean, we've got a really smart team that can come up with really cool ideas to test. For example, this month we did a black history month label, so we just, "Hey, let's just do a small run of a few hundred labels and see what happens." And larger brands can't in mid January, decide to do a label run for a specific event and try to get it to work. We're like, "Yeah, let's just see if it works. And so based on the success, we're going to do this multiple times throughout the year for different events and just have custom labels. Jon: That's a great idea. Ryan: Because we can. Jon: I believe this is called the innovator's dilemma. So when you're at a large corporation, you as an individual can come to the table and say, "I want to do custom labels for this month, starting in two weeks." But you have so much red tape to get through that you can actually affect the change that you want to affect. So that's a definite competitive advantage for a small brand, I can completely understand how that would work in their advantage. So that's great. Is there any other advantages that we should be thinking about? Ryan: I think being smaller also forces you to pay attention to details, that larger brands don't have to. We have a lot of large clients that focus on such macro level numbers, 35,000 foot layer of saying, "Hey, what's our data? How much should we spend? What is this?" And there's not the deep dive on, "Okay, how can I squeeze this little bit more out of this product?" It exists on a few large brands, but generally it doesn't matter to them on the small little minutia. And I think smaller brands, really have an opportunity because there is less data to sift through, they can quickly see where markets may be changing or evolving, that larger brands aren't going to catch till later. So you have to be willing to be aggressive and move quick when you see them, but you might see, even on Amazon, this is a massive thing with one of our clients where there's a couple really big players in vital wheat gluten, for example, on Amazon and the volume of sales on baking products on Amazon, is astronomical, I had zero clue until we started working with this company. Jon: Yeah, would not have suggested or thought that. Ryan: No, I'm like, "Vital wheat gluten," that's a very specific product for a very specific niche of people. Jon: Baking in general on Amazon, you would think there's no way. Ryan: It blew me away. But because the volume is so high, everybody selling FBA can only send in, because vital wheat gluten comes in, it's heavy and it comes in five pound bags or two pound bags, so it takes up enough shelf volume that you can't get 50,000 units in there at a time. And because you're usually co-packing, you're getting pallets delivered, and once it's down, you can't all of a sudden like, I'm just going to send 10 units today to take care of the sales. It's massive in and out of stocks all over the place. And so smaller advertisers could leverage that by saying, "All right, if I have my own fulfillment house, I can always keep a seller central product in stock on Amazon. Even if my FBA stock goes out," and you can play a lot of games and figure out what part of the country is or is not working. But that type of flexibility as a small brand, can pay huge dividends just by being aware of some of the struggles of your larger competitors. If your larger competitor has a disgusting amount of aging inventory, they've got problems probably floating the next purchase. Whereas you may not have that problem as a small advertiser, and you can even use drop shipping through one of the partners that could help you. So I think small companies have some significant advantages and I enjoy that part because it is more exciting to grow a smaller brand to take on a larger one. I do it myself, I add to this one. Jon: You'd love to take down the big guy. Ryan: IT do. Jon: Who doesn't? I mean, if you're in business, you're a competitor, just the way it is. Ryan: Oh yeah. And I love competing. And so it's fun as smaller business, but it does take a mentality that you are going to scrap and do everything you can to make it work. And when you come in with that mentality, I think it's very difficult to fail on Google ads or Facebook ads, because you're not accepting that it's not going to work. You see the data, you know people are spending money in your industry and they may not all be making money, but there's consistent effort there. And you just have to get to the point where you can wade through it and make it work because it will. Jon: Well on that note, any parting thoughts on this? I feel like I'm sufficiently equipped if I were a small brand advertising. You're giving me some renewed hope, that's for sure, that my $1,000 per day or per month, excuse me, would actually go someplace. Ryan: Yeah. The only thing I will say is that I do believe quality help will go a long way. You can be a small advertiser as a business owner and spend $1,000 if you learn and you're quick enough at adjusting and pivoting and looking at data, you're going to learn how to do it, but it might take you six, seven, eight months to get the point where you could have started at that point with an expert. And so it's at least worth interviewing a couple of agencies to see what it is they could do to help you if you bring experts on to manage that $1,000 spend. Yes, you're going to have to pay an agency extra cost, but can they get you moving towards your target at a quicker rate? I think often they can, but even if you're going to do it yourself, at least talk to somebody else that really knows what they're doing to see what the advantages could be. Jon: Well, and it could be huge too, if you get a higher return on that ad spend, that margin difference, they pay for themselves. It's like working with a great CPA, they're going to get you a bigger refund than if you did it yourself. So that covers their fees and hopefully more. Ryan: For sure. Jon: All right Ryan, well, thank you for your expertise on this. I know you guys work with thousands. Every time I talk to you, it's another thousand. So I'll just say thousands and thousands of clients at Logical Position, and a lot of those are smaller ones and you guys have learned a lot from that. So thank you for sharing all of the expertise you've learned. Ryan: Oh yeah. Thank you, Jon. I appreciate the time. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert, with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

On this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Drs. Julie Sias and Jenna Kantor to the show for our annual end of the year review. I also wanted to welcome Dr. Alexis Lancaster in spirit. All three of these incredible women are the team that makes this podcast happen every week and I am eternally grateful for all of their hard work, support and love throughout the year.  In this episode, we discuss: The ups and downs of 2020 for each of us How to deal with fraudulent Google reviews  Being a brand new mom and a private practice PT owner  What we are hoping for in 2021 And so much more!  Resources:  Jenna Kantor Physical Therapy  Newport Coast Physical Therapy Renegade Movement and Performance  Karen Litzy Physical Therapy A big thank you to Net Health for sponsoring this episode! Learn more about the Redoc Patient Portal here.  More about Julie, Jenna and Lex I received my Doctor of Physical Therapy and Bachelor of Science in Biology degrees from Chapman University. I became a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning Association to better serve my wellness clients. I am also a member of the American Physical Therapy Association and Private Practice Section. In addition to working with my physical therapy and wellness clients, I provide consultation services for children and adults with neurological conditions. In my free time, I produce the podcast Healthy, Wealthy and Smart which features leaders in physical therapy, wellness and entrepreneurship. Fun Fact: I love the sun! I am thankful there are 277 days of sunshine a year in Newport Beach! From hiking Crystal Cove, sailing in the ocean, scuba diving the seas and kayaking through the back bay — there is so much to take advantage of! As your Doctor of Physical Therapy, my goal is to help you maintain your active lifestyle because working with you inspires me daily to get out of my comfort zone and try new things here in Newport Beach. Jenna Kantor, PT, DPT, is a bubbly and energetic woman who was born and raised in Petaluma, California. She trained intensively at Petaluma City Ballet, Houston Ballet, BalletMet, Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, Regional Dance America Choreography Conference, and Regional Dance America. Over time, the injuries added up and she knew she would not have a lasting career in ballet. This lead her to the University of California, Irvine, where she discovered a passion for musical theatre.  Upon graduating, Jenna Kantor worked professionally in musical theatre for 15+ years then found herself ready to move onto a new chapter in her life. Jenna was teaching ballet to kids ages 4 through 17 and group fitness classes to adults. Through teaching, she discovered she had a deep interest in the human body and a desire to help others on a higher level. She was fortunate to get accepted into the DPT program at Columbia. During her education, she co-founded Fairytale Physical Therapy which brings musical theatre shows to children in hospitals, started a podcast titled Physiotherapy Performance Perspectives, was the NYPTA SSIG Advocacy Chair, was part of the NYC Conclave 2017 committee, and co-founded the NYPTA SSIG. In 2017, Jenna was the NYPTA Public Policy Student Liaison, a candidate for the APTASA Communications Chair, won the APTA PPS Business Concept Contest, and made the top 40 List for an Up and Coming Physical Therapy with UpDoc Media. Lex is originally from the Finger Lakes Region of New York. She graduated from Utica College with her Bachelor’s in Biology and her Doctorate in Physical Therapy. She also earned a graduate certificate in Healthcare Advocacy and Navigation. She is very passionate about empowering the people she works with and is driven by their success. Lex has worked with people of all ages and her passion lies within the treatment of performance athletes and pregnant and postpartum women. For Lex, the most important part of physical therapy care is ensuring that every person who sees her is given one-on-one attention, a personalized treatment program, and a plethora of resources to ensure ongoing results. Outside of Renegade Movement and Performance, Lex practices in pediatrics, owns and operates her website design company, and is an Adjunct Professor at Utica College. She enjoys hiking and dogs of all kinds. Read the Full Transcript below: Speaker 1 (00:01): Hello, welcome back to the podcast, everyone today, we're having an end of the year wrap up. We've done this every year, almost every year since the start of the podcast. And I'm joined by Dr. Jenna Kanter, Dr. Julie CEUs, and perhaps Dr. Lex Lancaster. She is currently driving through parts unknown in Vermont, so she can hop in. She can, if not, maybe we'll get her in at at at another time. But I just want to highlight the people who make this podcast happen because it is certainly not my, myself and myself alone. It's just impossible. So Jenna has been doing interviews for a couple of years now, and Julie has kind of been on board since the beginning almost I would say close to the beginning. Right. Speaker 2 (00:54): I think it's been five years. Yeah, Speaker 1 (00:56): Yeah, yeah. So she's been a part of the podcast behind the scenes doing the show notes beautifully. And then Lex Lancaster has been on board for the past year doing, helping with graphics. So I just it's for me, this is a big thank you to, to you ladies for being so wonderful and generous with your time and your gifts. So thank you so much. And let's start. So what I wanted to kind of start with is kind of talking about our highs and lows of 2020. So if you're listening, I mean, we, we all know that 2020 has been an exceptionally difficult year for almost everyone started out okay. For most people and then really started to go downhill pretty quick. So let's talk about, and then hot, like even through this, I think it's also important to note that good things have happened as well. So Jenna, why don't we start with you? Why don't you let the listeners know kind of, what's been your high and what's kind of been your low of 2020. Speaker 2 (02:08): Hi mom. I just want to first give a shout out to my mom, like I'm on a TV show. So I just want to say hi mom, I love you so much. Thank you for giving birth to me that one beautiful morning or afternoon. I'm not sure. Ooh, 20, 20, well, the low, I would say where, Oh, I want to talk about this because I know there are other practice owners who have dealt with it and I was a I was bullied and harassed online. And and, and this was for a group in which I do musical theater readings. It's a great group. I it's, that I've run into where I get a lot of patients, but the majority of people I know on there, I just know through musical theater and just performing, doing readings. And there were people who did not like how I ran the group. Speaker 2 (02:59): It's just like any place. There are people who don't like what you do. So they go off and do their own thing. And I eventually made a decision to block them out of my life because I didn't want this small section of people to still be present and judging me. I mean, I don't know about you. I like to feel the love in the room, not the hate. So I did that as a gift for myself finally, which did was very good. I was dealing with a lot of anxiety, just even knowing that they were around. Unfortunately, I wasn't strong enough to just handle it. I wish I could say it was, but I was like, Nope, I'm really unhappy right now what their presence. And they decided to go after my business and write false Google reviews. I was fine with the public social media posts on Facebook and everything. Speaker 2 (03:42): You know, didn't saying mine, you know, denouncing me. I was fine with that. I knew they were going to do that. That's why I kept them in my life for so long because I was so fearful of the public humiliation they would be aiming for. But then I was very okay with it. By the time I did it, you know, you come to that piece. But to me, the lowest part was having instilled, dealing with it, dealing with these false Google reviews where they've never been paid patients ever, ever. So I think that was, was a big, low yeah. And, and knowing that we're all going through it. And it's a hard year for so many of us. I felt like I had less people I could talk to about it because everyone's dealing with so much crap right now. So I would say that was like a very, very low point for me. And I know people have had so much worse. So I do want to acknowledge that this is so minuscule. I'm lucky my family is healthy. My, my friends have been healthy during this very, very lucky, but that was my own little piece of hew, toothpicks as positives go. Speaker 1 (04:54): I'm trying not to swear. I'm doing a good job Speaker 2 (04:59): This America way to network as, and do positive right back to back. Speaker 1 (05:04): Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Oh, right. Yeah. Speaker 2 (05:07): Cause it is I would say is, I'm not going to talk. I'm going to focus on business since I was already talking about business. So I'll keep it on that. Was the different branch. My practice took every business in physical therapy has been dealt with some sort of crap if they haven't, I'm so happy for you. But a lot of us have really dealt with some sort of big shift and, and stress and strain and sleepless nights, especially at the beginning of this and some States it's pretty new. It's new for the practices. For me during the shift, I was focusing on expanding more in-person and then of course I started doing more tele-health and now I'm a hundred percent tele-health yes. I refer out if they're not appropriate for tele-health yes. I'm a hundred percent. I don't see myself going because one, I love it. Speaker 2 (06:00): And that's the first thing to the performers I work with. Most of them can't afford that in person. Most of them can't, most of them don't have health insurance. And then the last thing with my practice I've developed these wellness programs. Yes. They're injury prevention, but honestly, no performers are Googling injury prevention. They're like my ankle hurts. I can't do boots. What's up. So, but with these wellness programs, it's not physical therapy. It's the many humans out there in the singing, acting, dancing world where they get the help they need from a PT. And then they're discharged when they're, you know, quote healthy, but their body's still not functioning to where they ultimately want it to be. That's where I'm coming in. And it's great. It's this, these group programs it's really supportive. I definitely have my own jokes in there. I'm a hundred percent myself. Speaker 2 (06:55): If anybody knows me, you're like, got it. And it's, and it's just a joy. The bonding, the, the growth everyone gets physically to get to where they are is just, it's, it's been the such a rewarding discovery and, and a lot of work to make it happen, but well worth it because just I'm happy, man. Like when you really get to do what you really want to do without even knowing that's what you really wanted to do all along until you actually get to do it. That's what I'm living right now. So yeah, I'm pretty happy about that. So that's my positive and I'll take it to the bank. Speaker 1 (07:31): Great. Now let's, let's take a step back to not to harp on the negative, but because I think this might help other people listening. What did you do when you were like, Oh my gosh, I'm getting these Google reviews for my business. I've never seen them. What did you do to mitigate that situation or if it's even possible Speaker 2 (07:55): Crying and vomiting? Let's see. What was the next? So I, I vomit when I get really stressed out. That's a new discovery in 2020. I don't recommend it. It doesn't make you slimmer just saying. So I do not promote that. Okay. [inaudible] so I already have a lawyer, but I even, I contacted Erin Jackson who is a great human my lawyer Stephanie wrote in, but I just, you know, who do I contact first? Because I knew this was now in some sort of it's the physical therapy where we have HIPAA. We have so many things legally we need to be careful about. And as much as I say, swear words, and I joke like there's liability for these things. Like, but this was just how do I handle this? Because Google reviews specifically, which I was fearful, I pre reported these people before it happened, because there was no way to block them on Google. Speaker 2 (08:52): Not because they were going to, I was going a little bit in the Cuckoo's nest. Like, how do I keep preventing? Cause they're doing all this stuff fine on social media, but just in case let's pre protect, there was no way to, well, getting Google reviews is difficult. So here's some things that you can do by hand that are suggested they, you can have friends report it. And if you have friends report it, make sure you have a written out exactly where they need to click step by step, what they need to do. And, and boom bought a bang. Another thing that I did is I contacted the patients. I felt comfortable contacting, cause that is a thing I'm saying, this is going on. I've never gotten a review from you. Would you please write a review so I can get some actual from actual patients on here. Speaker 2 (09:38): So I did outreach to those individuals as well. Which was great in that sense. I mean talk about like, you know, unexpected, positive. So that was good. Then with my lawyer, which we're still in the process of doing so a little bit slower in the holidays. It also, I'm just personally, not in any rush because I got so stressed out about it that just like, I'm okay, I've got, I've gotten zero patients from Google reviews, so it's not the end of the world. But she's writing out in legal jargon, what I'm going to be now sending to Google to ask it to be, and it's according to their policies, why these are inappropriate reviews. And so that is what our next step is. I have not met with anyone else yet, but because of enlight of how bored people are, are during the pandemic. Speaker 2 (10:29): And they're putting a lot more emphasis on these negative things, no matter how small or how big they I am in the process of being connected with the lawyer, through my lawyer to learn when I need to do a cease and desist. And when I, when I know it's actually necessary, I still am getting a little bit harassed by them, but I I'm. I'm okay. I'm good right now. But I do want to know, and that I look forward to learning, to be able to share with people like, Hey, here is when you hire the lawyer officially, because that is a good question. Lawyers should get paid for what they're doing, but it's just knowing when you bring that in, which is a very big deal that I think should just be common knowledge. And then where we were able to get one review, Oh, there's also a thing after you submit in there's you can write a post about it on Twitter and you tag people with Google. Speaker 2 (11:28): I forget who you tag. You guys will have to Google it. You'll have to Google the Google thing, but it you can do, I didn't get that far. I also was so hesitant to do that because then it would take it into the physical therapy world at large of, Oh, what's the going down with Jenna. I'm like, Oh my God, like it's literally children who are upset about musical theater. Readings has nothing to do. Like, no. Okay. And then my husband was helpful. He was able to get one of the reviews down by reporting the person's profile. Speaker 2 (12:04): And that was very good. So that was one there's still two that have written reviews. There are three with just one star reviews without writing anything. And none of them have been patients. And we believe that they created two false profiles to put in two of those one star reviews. Interesting. but at the end of the day, they're not in my Rolodex of patients, so they're not patients. So yeah, it's been a bit of a journey dealing with it, but that's a little bit of what I did. There's not one way to do it. There are suggestions on responding to the person where you can say, Hey, I'm so sorry to hear of this complaint. I don't have any records of you as a patient. Please feel free to email me at because there's no conversations that happen within the feed. It's like your reply and that's it. And people can look at it. That's Speaker 1 (13:02): Actually, that could be pretty helpful. Speaker 2 (13:05): My, my lawyer said right now, don't just because we, she was like, let's just, let's just, I'm fine with waiting right now. You know what? The level of stress gets so high, it got real bad for me to be throwing up from stress is a big thing. So the fact that I'm not throwing up, I'm doing well is good. So I'm okay with it being a slow occurrence because my body does start to shake going back into that world, which to me is also just another recognizer of why it's important to know when it's time to block certain people from your life. If they're making you shake and vomit, because you're stressing, like they're just not meant to be in your life. It's fun. It's that simple, you know? But yeah, no, it's, it's, it's it's a very humbling, very embarrassing situation to be dealing with. But I have learned that there are, there are definitely a lot more businesses right now dealing with that, unfortunately. Yeah. I wish people invested more time in the positive stuff to raise up to be the positive changes that we want rather than let's just tear people down because in that action, the wrong people are being torn down. Speaker 1 (14:20): Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that. And also, thanks for sharing what you did to kind of help as best you can at the moment. Kind of rectify some of that because now if people are listening and they go through that as well, they'll have at least an idea of like, okay, well here's a place where I can start. So thank you for that. Speaker 2 (14:36): Yeah. If anybody ever wants to talk some crap about what you're dealing with, I'm here for you. Speaker 1 (14:41): Yeah. Great. All right, Julie, let's go to you to your, your, your ups and downs of, I have a feeling that your, your and low point might kind of be the same thing, but I don't, I don't know. So go ahead. I'll, I'll throw it over to you. Yeah, Speaker 3 (14:59): Yeah. So I actually remember when we did the show last year, I said that I wanted 20, 20 to be more of a focus on more of my personal life and focusing on family and things in that direction, because in the past it had been all about my business and everybody has had challenges in the physical therapy world with their business. And we have with Newport coast physical therapy, we've actually come out strong. And that isn't really what I wanted to focus on because it's supposed to be personal. So I guess for my lows. Hmm. So me and Wade we've been together for 11 years. We had our 11 year anniversary. And when we're thinking about starting a family and everything, we were like, okay, we have to kind of celebrate the last year that we're going to have together. Just me and you. So 2020 we had like, all these things planned for our relationship. Speaker 3 (16:03): We were going to go to Switzerland, literally the day of the lockdown, that was our flight to Switzerland. And we were like, Oh no. Okay. So we can't do that. And then we had planned some things in the States, like going to national parks and all of those ended up closing down. And then, and then I I'm pregnant. I was pregnant with twins throughout all of this. So then as you know, I get further along in my pregnancy, it's getting harder to do anything just because pregnancy can for wound baby, but with two babies, it was just like, ah, I could give birth at any day. So I don't really want to be too far away from the hospital and everything. So I would say that for the lows, me and Wade didn't really get to kind of celebrate our last year together just as us and which is fine. You know, we, we, we made it work and did some other things, but I think that we didn't get to kind of grieve that aspect of our relationship changing. So that was a little bit of a challenge, but the highs, obviously Speaker 1 (17:15): I had my twins August Speaker 3 (17:19): In Westin and they're three months old right now. They are actually let's see, they're one month adjusted. So they were born two months early and they spent about two months in the NICU. So that was a little bit of a challenge, but given all the COVID and everything going on, luckily there was plenty of resources for my babies and they had great medical care and are super healthy now. So yeah, my highest definitely having my two boys, they're adorable and they're definitely a lot of work, all consuming basically, but hopefully in the next year, I'll get a better swing of, you know, balancing family life and managing my business and everything. So that's kind of a bit of a summary of my 2020 Speaker 1 (18:11): Now let's, let's talk about quickly for, cause you know, a lot of people that listen to this podcast, they're physical therapists and might be entrepreneurs, women kind of around in, in your stage of life who are thinking about I'm going to have children and what's going to happen to my business. How am I going to do this? So do you have any advice and, and what have you done with your business as, and I mean, twins, I goodness, but we should say that Julie is also a twin, so it's not shocking that you had twins. Speaker 3 (18:41): I wasn't surprised when they see that as having twins, I was like, you know what? There was a chance that was going to happen. Yeah. But I would say that for anybody that's in kind of a similar life stage, I fortunately, since my business model is pretty flexible in the sense that I can pick and choose when I take on patients, I don't have much business overhead just because of the, the mobile concierge practice model. That it's good for being a mom because I can kind of pick and choose when I want to take on clients. I would say that if you're, you know, the breadwinner of the family, that's a really tough position to be in because it's, it is really hard to balance everything because I'm going to be able to, you know, pick and choose clients that I want to see when I want to see them. Speaker 3 (19:35): And not everybody has that flexibility. So if you do own your business, it is a good time that maybe you could take a step back and be more on the business management side of things, where you can do things from home, from your computer and then hire somebody to go out and actually do the service. And I actually have a therapist that is doing some client visits for me right now, which thankful it's my best friend. So she's really chill to work with. But that could be a strategy that some people take on is that they end up doing some of the business management side of things instead. Speaker 1 (20:15): Yeah. So you're still working in the business. You're just not out in the field, so to speak because I mean, when you have a new, a new a newborn, I can only imagine that it takes up a lot of your time. Speaker 3 (20:30): Yeah. Every two to three hours, which, you know, if you're, you've never been around kids, I was surprised they eat that frequently. I was like, Oh my goodness. Speaker 1 (20:43): And you've got two of them, two miles to feed. Oh, that's so funny. And what, I guess, what has been your biggest aside from, you know, not getting a lot of sleep from being a new mom, is there anything that surprised you aside from how much children eat? You're like, what the hell? Why did no one tell me this? Speaker 3 (21:08): I'm trying to think. I think that the reality of taking care of a baby, like, I guess I thought it would be not as much of my time, but maybe it's because I have twins. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know any about anything about this, but it literally is like a 24 seven type situation right now. And I can only imagine for people that are going back to work at this point, because technically I've been off work for three months and not a lot of women are able to do that. They have to go back to work. I could see how challenging that would be. Cause if my twins were still in the NICU, so say I took off that six weeks of maternity leave and then had to go back to work before they even came home. That would be so tough to juggle. So it is a lot of work. Like it's the hardest job, just, just the physical toll it takes to be up and take care of babies. It's it's tough. Speaker 1 (22:08): And have you had pelvic health physical therapy? Speaker 3 (22:11): So I actually, haven't gone to a pelvic health physical therapist, not because of anything against it. I just haven't noticed any symptoms. Okay. So I do actually have a couple friends that are specialists in pelvic floor PT that I could reach out to. Maybe they would be testing me for certain things and be like, we need physical therapy. So that could be something I do in the future, but it's yeah. I fortunately have had like a very good recovery and haven't had to deal with anything on the surface at least. Speaker 1 (22:47): Excellent. That's so nice. Well, I love hearing your, your ups and downs and, and we should also say, cause I don't know that Lex is going to be able to come on here. Maybe we can splice her in later, but she did get married. So I can assume that would be her high point. If it's not, then she's, she's going to have some answering to her new brand new husband. I would assume that's her high point. And she also started her own practice in New Hampshire, which I would assume could, would also be a high point for her as well. And then what do you see happening moving forward? What are you, what are you, what are your goals, your dreams, if you will, for 2021, Jenna, I'll throw it back to you. Speaker 2 (23:34): Goals and dreams. Well we are moving to Pittsburgh. It's taken almost a full year, so I'm looking forward to moving there with husband and I have a dream office room cause I'm an actor as well still, and it's going to be decorated Disney theme. So I'm really excited to decorate and make my imagination finally come through and have the walls of tangled with the lanterns, hanging from the ceiling and have all my different collectibles up on display and my lights and my cameras and everything up permanently. So I don't have to keep putting it down and putting it under the bed in a New York studio apartment. I, that will be like Speaker 1 (24:21): For me, cannot wait, cannot wait, Julie, how about you? I'm definitely going to be going to Switzerland. Does I rebooked these tickets like three times and I don't know it's going to happen in 2021. I'm not from eight or tots with me. Well, yeah, go ahead Karen. I was gonna say I, if, if all goes well with 2021, I'll be in Switzerland in November. So you could come to a course, write it off. Oh my goodness. That's a great idea. What is the course? The course is only one day and if it happens I will tell you about it. Cause I don't think it's been announced officially yet. But it's just a one day course. So you can go to Switzerland, just pop over to burn for one day and then you pop out. Oh my goodness. It's it's the the, I think it's like the Thursday or Friday before Thanksgiving. Speaker 1 (25:25): All right. That'll be good. Cause the twins will be over one years olds. Okay. Throwing it out there. You guys, I will be in Switzerland. It's going to happen. Awesome. Well, I have to say Switzerland is really, really beautiful, so I'm sure you will love it. Love it, love it. I don't know. Should I talk about my highs and lows, I guess highs and lows. So I guess my lows were I think when, when everything happened here in New York and Jenna can probably corroborate this, but it was an, it was a little scary, you know, because it was everything locked down, nip. It, it locked down so quickly, but and nobody really knew what was going on. And I think that was a big, low, and I think I had, again, the sleepless nights and the anxiety about, well, what's what, what will happen with my practice? Speaker 1 (26:29): W what am I going to do? I see people in their homes, like you couldn't go anywhere, couldn't do anything. And, and so I think that, that, that sort of stress around that was definitely a low point professionally and then personally, well, my boyfriend and I broke up, but that's probably for the best in the long run. And then my sister had some health trouble, so it was a big sort of just like everyone else. 2020 was like a big sorta show. But that being said, the not knowing what I was going to do for work and being stressed as a low point turned into, I would say a high point along with Jenna is I started integrating tele-health, which is something I will continue to do. So now I do probably see half the people in person and half people via telehealth. Speaker 1 (27:23): And I love it. I love doing it. I think it's it's working very well. And I was also able to launch a business program to help physical therapists with the business and the business side of things. And that's been really fulfilling and getting nice reviews from that from people who have taken the course. So that, which makes me very happy because my whole anxiety was wrapped around. That was like, what do people take it? And they hate it and they think it's stupid and they don't want to do it. What am I going to do? And, and so, you know, you have all these doubts about like self doubts about what you do as a person and what you do as a therapist professionally. So I think those were, it was sort of a mixed bag of highs and lows. Speaker 1 (28:08): And I guess what I'm looking forward to, I too, am looking forward to going to Switzerland. And and just being able to travel and see people, like, I would really love to see my parents who I haven't seen in almost a year. And so that would be lovely because we did not, I did not see family for Thanksgiving or Christmas and probably won't until we all are vaccinated. Just to give everyone a little sense of that, like we're doing the right thing. So I think that's my, the biggest things I'm looking forward to is seeing my family, being able to see friends in person and colleagues in person, because, you know, we miss seeing all of you guys too, you know, so I think that's the things that I'm most looking forward to for 2021 is, and I don't, I don't think that things will go back to the way they were quote unquote, but I think that they'll be an improvement on where we are now. I don't know. What do you guys think? Speaker 4 (29:18): Yeah. I think having our support systems slowly return is going to be really, really fulfilling to just for humans. Like we love human contact and our relationships having all those kinds of slowly come back together is going to be amazing. Yeah. Speaker 1 (29:35): Yeah. I love the way you put that. Having our support systems back is huge. Yeah. Hugging. Yeah. I miss hugs. I know, I know one of my friends hugged me like a friend that lives here in New York. She hugged me and I was like, you know what to do? I froze up. I was like, Oh my God, what is she doing? Hugging is so good. Speaker 2 (29:57): Why my husband gives me time limits for my hugs. Cause I'll keep hugging. I love hugs and I miss hugs. I even miss the Wilson's a musical theater specific thing, but go into a musical theater audition and all the annoying screens of people reuniting with someone they only saw just a week ago, you know, cause we won't want to feel cool, but the people will see and know, but then we do it too. When we run into the people we haven't seen. Who's guilty of it. But yeah, hugging, hugging is just beautiful. Speaker 1 (30:32): Yeah. Human contact. Speaker 4 (30:36): What if on my flight to Switzerland, I have a layover in New York and then I can see you. Speaker 1 (30:45): Yeah. What is that quick? Have a quick one day layover and then Optus. Switzerland. Oh, I know. I forget. You're in California, such a long flight. Speaker 2 (30:54): You need to get pizza. You would need to get Levine's cookies. Oh yeah. And what else, what else would the food wise I'm thinking? I was thinking, Speaker 1 (31:06): Yeah, I just had, I just had a Levine cookie a couple of weeks ago. I eating live only a couple blocks. So the vain bakery was, it got really, really popular because of Oprah. It was like one of Oprah's favorite things like maybe a decade ago. Yeah. That's why they're so popular. But the cookies are like scones, like they're thick and gigantic. Like I got a cookie, it took me like three days to eat it. Speaker 2 (31:31): Yeah, no they're thick. It's, Speaker 1 (31:33): It's a lot, it's a lot of cookie dough there. But they are, they are pretty delicious. Now. You'd swear. We were sponsored by Levine. Speaking of sponsors, I have to say thank you to our sponsor net health. Speaker 4 (31:47): Great segue right there. Speaker 1 (31:50): Just getting it to me. So net health has been sponsoring the podcast for a couple of years and I'm really, really grateful and thankful to them and their support, their continued support. And net health has grown by leaps and bounds since they first started sponsoring the podcast. And so I'm really happy to see their growth, their Pittsburgh company, by the way, Jenna. Oh yeah. Pennsylvania company. And and so I'm really, it's really been exciting for me to see their growth and their movement upward and the fact that they are doing their best to help healthcare providers, which I think is awesome. And they also have, and not that they're telling me to say this, but they really do have some really good webinars. So they're usually free. So if you want like good webinars, business-wise they really have some good stuff, especially if cash based or non cash based. So I would definitely check out their webinars because they're all pretty good and usually free. I like free. Yeah. And everybody loves free. Okay. So I guess I'll ask you guys one last question, knowing where you are now in your life and in your career, what advice would you give to your younger self? Speaker 4 (33:05): Okay. I should be prepared for this because you know, this happens every single episode and did not think this question was coming at me. Okay. So the first thing that comes to mind, and I think it's important is that you should always maintain a sense of curiosity about everything going on in your life professionally, personally, I think that if you're open-minded and you can kind of think on things a little bit differently, just because you're not closed off, you might be able to see solutions in ways that you didn't think of before. So that is very theoretical, but I just think that that kind of vibe, if you maintain that sense of curiosity about everything, it can kind of lead you in new directions. What do you think? I think that's great advice. Speaker 2 (34:00): Oh my God. I'd love that. I, I I feel like I should have gone first because it naturally segues to what you just said. Oh let's Speaker 4 (34:10): Oh no, Speaker 2 (34:11): No, no, no. I think it's perfect. I loved it. I was like, Oh, you know, like for me, I get my best ideas on the toilet, but I still, I thought that was amazing. I was thinking the first thing that popped into my head was don't waste your time on the, focus on where, what your vision is for your life and put all your energy into that as it, and this is why it's like, why it's so good to yours. And now like the candles, I was like, Oh my God, this is perfect. It's so great for us. Speaker 1 (34:42): Perfect. I think that's both great advice. And, and I know I asked this question every time and how I would answer it, knowing where I am now in my life and in my career. I think that what I would tell myself, even like fresh out of, out of college is when it kind of goes along with maybe what a combination of what you guys both said. But what I would tell myself is to don't limit myself by what I see other people doing. Because sometimes like when I first graduated, I knew PTs worked in a hospital, they worked in a clinic and that was kind of it, you know? And so I didn't never saw that sort of broader vision. And so I think I would tell myself to look to people outside of the profession to help you your state in your own profession and seek out those people that have, that genuinely have an interest in you as a person and, and want to be a part of your life and a part of your success. Because I think I've fallen victim to people who I thought had my best interests at heart, and I'm a trusting person. And as it turns out they didn't. So I think really, I think as you get older, you sort of, you maybe, maybe I just have a better sense of who I am and what I want. And so I'm no longer kind of easily swayed and convinced by people who in the end don't really have my best interest at heart, Speaker 4 (36:28): But that's one of the qualities I love about you though. Karen is how trusting you are. I think that does serve you too in your life. So I think that don't ever lose that. That is something that it's, it's a gift and not everybody can be vulnerable. And I think that you wear that really well. Speaker 1 (36:46): Oh, well, that's nice. Yeah. I don't think I would, I'm not going to become that cynical of a new Yorker, but I'm going to, Jenna knows what I'm talking about. But I think that I'm just going to just be a little bit more discerning on the people that I choose to kind of surround myself with. And I think that I've been doing that more recently over the last couple of years, and I think that it has served me well, but that's what I would tell my younger self out of college anyway. Yeah. All right. So any last bits, any last, anything Speaker 4 (37:23): We're all gonna make it we're all gonna survive hopefully. Yeah. Speaker 1 (37:27): Yes. Rules. Yes. Jenna will be going to Florida next year because she missed it for CSM. I know, I know no CSM in Florida this year, but we did videotape our performance, little plug, Jen and I to have a thing at CSM on February 11th at 7:00 PM. Join us for our prerecorded topics on social media, social media. Yeah. Basically. How do you social media, mainstream media to improve your presence as physical therapist and then I think, but I'm not sure we might have a live Q and a afterwards at 8:00 PM. We're so clear. Speaker 1 (38:10): So we'll find out. So anyway thank you so much, Julie and Jenna and Lex for all of your hard work and all of your commitment and I love you all, all three of you. I was going to say, I love you both. And then a Lex, and I'm just getting, I love all three of you. And I really, from the bottom of my heart. Thank you so much. Thank you as well. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. I wish you all the very best and, and fingers crossed for a better 20, 21 and stay healthy, wealthy and smart.

Here's your SEO Brisbane tip for today. Google like when you use Google services. So, two Google services that you can use, which will definitely help with your SEO, and that they are Google Analytics, and Google search console. You may well need your person who's looking after your hosting account or your Google stuff, to set that up for you and and they're questions to ask that person. Have you got Google Analytics set up? And have you got Google Search Console setup? And are those monitoring your website all the time? Because Google likes it when they can easily get information from your site. And search console, and Analytics make it easy for Google to get information from your website. So two important Google features to be making use off.

We're going to continue the credit card talk next week, but this should get you started. Welcome to podcast 19 of the security box. This week, let's talk about credit cards, PCIDSS, and more. PCI DSS Compliance Guide: UK Costs & Checklist PCI DSS requirements for building and maintaining a secure network and systems The PCI SECURITY web site Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard We're putting the Wikipedia link in for reference. Please do not rely on it alone, as the page talks about a lot of unsourced material. We also posted two of those sources as I liked them, and we'll use one of them to talk about what PCIDSS is, and what is required. News Notes Thinking about getting an Android phone? Think that its security is better than IOS and what it may have to offer? Thats your choice, and we're not going to change your mind. According to an article from the Register, maybe you should think about this again. According to the article, Google is being sued because it is taking a couple hundred MB from you on your cellular data even if the phone is sitting there quietly not being touched. Why? Because Google is preparing potential ads that might be of interest to you after it collects data in the background. The article goes on to say that Google people agree to multiple terms of service, none of which talks about the passive collection of data that has nothing to do with your use. New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use? is the article, think about this when you decide which operating system you want. This Week in Security News: Ransomware Gang is Raking in Tens of Millions of Dollars and Microsoft Patch Tuesday Update Fixes 17 Critical Bugs has a bunch of items in it, and we'll let you decide what you want to talk about. Other news Looks like we've finally gotten something that might work. After some time, I am now back on MyTelespace, where they have a call in number for callers who do not have the other technology to use. That number is 720-787-1080 and my box number is 8347 over there. Just another option for people to use. Thanks so much for listening, and make it a great day.

If you ever wondered how to track clicks for free using Google Analytics you've come to the right place. She looked at me squarely in the face and said, "I didn't touch the skittles cookies at all." So, I asked her to stretch out her tongue. A few seconds went by and it seems as if the wheels in her head started turning rapidly. What happened next I'll explain in a bit... Have you ever had a situation where you wished that you had sufficient evidence as to exactly what brought you success in your business? If you've struggled with tracking clicks using Google Analytics then you'll love this. Many years ago when I first started in the online world I was told that success depended on my ability to track everything. Does hearing that make you feel lazy? Lol!! I know that I felt super lazy to put tracking in place for everything. However, I have learned that if I cannot track it I might as well not be in business at all. Ever wondered how to set up an effective system to track potential buyers in your business for free? In this post, you will learn how to use free tools to set a system or even several systems that will enable you to track your successes effectively. What is Google Analytics? There are effectively two systems set up by Google to track organic traffic to your website. One is called Google Search Console and the other is Google Analytics. The main difference between the two systems is that Google Search Console tracks the traffic from search engines. Whereas Google Analytics tracks search engines, social media, email, direct and referral traffic. Sometimes you may see one segment called 'Other' because Google has not yet determined a name for the source of that traffic. Google Analytics may not be 100% accurate. However, it is the only free tool that offers traffic statistics that is almost correct and it is trusted by everyone in the industry. Because Google is the number one search engine platform in the world it would be difficult to trust another provider. How to Set Up Google Analytics For the purposes of this blog post I will only be focusing on setting up Google Analytics on a WordPress.org website. These same instructions would apply to a WordPress.com environment as well as I set one up for a client in the last few weeks. Step 1 Head over to your WordPress dashboard and click on 'Plugins' then go to 'Add new'. Step 2 Search for the 'GA Google Analytics' plugin by typing in the name. You will notice that there are several plugins on the market that can do this job. However, this plugin by Jeff Star has been proven to be very lightweight and it would not slow down your website or blog. Next head over to the settings area of this Google Analytics plugin and you should see these options. If you don't already have your Google Analytics (GA) tracking ID then you will need to get one. Step 3 Head over to analytics.google.com and login using your existing Google account. If you don't already have a Google account then this is a great time to create one. You will need to create a new account and property. Be sure to follow the instructions that you see on the screen after logging into GA. Step 4 Click on tracking info and Google will automatically assign you with a GA tracking ID. Grab it and put it somewhere safe for now. Step 5 Enter your tracking ID into the section called GA tracking ID in the settings section of your GA Google Analytics plugin. You will need to wait 24-48 hours for the data to populate into the dashboards. Also, if you have not already done so, take the time to set up your Google Search Console as well. It would make sense to use the same Google account for both also be sure to submit your site map after setting this up. Why Do you Need to Track Clicks Once everything is set up in Google Analytics the cli...

The holy grail of local search marketing is ranking at the top of Google's Local 3-Pack. Here's how a local search expert helps his clients do just that. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Local SEO Search Owner John Vuong shares the strategies he uses to help clients improve their local search marketing strategies and rank at the top of Google's Local 3-Pack. Hint: There is no magic bullet. Ranking locally begins with a well run business that sells a great product and treats customers right. If you've got those three things in place, then John has some straightforward strategies that any company - large or small - can use to get to the top of local search results. Resources from this episode: Visit the Local SEO Search website Connect with John on LinkedIn Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is John Vuong, who is the owner of Local SEO Search. How's it going? John (00:21): I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Kathleen. Kathleen (00:23): I'm excited to have you because you are a local SEO guru amongst other things. And I feel like, especially at the time we're living in right now with what's happening in the world, getting your SEO buttoned up is more important now than ever because everybody's starting online these days. Right? John (00:46): Exactly. Kathleen (00:47): Before we get into our topic today, can you tell my listeners a little bit about who you are, your story as well as what Local SEO Search does? John (00:57): Yeah, definitely. So I started this agency seven years ago. But prior to that, I've always been in sales and advertising sales in particular. So I studied business finance, but I didn't really know where I wanted to go with it. And I got into my first job as a sales person and I kind of refined and learned the art of sales and really got better over the years, asked the right questions. Fact-finding, did a lot of training courses, audio tapes at the time because there were no blogs and video like there is today in podcasts. So consuming as much as you can to learn the art of sales. And then the last thing before I started my agency, I actually worked at Yellow Pages and I was there for over five years and I learned, I didn't really work in an ad agency per se, but I had a chance to understand advertising and how it worked in terms of a recurring business model and how to run a larger operation. John (02:00): And I did, I was basically face to face with the end consumer clients. And that's where I learned the most because I connected with them. I understood their pain points, their troubles, and I wanted to really help. Right? However, I was restricted to the product line that we were offering at Yellow Pages. As you know, at the time Google was really taking off, they were getting more and more users and more people were spending more time in front of a computer than ever doing searches. And as you know, more people were spending you know, more money at Yellow Pages, but getting less return on their investment. And so that's the reason I started this agency. From listening to my clients, letting them know that, you know, you can continue with Yellow Pages, but they didn't really adopt quick enough. And they don't have a solution where customers, your ideal prospects are now actively looking for businesses like yourself. So that's why I got into the world. Kathleen (03:00): So I just have to say that you saying the words Yellow Pages just took me down memory lane. And I'm sure there are people listening that either won't remember this or, or, you know, it's, they're too young, but like, just that I hear those words and all I can think about is the, the brick of the giant Yellow Pages book being dropped at my front door, like shrink, wrapped in plastic. And I have this one special drawer in my living room where I used to keep all the phone books. Cause you would get like your city phone book, your County phone bucket. And there was the Yellow Pages and the white pages and just the amount of paper that, that took, like, I don't know my mind, I was like, whoa, deja vu, as soon as you said that. So it's, I don't, I don't know whether I look back on it fondly or not. I haven't quite made up my mind. John (03:54): Yeah. But, but if you imagine like think about 10 years ago Google didn't take off, like the internet was just slowly taking off where the speed of connecting to the internet was dial up, right? Like getting in front of a computer to check your email. It took you five minutes to open up a browser and then search and load up a website. I mean, things took a very long time. And so before, you know, computers and internet and technology started taking off Yellow Pages was still the most instrumental place for a lot of small business owners small, medium sized business owners to market themselves because they knew it was an active, engaged consumer that was actively looking for a product or service. And all you have to do is advertise your one page content and kind of call to action. And really hopefully they will convert, right. They're engaged, they're ready to buy. And all you have to do is be in front of them at the time of purchase. Kathleen (04:58): So it's funny when I think about that, because, because yes, it was a very like binary equation of what it took to succeed in the Yellow Pages. It was a combination of purchasing an ad. And for those companies that were really creative, naming your company, triple a whatever, like, because literally ranking first was about alphabetization, you know, which is so simple and straightforward. And then you go into this world that we're in now we're ranking first is like, it's like magic, you know, or it seems like it's sometimes we were just talking about that before we started recording about how things changed so much and Google has this supposed algorithm, and now they have RankBrain, which is artificial intelligence. And, but, you know, they don't really tell anybody what's in that. I mean, they give you a sense of the big drivers of what makes you rank, but nobody really, really knows for sure. You know, what, what those factors are. So it's just such an interesting thing when you juxtapose, you know, it was alphabet, did your company name start with a, and did you have a good ad? John (06:04): It was very straightforward and easy, right. But then comes, but it wasn't actually easy because you had to run a really good business as well. You have to take care of your fundamentals of understanding who your customer is offering a really good product or service taking care of your clients and staff and, you know, pricing it, right. Competitive analysis, all that other stuff like foundational right before you can then promote with a good offer or call to action or whatnot to get them in the door. Right. So you still need to know how to run a good business when you were advertising the Yellow Pages. Right. Kathleen (06:40): And that will never change even today. Like all the digital advances in the world will never change the fact that you have to have the fundamentals straight. So if, when, when somebody comes to you and they're a business owner and they say, I want to, you know, dominate my local market for search, where do you begin? John (06:59): Yeah. So I always first find out a little bit about the company to see if they're actually running a good business in the first place. Right. See the little fact check thing to see if they even have a digital presence in first off, like, do they have a website? They don't have any social assets social or any, any media. And then also find out if they are a profitable business, do they know how to run a business? Right. So understanding who their ideal customer is, persona avatars, understand all that. And then you take on the path of what we potentially can do, because ultimately it's all about positioning themselves as the leader thought leader, authoritative figure and expert right. In their niche. And then from there, it's all about like that journey, what it looks like, how long will it take, because we need to really benchmark them and figure out where and what we need to do in terms of strategy and a campaign over the next course of weeks, months, years, even. Right. so it is a long process in terms of inbound and intake, but it's the right thing to do because it is more of a relationship partnership that we're looking for versus an ad campaign. Kathleen (08:08): Yeah, absolutely. So I mean the Holy grail of local searches, Google, there are other search engines, but let's be honest, you know, if you want to succeed in, in SEO these days, your, your starting point is Google and Google has the three pack. So can you talk a little bit about that? John (08:25): Yeah, definitely. So as you know, most people are doing searches by keywords on Google. There's paid at the top, there's the local three pack, which is usually radius centric, relevance, and distance based on that storefront or service area that you actually go in and do service calls on as then below is there is an organic listing. So traditionally before the map existed, it was all about making sure you rank organically or naturally below the ads. Right? And the local three-pack came out because mainly the driver was mobile. The reason the map came out because people were on the goal and they wanted to look for local coffee shops, gas stations, restaurants, whatever at their fingertips. And it was easy to go to that store quickly because of directions. You could read reviews, check out their followers, et cetera. So Google's intention was trying to get people usage up on their assets like Google, but also display as much information on their property as possible without going to their website. John (09:33): So state getting them to not go on your website, but keep them on Google as long as possible. So they can store and obviously, you know, understand your behaviors, right then there's ads. That will be retargeted to you. So the big thing for you to understand is how do you capitalize on what Google is presenting itself, where you can now be on the map potentially in front of a potential prospect who is searching or seeking out your keywords. So first thing is, make sure you verify and own your Google, my business page. So that's the first thing a lot of people don't even do. However, you should do that on it. Got to my business Google my business and own it. Usually it's a postcard that gets sent to you takes two weeks. It's just to verify that you're a legitimate business at that physical location. If you are a service type of business and you don't have a physical address, you can still claim it because you are a local business, you just service a radius. So you just submit it as if your home is your main central pinpoint. And then you can go into Google My Business and put in the radius service area or cities that you actually service. Kathleen (10:48): No, I had somebody I know who did that. Actually, this is interesting that you bring that up, who was a service business who put in their home and then Google automatically pulled the picture of his house for the business. So how do you deal with that? Like, I mean, I think there's a lot of people who would say, I don't want anybody to have any information about my home. I don't want them to know that it's a home based business. So how do you manage that? John (11:10): Because Google has maps, right? So there's a difference between putting your address and hiding your address. So you can actually go in and hide your address because then people will not know the physical address. So as a service base, most people are operating from the home and therefore you have the ability to just hide your address. Typically, if it is a service based like plumbing, HVAC, roofing, because these are category driven. And most of the time Google recognizes the services as if they don't have physical locations, because you can operate at home and just run a business, right? So certain categories, you can actually hide your address. And in that case, your friend, you can definitely hide it. And then that map and that photograph of your home will not appear. Kathleen (12:01): Okay. Good to know. So when, when you talk about the three pack for people who might not be familiar with, what are the three things that make up the three words? John (12:08): So there's a lot of factors to rank on the Google three-pack. And as you know, Google is always changing their algorithm and always looking for the best result for that given search query or the user. Right? And to understand that you need to understand users in general, right? Because each criteria each vertical, each industry, each market will have different subsets of criteria and factors to rank on that three-pack and even on the natural listings, right? Ultimately what you want to do is have a great website that answers the question, answers the user intent, but ultimately it's all about users behavior as well. So you need to understand that you're providing good, authentic, raw expert content on the website to position yourself as the expert clean look, user friendly website ease of navigation, quick loading, secure website, all these stuff that you should be doing anyways. John (13:12): And then of course, it's the other factors as a fundamental. It's like, make sure that you have good reputation out there. Good reviews, make sure that other people know about you backlinks, right. Go out there and position yourself as an expert by being a part of better business, rural, or getting more speaking engagements or other articles. You know, it's like a guest posts and associations and memberships. All these are all other factors that organic SEO also plays, but there's other signals that Google local three pack are really prominent on, which is citations, which is you know, directories are submitted, which is consistent across all the board, all, all channels. So all your assets should be consistent. The messaging, the content piece, the authorship just everything, right. And then of course it's all about relevance as well. So if you service an area that is New York, for instance, Manhattan or whatnot, you have to make sure that your website, every property and as every post that you mentioned should be related to that region, right. That the surface area, because you don't want articles to be mentioning your, your service or product if they're in a different country or a different postal code, or, you know, because Google, their whole purpose is to really provide the best user experience for that customer. Who's seeking out the best product or service or finding best business owners to match them. So by displaying the best results for the user you're trying to position yourself so that, you know, you get a higher conversion rate. No, that seems pretty straightforward. Kathleen (14:52): If you are, let's just use this as an example, a plumber, who's servicing a very specific area, but what if you are, you know, I'm a big like Mr. Plumber that has locations all over the country, but wants to show up first in each of those locations, because then you do have a situation where your website is going to have to have content on different locations. So how do you, how do you tell Telegraph that to Google that, like, I might have all this information on my site, but I have these very discrete, like territories or areas that I serve. John (15:23): Yeah, definitely. So it's a very similar process as a local mom and pop shop business, small businesses owner, right. Because if you're a Mister plumber, Mr. Rooter or whatnot you have a franchise model and one person still owns that region, right. So there should be a website or a landing page or a subcategory within a page so that you can actually optimize and let people in on that page. Right. Because that's really representing the brand. So it's the same factors because you're still ranking for that one location one. Kathleen (16:02): So are you putting that landing page in as your website address for that particular local pack listing? John (16:09): You have to, because if you're going to the main page, which is where every other city is going after you're not going to be optimizing for the right reasons, right. Google will not, you know, signal their signals out there. Right. And they will know that it's more of a branded search versus like a local search. Kathleen (16:28): So whenever I think about local search and, and you know, this whole topic, there, there are obviously fundamentals, as you said, that need to be put in place a good website, good content you know, getting, claiming your listing and having it all set up properly. So I feel like there's some table stakes and, and, and that's accessible to a local business. But then there are some things that are trickier, right? Where if you're a local business and you're trying to compete against the 800 pound gorilla of your market in the local listings there, they're probably going to have a much higher domain authority, more backlinks. So when you look at all of the different things, the factors are the levers you can pull that are within your control. Are there certain ones that carry more weight with Google? You know, so CA can David take on Goliath in this situation? John (17:27): Yeah. With the local three pack, it's actually a lot easier for a small, medium sized business owner to capitalize on a competing with a big brand big monopoly, right? Because end of the day, the big, big brands, their main focus is really not on the local level, but more on the branded level. They're going after national campaigns, national ad campaigns, they're not focused on long tail keywords markets, regions, neighborhoods, cities, street level, right? Like intersections, that's where community level search results and queries can dominate versus large brands because their focus is on the bigger picture versus the like little micro level picture. Right. So I always ask clients like, you know, yes, there's a specialty, there's actually a niche in most subsets, like plumber, for instance, but you are also looking for like long tail, what are some of the triggers like drainage, septic tanks stuff that actually matters for that local small business owner that might not actually matter for the larger brands that were just going after very broad plumber terms, right? Yes. There's a lot more competition. There might be a little bit more keyword volume, but is the conversion rate as high, right. What really matters for a small business owner is leads cause sales, revenue, and profitability. Kathleen (18:49): Yeah. Now it's interesting. Cause like we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast and a lot about content specifically. And so I think probably most people listening are pretty well versed generally on what constitutes a good content or organic SEO strategy. But what I think is very interesting, at least to me, is when you take that overarching approach to content marketing, like, you know, for example, you want to go after the long tails, you want to answer the questions that people are asking about the problems they have. And when you put that, when you put a local search lens over it, I think it could be very easy to get your content wrong. And what I mean by that, and I've seen this play out is I'll just use an example. Like I live in Annapolis, Maryland, and I, I know someone who owns a commercial real estate company. Kathleen (19:41): And we talked about this once and you know, you can create all kinds of content around commercial real estate. And you know, you could even do commercial real estate in Annapolis, but, but there's, I think there can tend to be an inclination to get a little, I don't know if spammy is the right word. We're like, let's have a landing page for every neighborhood and let's, let's make sure to put the words, Annapolis, commercial, real estate and every blog we write and it can start to sound really forced. So do you, how do you generally counsel your clients to approach that so that they're creating genuinely helpful quality content, but still nailing it at that very hyperlocal level? John (20:26): Yeah. So I, when I try to find out from the clients are, which markets really are important for them, right? Like always dominate local first and expand, you know, regional national, et cetera. So the big thing for me is understanding where they want to go with it. In terms of, yeah, there's service pages, blog pages, there's different content assets, like video, audio images and all that, right? Like written content. So you need to really refine and figure out like who your ideal customer is. Figure out, map it all accordingly with the journey, but then figure out like, yes, there's certain landing pages that will result in a higher conversion rate you to make it sound natural. So there's an an art to it. Then then more than anything, right? Like you're not just writing for the purpose of Google, you're writing for the purpose of the user. John (21:21): Right. And you should always write for the user and yes, there's keyword research, semantic keywords, there's different variations. Yes. You can use some certain keywords and embed a couple drippings of that. Even internal waking and all that other stuff, but it's all about like always focus on your ideal customer and write for them. And if you do that on a really regular basis, consistent basis, then it's no longer spam because you see, you'll see a lot of fruits and rewards from it because your ideal customers will reach out to you so far down that funnel that all they care about is pricing, or they've already vetted you. They already check out your case studies, reviews, and testimonials. All they care about is when can you start. Kathleen (22:08): Right. That makes sense. So when it comes to the listing, you mentioned in the beginning, you have to claim your listing. Obviously that's, that's step one, but then once you have that listing, there are a lot of things you can do with it. And you just talked about assets. And I'm really curious, you know, how important are those assets, the photographs, the video reviews. Like I would love to understand what weight reviews really carry and how many do you really need and that kind of thing. John (22:33): Yeah. So it's all about perception of running a real good business, right? So it's your first impression. If people don't go to your website, they're going to check you out on Google, my business. Right. And the first thing they see is images of the store, either external or internal. So make it as professional as possible. Spend that extra photography fee to make it look as genuine as possible. And also it's all about like, you can put videos as well, right? Short little clips because more important than ever people want to check you out before they even come to your store today, especially during this pandemic. Right. So they want to vet you and then the reputation aspect is all about making sure that they're authentic as much as you want more, I'm more concerned about quality reviews, right. And always genuinely ask as a process to every single customer, not just your best customers. Right. Because those see right through that you vetted your reviews even, or you paid someone to get only five stars. Right. So try to be as genuine as possible, there are going to be some negative and that's okay. Right. It's all about being real about it and acknowledging it and really responding to positive and negative reviews. Right? Kathleen (23:55): Yeah. There's a lot of research that goes into like that, that has shown that, that having only positive reviews actually is not good. And it makes sense to me intuitively as just a buyer. Like if I go and I'm looking at a restaurant and all they have is five star reviews, I'm like that that person got their cousin to write all of those, you know? So I agree with you. It's important to have variety. Any best practices around how you ask for them? John (24:22): Put it in your process, right? So whatever it is from reception to invoicing to thank you, email or a thank you letter, make it a process or text message or call whenever it is. And drip them, it's the same thing as where you drip to get a new customer, you need to have that final, have a final for getting reviews. A lot of people forget that once you have a client that's active paying, they're inclined to do something for you already. They already, you know, use you for a reason. So why not? If, and it's all it is, is a process it's like, you already have an active client, get their email, their information so that you can drip them for a newsletter or whatever it is, right. Like referrals or whatever it is. Kathleen (25:10): And how often should a business be looking at their listing, updating it, keeping it fresh? John (25:19): So updating and keeping them fresh. I personally don't update mine quite as often as you know, because nothing really changes. You only update it when there's dramatic service changes or product changes, right. Unless you move location, you have new images of which we need to talk about. Yes. But it's all about like, you know, if you're in a very hyper competitive industry and they expect a lot of changes, like restaurants, like you need to stay on top of what's going on. Like, are you doing deliveries more so than ever where the specials, because you can do Google my business posts as well, very similar to Facebook posts. You know, you can post it on Google and they last for seven days an image and a content piece with hashtags. So why not utilize that extra piece of asset? Right. so I forgot to mention like images, make sure it's your own images to like never use stock photos, make sure you personalize it as much as possible, as much as a lot of people use image tags and make sure that, you know, you, you save it on a file with keywords, Google actually, you know, so they say they don't take that into consideration. John (26:29): Right. They already have a geotarget. They already have their own vetting system to make sure that it's authentic and real. So do just things that are real to your business. Don't try to hack or trick anyone because people will see through it, especially Google. Yeah. Kathleen (26:44): That's a good point. I didn't realize you could post updates like you can on Facebook. That's interesting. And I mean, how many businesses would you say really take advantage of that? John (26:54): So all my clients, we do it for them. So when, when you, most businesses don't even know about it, maybe 5% actually utilize that feature because only half of the businesses actually claim and verify the Google my business page. So there's a huge amount of people that are even missing that boat, let alone, you know, understanding like the category that you put yourself in is so important. Right. And making sure you check in to see where your competitors are actively marketing themselves as well, in terms of review, count, always check into your competitors, make sure you're in the same playing field, right? Because Google will look at trends. They'll look at industry stuff to see if you suddenly have a hundred reviews and every, or your nearest competitor only has five. What's going on. Are you being in buying reviews? Like just do things that are natural, right? Because if you're a high, big ticket item and you're selling homes, you maybe sell five or 10 a year, how do you have a hundred plus reviews? Kathleen (27:53): Yeah, no, that's a good point. It's a good point. So I assume that you have some clients that come to you and they don't have their listing set up and you need to help them do that from scratch. But I would think, and correct me if I'm wrong. Do you have some companies that come to you and they've set their listing up and they're like, I want to get higher in the rankings. I would love it. If you could talk maybe about any, any case studies or examples you have of like, what, what have those businesses done when they've come to you with an existing listing and they just want to increase their ranking? What are the things they've done and what improvements have you seen and how long does that take? John (28:29): Great questions? Because we get asked this daily. So most of my clients, I mean, we've been in business for seven years and we focus on family, run, small, medium sized businesses, dentist, physio, chiro, you know, professional health and beauty as well as traits. Right. And usually they are smaller in size, but they're a local leader, right. They have experienced, they've been doing it for five, 10, 20 years. They expect it and plan on doing it for another five, 10, 20 years. Right. so that's my target client and what their intention is, is obviously to cultivate new, acquiring new customers because they understand like Yellow Pages. If you're not there and present, you're not visible to have the opportunity to generate leads, potential clients. Right. so most of my clients actually week we have a pretty good track record. And majority of them do see an increase of between, you know, 20 to 50% in terms of organic traffic growth annually. John (29:36): And it actually grows afterwards too because we focus not just on the map, but organic as right. And we really focus on like service level targeted keywords that actually drive real business versus blogs that are general in nature and informative type of content pieces that doesn't really drive real customers acquisition of, you know, sales and revenue, because the main purpose for all my clients is phone calls, leads, revenue, sales, and profitability. Right. And if it's not working exactly. And if they don't, if it doesn't work, they're not going to renew with me. So my focus is yes, we have a longer term contract, but we have a very high renewal rate because our whole premise is longterm relationships because we want to grow with them. And it's more of a partnership than anything. Kathleen (30:27): Well, what you're saying makes sense. And I think in general, philosophically, I get this question a lot. Like if you're doing content marketing, where do you start? Because you have, you obviously want a full funnel strategy, but like where do you begin? And I always tell people, you start at the bottom of the funnel, which is basically what you're saying, which is hyper-specific queries that have to do with high intent purchase searches. And that's because that's the fastest path to revenue and you start getting revenue in and that buys you a lot more time to figure out the top in the middle of the funnel. So I totally agree with you. John (31:03): Exactly. And then in terms of timeline, I forgot to answer that. So I've seen clients rank months, and then it's some clients like dentists in Toronto. That's where I am may take years because it all depends on benchmark where they're at versus some of the major players. Right. and how much they've invested, especially your client competitor. So it's very hard and it's very individualized in terms of the quotes that we submit to our clients. Kathleen (31:33): Well, I really liked your suggestion though, of competitor tracking, like, you know, set a schedule, whether it's once a week, once a month, once a quarter, whatever you decide it is. And I guess it depends on how competitive your spaces and go in and look at all of your different competitors and how many reviews they have and what's going on in their listing on the category they're targeting. Like that seems like something very actionable that any business could do right away. And if you see yourself slipping by comparison, then you sort of have your marching orders. Right. It makes, it makes a lot of sense. All right, well, shifting gears, then I have a couple of questions that I always ask my guests. And I'm curious to know what you have to say. The first one is that we talk all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is doing a really outstanding job, but with their own inbound marketing these days? John (32:22): Yeah. So I I'm always reading HubSpot, Infusionsoft in terms of their you know, blogs and marketing tactics. Cause they seem to know a lot and just like a big brand, like Yellow Pages, you respect people that have been there for a very long time with a huge user base. And they usually hire the top leaders and experts in the industry. So I do follow them. In terms of specific people in SEO, there's dozens of people that I follow. Just because it's, so, I mean, there's so much going on from technical to link building to you know, user engagement, UX, design speed, there's so much going on. So for me, there's people. But there's also a lot of like big software that I follow it. Kathleen (33:13): Yeah. Yeah. And I see if you're listening, you can't see this, but I, I can see cause we're on video that behind you, you have Rand Fishkin's book Lost and Founder, and he's one of my favorite people to follow for SEO information. So all right. Second question. I always hear from marketers that it's very challenging to keep up with all the changes, especially in the space you're in. I mean, as you we've talked about this at the beginning, SEO changes all the time, literally. And in fact, I think right now there's a lot of chatter that we're in the middle of a big core algorithm update and everybody's kind of like freaking out, what does this mean for me? So as a marketer, how do you stay up to date with all the things that are changing all the time? John (33:55): So that's the biggest challenge like, yes, we read a lot. All everyone on my team needs to be on top of the game. There's changes all the time, but there's major changes. We try to stay away from like small level micro changes because it's not going to move the needle as drastic as the larger macro ones. Right. but we do read a lot. So Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, backlink.io, Or there's so many different blogs out there. So many videos and podcasts. I listen to it, but I always look at like core foundation and fundamentals all the time. That's more important to me like business. How do you run a good business that has lasted for generations? Not just five, 10 years, I'm talking about 50 years, 80 years, right? Those are the people that want to pick brains with and see what cultivates and what are the real, tangible things. John (34:50): And that's why I learned a lot from Yellow Pages, like working with thousands of business owners that lasted through many generations. It was all very simple. If you think about it, it's taking care of your customers, listening, understanding what the value prop is, differentiating yourself from competitors, pricing it well, like all the things that you take for granted, but a lot of business owners oversee and they think, wow, getting on the first page of Google will be the Holy grail of at all. But if you think about it, if I get you there and you don't know how to answer your phone, take care of your clients, price it right. All these other factors, it's kind of a waste of effort. Right? Kathleen (35:28): I feel like, I feel like it's like weight loss. Like everybody gets so entranced by the latest diet fad, but really it's eat less and more, but none of us want to do it. We all want the quick, the quick fix. Right? well, so interesting, John, I really appreciate you sharing all of that with us. If somebody wants to reach out and ask you a question or learn more or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do. John (35:55): Yeah. So you can check out my website, it's www.localseosearch.ca. But you can also connect with me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best medium and you can find me. It's John Vong V U O N G. And I'm the founder of Local SEO Search. Kathleen (36:11): Awesome. And I will put links to all of that in the show notes. So as always, head there and check that out if you want to connect with John. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a preferably five star review, because that is how we get found. Just like a, you got to get found in local search with reviews. That's how podcasts get found. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. Thanks so much for joining me this week, John. John (36:47): Thank you so much, Kathleen. I had a lot of fun.

Is your website hip and modern – or is it out-of-date and sad? If it's been a while since you updated your site, there's at least a chance that it's a dud. That doesn't mean it's poorly designed, but it does mean that it's your job to give it an honest evaluation and update it if it's not good enough. Fortunately, an update doesn't mean a full redesign. Here are 7 simple things you can do to make sure your website is offering the user experience and value your customers deserve. #1: Optimize for Voice Search One of the biggest problems I see with websites is that many are using keywords that haven't been updated in years. The days of short, generalized keywords are long past. Instead, focus on voice search, which is already important and on the rise. As of 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-based. With virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana more popular than ever, it's safe to assume that a hefty percentage of the people who land on your site will get there via voice search. #2: Add Structured Landing Pages Structured landing pages have content that's easy for Google to interpret. They provide context for your content and identify how it relates to your metadata. The best-known tool for structuring your content is Schema markup. Schema provides a vocabulary that web developers can use to structure data around people, places and things on the web. When you add Schema markup to your site, it delivers rich snippets and rich cards as part of your search result on Google — making it easy for users to choose your site over the others that are available. #3: Update Your SEO Optimizing your website takes times, which is why a lot of companies do it only when they notice a big drop in their traffic. If it's been a while since you updated your SEO, then it's time to take another look. Why? Because Google updates its algorithm constantly. The most important update in the past few years has to do with relevance. Google Rank Brain, which is now part of Google's search algorithm, prioritizes sites based on their overall relevance to the term being searched. It measures bounce rates and the amount of time visitors spend on your site. The longer you can get them to stay – something that'll happen if you provide tons of relevant content – the better off you'll be. #4: Be Ready for Mobile There's really no reason for any website not to be mobile optimized at this point. Google rolled out its Mobilegeddon update back in 2015. That's when they started to penalize sites that weren't mobile optimized. It's not enough to have a mobile site now. You need a site that's perfectly optimized for mobile users. That means that mobile visitors can get the same content and functionality as a visitor using a desktop computer regardless of which device they're using. Some things that are particularly important are having buttons that are right-sized for mobile users, content that's easy to read with no teeny fonts or horizontal scrolling, and access to ALL the relevant content on your site – not just a few things. #5: Gather Some Social Proof Social proof can take many forms. Some of the most common kinds of social proof are: Customer reviews Customer testimonials Consumer ratings “Best Of” awards Industry awards Industry certifications There's plenty of research that shows that people give just as much importance to third-party reviews online as they would to a recommendation from a trusted friend. If you're not including some type of social proof on your website, then you're missing out on an opportunity to show casual visitors to your site that they can trust you. #6: Improve Your Page Loading Time How quickly does your website load? If the answer is more than four seconds, then it's a virtual certainty that you're losing visitors as a result. After just three seconds, approximately 53% of mobile users will navigate away from a site and try another one. The numbers are just as bad for des...

David Azar is Founder and CEO of Outsmart Labs, a digital marketing agency focused on riding new trends and platforms to drive more traffic, more visibility, and more online conversions. His agency works with clients to build a 360 strategy to drive those conversions in sales, traffic, and newsletter signups. David says, “Digital marketing changes so fast that it's about whoever adapts faster and whoever finds the opportunities in the market.”  The agency provides traditional digital marketing services -- Google strategies, Facebook, traditional social media strategies – but likes the advantage of being an “early adopter” of the newest trends. Where to be now, according to David? TikTok – the place where kids dance. Or not. In this interview, David describes the phenomenal growth of TikTok. The number of U.S. users grew from 27 million in July 2019 to 40 million in January 2020, and then to 65 million at the beginning of April, with 85 million users by mid-June. About 1 in 4 people in this country use TikTok, many of whom are “very involved,” to wit, 34% of TikTok users actively produce content.  David explains that TikTok's paid ads platform can cost over $50,000 a month. On the self-serve side, the budget can start as low as $1. TikTok has specific rules about content, posting, and addressing the audience, along with a powerful editing app. Videos created for Instagram won't work on TikTok.  David says now is the time for smaller brands to gain TikTok followers and community. The cost on TikTok is one-tenth that of Instagram. Big brand demand for influencers is low, so the spend on these initiators will produce a better ROI than an equivalent spend on TikTok ads. This cost is only going to go up, David warns. Today's users will only pay a fraction of what they will have to pay in a year to “get the same audience and the same followers.” The current TikTok algorithm promotes good content and makes it extremely easy to go viral. That, David says, will probably change. TikTok usually starts with a challenge. Someone responds to that challenge. The greater the number of people who respond, the better the chance that challenge will reach the “For You page “where everyone's going to see it and participate in that challenge.” Outsmart Labs partners with initiators who have up to a million followers to create concepts for its client brands. It then develops a first activation, one that will attract a lot of followers and eventually take the brand to the For You Page and “very large exposure.” Outsmart Lab clients have seen great ROIs on TikTok activation campaigns over the past year. Other areas of opportunity David discusses in this interview are local SEO and programmatic advertising. In regards to local SEO, David has found that close to 96% of retail establishments don't do anything to develop local SEO. Yet, many customers will look for a company offering a specific product or service in their community. Unfortunately, Covid-19 has impacted this “local market opportunity” for many businesses. But the situation also presents an opportunity for companies to rethink their websites and their business models. Programmatic advertising tracks customers from their cell phone locations and pushes strategic advertisements to these phones based on their location. Covid-19 presents an opportunity for companies to rethink their websites and their business models.  David can be reached at his company's website at https://outsmartlabs.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by David Azar, Founder and CEO at Outsmart Labs based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, David. DAVID: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you tell us about Outsmart Labs? Many firms have a superpower, so what is yours?  DAVID: That's a great question, great way to put it. I think our superpower is definitely our team. I think the team that we have together is what makes all of our campaigns very successful. At Outsmart Labs, we focus very highly on new trends and new platforms. First, to introduce what Outsmart Labs is, we help clients with having more traffic, more visibility, and more conversions online, and we really build a 360 strategy in order to drive those conversions, whether those are sales, whether that's traffic, newsletter signups. I think the team we have is a team that's very hungry. We are at the forefront of trends. We were actually one of Google's top agencies, rising agencies, which really allowed us to have access to a lot of data. We're not scared of trying new platforms. For example, right now, what we've been doing over the last year, which we've been seeing really great ROIs on, is TikTok. TikTok activation campaigns. I think what clients like is the mix of finding traditional marketing, whether it is Google strategies, Facebook, traditional social media strategies, and also inputting some newer platforms. At the end of the day, digital marketing changes so fast that it's about whoever adapts faster and whoever finds the opportunities in the market. I think our clients like that in us, understanding that some of the things might not work, some might work, but overall the strategy is going to be a very good strategy in order to scale. ROB: Excellent. It sounds like from your first introduction, you are very results-focused. How do you align a channel like TikTok – what do good results look like on that channel? Are you looking primarily at brand impressions, or is there a deeper level you can go to with a campaign there? DAVID: Great question. I think I mentioned what's really important now n digital marketing is not just doing one platform; it's really the 360 approach. Think of yourself whenever you're online and you're shopping for something. Most likely, if you see an ad for something you're interested in, you'll click it, but most likely you won't convert that first time. So over time, the more you're going to be seeing that ad, the more likely you'll say, “Okay, now I'll take the time to convert.” TikTok actually has a great opportunity at the moment. Even though it's been seeing humongous growth – and clients always tell me, whenever I offer them to go on TikTok and I go, “You guys should go on TikTok,” they tell me, “But I don't understand. TikTok is just kids that dance. I don't understand why that's my market.” This is when we tell them the growth of TikTok over the last year. They had 27 million users in July of last year, 40 million in January – and I'm talking in the U.S. – 65 million in the beginning of April, and on June 15th they had 85 million users. So, 85 million users means that now 1 person out of 4, almost, in the U.S. has a TikTok account, so pretty much anyone. It's all about finding the right way of – the way you're going to be marketing your product. It's not about just doing dance. It's about finding your core values and creating it in a creative way. At the moment, that we're at right now, it's a huge opportunity because the TikTok algorithm works a certain way where it's actually very “easy” to go viral on TikTok, and the algorithm really promotes good content. To answer your question of what a good ROI on TikTok looks like, it depends on what the client is. Depends on the number of activations they're going to be doing on TikTok. But I think that right now, what brands should really focus on is gaining followers and gaining a community on TikTok. As you know with Facebook, Instagram, and other different platforms, the organic reach goes lower and lower as time goes by and as more users are using the platform. We are at a time with TikTok where they haven't changed their algorithm yet, and so far, if you do a good video and you make it to the For You page, pretty much anyone with the right center of interest is going to see your video. The way we look at it is not only do we do organic content for clients, where we're going to be creating videos for the clients, but in order to have quicker results, it's about doing activations with influencers – what we call initiators for TikTok. I don't know how familiar you are with TikTok. I don't know if you wanted me to talk to you about how the trend works to get to the For You page. But usually you want to have a challenge, and then someone's going to do the challenge, and the more people do the challenge, the more likely your challenge will get to the For You page where everyone's going to see it and participate in that challenge. In order to ensure that the challenge is going to make it to the For You page where everyone is going to see your challenge and you're going to have a huge amount of exposure, we actually partner with large initiators and we come up with the concept of whatever the client wants. They tell me, for example, if it's a cosmetic company, “We want to promote our skincare line. We want to showcase it to as many people as possible.” So, we're going to come up with a creative concept. For example, there's a trend that works really well, which you've probably seen, which is people have all these cosmetic products and they act as if they're DJing, and the lights go on and off and you're pretending you're DJing with cosmetic products. Everyone was redoing it, and you can get a lot of followers and people exposed to your brand by doing that. So, we actually partner with initiators that have a million or up followers, and then we work with them in creating the concepts. We have a general idea, we work with them and say, “This is the hashtag challenge that we want to create.” They help us do it, and then they launch the activation with us. Because they have such a large following – and 34% of people on TikTok are active content creators, meaning people do actually want to create content on TikTok because it's kind of the whole goal of TikTok. So once those large initiators create this first activation, then as you see it, you want to participate, and little by little we ensure that brands go to the For You page and get a very large exposure. It's really a tenth of the price of Instagram. Budgets are significant for a small business, but for larger businesses, it's not that much – especially when you're looking at the reach you can have. A TikTok campaign right now, activation ranges between $10,000 and $20,000 for an activation, but you're going to be reaching around – depending on how well the campaign performs – 10 million to maybe 30 million views, people watching your content. This is incomparable to any other metrics. The reason I was saying – you were asking what the superpower of Outsmart Labs is; it's really seeing those opportunities in the moments they're there, because in 6 months from now, the algorithm is going to change. In 6 months, maybe 3 months, 4 months, we don't know when they're going to change it, but that opportunity, as great as TikTok is still going to be, it's probably not going to be as great as it is now. TikTok is going to have to change the algorithm, just like Facebook did before, just like Instagram did before, because they have to make sure the content they're showing is quality content. Because obviously, they make money by showcasing a large number of pages, and the more pages users watch, the more the platform makes money. So, they want to make sure people stay on the platform. That algorithm is for sure going to change. There hasn't been an announcement by TikTok; it's just knowing how digital works. But I think right now is really the time where brands need to go on TikTok. Also, a lot of large brands at the moment – we have a variety of clients, some very large international groups, and every time we pitch TikTok to them – it's changing now in the last month, but originally for the last year, it's always been, “We really like TikTok. We see what's going on on TikTok, but on a global level, we haven't decided how we feel about TikTok.” This is where I think a lot of smaller brands have such a big opportunity, because at the moment, TikTok isn't really crowded by the biggest brands. Except if you're the NBA or brands that are more talking to a Gen Z audience, which already got onto the trend. The other bigger ones haven't. So, if you're a smaller brand, it's really the time for you to take it upon yourself to go on the campaign. I actually have another example of showing how important it is to get on the platform early. We have this client – I can't name it, but it's a large high-end fashion brand. Family business. Not one of the largest ones you can think of, but fairly known in the world of fashion. I was talking to them, pitching them TikTok, and the person in charge of marketing is about 32 years old. I was telling him why he should get on TikTok now, before everyone gets on it, and he told me, “You're right, David. I definitely see that because as a brand, I was lucky that I was in the U.S. when Instagram launched, and I told our founder to create an Instagram account for our brand, and within one year we gained 500,000 followers.” In the last 10 years, they only gained 75,000 followers because the algorithm changed. At the beginning of Instagram, it was much easier to push your organic content. Same thing with TikTok. Whoever's going to be able to take advantage of TikTok now, they're going to pay a fraction of the cost they'll pay in a year to get the same audience and the same followers. I don't want to make the whole talk about TikTok and bore you with just TikTok, but it's definitely a fascinating platform. Digital is so fascinating anyway. Every month or two or three, there's something different where there are opportunities to be seen. It's just about finding a way to adapt your brand values and your message to that audience. ROB: Definitely. Even though it's been very focused on TikTok for a moment, I think it underpins even the name of the brand, Outsmart Labs. It seems like we're in this moment of this TikTok channel that you mentioned. Instagram's been through it, Facebook's been through it. Even Google, from a search engine optimization perspective, has been through it. I think two things were true. One is that the algorithm was at a point where there were true legitimate tips and tricks that work and help you rank that you can actually know and, to an extent, master or be very good at. The other one – I'm not entirely sure, but I think you may have implied – essentially, this is a really good organic marketing channel, whereas – I don't even know; are you doing paid on TikTok? Or is the opportunity on the organic side so immense that it's worth going deeper there? DAVID: It really depends what kind of brand you are. The TikTok paid ads platform is fairly expensive. Usually it's over $50,000 a month in spend, so it's not accessible to everyone. They opened the self-serve on TikTok, which you can start at $1 or whatever budget you want to put in, so we do use that as well. The thing is, usually clients want to have fast results. Because influencers right now are not as in demand by all the big brands and haven't had those large contracts, at the moment, spending $1,000 on TikTok ads versus $1,000 on getting more initiators, I think at the moment it's better to go with the initiators. But I think in 3 months it's going to be something different, and most likely you're going to see a big rise – and that's also why I'm sure the algorithm is going to change, because they can't let that happen because that's how they monetize and make a dollar on an initiator doing something on TikTok. So, it's a mix of both, but when you talk organic, you definitely should. Especially if you're a brand that's a little popular where you have a market that knows you. People are just looking for people on TikTok. I think the DJ Khaled example is a great example with what he did with Snapchat. I don't know if he was still very popular at the time – I don't know if you know what happened. He got lost on his jet ski in Miami and started saying, “I'm lost in Miami” on Snapchat when Snapchat just started. Everyone picked up on it and helped him to find his way. Then over the course of the year, he became the most popular person on Snapchat and now has the success and popularity that we know he has. So, it's about taking it at the moment and finding the right video. The organic does work really well, and people are looking for those brands. If you look at a lot of the brands that don't create any content at the moment, but they're a little famous, they have followers already on their account even though no one's really posting anything. So, I think doing some organic content is definitely great just because the algorithm works so well. If you do a good video – the thing is, you have to spend time in creating videos specifically for TikTok. Whatever you share on Instagram is just not going to make it to TikTok. TikTok has its rules, has its way of posting, its way of addressing the audience. The editing app is quite incredible in TikTok. So, you need to utilize all of that to make it work. It's a mix of everything. In order to have quick results, definitely activation with influencers is number one because you definitely see a switch right away. But obviously if you're going to be investing in the platform, you definitely want to think of also organic content and what you're going to be producing. A great tip I give clients that are scared and saying, “I don't know what I'm going to be posting if I do organic content” – first of all, that's what we do, so usually we take care of it. But other than that, the whole concept of TikTok is they suggest challenges and trends that they want people to do. Sometimes when you're a big brand or you're a little famous, if you just find a creative way to participate in a challenge, it gives you a chance of going viral. There's not that much creativity that goes into it because you know the trend and the kind of video that you need to create. ROB: Wow. It's very clear you are, as best I can tell, completely up-to-date on the now. Let's rewind a little bit, though, to the very beginning. What is the origin story of Outsmart Labs? What got you started in this business? DAVID: Actually, it started very early. I was 16 years old. Before even Outsmart Labs, just digital marketing and my love for digital marketing and the possibilities that it offers. When I was 16 years old, I was put on a project. We created the first professional sports team affiliate marketing website. It was for the team – I'm French; I'm from Paris, so it was the team of Paris. We had sponsors like Nike, a kayak company of France, large car companies. We went to the sponsors, they wanted more exposure, and we told them, “Why don't you give us discounts, and whenever a fan goes through our website and goes through to your page from our website, they'll get discounts from Nike, or on kayaks.” During that whole project, I was in love with how, as long as you think it, you can reproduce it. Then I fell in love with digital marketing, went to school at University of Miami, got very lucky that it was the beginning of Facebook and Twitter, so I got to see that grow. I started an event company when I was in school. All of our promotion was done through Facebook, and we had about 800 students come to our events every time, so I saw the power that Facebook had. Basically, a free tool was giving me the strength that a paid tool would give me. I always thought that was super interesting. If you think smartly, you technically don't necessarily need to spend a lot to get a lot. Doesn't mean you don't spend a lot of time, but in terms of actual dollars spent, it doesn't have to be that much. Then as time grew, I worked for a large firm called Amadeus, which is the reservation system of every plane ticket that you book. They didn't have a social media presence at the time or Facebook, so I did it for them. It was a fascinating project. I was like, “You know what? I'm doing this for all those different clients; why don't I just create my own agency and take it from there? I know there's a lot of people that don't know how even Facebook works or are new to the trends, so why don't I help them?” We started Outsmart Labs 9 years ago now, and it's been growing ever since. We have clients in a lot of different industries. What I really love – I personally love innovation. I personally love thinking big picture, thinking how to beat the system in ways like you were mentioning before, the secrets that are not really told, but that you guess from Google, but also applying the rules and putting it all together and making it work. So that's what we've been doing. We've been working with clients in hospitality, in travel, in luxury, even in mental health. I really love thinking about a lot of different industries. A lot of clients ask us, “But you've never worked in that industry. Is that a problem? I'd rather have an expert in whatever space,” and I tell them all the time, honestly, if someone is knowledgeable about digital marketing, there are so many tools out there that allow you to analyze all the competitors, analyze what they're buying, what they're doing, what kind of ads, what wording they're using, so it's almost not even that important. It's even almost better to use an agency that maybe doesn't have as much experience in the specific industry because in order to get to that level, they're going to have to do so much more research. Because it's changing so fast, that research is going to pay off into a smarter strategy than whoever did it a year from today. That's basically how Outsmart started and the logic and what I love personally about digital marketing, and I think everyone on the team is similar to that. ROB: That's really excellent. If you look out a little bit even beyond now – TikTok rose, it's working; there's probably some other platforms you've worked on – Instagram, there's probably some stuff you can do even on Facebook. But what are the next potential frontiers that you see coming? Are there maybe two or three new opportunities you see emerging that maybe it's just experimental budget for your clients now, or maybe it's already humming for a very select subset of them, but we might be thinking a little bit more about in 6-12 months? DAVID: One opportunity that I see that's a really big opportunity – unfortunately, because of the current situation of COVID and physical retail not being as open as it was prior, it might not be as big of an opportunity as it should be, but in a world where there's no COVID or in places where it's less affected by COVID and stores are open, local SEO is something that I see overperforming. It's something that not a lot of people put a lot of effort in. If you want a little definition of what local SEO is, it's how you get your retail business, your physical business, to show up on Google whenever someone makes a search query under which your business should show up. It's showing the closer local retails, whether retail or hospitals or mental health institutions or insurance companies or cosmetic stores or whatever that is. Local SEO is not necessarily very difficult to do in terms of what needs to be done; it's just very time-consuming. Because Google and all of those platforms create data, people tend to assume that because they're finding their business on Google or when they google their name, automatically they're registered within all the local directories within Google, within Facebook, within all of those platforms, which is actually not true. It's just a crawler doing it. So, actually spending a bit of time on local SEO – and about 96% of retail don't do anything on local SEO. I'm talking even the largest brands that we work with. Some of them tell me, “Everyone knows my brand. There's no point in me working on local SEO.” Sometimes if someone types in “cosmetic store near me,” you want that store to show up first versus a competitor. So, I think that's definitely a trend that I've been seeing. It's not necessarily a trend that's just now. It's been two years where no one's getting on that, and I really think it's working really well. Another thing that I would say – real-time bidding, programmatic advertising, definitely something we see also. Very efficient. Being able to target people based on their location, historical location or actual location, allows you to target and trigger a message very customized to each audience. Not necessarily something very new, and not necessarily something everyone's doing. It's also a little more expensive to do, so that's why maybe a lot of smaller businesses don't do it. But doing it smartly and using the tool for another purpose – which we do a lot for some of the clients that can't afford those budgets – you can really leverage programmatic advertising to your benefit to create a new audience, to track foot traffic in a location, to drive more foot traffic, to drive brand awareness. All of those are great things with programmatic. In terms of other opportunities, I think just being active in general. But that's not really an opportunity; that's just a truth. Those are the three that we're working on the most. Influencer marketing with TikTok mostly. We do YouTube, we do Instagram, but where we see the biggest growth is TikTok in that sense. ROB: For someone who's never dabbled in programmatic or real-time bidding or hasn't done so in a while, how has that ad inventory changed – the ad units, where they get displayed, how they're bought? I think it may not be what people used to think it was in terms of where the ads actually show up. Have they caught up to Facebook a good bit in terms of targeting? DAVID: What's interesting about programmatic is, first of all, not a lot of people know that this even exists. I think if more people knew how it worked, I don't think people would accept to share their location on their apps as often. Just to explain quickly how programmatic works, every time you download an app and you agree to share your location with the app, your device ID goes onto a stock market that anyone can buy. Along with that device ID, it gives your browser data saying you're using Chrome, Safari, your phone is in English, French, Spanish, and you were at this exact location. On average, someone shares their location between 25 to 40 times a day. With programmatic advertising, the great thing is we have a really great understanding of who every person is because it's not just what you search, it's not what you pretend to be on social media; it's actually who you are by where you live, what time you leave for work, what time you get to work, what time you leave from work, what type of restaurants you go to, do you run, do you not run, do you bike, do you not bike, and all those different things. Then how it works and where it's displayed – think of yourself whenever you play Candy Crush, whenever you read the New York Times or whenever you read CNN. There are ads on those platforms. Those ads are ad placements that can be bought by anyone and it can input your ad into that. This is how programmatic works. The beauty of programmatic from an advertiser standpoint is that as long as you can think it, you can do it. You can initially drive traffic – so you could have two competitors. Let's pick an example at random and say McDonald's and Burger King. That's actually a campaign we ran with one other restaurant. What we could do is geolocate every single Burger King, if you're McDonald's, for example, and say everyone that's waiting in line at a Burger King, I want to send an ad that says “Claim this $1 menu at McDonald's.” You see that ad on your phone, you can click “Add to your wallet.” It looks like the exact same thing as a plane ticket when you add it to your wallet, and then automatically it's claimed. Then you can trigger that alert once it's on the phone any way you want. You can say I want to look at the 10 closest McDonald's to this Burger King where the person redeemed this coupon, and any time the person comes within 100 feet of my McDonald's, I want a notification on his phone saying “Don't forget to claim your $1 menu at McDonald's.” Or you can say, people tend to go eat at 12:00; at 11:30, I want to send a notification to all those phones saying “Hey, don't forget to come eat your McDonald's.” And you can go back 90 days, so technically you can geofence every single one of your competitors' stores, go back 90 days, take all of the global data from all of those stores, and target those customers. The possibilities are endless with programmatic. ROB: There's absolutely a lot going on there. David, as we wrap up this conversation, what are some other things that we should know about either the journey of Outsmart Labs or what's next for you and the firm? DAVID: Two things we're excited about. The first thing is digital marketing has always been huge. Obviously, a lot of brands spend a lot of money on digital marketing. No one's really questioning the efficiency of digital marketing anymore. But still, for brands that are not ecommerce only, digital marketing came second to the retail business or their traditional marketing, and I think this whole situation of coronavirus has repurposed or made people reconsider the positioning of digital within their mix of marketing assets. A lot of companies have noticed that once they got all their stores closed, all they had left was their website. A lot of companies haven't even thought about where their in-store POS was not synced with the website POS, so all of a sudden they were left with nothing. So I think this whole coronavirus has gotten brands to rethink how to consider their digital strategies and understanding they should be relying a lot more on it because the chances of this going down is lower and people are shopping more online. To me, whenever I pitch a client, there's a lot of indication in terms of saying why it's necessary for them. I think the last 3-4 months in that way, we skipped through that. Now they know, “It's necessary, we need it; how do we do it?” I look very much forward to this because of the positioning of Outsmart. We tend to also pitch things that are not so traditional. As much as we do traditional, we always try to test things. You always need to pick your clients because not every client is willing to test things – and it makes sense; it's their money, and they want to maybe spend money just where they know the return on investment they're going to get. So that's what I'm really excited for. I think we're going to talk to a lot more clients. A lot more clients are going to be willing to be even more out of the box in terms of what they're going to try to do to differentiate themselves and basically have more real estate online. ROB: David Azar of Outsmart Labs, thank you so much for joining us today. I think you've given us a clinic on a bunch of very targeted and effective tactics in marketing. Congratulations to you and the firm on everything. DAVID: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to talk for the 30 minutes. ROB: All right, David. Be well. DAVID: Thank you. You too. Bye. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Some plumbers and HVAC contractors, we speak to believe that SEO is a magic trick. These people aren’t fools, they are just misinformed. There’s a point of view from people outside the industry that proper SEO requires some kind of magical formula. The truth is that SEO is very straightforward when done right. Furthermore, Google can’t be tricked in the way that it could be in the early 2000s. Stop trying to trick Google and focus on your users instead. If you track Google’s algorithm updates you know it’s their end goal to provide the best experience to searchers and to satisfy their queries or intent. Check out today’s plumbing SEO podcast to learn more: Don’t Try to Trick Google Trying to trick Google is a lonely road that ends with a penalty and potentially bankruptcy for your plumbing or HVAC business. It depends of course how reliant you are on organic traffic for leads, but it’s going to be very difficult to sustain success without any organic traffic. Aside from the possibility of a penalty, Google is away too smart to be tricked in 2020. Their algorithm updates have address every kind of shady tactic from link manipulation to low-quality content production. Steer clear at all costs. Google Values Credible Brands One of the primary reasons why Google can no longer be gamed by shady tactics is because they’ve increased the value of brand credibility. This value optimization allows Google to ignore tricks from SEO scammers who don’t work with credible brands. For example, a local plumber with no reviews or reputation can build thousands of inbound links, but never rank well. Why? Because Google knows that nobody cares about their brand. In fact, their brand may not even be legitimate in the first place. Google uses signals from 3rd party sources as well as their own search data to determine whether a brand is credible and engaging for local consumers. Brands are Built Through Engagement Building your HVAC or plumbing brand is a holistic process. Whether you have yard signs, newspaper ads, or simply a good reputation in local neighborhoods, you build your brand by performing great services. These offline behaviors are then translated online with the help of reputation management software like BrandRevu. It’s important that Google sees your reviews on your Google My Business listing along with other 3rd party platforms like Yelp, Facebook, and Better Business Bureau. As you build on your reputation, your SEO should improve even more than before. Responding to reviews is also a highly-suggested marketing technique going forward. Check-ins Help with Branding There’s some reputation management software for plumbers that supports local check-ins. Our favorites at HVAC – Plumber SEO Webmasters is BrandRevu. This software allows for local contractors to check-in at job sites and have those check-ins displayed on the appropriate page of the website. For example, you service a water heater in Dallas, TX, and take a picture of the tank. This picture, along with the other check-in information, is automatically populated on your water heater repair page. That’s the best SEO you can get. Forget about all this manipulative stuff and focus on actual work you do. Not only does Google prefer it but so do your website visitors. Do Digital Signaling We talked about reputation management software and how it can help build branding signals f...

Some plumbers and HVAC contractors, we speak to believe that SEO is a magic trick. These people aren’t fools, they are just misinformed. There’s a point of view from people outside the industry that proper SEO requires some kind of magical formula. The truth is that SEO is very straightforward when done right. Furthermore, Google can’t be tricked in the way that it could be in the early 2000s. Stop trying to trick Google and focus on your users instead. If you track Google’s algorithm updates you know it’s their end goal to provide the best experience to searchers and to satisfy their queries or intent. Check out today’s plumbing SEO podcast to learn more: Don’t Try to Trick Google Trying to trick Google is a lonely road that ends with a penalty and potentially bankruptcy for your plumbing or HVAC business. It depends of course how reliant you are on organic traffic for leads, but it’s going to be very difficult to sustain success without any organic traffic. Aside from the possibility of a penalty, Google is away too smart to be tricked in 2020. Their algorithm updates have address every kind of shady tactic from link manipulation to low-quality content production. Steer clear at all costs. Google Values Credible Brands One of the primary reasons why Google can no longer be gamed by shady tactics is because they’ve increased the value of brand credibility. This value optimization allows Google to ignore tricks from SEO scammers who don’t work with credible brands. For example, a local plumber with no reviews or reputation can build thousands of inbound links, but never rank well. Why? Because Google knows that nobody cares about their brand. In fact, their brand may not even be legitimate in the first place. Google uses signals from 3rd party sources as well as their own search data to determine whether a brand is credible and engaging for local consumers. Brands are Built Through Engagement Building your HVAC or plumbing brand is a holistic process. Whether you have yard signs, newspaper ads, or simply a good reputation in local neighborhoods, you build your brand by performing great services. These offline behaviors are then translated online with the help of reputation management software like BrandRevu. It’s important that Google sees your reviews on your Google My Business listing along with other 3rd party platforms like Yelp, Facebook, and Better Business Bureau. As you build on your reputation, your SEO should improve even more than before. Responding to reviews is also a highly-suggested marketing technique going forward. Check-ins Help with Branding There’s some reputation management software for plumbers that supports local check-ins. Our favorites at HVAC – Plumber SEO Webmasters is BrandRevu. This software allows for local contractors to check-in at job sites and have those check-ins displayed on the appropriate page of the website. For example, you service a water heater in Dallas, TX, and take a picture of the tank. This picture, along with the other check-in information, is automatically populated on your water heater repair page. That’s the best SEO you can get. Forget about all this manipulative stuff and focus on actual work you do. Not only does Google prefer it but so do your website visitors. Do Digital Signaling We talked about reputation management software and how it can help build branding signals f...

“Because Google is cleverer than that, they can spot related words. They’ll scan your website and as long as you have clear language, they will be able to tell what you are providing there. ”Promoting your business is hard work. The most popular way of bringing attention to your business and finding new customers is paid ads that can be used throughout various platforms, such as Google, Facebook or Instagram. But there’s one more way that not many people understand or take the time to get to know, and it is SEO. SEO can bring organic growth to your business and it’s not as hard to learn when you get the hang of it.Today’s guest is Sophie Caldecott. Since getting her MA in magazine journalism at City University of London almost a decade ago, she's worked for companies like The Ethical Fashion Forum, Verily magazine, and Marie Forleo, and writes for publications like Harper's Bazaar, Brit + Co, and Darling, alongside her work teaching creatives and small business owners to grow their website traffic with her uniquely intuitive approach to SEO. Sophie believes in doing less but doing it well and is obsessed with SEO as a slow living-friendly growth strategy.In this episode, we will be talking about how to use SEO to grow your organic search traffic, Sophie will break down some strategies in using SEO as a long-term growth strategy and also how the pandemic has been affecting the way people are searching on Google and much more.Let’s jump in!WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:Who is Sophie Caldecott and what she doesWhy Sophie loves SEO so muchWhere do you start when it comes to SEO?How to choose the pages you want to optimise? Which page has a priority?How to choose keywords that people will actually use to find your websiteIs SEO a quick fix or a long-term playWhat are the best SEO practicesTips on keeping the new website visitors on your websiteRESOURCES:Website: www.sophiecaldecott.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_by_sophie_Sophie’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sophie-caldecott-95986b61Kaity on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kaitygriffin_/Free Masterclass: www.sundaydigital.com.au/masterclassKaity Griffin Website

You can't tell the difference, between an artificial intelligence written article and an article written by a person, but that's a big problem for SEO. Because Google can't tell the difference either, so they're going to be getting more and more sceptical about articles and blog posts as time goes by. Podcast's are definitely another option. There is an issue with podcasts as well, though, and that is text to speech. So you can have your text written by an AI article writer, use text to speech to create the audio, and then you have a podcast. So Google won't be able to know what's genuine with podcasts, and what's not genuine, and will be getting ever more sceptical about podcasts as well. That's a big problem for SEO also. There is an answer, however, and definitely, I'll give you that answer next time.

It's early November here in Northern Michigan but it already feels like mid December, possibly February, and we're trying to avoid early onset cabin fever, so we look to Danelle and Stephie to provide some much needed "Ed-Tech Inspiration," to get through the bleak early winter.Show Transcript:Danelle Brostrom 0:00 Obviously it's smarter than I am.Larry Burden 0:08 Where's this come fromDanelle Brostrom 0:08 because you have to edit out all the stupid things that we say,Stephie Luyt 0:11 Now the pressures on.Larry Burden 0:13 gotta delete thatStephie Luyt 0:14 You're like Botox.Larry Burden 0:21 It's Episode 96 of the EdTech Loop podcast. My name is Larry Burden and she drank a bit too much of the apocalyptic Kool Aid after binging 16 straight hours of Black Mirror its Danelle Brostrom. And here to reel our Ed tech hero back from the dark side, it's Stephie Luyt. To coax Danelle back from the edge, this week's moment of zen trends hopeful.Moment of Zen 0:44 I hope that in this year to come you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world, you're doing things you've never done before. And more importantly, you're doing something.Larry Burden 1:06 After checking the unseasonably cold hourly forecast our decision was made to stay in, and partake in this week's meat of the show: Ed Tech Inspiration. It's Northern Michigan here, it's early November, it already feels like mid December, possibly February, and we're trying to not get into that early kind of hunker down mood. So we needed to find a little inspiration today. It was a great idea that Danelle had yesterday, as far as coming up with a topic for this podcast. So we all have lists, let's just jump right into this.Danelle Brostrom 1:43 I can start. My first favorite thing that I love right now, Common Sense Media had an amazing blog post on ISTE. It was written by Liz Cline who's their VP of Education Programs, and her idea is to, "Pause for People." We talk a lot about digital lives and how to find balance with your media and real life, and I think this idea of pausing for people is beautiful, and it's simple, and it's a great thing to keep in mind. So when you're in real life and someone is talking to you, pause what you're doing and privilege that human standing in front of you over what's on your screen.And she says this, "I'm no tech hater. I strongly believe that technology does help connect us with people in meaningful ways, and it should be used for powerful learning in the classroom. But even with all that potential the face to face interactions that you could be having. You should be having, starting now."I love that idea of pausing for people, and I'm really trying to do that when I'm in meetings when I'm, when somebody comes in and interupts me at my desk either turning around for my screen or closing my screen and just pausing for people. It's a great thing to talk about with kids in the classroom to.Stephie Luyt 2:45 That's a beautiful way to say that whole idea of a balance between how we use tech and how we, how we function IRL. It's a really good way to think about it. There's nothing more valuable than pausing for someone, and having that conversation.Larry Burden 3:02 I love that you're making an active step to do that. Sometimes we want to do that but we still have our device up, or we have our device open and it's amazing how our eyes just naturally fall back down into it. David Noller, the TechNollerGist, mentioned that when he's using devices in his class they're open, as soon as they're not being used, he tells them, close the device, close the lid. It's easy to get distracted by the device. So we need to be probably very, very deliberate in what we do to make sure that we are pausing for people.Danelle Brostrom 3:36 And tell people around you that this is something that you're trying to do too because I want you to check me on it. If we're in a meeting together and you see me not pausing, remind me of that. My kids have been checking me on it. My four year old will say, and I've got her saying this, I told her what to say so it's really funny when she says it, but she'll say, "daddy, what's more important right now me or your phone?" and he's like, okay, that is a kick in the teeth, I'm putting this phone down. You are more important to me always. But I think that's a good, you know, pausing for people, we need to make sure we're doing that.Stephie Luyt 4:05 I also feel like in meetings and in just events in general I feel like people are trying to be more mindful about that. I feel like there was a time where it was, hey great look at how busy you are, I'm going to check these four different things, and I'm going to have this open, and I'm going to be looking at this device, and, and that was almost a good thing. But I feel like that pendulum has swung a little bit and we're seeing more, I'm seeing more active examples in adults of trying to model that balance because we can't multitask in the way that we think we can. I 100% can't, and I think the research proves most people can't.Larry Burden 4:39 I can almost guarantee you guys do it when you go into a meeting. I take a look at the table and see how many people have their phone on the table. And over the past year I've noticed, less.Stephie Luyt 4:51 I agree.Larry Burden 4:52 Whereas so that trend that you're talking about, I think is taking hold. I think people are recognizing that the multitasking skill, isn't really a skill.Danelle Brostrom 5:01 I agree, it makes my heart happy.Stephie Luyt 5:03 My first favorite thing is, is pretty nerdy, but I've been doing a lot of looking into evidence based practice in libraries which comes out of the healthcare fieldLarry Burden 5:13 I'm not going next.Danelle Brostrom 5:14 I like this one already.Stephie Luyt 5:15 The part I wanted to highlight is you can collect subjective data, as well as objective data. And the piece in subjective data that is meaningful to me is really that idea of a narrative and the storytelling. It's falls under the "anec-data." So anecdotal data. And it's telling the story about the connections. It can be about anything, but the something I'm thinking about is the number of our schools are focused heavily on relationship building and connections. And they are always doing that but for some it's like the top focus this year. And just trying to quantify for lack of a better word, how some of those connections get made with individual students or staff members in the library, and how valuable that is for way down the road, even. I just read a report last night, it was from NPR, and it was some research that had been done that, if a student even has one positive connection with an adult, it can help buffer them against, really some of the things that come up on like the ACES Survey, our those childhood trauma experiences. And like, those meaningful connections, and even what seems like a small interaction reaps benefits down the road. And so my point here is just saying that having anec-data to show those connections, it's very valuable. Like, that is time well spent. And it's kind of the same idea that Danelle is talking about in terms of making connections. Like, those, those connections are meaningful, and they can be very powerful for our kiddos. So, anec-data is my one of my favorite things.Larry Burden 6:53 At the start of last year, our opening PD for the school year. We focused on something called the ISSN, the Intense Student Support Network. And I don't know if this happened over at Central High School, but I know at West Senior High, all the people that attended that PD wrote down something that they were going to do for students, be mindful of doing for students that year. And we ended up having, documenting the full list of things. And as far as something that would create a positive environment and would be what, what, what's the term again?Stephie Luyt 7:25 anec-dataLarry Burden 7:26 Anec-data, that was, you know, I look at it because it was a spreadsheet of anec-data, and it was, it was very inspiring. We actually made a video out of it with the running, the running comments. "I want to make a kid, one students smile today," I'm going to say hi to a student everyday," "I'm going to try to imagine, trying to focus on their needs over mine." And we just it was all, just so many great comments from our educators, and it was nice that they had a moment to reflect. Because sometimes it's hard to reflect on that anec-data and recognize how important it is because you're wrapped up in so many other things. It's nice that, that became a focus.Danelle Brostrom 8:03 Everything we should be doing. Kids, if they don't have that they can't learn. And that, those are the kinds of things we, we need to be doing every day.Larry Burden 8:10 I'm not nearly as cool as that.Danelle Brostrom 8:12 What'cha got Larry.Larry Burden 8:14 The thing that I'm inspired about or that's inspiring me is the continued focus on STEAM and STEAM education. I love the A. I so love of the A. You know, we're all familiar with, with STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. Throw the arts in there. Some of the comments that I ran across were, "It removes limitations and replaces them with wonder, critique, inquiry and innovation." The four C's, the 21st century skills, are all based, kind of in that artistic mindset, the creative mindset, collaboration creativity, critical thinking, and communication. Art is the tool to get those things done. So it's kind of like that connective tissue. It's like if STEM is the muscles and the, the skeletal structure. The A is the tendon, it's the ligament. It's all connecting it together, and I think that that's always been kind of a separate thing. You know, we always look at it any of our schools, especially high schools, the Arts Wing, it's kind of over there, it's those kids, you know, the artsy kids. And later on in life, when we're in business, or in any other field, we always go for it we really wish we had that creative person to kind of, not only bring some visual flair, but the viewpoint, the value of the viewpoint of, of a Creative, to look at a problem, and do that problem solving, from an outside perspective, I think is really what the A, brings to STEM is that, that creative problem solving.Stephie Luyt 9:46 The jobs, and the challenges, and the fields that aren't even created yet, like, the creative problem solvers of the world are going to be able to make the future happen. That is so, such a valuable perspective.Larry Burden 9:59 Next,Danelle Brostrom 9:59 Next, the next thing that I am super inspired by are the Michigan Social Studies Standards.Stephie Luyt 10:05 Interesting.Danelle Brostrom 10:06 I know, right. You would never thought that one would have been on my list. No, they just were approved in January 2019 and it was after.Larry Burden 10:13 You just had a meeting on this.Danelle Brostrom 10:13 I did that's why it's kind of in my, in the forefront of my brain right now. They were approved after this big five year discussion and it became political as these things often do, but the final draft is the part that I love. It has this heavy focus on inquiry, and the entire first few pages of the Standards introduction talks all about how social studies should be taught. And how different it is from how we used to teach it. So it's heavy into inquiry and that should be the primary form of instruction for social studies. And that students and then they put, and teachers, kind of in parentheses, like as a second thought, like, oh yeah teachers should help too. But mostly the students should be crafting these investigative questions that matter. That teachers should provide and help students develop tangible opportunities to take informed action. And I just love this focus on inquiry. If we do true inquiry, then I think we can come, we can knock out like 95% of those ISTE Standards that we work so hard on.Stephie Luyt 11:07 And ASL.Danelle Brostrom 11:08 Right? It's, it's beautiful. I think Trevor Mackenzie's work on incredible become important as we unpack with the shift and kind of how, how this changes our teaching. He wrote a series of books, one is called, "Dive Into Inquiry," that I'm in the middle of right now. But he has another book called, "Inquiry Mindset," that's more K-7 focused. This one is more K-12 focused. But even just looking at his companion website, there are a ton of resources that, how to take students from, here's what inquiry is, which is wouldn't be very structured into this like free inquiry work students are actually solving problems that they care about. And I just, I love that scaffolding, and there's, there's even a section that I was thinking about he calls, "Teacher Librarians Your Inquiry Superhero." That they're the ones who are really helping you understand and empower within this learning idea. It's just, it's beautiful. I'm excited to see how inquiry into the social studies standards really changes the way we teach and how it starts to excite kids. This is a topic I'm passionate about, social studies instruction, and I'm excited to see how we can make kids passionate about this too.Stephie Luyt 12:15 And let them follow what they're curious about reminds me a little bit of Genius Hour. It's that same following the, the area that you're passionate about, and, and seeing kids in that world, it's pretty empowering.Larry Burden 12:29 The fact that this is actually in the standard is great. I think we have educators that do this, that focus on this. Our superintendent was just in, was mentioning in a board meeting recently that he was in a classroom where he was observing a teacher do exactly this. I think she's been doing it for years. The fact that it's a standard shows was me, or tells me that we're recognizing that we are we are no longer the gatekeepers of knowledge, and that our job really is to spark curiosity and inquiry. And the fact that it's a fundamental shift now it's not just something we're talking about it's actually embedded in the standards. We're not talking about content. We're talking about,Danelle Brostrom 13:13 ProcessLarry Burden 13:14 Process. That is a foundational shift in how we're educating and how we're expected to be educating.Danelle Brostrom 13:21 It's amazing to see that in our standard.Larry Burden 13:23 Two years ago we were frustrated that we had been talking about this. And it wasn't happening fast enough, and now...Danelle Brostrom 13:30 It's there, and I would definitely encourage people to go to Trevor Mackenzie's website because there are a lot of resources on how to start inquiry. One of the things that he shares, and it's kind of fantastic. He took the UN Sustainable Development Goals and made this, I guess it's a slideshow, and each of the squares are interactive. So you click on the one that talks about poverty, or you click on the one that talks about access to clean water, and it shows you this little kid friendly video that would be a great starter for inquiry into that topic. Response, it's real world, it's inquiry, it's going to be great for kids and teachers.Stephie Luyt 14:06 My next thing is everything over at TADL. I spent yesterday there. Thanks to TADL for hosting our PD. We had our K-12 library staff there for the morning and they were gracious enough to provide the meeting space. And just being reminded again, I spend a lot of time at TADL, but we have such a gem there of resources, as well as a community space. And the number of innovative programs and opportunities to our, for our community. Every time I'm there there's something else that I think, oh my gosh they're doing this. You know you can borrow a theremin, if you want to do that.Larry Burden 14:44 Because why wouldn't you.Stephie Luyt 14:44 It's not everyday, right? Besides the theremin lots of other gear for any kind of audio visual project that you might have. You know, it's just a beautiful community space, and I actually looped back over to the library at the end of the day, my son had robotics, so I started the day there early and then was there at the end of the day and saw some of the same teens that had been there all day, taking part in all of what's there for teens, you know. And I thought what a great space, you know, being there, so much yesterday, just saw kind of the, the evolution of the day. And like, how people are using this. It's just, it's just awesome, and I just wanted to thank them for the experience being there, but also just say that's one of my favorite things currently.Danelle Brostrom 15:25 I would agree with you totally. Yesterday I was there as well picking up some MELCAT resources that I had ordered online and shipped right to my local library. And I walked in andLarry Burden 15:35 Shout out to MELCAT.Danelle Brostrom 15:36 I know, right? My kid was there and she was looking for some things. And that, that idea of connections with people, they are just so wonderful about talking to a child at their level, finding out what they're interested in, helping them find books. We're first taken the the card catalogs, they can look it up. And then helping them find that book on the shelf. And then, offering this additional series that they might be interested in. Like, they know their stuff, and they know how to get kids excited by reading.Stephie Luyt 16:02 Absolutely. They're a great partner. One thing that I noticed yesterday that then looped around today, I, there's a sign in the, in the teen section and it lists all the dewey numbers for topics that you might not want to ask about. So, just think of a topic that as a kiddo you might be nervous to ask about, you know? And then as I was driving here today there was a story on the news about a person who was, you know what, growing up had some, some things that they were figuring out and spending a lot of time in the library and trying to learn about some of these issues but not wanting to ask questions, and so kind of fumbling their way through how to find the right materials. And I thought what a great thing that they're posting some information like, you might not want to ask but here's some places to start your inquiry.Larry Burden 16:48 Is ours a diamond in the rough?Danelle Brostrom 16:50 We are really fortunate for all we have in our library for the size of our community. We have just a really innovative, forward thinking staff over there. I mean, there are a lot of fantastic libraries, but I think we're just, we're extra fortunate and what we have in the size of our town.Larry Burden 17:08 I was going to kind of jump off my STEAM conversation and actually go into one of the ISTE Standards. I really liked the Design Thinking Standard. So, students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions. Kind of piggybacking off of what I was saying before. It's somewhat similar, but again it's taking a lot, maybe oftentimes several problems and looking at them as a whole, and then getting our students to, instead of focusing on the small point also look at the bigger picture and teaching some of those design skills and recognizing the usefulness of those design skills and design thinking is, is very important. You know, Stephie, you had commented on maybe not liking the word standard. But really, maybe instead of standard, maybe a different word would be design. Because really that's what it is. They're taking the social studies curriculum, or the social studies standards and they're actually looking at social studies design, and how best can we create a system that will educate our students in the social studies field, most efficiently and most productively. It's a standard, yes, but really it's a design, and I think that's really something that is exciting that you see that pop up, obviously in the ISTE standards as something that's really important. Moving it along.Danelle Brostrom 18:34 I only have one more thing and it's eSports. Wow, last week's pod was amazing. Um, I'm reading, "The New Childhood, Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World," by Jordan Shapiro. I don't agree with everything in the book but he does lay out a lot of things that kids can learn through gaming. It's super interesting, reminds me a lot of the Jane McGonigal book, the "Reality is Broken." She talked about why gaming makes us better. And I think I really got that sense last week talking to the guys. That the things that they're doing with eSports, and the MiHSEF is so much more than just having kids on video games. It's all of these essential skills that they're learning through video gaming, and it was so cool. So that's another thing that I love.Larry Burden 19:16 One of the neat things about eSports is the fact that you can get all these kids together in a community. It's an online community, but it's a constructive, controlled online community. One of the things that a lot of parents, including myself, would have wished for, for my kids is neighborhood time. Where they can go outside, and explore, and play and find their friends and do whatever. It's this, "come back at five," that doesn't exist. It just does not exist because oftentimes schedules. They're here, they're there, a lot of our houses are far enough apart where the distance isn't really workable. Online is actually a place where that can happen, where you can get groups of kids together in a constructive, fun place. When we were out playing in the yard, in somebody's yard, it's not like we were being constructive. I mean we were because we're learning so many of those skills that would be learned through eSports. Similar, similar topics, similar skill sets, similar mindset. It's just the playing field has changed from the yard, which we can't, we can't seem to recreate anymore, to an online yard, which is available.Danelle Brostrom 20:33 Did you read the Jordan Shapiro book?Larry Burden 20:35 I did not.Danelle Brostrom 20:35 That is exactly what he talks about. He goes through things like, that kids would have normally learned in the sandbox, and this is what they learned in the online sandbox, and it's the same thing. It's just in this online community versus this face to face community. And yes, you need balance, but they're also learning these things online. You need to read it, it's exactly what you're talking about.Larry Burden 20:52 We've talked about this before, we're not leaving our students, or our kids at the playground and walking away. The eSports environment, creates a controlled environment. So suddenly that sandbox is being monitored. Instead of, we're just throwing them out there and, you know, who knows what's happening. There's adult moderation in that environment, which I think is really important.Stephie Luyt 21:16 And adult modeling even like, yeah,Larry Burden 21:19 We hope.Stephie Luyt 21:19 Yeah. My next one is specific to this time of year but the, the Youth Media Awards. So the Children's Literature Awards will be announced in January, and so this time of year is such fun because there's such a buzz about what books might it be, and lists coming out, and people making predictions. And what happens for me as the immense addition to my reading list that I got this time of year, because it's like, oh, this one, this one, this one, this one, oh yes okay. So I just love the, the discussions happening around books and the, the buzz around books, and the excitement, and the discussions that are happening. And I'm headed to a conference next week and they'll be that times 1000 so this is it fun time.Danelle Brostrom 22:03 So the stack next to your bed of the books you need to read...Stephie Luyt 22:06 unsafe.Larry Burden 22:08 I trying to think of your Twitter stack. Because I know, you know, after we had we mentioned Colby Sharp on a few pods and that obviously triggered an algorithm on Twitter at some point in time because we @ him a few times. And suddenly, I'm pretty up on all the new books and things that are coming out because that is my Twitter feed and I'm thinking, what is yours like? Is it just, just book, after book, after book?Larry Burden 22:28 You've got to read this, you've got to read this, You've got to...Stephie Luyt 22:28 Pretty muchStephie Luyt 22:32 It's nerve wracking.Larry Burden 22:32 I was just going to say, it's got to be overwhelming. I'm stressed just looking your mine andStephie Luyt 22:35 This is a fun time. Yeah.Larry Burden 22:36 For sure.Larry Burden 22:37 Stephie, do you have anything else?Danelle Brostrom 22:37 I'm out.Stephie Luyt 22:38 When you mentioned Colby Sharp, the one book that he, one of the books he talked aboutLarry Burden 22:43 This year's Liz Kolb it would seem.Danelle Brostrom 22:45 Colby SharpStephie Luyt 22:46 He mentioned that he was reading "Atomic Habits." And then it popped up for a couple people, and so I just started it. So I can't say much about it but I am really encouraged by, it's an interesting look at sort of those small things, those small changes that you make. Nothing, in terms of a huge new philosophy, but I think it, it's really interesting, and if it gives me insight into how Colby Sharp reads 1000 books a year and then that can even translate for me to read a quarter of that number that would be a huge win for this book to help me do that. So get through that big list.Larry Burden 23:25 I guess for there. TechTool of the Week.Techtool of the Week 23:31 I want to share the, "Use Tech for Good," site. It's ustech4good.com, and they challenge youth and adults to find and create the good online. Replacing the fear with positive deliberate and constructive ways youth and adults can work together with technology. It is beautiful, and inspirational, and there's a ton of positive examples of youth in tech, and it's definitely my tech tool of the week.Larry Burden 23:55 This is good stuff. Tutorials and Updates. TechNollerGist shockingly has a new tutorial, "Intro to Google Drive." I think there's a cottage industry on Google tutorials. Because Google updates and changes so many things so often, for the good 90% of the time. So, if you think you know Google Drive you probably don't, watch the tutorial, "Intro to Google Drive," by the TechNollerGist. Hey, I would ask for our listeners, leave a rating on iTunes and include your favorite trends in education in, in the review so it's a great way for us, A. to get reviews, so please leave a review, but also a great way to communicate with us on what you think is really cool in education right now. So leave a review and a trend. In closing, follow us on Facebook and Twitter @tcapsloop,Danelle Brostrom 24:44 @brostromda,Stephie Luyt 24:46 @StephiLuytLarry Burden 24:47 And get all the books. Subscribe to the podcast on podbean, iTunes, Stitcher and tune-in, downcast overcast, the Google Play Store, Spotify and wherever else you get your ear candy. Leave review, we love the feedback. Thanks for listening, and inspiring.Danelle Brostrom 25:04 Jeez Larry, I wasn't gonna Black Mirror it.

1) Facebook Pixel Tracking Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do eating. It is estimated that most U.S. residents check Facebook 15 times per day on average. Facebook pixel tracking allows your website to advertise to users who've already visited your site as they browse Facebook. Cookies are stored in their browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) when they visit, and then are pulled when they log onto Facebook. Pixel tracking typically improves conversion rates from around 3% to around 15%. Best of all, pixel tracking is relatively inexpensive but highly effective. 2) Google Remarketing Ads Like Facebook, Google allows for advertisers to track and then follow visitors of their website. Remarketing ads from Google are the same fundamental concept as Facebook pixel tracking and are even less expensive. Why? Because Google doesn't actually charge a fee until the remarketed ad gets clicked on. Remarketed ads appear on all kinds of platforms in Google's display network. It could be anything from Accuweather to a tutorial blog post. Let's say that a potential customer thinks they can fix the plumbing job themself, but then finds your ad on the how-to manual. They might reconsider. 3) Google Ads Once known as Google AdWords, the now named Google Ads is still one of the most effective ways to advertise your plumbing business online. Because it can be expensive and requires a level of expertise to properly maximize, there are some who have grown frustrated with it as a platform. Still, if ads are properly targeted and campaigns are managed by experts who have an understanding of demographics, targeting, and ROI, plumbers can really clean up with Google Ads. Depending on what city you are looking to target for plumbing jobs, Google Ads may be less expensive than you think. In any case, make sure you hire an AdWords certified manager. 4) YouTube Ads Like Google Ads, YouTube ads can target specific demographics. As the number one platform in the world for streaming video, YouTube is unsurprisingly a highly frequented domain. Investing in plumbing ads on YouTube can ensure that video watchers in your target area see your company promotions on relevant videos. While the ROI is typically less significant than that gained through Facebook and Google, it is still enough to pursue the venture with open eyes. What can enhance your ability to advertise on YouTube is by creating a video channel for your brand and even posting video content. 5) Search Engine Optimization SEO remains the most efficient way to advertise a plumbing business online. Some would disagree with this sentiment and for good reason. These plumbers have been screwed over by shady SEO firms who overpromise and underdeliver. This unfortunate combination has given the SEO industry a negative connotation amongst many in the service industries. The facts are unbothered however. SEO is affordable and sustainable which are the two most important components of any advertising campaign in 2019. Make sure you invest in a trustworthy SEO company and one that specializes in your niche, which for you is plumbing. 6) Website Design Design is important for conversion and personalization. Plumbers advertising campaigns don't end until a visitor is actually converted. Design goes a long way towards making that happen. From clean codebase and pertinent calls to action, design elements can close the deal on behalf of plumbing companies. Web design also ties in with SEO so it can actually help generate more leads which makes it even more potent from an advertising standpoint. Aesthetics are a big part of trust building, so make sure you website is visually appealing. 7) Codebase Part of strong design is clean codebase. Template websites use obtrusive elements that bog down site speed and hinder SEO potential.

1) Facebook Pixel Tracking Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do eating. It is estimated that most U.S. residents check Facebook 15 times per day on average. Facebook pixel tracking allows your website to advertise to users who've already visited your site as they browse Facebook. Cookies are stored in their browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) when they visit, and then are pulled when they log onto Facebook. Pixel tracking typically improves conversion rates from around 3% to around 15%. Best of all, pixel tracking is relatively inexpensive but highly effective. 2) Google Remarketing Ads Like Facebook, Google allows for advertisers to track and then follow visitors of their website. Remarketing ads from Google are the same fundamental concept as Facebook pixel tracking and are even less expensive. Why? Because Google doesn't actually charge a fee until the remarketed ad gets clicked on. Remarketed ads appear on all kinds of platforms in Google's display network. It could be anything from Accuweather to a tutorial blog post. Let's say that a potential customer thinks they can fix the plumbing job themself, but then finds your ad on the how-to manual. They might reconsider. 3) Google Ads Once known as Google AdWords, the now named Google Ads is still one of the most effective ways to advertise your plumbing business online. Because it can be expensive and requires a level of expertise to properly maximize, there are some who have grown frustrated with it as a platform. Still, if ads are properly targeted and campaigns are managed by experts who have an understanding of demographics, targeting, and ROI, plumbers can really clean up with Google Ads. Depending on what city you are looking to target for plumbing jobs, Google Ads may be less expensive than you think. In any case, make sure you hire an AdWords certified manager. 4) YouTube Ads Like Google Ads, YouTube ads can target specific demographics. As the number one platform in the world for streaming video, YouTube is unsurprisingly a highly frequented domain. Investing in plumbing ads on YouTube can ensure that video watchers in your target area see your company promotions on relevant videos. While the ROI is typically less significant than that gained through Facebook and Google, it is still enough to pursue the venture with open eyes. What can enhance your ability to advertise on YouTube is by creating a video channel for your brand and even posting video content. 5) Search Engine Optimization SEO remains the most efficient way to advertise a plumbing business online. Some would disagree with this sentiment and for good reason. These plumbers have been screwed over by shady SEO firms who overpromise and underdeliver. This unfortunate combination has given the SEO industry a negative connotation amongst many in the service industries. The facts are unbothered however. SEO is affordable and sustainable which are the two most important components of any advertising campaign in 2019. Make sure you invest in a trustworthy SEO company and one that specializes in your niche, which for you is plumbing. 6) Website Design Design is important for conversion and personalization. Plumbers advertising campaigns don't end until a visitor is actually converted. Design goes a long way towards making that happen. From clean codebase and pertinent calls to action, design elements can close the deal on behalf of plumbing companies. Web design also ties in with SEO so it can actually help generate more leads which makes it even more potent from an advertising standpoint. Aesthetics are a big part of trust building, so make sure you website is visually appealing. 7) Codebase Part of strong design is clean codebase. Template websites use obtrusive elements that bog down site speed and hinder SEO potential.

Boom, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen. This is Sales Funnel Radio, and today I'm gonna talk about my greatest asset and my college transcript.   What's up, guys? Hey, today's a little bit different.   First off, I wanna apologize. The last few episodes that went out, we found out the mic on the camera was busted, and so that's kinda why they sounded a little bit weird.   Thankfully my super-ninja sound dude was able to take out a lot of the stuff, but we apologize for that. He's the man. You guys'll all get to meet him another time when we all feature our content team again.   But, what I wanted to do, this episode's a little bit different, and you'll notice it's a little bit longer, but what I wanted to do is...    I did a Facebook Live to my group, and it's a little long but the lessons are huge, and it frankly is how I went from completely failing out of college; I had no idea how to learn. Did not know, right? I really didn't know how to learn. Even into my early 20s, I had to figure out how to learn.   In fact, the first thing I show you is my college transcript  - you'll see the huge difference between when I learned how to learn, and when I had no idea how to learn. And how that's blessed me in my life and frankly, everything else that I do.   Anyway, so it's a little bit of a different episode. We're going to cut over to it now. It's the recording from me in my group The Science of Selling Online. And so, we're going to cut straight over to that.   If you have any questions or whatever, please reach out.   The group itself had a great discussion about it afterward, and by the time I was done over 900 people had already watched it. And then a few hours later it was 1500.  It's been really, really cool.   There's some real talk, please go in with some thick skin. If you are easily offended, maybe don't watch this one. But anyway, let's cut over to it now and I'll see you in that episode.   I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today. And now, I've left my nine-to-five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business.   The real question is: How will I do it without VC funding or debt? Completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer.   Join me and follow along as I learn, apply and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels.   My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.   Hey, I just want to share with you guys probably one of the most important assets that I've ever created. It's something that took me, probably, two years to develop. Um, of actively trying to do it, okay? And I want to show you this real quick though, hold on, let me; just pulling it up right here so you guys can see it.   I want to walk you through what I've done and why it means so much to me. And frankly, I know it's one of the major reasons why I am where I am right now. And it's because the lesson was so painful, okay? So let me share this with you guys...   Alright. Okay, check this out. I went through, and I found my college transcript. It's not like anyone has asked me for it, ever. Russell certainly didn't care. But I'm glad for what it taught me.   I'll never, ever regret going to college. Although, I you don't learn how to learn. You don't learn how to make money in college, right? But I'm glad I went.   Check this out. I'm gonna show you my transcript, okay? And I'm going to show you something. This is funny...   I graduated from college when I was 28. Right, and it's because I did like a two-year mission for my church; I took, frankly, a year and a half off. This was before I knew what I wanted to do. Before I tried enough things to know what I wanted to do. Right?   I took a couple of semesters for army stuff. You know, going to basic training and a whole bunch of things.  So it was a long time, okay? Much longer than normal people usually take to get through college, but I mean I had a family. We had kids; we had a different scenario and everything.   Anyway, check this out. Okay, I'm going to show you my transcript. No one laugh, but totally feel free to because I'm going to.   Let me make sure you guys can see this. Look at that first semester right there. D plus, A, F, F, F, F. That's the first semester. Okay, check that out.   I got an A in Apartment Leadership because it was a two-hour thing. I just sat down and did it one day, when I realized how screwed I was at the end of the semester. My GPA was literally .00017, okay?   I had no idea how to learn. I actually got kicked out of college. I got kicked out - and frankly, you have to go to class to stay in it. That's kinda funny.  I kinda stopped going to class about halfway through. But the issue was; I didn't know how to learn. Okay?   I had no idea how to learn, I didn't know the process it. I  barely graduated high school, okay. I'm not just saying that; I got straight D's in science every semester; in math, every semester; in English. I certainly did in foreign languages. Spanish, straight Ds.  And half of it was just because I didn't know how to learn. Right?   I was always interested, and at parent-teacher conferences, it would be like, "Your son seems really, really interested in this, he just hasn't applied himself." And that's what they said every freaking parent-teacher conference - from when I was in the fourth grade all the way through! Until I finally went to college and removed my parents from the notifications list for the school. I didn't know how to learn.   The thing that I went and I figured out was, "how to learn." So  I thought it would be kinda cool to share my process for learning with you. Cause there's a process, and it's active.   Let me share with you guys the difference though... So I ended up having to apply for college again four years later. Okay, four years later, I went and said, "let's go finish this thing; I gotta figure out how to do this."   I did not learn how to make money in college. I did not learn how to be a marketer, even though I have a marketing degree - which is really funny. I didn't learn how to do any of that stuff in college. It was all my own side hustles going on, you know. I had actual clients going on, on the side.   But anyways, let me show you this. Okay, check this out. Alright, so that's the semester that I got kicked out, okay?   Then check out that row right there. A, B, A, A, A, A, A, A, B. A, A, A, A, A, A. B, B, B, A, A, A, A, A. A, A, A, A, A. I didn't get a single C the rest of the four and a half years that I was in college. Straight A's, a few B's here and there. Ended up with a 3.83.818, okay? That's crazy, that's crazy. And the difference was that I learned how to learn.   This was such a powerful lesson to me.  I remember where I was. I was over on the east coast, living in North Carolina.  I was on a mission, and I started learning how to learn.   I completely believe that God had every bit to do with it, okay? For some reason, kinda opened and expanded my noggin. But this is what I learned. This is the process that I learned. This is literally what I go through to learn.   It's no different, no different than what made me able to sit next to Russell in Build Funnels forum. It's no different, the exact same process.   In fact, even when I was sitting next to Russell, and he'd say, "Steven, go figure out how to hook up deadline funnel. Steven, go figure out how to do this. You got two hours to learn this whole software and integrate it into this funnel, go." Same process, okay, same process.   In fact, most of the time when I am coaching - I've brought 1600 people through this process now. Many of them became millionaires. Many became hundred-thousandaires, and lots of people made money for the first time in their entire life. It was by applying this process.   If I was sitting in Quantitative Marketing Research; blah, blah, right? I hate that, like; oh my gosh, that's terrible, right? I hated that stuff. Accounting!!! If you guys like that stuff, that's great. I don't, I'm not good at that.   In fact, my first major was CIT, blah. Coding? I'm not good at that, I hate coding okay? I do not know how to do it, I understand pieces of it, but my brain doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. And so, I had to learn how to learn.   The stats all say that every CEO is reading a book a week, at least, right. You gotta learn how to learn. And you gotta do it at speed, right? And that, if you guys go to; I'm not promoting or anything, but if you go to doublemyreading.com - it's the worlds fastest reader...   Every year Russell goes and does a promo with him.  He's got a course, it'll more than double your reading speed. If it only doubles, he gets mad about it.   I got to meet him. He read Expert's Secrets in five minutes. It was the craziest thing, I sat right in front of him, and I watched him. And then he had an in-depth conversation for an hour with Russell about all the details inside.   There's so much information around, the first thing you can do is be really picky on what you consume.   Stop listening to every podcast show that's out there. Choose the top two or three guys and go deep with them.   Stop reading every book. Choose the one or two topics that you want to get really good at in your lifetime, and that's it. Only do those things. Don't worry about the others, you're not going to get good at them anyway.   The first thing you can do is do what Tim Ferris teaches, and have a low-information diet, okay? And then you go deep on that thing.   I prided myself for a long time for being a Renaissance man. I could do ad copy, I could do the actual ad. I could do the actual funnel, I could set up the integrations. I could do the actual video, I could do sound editing. I could do all of it! And I was a one-man show and, frankly, for a while before you build a team, that's a great way to go so you know at least who to hire and who's good.   But after a while, stop learning everything. Okay? Cut it out. It's what's killing you. You just dive deep on just one or two experts that you really, really like. And you study 'em for years. That's the reason why Clickfunnels is literally three miles away in that direction, right over there. It's three miles away. Even though I was next to The Man that long, he is the silo that I have determined to learn and study from long term. I'm never not going to study deeply from him.   When I find out there's something that he is just freaking out about, and is super excited about. I read the same book. When I find out there's something; I still do it! Even though I had a massive brain dump just sitting next to the guy.   Anyways, what I want to do real quick is; I wanted to share with you the process...   The very first step, if I needed to go learn something that I didn't want to learn; I had to find a way to become curious about it. I had to become curious. I had to seek information, okay?   I looked at all the guys who were in my marketing classes, who were in my entrepreneurial class. Pretty much 99% of them were not doing a dang thing outside that class to learn on their own.   They literally surrendered all, all learning, All Learning, ALL LEARNING - to the teacher! That's crap! Don't do that! Okay, don't do that! You should be going and just getting extra little pieces done by that teacher.   If I'm coaching somebody (or somebody is in some program of mine), and they leave every single step up to me, I know they will fail. I'm that strong about it. If they have no drive,  if they do not learn on their own, if they've never opened up freaking Google or YouTube and typed in, "how do I _____ ____? I know they're not going to make it. Bar none! Done, right there - gone. Will not make it. Will not make money because they have zero drive.   Look, all these things that we're teaching you guys. Everything that we do is a formula. It will get you to the 90%. Okay? It will shortcut, save years of your life, Tens of thousands of dollars of you testing on your own. But that last 10% is up to the athlete. Right? It's up to you, right?   It's up to you; "Hey, this is how you do an econ funnel." Sweet, but I'm not going to go make an econ funnel specific to your exact product. So there's gonna be that last little 10%.   You'll make money during the 90%. You'll figure out how to be successful doing the 90%, or get leads doing that 90%, but it's that last 10%!   For the guys who can't stay up a few extra hours; who can't get up a few extra hours -  who can't and won't do it on their own... They surrender all of their learning to another person and say well, "But Steven didn't teach me how to do it with my product." Bullcrap! Not my fault. Not my fault, okay!   I realized when I sat down in college that people were literally leaving all responsibility for learning up to the teacher. That's when I realized; oh crap, it's actually freaking easy for me to be apart from everybody else.   That's the beauty of it guys. Study for an hour on your own. No one telling you to do it.  I'm preaching to the choir for a lot of guys on here right now. I know I am, but let me keep ranting, okay?   If you do just a little bit extra; in only a year's time... Six months guys! Six months from the time I built my first successful funnel was when I met Russell and got a job offer from him. Six months! It's because I dove deep.   Step number one, you've got to be self-sustaining. You've got to be diving deep, you have to be curious.   If there was something that I needed to go learn, I found a way to be curious about it. You must be curious. You must learn for the sake of wanting to do so. Reading is not enough, okay? Which leads me to step two.   As I was learning,  (and this was weird, okay), but I did this actively in college...   When there was a subject that I did not want to learn, you can see, I almost got straight A's. I got a 3.18 the rest of college after that. From straight F's? Right? I just showed my transcript to ya. What did I do?   One of my tricks was that I always "learned for two." That's the phrase I always say inside my head." I'm gonna learn for two, I'm gonna learn for two, I'm gonna learn for two." Meaning: As I'm learning something, one of the easiest ways for it to sink inside of my head; whether it has to do with funnels, right; or a script strategy...   Right now,  I am actually in funnel script.  I'm building out the webinar for funnel builder secrets to go do with all these cool JV's with Russell. Super cool, cool stuff. So anyways, that's what I'm doing right now. But, I'm learning for two...   Every time I watched Russell - even before I met him in person; before he ever knew who I was - I always learned for two.   Let's say there was some topic which I didn't want to learn it. I would sit back, and I would go: "How would I teach this to somebody else?"   I'm 100% convinced the reason I have this status right now is because of that principle.   It was weird guys; I would sit back, and I would say to myself: How would I teach this to somebody else?  For some reason I always imagined myself teaching it onstage. I don't know why but I always did.   I felt a little weird, little conceited even, doing that. And this became the basis for me to begin to publish - even though I didn't want to. Because in my head I'd future-paced myself enough times. Id think, "How would I say this onstage?" If I was gonna teach this; how would I simplify it? How would I draw in a picture so they can understand?   I'm not trying to sound super smart. I'm trying to sound "simple" - because it's actionable.   One of my favorite quotes... You know I'm starting my quote wall again, which I'm really excited about. I think it's that one right there. It says, "The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligence." Okay?   I'm not trying to sound all smart and crap. I'm a "geek out," guys. We go some deep concepts for marketing, right? The different psychology and ask, "what's actually going on in the noggin?" If you guys followed me in affiliate outrage, then you saw me do that a little bit while I've been building it.   So step number one is; be curious, seek. You've got to be able to deep-dive without anybody telling you to do so. Freak out over it, obsess over it. Be unreasonable over the amount of information you're consuming on it, okay?   I have mastered this to such a level that I feel like already that I could teach a master class on any subject if you gave me two weeks. I just dive, dive, dive, dive, dive.  You will be ahead of so many people, it's ridiculous.   So that's step number one, okay. You have got to deep dive. Find a way to be interested. Find a way to be curious. Seek, seek, seek, seek, seek actively.   Number two is, "learn for two." And more specifically, you need to learn how to document what you're learning, okay? Write it down, I don't always write stuff down.   I used to write a lot of stuff down, which is why I showed you guys my funnel journal. Which is a previous Facebook Live.   If you haven't seen that one. I showed you my funnel journal and everything I was learning. I just showed Russell like two days ago, and he's freaking out about it. Which is awesome. It'll be on a Funnel Hacker TV episode soon, which is cool, cause he was really impressed by it. But that's how I used to do it.   Other ways I would document, though;  let's say there was a subject I didn't want to go learn. I actively would find somebody after class, I didn't care who it was. There were strangers I did this to many times.   I would walk up to 'em, and we'd be getting on an elevator or something like that. And I'd be like, "Hey, this is gonna be weird, but can I just tell you what I learned in this last class?" And they'd be like, "Yeah, I guess." And I'd be like, "Cool! This is what I learned, isn't that interesting?" They'd be like, "Yeah, that is interesting."   I would go back home, and I would teach my wife for that purpose, guys. It was an active thing that I would be doing. I would take that piece back, and I would go and tell it. I would teach it to my wife so that it sank in my brain. If you can teach it, you know it.   Those are really the two steps, okay?   Now the way you teach it matters. You know what's funny is with Sales Funnel Radio; do you guys watch Sales Funnel Radio at all? I don't know if you guys watch it at all. Sales Funnel Radio is freaking amazing. Love the group. Hey thanks, Adam, I love the group too. Sales Funnel Radio is epic.   What's interesting about Sales Funnel Radio is everybody just wants the nuggets. Okay, they want the nuggets. It's funny cause I was totally surveying people and this is what they say.  It's funny, they'll tell me things like, "Steven this is a really good point, I wish you just got straight to the lesson though." And I'll be like, "Oh, interesting!"   So at the beginning, when I was first doing Sales Funnel Radio, you can hear a few episodes where I did that.  It was pretty straight tactics. Straight to the point, right to the nugget. And you know what's funny about that? Nobody ever remembered it. No one remembered the nugget. Nobody applied it. It didn't mean anything to them. After two episodes, I stopped. I was like, crap, that didn't work.   They want the nugget, but if I go straight to the nugget, no one remembers it. And frankly, you won't remember it either. And so you have to wrap your nuggets in stories. Okay? You have to wrap the golden nuggets in stories. That's how people learn, it's how what sticks in the brain.   It's what also assigns the value to the nugget. Alright? It's what gets people to go, "Oh my gosh, that was so cool!" It only happens when I wrap things in story. When I do 80% story, 20% nugget. So watch what I'm doing in those episodes. Okay, and again; 80% story, 20% nugget. When I do it that way, they're like, "Oh my gosh, that was such a sick episode!"   When I go straight tactical, and it truly is stuff that I would charge a grand for at an event to go teach. They're like, "Hey, that was cool!" And then I never hear about it again. When there is a story though, there's an emotional response that people will remember forever. So what does this have to do with anything?   So again, here are the steps. Number one: you've gotta be able to dive deep and be a self-solver when it comes to your education.   I hate it, hate it when people reach out to me and they're like, "How do I add a new funnel?" I'm like, "Freaking A! Did you even google it?!" I get so mad about it. Are you serious? Google it!! Right!   Did you do anything on your own to solve that question on your own? No! Therefore, I'm not even gonna help! That's my response to it, and I get pretty animated about it, which you just saw.   When people reach out, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, Steven, how do I write a Seinfeld series?" "Did you even google it?!" Right? "Did you look at Dot Com Secrets? Did you read the scripts? Did you even YouTube?" Someone already has the answer.   I have a YouTube education. No one taught me how to do what I'm doing. No one taught me, okay? My very first education was a YouTube education.   For a long time, I would go, and I would get these people to say yes to me.  I would turn around, I'd say, "Look, I know you don't know what these funnels are, and in fact, I actually don't know how to build half the stuff myself." I wouldn't say that. I'd say, "Do you want me to go rebuild your website?" And they'd say, "Sure."   All I knew was that there was a guy out there, somewhere in the ether, who had some little tutorial on how to build a website in WordPress. And I would say, "Sweet!" And I would dedicate two days; guys, I'm not joking.  I would say, "Yes, I'll go do it!" What I was really saying was: "Let me go figure it out."   I would grab whatever asset I found on YouTube; I would go grab 'how to build a website' and I'd have that on one screen. I'd do it in the library, guys. I didn't even have a computer sometimes.   One of the things that I would do is I'd say "yes" to people. And I would be like, oh man, I just said yes to filming that guy's thing; I don't even have filming software. You know, editing software. Oh cool, libraries do. And I would go edit everything in a library.   Or I'd say,  "You want me to come to your event and film a thing? Yeah, I could totally do that!"   I didn't know what I was doing for a while. I was in my age of exploration. I was just learning crap, okay? I was doing it on purpose. Just saying yes to stuff and figuring it out as I went.   Build a parachute as you're falling. Funny enough, the ground never comes, okay.   So I went out, and I would go, and I would say things like, "Hey, let me say yes to you on that and then let me deliver it to you in about two weeks." And I would literally just go and grab, I would just go and grab a tutorial and press play for 15 seconds and do what the dude did over on WordPress before Clickfunnels existed.   When Clickfunnels came out, I did the exact same thing in Clickfunnels. Guys, I probably read every support document that they ever had out. It's not a joke.   Two to three times a day, I would be reaching out to support asking questions. I was "THAT GUY!"  I knew that, and I was fine with that. But I was that 'oh crap, it's this guy again.'   That's how they knew who I was when I actually showed up to a Funnel Hacking Live event. That's why I got five job offers by the time I actually got there. They knew who I was because I was dedicated to educating myself. I was a self-solver.   This topic for me drives me nuts. I absolutely hate it. When people come, and they say things like, "But Steven, I just don't know how to find a product to sell." Google it! Right? It's like right there! There's so much information! Google it! Right! Are ya feeling me?   I know I'm totally preaching to the choir here. You guys are all; you're in a group called Science of Selling Online, right? This is like me going deep in innermost thoughts of my noggin, okay? But I'm trying to help everyone see like, nothing is stopping you!   It is not a matter of "how do I?" anymore. How does this happen? How do I do that? Is this what-- Is this how this works? Is this how I do this over here? It's not a matter of that anymore! Freaking YouTube and Google are amazing! Just go there! And do it! That's why I get so frustrated about it.   When I'm in a course for someone. Or there's like this little tiny contingency that only matters for the smallest little deep, darkest corner of their very scenario -that happens on a Tuesday, after a full moon... And I'm like, oh are you kidding? Just go google it.   I'm freaking just yelling right now. And I know, and I totally get that. But it's because it's a passionate thing for me. I just showed you my college transcript. I failed my entire first semester. They kicked me out, I literally had to reapply for college. What I learned in that scenario, was how to learn.   How to learn is never on anybody else's shoulder. If you don't know how to do anything it is nobody else's fault; it's no one else's fault - BECAUSE Google exists! YouTube exists! Guys like me, who are willing to teach you, exist! The 80 20 principle totally applies.   When I was doing 2 Comma Club coaching, and I was the only coach, there were 600 students. I was the only coach for a full year. How did I do it? You wanna know the honest truth? It's because the 80 20 rule still applied, and 20% of the 600 weren't even doing anything. Okay? You getting info is not what gets you results.   If you go out and you start saying things like... (I know you guys don't do this, okay), this is my rant to the world as if everyone can hear it. I should stand on my roof and yell, "Do crap! Just look it up! The answer is already there."   It has nothing to do with 'how do I?' anymore! How do I "X"? How do I "Z"? (I forgot "Y") How do I "X" ?; How do I "Y"? How do I "Z"?  "How do I one, two and three?" That's no longer the issue. The issue is always: Have you taken the freaking time to answer it on your own? Are you in a group? Are you in a course? Did you pay the dude who's taken a lot of time of his life to learn it some money so that he can show you how to short-cut it? Have you done those things?   If you do that, and you actually get in those courses. And you do it, and you apply it; that's like half the freaking battle. Just being where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be there.   In the army, there was a phrase; "You guys wanna know how you're not gonna get jacked up in this life? And you wanna know how you're gonna stay the course? It's simple; Be where you're supposed to be, when you're supposed to be there, in the uniform you're supposed to be in." And that's all they would say.   If you're supposed to be up at a certain time studying your craft, be up! If you're supposed to stay up late; be up! If you're like, "I don't know how to do this," make it your number one thing that day to figure it out. That is why I sat next to Russell Brunson. I am a self-solver, I am a self-teacher. God had everything to do with it.   When I asked him, "Will you please help me learn this because I'm kind of an idiot right now." Right, and I failed out that first semester of college, he helped, okay? And when I went out, and I said, "Look, I'm going to try and be curious about this." Rather than my attitude of like, "ugh I've got to learn freaking dream 100 again?," (Which is what I know people say), I was like, "Cool. How can I be curious about this? How can I seek the knowledge? How can I seek information and how can I get myself results? How can I self-solve and self-teach?"   There's no one else who's to blame except for myself if I don't learn this. Even the expert, even the guy teaching it. It's not his fault, it's always mine, okay? For my successes and my failures, never the expert's fault.   Number two, what I was saying is that you have to build a document somehow. I always follow the adage of "learn for two." Meaning, how am I going to go teach it? Either on a podcast or by writing somewhere? Am I gonna teach some random person on the street? Which I was doing to a hair-cut lady the other day as she was cutting my hair. She had a really terrible attitude about trying new things in life. Okay, anyway... You feeling me?   I don't care if the internet was to blow up; I'd be totally fine. Because I've learned how to learn. Does that make sense?   There's been a few times in my life;  a few projects that I've been on... This was true if it was a school project or a business project... Where if something changed the way we were running the business. And somebody started getting, "Ah, who moved my cheese? Ah, wait, am I gonna be taken along in that ride? Where am I gonna get mine?" It was always because they weren't a self-solver.   They always had the attitude of like, "Is, is this guy gonna remember; am I gonna be remembered? I'm gonna die in a gutter, blahhh!" And they would start saying that kinda crap, and you could see it. Their attitude would go that way, and they'd get a little more cut-throat. And we'd be like, "Dude, relax! We're still like fleshing out this thing. First of all, yes; you're still gonna be cut in this thing, it's okay."   I'm not gonna name a very specific project I'm thinking of, but it was always because someone didn't know how to learn on their own. They had no idea how to learn on their own. They had no idea how to self-solve. They had no idea.   There was a challenge that I used to run in the 2 Comma Club group called "The Self-solver Challenge." It's funny that I called it The Self-solver Challenge - all they had to do was just do the things I was teaching them. It was so ridiculous how many people wouldn't even do that. I'm like, "Are you committed to this?"   It's almost like Bourne Supremacy, you remember the Bourne movies, the Bourne Supremacy? "Will you commit to this program?",  Maybe a vague movie reference, I don't know? But I'm obsessed with Bourne movies. That's all I was asking for; "just freaking commit to it." And if they went and did what they were supposed to do in the program, I would go and do this special critique with them, or something like that.   There are two lies with this game. Especially in the info-product game. The first lie is that most of us start to confuse action with achievement...   Sorry, my hands shaky, I'm yelling too much...     If you're learning things, that's great. But if you're not learning with the intent to solve a problem, that's a distraction, right? It's the reason why I have so many books on my shelves that I haven't read. I have no reason to learn what's in those books right now.   People are like, "But you're supposed to read a book a week." Alright, maybe the equivalent of that I'm learning through listening to a ton of podcasts and a few other things that I do. I'm still learning like an animal. But I'm learning with intent.   This is how the game works...  I don't see beginning to end, and it's the reason why most people don't get started. What happens is they sit back, and they go, "Steven, I see how this funnel game could work," right? And some of you guys have said that "I get it, I get it."   These are like the two lies, okay. This is the first lie; the lie is that someone says, "I must see from beginning to end to get started in this game," but this is always a false belief.   I know this by taking 1600 people through this process. 1600, okay, I think it's more than that now. I think we're nearing 1700. The door is about to open for more, I'm really excited...   See, I teach people how to do for themselves the very things I'm teaching them how to do to their customers. I say, "What are your false beliefs about this very process I'm about to take you through?" And I, one of those beliefs is always, "Steven, I can't see the whole path."   Engineers and designers are always the worst because they want to see beginning to end before they ever start a project. They're always the worst.   Every time I'm gonna go teach on stage, I always look and see who the engineers are. If I know who the engineer is, I'm like, "Crap, there's the logic person who needs to see every step before they'll do anything." There's nothing wrong with that, it's a different skill set, just be aware of it   I'll sit back, and I'll say, "Okay, wait a second, that's not how it works. We see the peak! I always see the peak. I know exactly where I want to drive the ship. You all do, too. I want this kind of thing; I want this success. I want this kind of outcome; I want this kind of life. This kind of revenue or profit or whatever it is. We all know, right, you guys know what your peak is.   The reason I found that most people don't get started, and the reason that I found that most people who were taking time was because they could see the two or three steps in front of them but there was this area that was totally dark. No lights on, completely black. And they're like, "Ugh, okay, I see how to build the funnel, but I don't know how to get traffic?' And I'm like, "What!?" Month two hasn't even happened! Right? That's not how the game works! That's not how the game works!   There's as much faith in it as in anything else. You sit down, you say, "I'm going for that peak." You look down, and you say, "I see the one step in front of me, and number two, number three. I don't even really see number four." I don't even see number four in my own business. I see the peak, and I know the major milestones to get there, but in-between it's completely, completely dark. It's totally black, I have no idea what's there. No idea, no idea.   If you're nervous about solving problems in entrepreneurship, like get used to it, or learn to love it because that's all it is. So all you have to focus on is step number one.   Don't worry about step number three until you've taken step number two. So many people are trying to put every little asset, every little thing in place. All these little pieces; "I'm not gonna be a good speaker. I'm not good at the funnel building. How does the offer go? How does this happen?" And they're like, "Oh my gosh."   Just start moving, and take step one. Don't worry about step two until it's completely there. You take it slow, and your speed increases over time. But you put that foot out, right there. You just put the foot out, and you place your foot as perfectly as your foot can be placed. Then you start to put a little weight on it. Lift up that back foot and get ready for step number two. And you hold it above, and you place that step as perfectly as it can be placed. And then the next one, and the next one. And you know what's funny is when you take the first step, a new third step always appears and begins to become visible.   The issue happens when people get distracted by it. "But how do I bill an affiliate product?" Man, you don't even have a product, who cares? And, "What's my affiliate program gonna be? I haven't set up backpack yet." You're not even selling your normal products on your own anyway, who cares?   Don't even worry about it until you get there. Don't even worry about it. Right, boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. That's like the first lie of the info-product, actually entrepreneurship game in general. Well, the first lie that people believe is, "Oh my gosh, I gotta know all these steps, I gotta know all these things. I'm not gonna be successful unless I do. I'm don't see from beginning to end." Okay, no one does, nobody does.   You guys know when we actually started the funnel for this book? Two days before the launch. Okay, that's some scary crap. I would not encourage you to do that. Okay, it's some scary crap, and we had a very pro team pulling it off, okay? But what I'm saying is execution is what matters. Done is the new perfect. Stop needing to see beginning to end, stop needing to be perfect.   Most of the time it's just a pride thing that the person is experiencing. "I'm gonna look like an idiot if this fails!" You mean when. When it fails - it will. Just get over it. When it fails, okay.   But because so many people are so scared to take action, if you just take a little, you're already ahead of 80% of humanity. Okay, that's why I can stay ahead. That's why I'm doing it the way I am. I already know it's not gonna be perfect. Right?   That's the way I started treating my learning. I didn't need to learn every little piece of detail.  I dove deep with it, right, I dove deep with it. I found step number one, just as I was talking about. Step number one. How can I be curious about what I'm learning? How can I dive deeply?   Then number two: How can I teach for two? I mean: How can I learn for two - so I can turn around and teach it to somebody else? Somehow document it. Somehow go around and turn around and be like, "Check it out, this is how it happens!"   Okay, anyway. There's some real talk there. Oh, that was lie number one. Lie number two is that "when I purchase something the problem is solved." That's the other lie that people believe.   How many you guys bought a treadmill and never used it? That's a perfect example. We've all done that. I'm not poking fingers. We've all done that, every one of us. That's fine, okay? But you have to buy with intent.   I buy stuff to funnel-hack it or to use it. There are times where stuff sits around. I'm totally guilty of that as well. That's the second lie of this game that people believe. When I go purchase something, it scratches the itch. And therefore I'll be successful, and we begin to confuse action with achievement.   So just to recap, cause I just said a butt-load of stuff and that was way longer than expected and I went into things that I wasn't planning to. That was gonna be like a five-minute little thing.   Number one, right? I showed you my college transcript. I literally failed out of college. I had to learn how to learn. I had to literally reapply, they kicked me out. Like, for real, okay?   Four years later, I went back in, I learned how to learn. Got pretty much straight A's, graduated with a 3.8 the rest of college. And then, then what I started learning, right.   The big difference between a straight A's and me failing out of college, which totally applied to me everything funnel-building-wise. And which is why I am completely convinced is why I'm doing what I'm doing now, right. In college, I learned how to learn, okay? I asked God for help, I learned how to learn.   I turned around, and I figured out how to get curious about things that I needed to learn but didn't want to. "How can I get curious about this? How can I seek, how can I ask for help? Who has the biggest cheese? Who can I go run after? Who's that person who that'll take me in to shortcut as much of the process as possible?"   Number two, I always learned with the intent to teach somebody else. I learned for two; learn for two; "learn for two, learn for two." It's like this constant thing that's going on in my head.  There have been awkward moments where I walk up to random people and say, "Look, I know you don't know who I am, this is gonna be weird, but I want to teach you what I just learned, so I remember it, is that cool?" Sometimes I would just tell them anyway. That was weird, a few times. But it worked   When I started funnel building  - the exact same thing, right!   The fastest time I ever built a funnel was in 11 minutes. I walked out of a 2 Comma Club coaching event.  Russell goes, "Dude, oh my gosh, good! You're out. This thing's launching in 11 minutes. Can you put it out?" I was like, "What?! Oh my gosh!" Right, whew! Right, say 'yes,' build the parachute while you're falling, funny enough the ground doesn't even come.   And then the two lies, right? Lie number one is that when I start anything, I believe I need to see beginning and end to be successful. That is a lie. That is not true. Nobody ever does. Get used to it.   Step two should never even be thought about until you've put a step in step one. I'm not talking about thoughtful planning. I'm talking about just executing and getting crap done.   The other lie is that when we purchase something we believe that the problem is solved. Like buying a treadmill and it just sits there, or buying into a member's area; we never do anything with.   The 80 20 principle sadly applies to everything that I've ever sold, ever. 20% of people do stuff with it. The other 80% will not. Some of them will come in, and they do stuff, and they get what they need from it. Or they'll funnel hack me, which is fine, too.   Guys, hopefully, this has been helpful. That was a lot, you guys commented like crazy. I haven't even read any of them. But that's my greatest asset. That's why I believe if something was to go to crap, it'd be fine. Because; let's say the internet exploded. I'm probably going to go into real estate, and I'm going to spend two weeks learning all the strategies and who has the biggest cheese, right? Who has the biggest cheese? Sausage number one, in the real estate game! And then I would go, and I would dive deep with them and do exactly what they said, right.   I'd find a Mr. Miyagi, which is why I have this thing. "Little Mr. Miyagi bobble-head," I gave one to Russell. I was like, "Dude, you're my Mr. Miyagi." You tell me to do things I don't want to do a lot of times, but when I do, money comes in. So that's why I do it.   It's not about what you think. Sometimes you think too much, sometimes you feel way too much.   (COMMENT FROM PEOPLE WATCHING STEPHEN LIVE ON FACEBOOK:)   Javier said, "Did you get kicked out for partying too much?" No, I literally just stopped going to class.  I didn't know how to learn. I'd go to class, I wouldn't know how to do anything afterward. I literally had no idea how to learn.   Anyway, hopefully, it's helpful. It's kinda some real talk, I guess if you want to call it that.   The YouTube education thing is huge, absolutely Billy. It's Tuesday, roar.   That's right, John. Google that crap, learn from my kids. Exactly.   Actually, funny, I used to use this as an insult and um, please take it as a learning thing if I ever do it to you, or do this in the group...   But if you're like, "Stephen, how do I make funnels?" Or how do I do this, how do I do this? Man, there's a site called let me google that for you dot com - It's the acronym for it though. Let me google that for you dot com, you type in lmgtfy.com   Anyway, what's funny about it is that you can go in and  I could type in 'how do I build a funnel. And it creates a little video gif, and you can-- It pops out a link. And you can send it.   In fact, I'll do it, I'll do it after this, okay? I'm gonna go drop it in so you guys can see what I'm talking about. And anytime that someone needed to ask me a question that was frankly stupid, or I could tell them, or I could tell that they had done no thought to think about the answer on their own, alright? This is what I would do.   As soon as the video is over, I'm gonna drop one for you. So you guys can see what I'm talking about. And it's not me saying, "Hey, I won't coach. Hey, I won't help," it's not me saying that at all. What I'm saying is; let's solve the greater issue.   If the person doesn't know how to learn. If they're not a self-solver - they literally have no responsibility for their own education. And they're putting it on everyone else? It doesn't matter if I even answer it, cause they're gonna come back with the next question, right?   This game is a series of questions. So I'll answer that one, and they'll be like, "Cool, I built a funnel! How do I change button color?" Are you kidding me?!   You know what I mean, oh my gosh! Like, you know what I mean? And so I want to solve the greater issue. I want you to be self-solvers.   Anyway, 100% responsible. 100% real talk.   FB COMMENT: "Stop yelling, you're scaring me." Good! It must be the Tony Robbins hat that's getting me kinda, hopped up on goofballs.   You guys are awesome. Good watching you as always.   "Great to see another veteran smashing it." Hey, thanks, Nathan.   Leslie, ha I just did it, fun stuff.   Awesome, cool guys. Hey, I'm gonna drop an LMGTFY for you, so you know what I'm talking about.   Please, please, please keep sharing the group. It means a lot. I know there's a lot of voices out there, and having built a lot of funnels; I think besides Russell, I think it's okay to say: no one else has built as many funnels in the world as I have. I mean, really.   People clone them, or stuff like that. But, and um... it feels weird to say that... I'm not trying to showboat. But it is a reality.   I'm trying to be a voice of clarity in the funnel world - and teach you how to sell crap on the internet, where you're not having to compete on price. I hate that. I don't compete on price, I sell for full-value. In fact, I mostly sell for premium values. And I'm trying to teach people how to do the same.   So if you guys like the group, it's my goal to go live in here daily. And it means a lot to keep sharing it. We screamed to over a thousand people so fast. I can't even believe that.  It means a lot.   So anyways, thanks so much for your involvement. I appreciate you guys being in the group and it means a lot.   Hey guys, I'll talk to ya later. Bye Ah, yeah.   Hey, wish you could geek out with other funnel builders and even ask question while I build funnels live.  Wish granted! Watch and learn funnel building as I document my process in my funnel strategy group. It's free, just go to thescienceofselling.online and join now.

Listen now: Shannon DeJong is the CEO of House of Who, an art house and agency based in Oakland, California, whose clients include Google, among others. Outside of her naming expertise, Shannon is an artist, speaker, and podcast host: she hosts ArtistCEO, where she uses her story to talk about how business and art can work together. Shannon's also worked at Salt, an independent branding agency in San Francisco. She's worked at Logitech, and also HP, where she was global naming manager.  Toward the end of my conversation with Shannon, she describes what she was like as a kid: "a very mercurial, precocious little thing...[that] would bounce around and just talk and talk and talk" [27:16] You can still hear that kid come through in the enthusiasm and energy she brings to this episode. We kicked things off talking about her approach to name generation, in which Shannon starts out as a hummingbird, flitting from idea to idea. Later on, she turns into a drill, when she's more thorough and exhaustive. In the hummingbird phase, Shannon's quick to get out of her chair and go outside, sometimes driving for miles to find the right setting for creative inspiration. Shannon lists some tools* she uses, such as: A dictionary (ideally the Oxford English Dictionary) OEDonline Dictionary.com ("not the best dictionary...[but] often it gives me that base of synonyms that I start from") Synonym.com Online Etymology Dictionary Google Google Images OneLook We also talked about how to get past writer's block, for which Shannon shared the "Stupid Rule" and the "10-minute Rule" [15:24]. Lastly, Shannon gave her perspective on "brand truth" [21:20], and says the reason she loves being a namer is that "for just these few hours, I get to create an entire world" [26:26]. Below, you'll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors). Click above to listen to the episode, and subscribe on iTunes to hear every episode of How Brands Are Built. * To see a complete list of online resources listed by namers in episodes of How Brands Are Built, see our Useful List: Online/software resources used by professional namers. Rob: Shannon, thanks for taking the time to chat. Shannon: My pleasure. Good to be here. Rob: Let's zero in on name generation. So, you get a naming brief, you sit down to start generating names. Walk me through what you do next. Shannon: Well, I am a bit of a hummingbird when it comes to creative. The very first thing I do is just read and absorb and listen, letting it kind of sink in, because sometimes it's the stuff that I wouldn't hear on first blush or the nuance of what the client is saying or not saying that ends up proving to be a really fruitful area. You know if someone's like, "Here's the brief; we want it to be about connectivity and speed," you're like, "All right, network, hive, bee, prism, nexus, fast, cheetah pounce, run, paw." Y'know, it's like, that's great. And, once that has run out, the place that's gonna be sweet, where it's going to be truly helpful to the client and where the client could not maybe have gone on their own, is to think about the subtlety of what they're asking for and the subtlety of what the right answer could be. Especially now with the world—everything, brands, naming, trademarks—being so cluttered, it's really about these little teeny slivers of space, whether it's creative space, strategic space, where there's going to be something truthful and effective and clear. So, I like to just do a lot of receptive work first, especially because naming is such a generative, productive act. Rob: So, talk to me a little bit more about interrogating the brief. Is there anything you can point to that that works? Shannon: Yeah, I mean, I guess broadly I just want to ask every question until I have no questions left and I'm sitting there on the call or looking at the brief going, "Ok, Ok, I guess there's nothing left to do but start naming." Like, if I have any question at all in my head, even if it's a playful one or a curious one, like, "Hey this maybe doesn't have anything to do with naming, but how did this company start?" And then I think, practically, I will interrogate a brief or dissect it by just making sure the strategy is watertight. You know, the number one factor for success in any naming project is the strategy. It's always about making sure that you're clear what the ask is and what this name is going to do for you. So, I will always look a brief through and through and just know that there are those different pieces that I know need to be covered. I have to be very clear on what the brand—the master brand or the product brand—is about, the positioning must be ultra-clear. One thing that I find really helpful is coming back to the simplicity of this particular exercise, which is just a small part of branding writ large. It's a very important part. It's an essential part. But just reminding everyone, hey this is a name. There's a lot of other things that the brand is going to be. What do you need the name to do? Rob: Well let's talk about a hypothetical. I don't know how often this really happens, but let's pretend that you've been given a perfect brief. Where do you start, any process or steps that you follow consistently? Shannon: Oh yeah. Now the fun begins. I think my number one thing that I always do—so I mentioned I'm a bit of a hummingbird and then other times I act like a drill... Rob: And explain what you mean by those two metaphors just so that I'm clear. Shannon: Yeah, sure. As a hummingbird I like to give myself permission to...so creatively, I think I need to be able to flit from idea to idea. So, when I first sit down, I really like to give myself a ton of freedom, even though later on I will be more thorough and more exacting and I will make sure that I've covered my bases, and what am I missing, and where can I mine? And that's when the drilling comes in. The initial phase for me is always one of freedom and following the thread wherever it goes. It's organic, it's potentially disorganized. It's kind of like a little kid with a bunch of sugar who just wants to like, run around like, "Oh ooh, what's this over here? Oh, look at that! Oh, look it's a kitten. Oh, Mommy, can I have another..." You know, it's like I let myself do that because I know that that's where a lot of the creative wisdom is. And at the very least, even if that initial flush of naming doesn't produce names that are going to be viable, because like I said, the way the brain works you're going to have to be recycling and going over lots of synonyms and things that maybe aren't the quote unquote "diamond in the rough," that's where you get the volume. That's where you get the quantity, at least for me. I should say, I get the quantity and the volume and the breadth and inspiration and the curiosity, so I can cover a lot of ground if I just let my mind flit from beautiful little idea to beautiful little idea. Rob: And just to be clear, how are you, in practical terms, how are you working at this point? Are you often on a whiteboard or working with Post-It Notes or are you in software of some sort? Shannon: Great question. I would say that, well, first of all, I would say even my method is a little hummingbird-like in I also follow wherever the impulse is in terms of how to work. So, in the first several hours I really do just follow however I want to work. I start totally on impulse. It's like, have I been sitting at my computer all day and I'm just now getting to it? Well, opening up an Excel spreadsheet, while it can be very helpful later on with organizing, right now is going to just kill my creative mojo. So, why don't I grab a pen and paper and my running shoes and walk outside and go for a walk? I mean, I have even driven before an hour away to a beautiful setting. Especially when it's a particular kind of project and I need you know more tranquil, kind of open, expansive ideas and given myself physical space and physical beauty in order to start unleashing. Other times, I work a lot in just good old Word or good old Google Docs or a text doc. Increasingly now, I have, when I have a limited amount of time, I actually will start in Excel because anytime you take your pen and paper and you go out into nature, it takes longer. But I would say that I love starting with pen and paper. That's always a great way to start because you know that no matter what you're going to be ending up back at a machine. Rob: And I'm just curious, when you when you do wander off into nature with a pad, you don't you don't have Wi-Fi access when you're doing this? Shannon: Correct. Yeah, absolutely. That's part of the genius, I think, is that, to totally disconnect. I'd like to give myself a chance to see what I can do without any influence. I guess I should say without any digital influence. Because I think once I start getting into using—and there are a lot of great tools out there and they're absolutely essential, you know dictionaries and thesauruses and I think there's something called OneLook, and Wordnik, and Wikipedia, not even for words but just for ideas and how are certain concepts related to other concepts. These are all great. And for me that's more like middle process or it or toward end of the generation process when I'm starting to slow down a little bit from my raw creative fire. I think the best stuff has come from when I'm actually just sitting back a bit. And sometimes I physically do this. I sit back from the computer, I sit back from my desk, maybe I don't even have a pen and paper and I just... It's kind of that like shower moment, that lightbulb moment of, "Hold on, hold on, let me take a break from trying to generate 20 words a second and just go back to that initial listening and thinking. It's a very important step because sometimes I have had that moment and it's like, "Oh, that's the name." Like you just had this moment you're like, "That's it. Yes!" And you know that it's probably not it. Rob: Or it's not available. Shannon: Or it's not available. Yeah, usually that's the next thought. I think I need to have a feeling of, oh, I've had several moments like that, where I just go, "Yes, oh yes!". Rob: You've brought up timing. How do naming projects go for you from a timing standpoint and what's the ideal? Is it to have a huge block of time in front of you or do you like to work in little sprints? Shannon: Well, the ideal timeline is one that is two weeks for creative work where I have the opportunity to try out a lot of different modes. No matter what, at some point, I need to have a long block of time and that long block of time is always relative to the timeline and size of the project. So, if it's a quick little name list that I'm helping another agency with a long block of time might be two-to-four hours. I mean, that might feel like a good amount of time to sink in. I do feel like the minimum amount of time total is four hours. Like, I feel like it's after the four hours is when you can really get to some good stuff. And then you do hit a wall and you're like, "Ok, I need to refresh." Rob: Let's talk about tools. You mentioned a few but I'd love to just get a list from you, if you have it off the top of your head, of online or offline tools that you like to have handy for every project or maybe there are some that you find you only use once in a blue moon. Shannon: Sure, yeah. I have to admit, while I'm always on the search for new tools, I kind of I kind of feel a little boring or old school because as of yet I haven't found a tool that's better than my brain. But, with that said, I definitely use various dictionaries. So, I might have a dictionary here, whether that's a Webster's, ideally you have a full, original OED and you can open up and look through etymologies, but I do not have one of those. I do use, I think it's called OEDonline or Etymology.com [Online Etymology Dictionary, I believe. OneLook. Just, really Dictionary.com. It's not the best dictionary and often weeding through all of the ads and crossword puzzles and whatever I find very distracting, but it works as a tool because often it gives me that base of synonyms that I start from. Like ok, here is "fast," and dictionary.com or synonym.com, they're going to give me a definition and like top-10 synonyms. And then those synonyms, I, using my brain, or my other favorite naming tool, which is just Google, then get inspired to take that synonym and try and find what I call related or extended conceptual synonyms to go from. I also just use Google and the way I use it is I will start, embarrassingly, by just taking words in the brief or in the pathways and just typing them in. Like hey, let's just start. What does the Google brain and what does the world and what does the internet...how do they relate to this word or this pathway that I need to explore? Then I go into, I use a lot just Images, Google Images, and I'll type in various words, whether it's from the brief or even words that I have found that capture some kind of essence, even if it's not the right word. I'll write that into Google Images and then I'll get a visual palette or visual collage of more things that stimulate more thought. Rob: That's a great idea. I love the Google Images idea just to break yourself out of...I mean frankly, you're looking at words a lot when you're doing gaming so it's even just a nice break for the eyes. Is there anything particular that you've found works well for writer's block, so to speak? Shannon: I want to think carefully before I say this because I might jinx myself. I was going to say I don't experience writer's block very often. Maybe more than writer's block, I just get constricted and rigid and I get too narrow in my thinking and it just gets dry. So, I think that's probably my version of it. It's not a full block. But it just sort of is there's no juice anymore. And what I always do then is the Stupid Rule and the 10-minute Rule. The Stupid Rule—I just made these up right now, can you tell I'm a namer? The Stupid Rule is that I have to write down things that are stupid. Like alright, alright, now I want the next ten names, fifty names, to be totally stupid. Like you would never name this that. You would never even show it to the client. You'd be embarrassed to do it, you know? Rob: And the Stupid Rule—I love the name—when you do that...so, I guess it's sometimes it tells you, "Ok, I'm done, because I did this and I feel like I've gotten everything out of my system," essentially? And then other times does it, it spurs another wave? Shannon: Well, I don't think that just feeling like I'm out of ideas is the right feeling for telling me that it's time to stop. Usually that tells me that it's coming up on that first wave or a dry spot and I have to push through it. The 10-minute Rule—to finish up that thought—is just do anything for 10 minutes. If you want to stop after that, ok, then maybe it's not the right time to do it, but most likely you'll get into flow and you'll be on the treadmill and it will just, fwip! And off you go. I think it's absolutely that way with creativity. I mean anything, right, it's "I don't want to do it, I don't want to do it, I don't do it. Ok, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes—oh, this is fun." Rob: So, in that example what are you doing? What are you doing for 10 minutes? I just want to understand, are you doing something naming related for 10 minutes? Shannon: That's it. And maybe you only get 10 minutes of naming right now and then do something else and come back to it. If I'm really feeling blocked or I don't like it I'll just say, "Ok, 10 more minutes. Just do 10 more minutes." You know, I've even done that to myself three times in a row, like "Uggh, I don't want to." "Ok. Hey, hey, how about another 10 minutes? Rob: Making deals with yourself. Shannon: Exactly. Rob: Are there any specific name ideas or naming tropes you know like the "-ly" on the end of all these startup names—is there anything in particular that you're sick of seeing or that you've identified as a trend that you try to steer clear of? Shannon: Well, it's a trend that isn't my favorite but I'm not yet able to steer clear of it because it's so pervasive, but I must say the verbable name is lovely in theory and there's nothing overtly obnoxious about it. But here's what I don't like: I don't like it because people ask for it just because they think that that's going to be a successful name, and I hate to be a broken record but I want to go back to this idea of, "Yeah, but does it make sense strategically?" And I have gotten a lot of that like, "We want it to be one syllable, real word, ideally verbable," which is nice but there's going to be tradeoffs. Rob: To what extent do you think verbability is a real thing, though? Because "Google" is a noun, right? I mean, if anything. Shannon: You know what, Rob, thank you! So is Apple. So is...Uber is an adjective. This is what's so funny, is that I look around I'm like, "How many names are actually..." and people are like, "You know, like Twitter." I'm like, Twitter is not...you don't "Twitter" something. You Tweet it. And I don't know, honestly, if that came from Twitter, the company, the brand itself. But I don't think so. I don't even think that they created their own language. That was done by people. That's the thing, people will do that. This is the nature of language. This is my background: linguistics. I started as a linguist and I love language and the beauty of language. This is why I'm not a prescriptive but a descriptive linguist, which just means languages is alive. Language is organic. And it will extend and bend and twist itself as memes, as trends, as tropes from person to person in this way that is beyond any one individual or brand. Rob: I absolutely agree with you. I think what I hear you saying is that it's not necessarily our decision as the people behind the brand as to whether or not people end up using it as a verb. That's their decision, and one that they'll likely make subconsciously. But then, on top of that, I also think that brands need to be really careful about trying to impose that type of prescriptive language on to consumers or onto their customers because it—aside from it potentially not working—it could also just really backfire in terms of making them look silly. You talk about "brand truth" a lot. I think I saw it on the House of Who website and I believe you give talks about it as well. Can you just explain what brand truth is and how it relates to naming? Shannon: Brand truth is the very simple idea that one, you don't have to be fake in order to succeed. And two, your truth is going to be your most valuable asset. I think that the branding industry and the marketing industry is often known for putting layers on and making things shiny and beautiful and glossy, and there is a time and a place for that. I'm most interested in peeling the layers back and getting to the heart of what is essential. And if you are a business and a brand, there's something truthful about your product, your offering, your culture, and the essence of who you are, and that is going to be your sweet spot. I think that that actually ends up being—especially now with the way the world is going—people want realness. People want to be able to connect with a brand and its truth, in all of its glory, wants it to be whole. And I think in terms of naming it drills down the value of essential information. You get one word, one name, to communicate who you are and hopefully you have a bunch of other brand assets that go along with it. But sometimes you don't, and it's one word that may appear in print, it may be verbal, it may be someone just passing on the street. And I think, in that one name, there should be something really essential about who you are and it should be real. Also, just in terms of the process of naming, we're talking very tactical, you don't have to go to all these fancy bells and whistles and naming trends and what's going to be cool in five years and what's most searchable. All of those things are important to consider because they're realities. But I think in the process of naming, what's most important is to think of something really clear and clean and concise. And I would call that "truthful." We recently worked on Google Home Mini, and that's not a sexy name, necessarily. It's not like, "Oh god, that's so fun, and you just say it and it's like an inside joke, and it's cool, and it's hip." But it's pretty simple and it just makes sense. And it's at the heart of what the thing is. It's a small, cute version of Google Home, and there you have it. So, I kind of feel like people often try too hard when they don't have to. There doesn't have to be anxiety, you don't have to worry like, "Oh god, we have to be super creative, or edgy, or unique, or differentiated." Yeah, those things, sure. That's where your strategy comes in. But when it gets down to naming, I say start with the truth. Rob: Yeah, I often find myself reminding clients that no one will ever think as hard about this name as we're about to do. And try to relieve a little of that pressure and temptation to overthink it. Shannon: I often say to people my secret as a namer is that naming is the most important thing you will ever do for your business, and...it doesn't matter. At some point, get as close as you can and do the best you can, but as long as you—again—as long as you're on strategy and you're communicating what you need to communicate, you're fine. Rob: Well I love that Google Home Mini name. I think it's a good example of a name that's great but you don't realize it is. And the reason for that is, or the way to realize how great it is, is to think of what they could have called it. To think of all the things they might have done and some of the atrocities that other companies have waged upon us with more fanciful attempts to convey what is ultimately a pretty simple message. Shannon: I think when I was younger and new at naming, for a long while I was like, "Oh, I want to get that that perfect name. I want to have on my resume...like I want to have named Twitter!" I want to get something that people hear and they're like, "Oh my god, that's such an amazing name!" and I'd be like, "Yeah, thanks." And at this point I really let that go and I realize that it's far more satisfying to just get a name that's right and just makes sense. And if I never get associated with it, great. And if it does its job, great. Rob: Last question: What is your favorite thing about naming or generating names? Shannon: Oh gosh, I think that it's a little moment to play God. It's like, for just these few hours I get to create an entire world. I mean maybe it's like—I don't have children, and so maybe it's getting to name all of these potential little babies that will grow up and go out into the world, and there's sort of like a maternal pride about giving my creative oomph to something that will live on past me. I think that's part of it. And I think the other part is it satisfies this, like I said, the hummingbird in me. When I was a kid I was a very mercurial, precocious little thing. I was super teeny with shock-white hair and I would bounce around and just talk and talk and talk, and I think at some point, people were just like, "Ok, thank you for the 15 cartwheels and the story about rainbows. But it's time to be quiet now." And I think that energy, that childlike enthusiasm for language and ideas, gets to play when I'm naming and then it gets to saddle up next to, and ride along with, the other part of my brain which then wants to make it all make sense and put it all into a structure and find a place for it in the world. Rob: Shannon, thanks so much for making the time to chat. Shannon: Thank you. This was a lot of fun.  

Good Morning...I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and host of Onward Nation – and I’d like to welcome you to Episode 705...this week’s solocast. In case you’re new to Onward Nation...a solocast is where you and I take a deep dive into a topic...just you and me...without a guest. And this one-on-one opportunity provides the necessary time to really explore a topic with some depth. And during a solocast, I typically share my point-of-view – when relevant – on trends my team and I are watching play out with business owners every day in the marketplace. Or, I may share the most important lessons I am learning during conversations with other owners either during our Onward Nation episodes – sometimes during the recording or behind-the-green-curtain discussion I get to have – or – when I am out on the road teaching at conferences, or the new tools and tech I am learning about during mastermind sessions, or weekly check-ins with my accountability partners. So these solocasts are the place where I can share all of these points with you – and hopefully – I am able to share them in a practical and tactical way that the information and ideas serve you, your team, and overall, are helpful as you work toward building and scaling your business. So for today...I am going to explain why I believe so strongly that “voice” represents that next opportunity – that next patch of fertile ground – for significant business development. What’s Voice? Let’s start off with some context around the word “voice” and what it covers. And then we will dive deeper into what, in my opinion, likely represent three of the most significant business development opportunities for you as it relates to voice – and how you and your team can win if you were to add a voice-centric strategy to your overall biz dev plan. Okay, so what do I mean when I say “voice” and why does it matter? The term “voice” today is being used to essentially encapsulate all voice-activated or operated devices, apps, and Internet of Things accessories that you may have in your home or office. So for example, if part of your daily routine while you’re coffee is brewing is to say, “Hey Alexa, give me my flash briefing,” you are using voice to get information. Or, maybe part of your daily routine is to say, “Hey Google...dim the kitchen lights to 50 percent,” you are using a voice command to get a desired result. Or, let’s say you are working on a research report and you grab your iPhone X and say, “Hey Siri...what is the 52-week high for Disney stock,” you are using voice to pull data from a search engine.   Or, maybe you want to listen to your favorite podcast and you say, “Hey Alexa, play the Onward Nation Podcast,” and the most recent episode begins playing. And over the last couple of years, we have seen a real proliferation of voice-controlled devices or VCD for short...to the point that we are seeing a category emerge with a real acronym...VCD...voice controlled devices. And we as consumers are responding and voting with our wallets. To help illustrate this...I want to share some of the trends and data points we are watching really closely here at Predictive ROI. According to Techcrunch...the Echo Dot was the best-selling product on all of Amazon during the 2017 holiday season. Amazon did not release the actual number sold, but they did confirm for Techcrunch that tens of millions were sold. According to comScore...the number of U.S. households with smart speakers grew by 49 percent from June to November 2017. And smart speakers currently consist of Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, and others. Amazon Echo continues to be the market share leader but Google Home is gaining ground quickly. Here’s a market share estimate that shows Amazon with 88 percent market share in 2016. Their share dropped to 52 percent in 2017. Source: https://alpine.ai/voice-search-trends/ It is also important to realize that the overall market is exploding and that Amazon is still selling millions of Echos – and – from an software perspective...Amazon provides buyers with a library of over 30,000 Alexa Skills that can be verbally installed so that Alexa can perform certain tasks for you, as compared to Google Home’s library of less than 1,000. But, Google’s major advantage is its dominance in search. Right now, when you ask Alexa to search for something online, she is only able to search the topic using Wikipedia, which is not as comprehensive as using Google, which comes native as part of Google Home. This provides Google with a huge advantage to penetrate more and more areas of our home. A results of a recent Google survey estimated that 72 percent of people who own a voice-activated speaker say that their devices are often used as part of their daily routine. But the market share competition for voice controlled devices is not being waged just by Amazon, Google, and Apple. Samsung is expected to get into the smart speaker space – and according to Forbes, Spotify has been rumored to be preparing the release of their smart speaker. And, Spotify is about to conduct a $1 billion initial public offering for their stock, so the stakes are high that they execute their products strategy carefully so they can diversify revenue beyond being a music subscription service – otherwise – the company would not be worthy of such a lofty valuation. So let’s shift our attention away from devices and think about search and how we as consumers are being to use search engines to find what we need. According to Branded3 and data collected from IBM, 25 percent of searches on Windows 10 taskbar are voice. According to a report in Search Engine People, 20 percent of mobile searches on Google are made via voice command. And according to comScore, 55 percent of teens and 41 percent of adults already execute voice searches multiple times per day, and the forecast is that by 2020, 50 percent of all searches will be via voice. Onward Nation, I have even read reports predicting that by 2022, our computers will no longer come with keyboards because your laptop will essentially become a voice controlled device. It blows my mind to think about that – but – the data does seem to point in that direction. And what about podcasting as part of growth – is it still a growing category? And I get the fact that for me to have a bullish voice in this area makes me seem biased...so let me share some data from Edison Research. They are the leaders in collecting and sharing the growth related data in their annual report, which you can download here. Podcasting...even though it may seem like it is exploding right now...by the numbers...is growing at a slow and steady clip. There does not seem to be a podcasting bubble – instead – the data seems to indicate that there is some significant upside potential and we are just beginning to scratch the surface as more and more listening channels come online making the content that much more accessible. 24 percent of Americans have listened to a podcast in the last month – up from 21 percent 12 months ago. And 40 percent of Americans have ever listened to a podcast...up from 36 percent 12 months ago. The awareness of the term podcasting increased to 60% up from 55 percent 12 months ago. And 15% of Americans said that they listen to podcasts on weekly basis up from 13 percent 12 months ago. See what I mean? Slow and steady growth – even though – sometimes it can feel like every business owner on the planet has podcast and everyone is listening...the reality is not that. In fact, there are only a few podcasts – there is a lot of room in the market especially for really good content – and there is still a lot of blue ocean out there with growth potential. And we are seeing this steady growth as smart phones become more and more sophisticated, podcasters are developing their own apps so their audiences can find their content with just one tap or click, and their continues to be a proliferation of channels where the content can be accessed. For example, when we launched Onward Nation on June 15, 2015...705 episodes ago – yay! – you would have been able to listen to our episodes on iTunes, Stitcher, and our website. That was it. Now...you can listen to our episodes on iTunes and Stitcher as well as Amazon Echo by asking Alexa, you can find us on Spotify, on CastBox, on iHeart Radio, and on Google Play. And I am sure we will see more and more channels come online as the competition for subscribers and downloads continue. Lastly...we are also seeing large brands beginning to make significant investments in voice as part of their overall marketing strategy. According to AdAge, and what might be an industry first, JPMorgan Chase recently appointed VaynerMedia as its agency of record for “voice marketing” as the financial services giant looks to amplify its strategy around the nascent practice. Onward Nation, there are a number of reasons why I think this news is significant – but most of all – brands have been resisting for years and years the naming of an agency of record for any part of their business. Because awarding an agency with that title anoints them with a high level authority – certainly at the strategy level – above all other agencies. It is typically reserved for something very significant – and it is rarely used in today’s advertising world. Instead, brands are breaking up with agencies, slicing and dicing responsibilities across many agencies where they think they can get the best pricing, etc. So for JPMorgan Chase to make the bold move toward voice and to do it such a way that named Gary and his team as the agency of record – is huge. Huge kudos to Gary – major win. We are definitely witnessing the fulfillment of some of the predictions he made during Episode 42 of Onward Nation. Okay, let’s bring this full circle...all of this combined is why I firmly believe that the momentum we are experiencing around podcasting – and more macro – what we are experiencing around voice – is just the tip of the iceberg and all of this exciting momentum represents a myriad of opportunities for you and your team to plant your business development flag. So let’s take a look at four business development strategies that in my opinion, you and your team should seriously consider. These are not pie-in-the-sky ideas that you might be able to implement if we go keyboard-less computers in 5-years. Strategy #1: Launch a podcast Hosting your own podcast is an exceptional opportunity for you share your point-of-view with your customers and prospects, to be helpful to them as they work hard to grow their businesses, and to grow your audience and influence. Once you launch your show...be sure to get your content into all of the major distribution channels like Spotify, Alexa, CastBox, iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, Soundcloud and the myriad of other channels were podcasts live today. If you want a complete list of what we consider to be the big ones...go to PredictiveROI.com and click on “Podcast” and you will see a long list down the right side of the site with links to each channel. A podcast will also provide you with numerous monetization opportunities from developing business relationships with your guests, to promoting products and services to your audience, selling sponsorships to third party brands who want to pay you to access your audience and many more. If you’re consider launching a podcast – or some other form of cornerstone content – I highly recommend going back to Episodes 676 and 659 so you and your team can refer to all of the step-by-step tactical plans I included in each episode for creating and monetizing your cornerstone content. Strategy #2: Launch an Alexa Skill or Flash Briefing Okay, once your podcast is launched, and your episodes are available on Amazon Echo via Alexa voice commands, then I recommend you give some serious thought to building your own Alexa Skill or Flash Briefing. At the time of this recording, we are about 2 weeks away from launching a beta version of our Predictive ROI flash briefing where we will provide helpful insights from our guests that were not aired during their actual episode – a collection of behind-the-green-curtain conversations – and the daily Flash Briefing would be the perfect channel for sharing that super exclusive content. In addition, we may also include research points, the answers to FAQs, and other ways we can be helpful to business owners who may be looking for resources on how to gain clarity around their point of view and use cornerstone content to share their thoughts and wisdom with a larger audience. A key point for you to consider as you map out your Alexa strategy is that Alexa can do more than just straight responses to specific questions. Alexa can also be configured to access and pull data from sources like Google Analytics – all of which is possible by making the correct API calls. Incredible! If you log into your Amazon account, you will be able to access the Alexa Skills Kit so you and your team can begin reviewing all of the technical specifications involved in the process. One of the most interesting features for Alexa Skills is how you can require that someone who enables the skill – also “links” their account. Which means they have to accept granting linkage to their Facebook account which then you as the marketer have access to their email address and Facebook messenger. So...if you build a rockin’ awesome Alexa Skill, it can not only help you be helpful to your audience – but – the Skill can also build your email list. SUPER AWESOME!! Strategy #3: Convert your blog into audio content Say you are struggling to think of how you might host a podcast – or – the thought of you interviewing your dream prospects as guest makes you uncomfortable – but – you also recognize the power of voice and you happen to have a rockin’ awesome blog that you have spent the last several years building out. Wonderful. Enter...Voxsnap. Voxsnap is a recently launched service where you can provide them access to your written content – and they will convert it into audio files for you. Voxsnap has a stable of professional voice actors who will read and record your blog content and then give you back a professional sounding mp3 file of your content that you can then share via iTunes, etc...all of the podcasting channels we discussed earlier. So if writing is your preferred way to create cornerstone content, and you are uncomfortable with the thought of recording audio, continue writing with excellent and then leverage the power of voice through Voxsnap. Strategy #4: Optimize your content for voice search And lastly, you and your team need to get up to speed with the changes voice is having on search engine optimization. I mentioned earlier how comScore predicts that nearly 50 percent of all searches in just a few short years will be voice activated – and that means we need to create different content – and serve it up to Google differently if we want to continue driving organic traffic to our websites. And with voice search...there seems to be one vital priority at the moment and that is to create and optimize content so that it is worthy of becoming the “Featured Snippet” in the search results. The featured snippet is the content that is ranked so high in the search results that Google tends to put it inside a box and it is typically the answer to a question you may have asked when searching. So why is the featured snippet so important to voice? Because Google tends to highlight featured snippets in the voice search results and read them to you audibly. So, if you score a featured snippet ranking for your content – you will not only be served up to searches who are using Google the traditional way – but you will also be served up first to voice searches and your content will be shared with them audibly. Come on...how cool is that, Onward Nation? So...how do you score a featured snippet ranking? Well, I will likely dedicated a future solocast just to this topic because as you might imagine – it is a deep one all by itself. But for now...I will share several quick guidelines. First, you need to begin creating content for your website that is focused on answering “what,” “how,” or “why” questions from searchers. “What” your product or service does, “how” your team solves problems, and “why” you and your team believe so strongly in supporting the industry through your annual research report on trends, etc. So you need to think creatively about matching your content with the intent of voice search so that they sync up. Second, Google has shared data about how searchers who are using voice are also using long keyword strings – or what is often referred to as long-tail keywords. Gone are the days of someone going to Google and searching for a single keyword but instead of searching for a solution to a problem. For example...the deep dive solocast that I record that will focus on voice search might be entitled: “Okay Google, how do I optimize my website for voice search?” Because I will want anyone who is struggling with that topic to find my solocast. So you need to think of your keywords from a long-tail perspective but also from a question and answer or solution perspective. And third, I would highly recommend you and your team doing some research and testing using Schema.org – often referred to as Structured Data. With Structured Data, you will have more opportunities to tell Google, Bing, etc. what your content page contains – to label it – identify it and to make it easier for them to index and rank. Recent studies have shown that of all the content pages in the same that were ranked by Google with a featured snippet, over 40 percent of the pages were using Structured Data as part of their optimization recipe. Again, I will record a separate solocast on voice search engine optimization to share all of our steps in full transparency – but for now – if you and your team begin reviewing your content from the perspective of those three areas, you will likely be ahead of 95 percent of your competition. Okay, there is one final reason why I am urging you to immediately consider voice as part of your business development strategy. Because if you truly want to be a thought leader – and you want to leverage your thought leadership so that it serves you in attracting new clients as I have shared with you in past solocasts, then you cannot be a one trick pony. Here’s a quick video snippet about why I think that is the case. Your content cannot just be available on your blog...or just your YouTube channel...or just your podcast...or your latest book. Your content needs to be available across multiple channels and you reaching your audience and being helpful in multiple ways...and voice gives you that exceptional opportunity. With voice...you have the opportunity to no longer be a one-trick pony. With voice, you can create new content and then transform it into written content. Now, with the launch of Voxsnap, you have the opportunity to take your written content and transform it into voice. There is so much opportunity today to take one piece of cornerstone content and to transform it into many different spokes – and unfortunately – if you are not doing that – you are missing out on significant business development opportunities. So with that said...I want to say thank you, Onward Nation – thank you for taking time to be here – thank you for sharing your feedback, opinions, and insights with us for over 700 episodes. Please know – I appreciate your time and attention so very much – thank you for helping us get better each and every day. And I am thrilled that we crossed another milestone with 700 episodes – and that feels wonderful – but I think we are just scratching the surface in how we look to serve you the best going forward this year. I wish you a wonderful rest of your week and look forward to having you back tomorrow for another great interview with one of today’s top business owners. Until then...onward with gusto!  

This episode we talk about 5 Google Tools that will help you grow and run your business with ease. They make life easy and give you the knowledge to take your company to the next level. -We don't have one tool of the episode this week...because we have five! -Our Deep Dive this week is all about 5 free Google tools to help your business. You no longer have to give Microsoft all of your hard-earned dollars or download a new version of Excel 6 times a year. Because Google's got you covered. -In our trivia round, the guys talk about Gal Gadot and other girls on their "List." Arguments and hilarity ensue.

Not all Shopify themes are created equal. Even in the Shopify Theme Store, which has a carefully curated collection of fewer than 50 themes, some are certainly better than others. That's we've learned In working on Shopify themes for the last five years. (Which is why we now only work on themes from trusted developers.) For new store owners on Shopify, choosing the right theme can be an intimidating task. On today's episode, I talk through my theming experience, and we take a deep dive into a new theme that's become my preferred go-to choice. Joining us is Brad Miller from Out of the Sandbox. Brad is the founder and CEO of Out of the Sandbox, the designers of Shopify's best reviewed and most popular themes. Out of the Sandbox has been designing revolutionary online shops and setting trends in the ecommerce world since 2011. Their theme work has earned them a Shopify Design Award, and they've continued to push the technological boundaries for high-performance ecommerce. — Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via Email Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on iTunes Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Stitcher Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via RSS Join The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group Work with Kurt — Learn: Why start with a premium theme from the Shopify theme store? How Turbo theme achieves incredible performance The ‘Ludicrous' feature exclusive to Turbo Turbo's clever solution to images 40% of customers will abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load The most requested features from Out of The Sandbox and what to expect next How the Theme Updater app automatically gets you the latest features What you can do to get the best support Use Code PODCAST20 to save 20% off the purchase price of Turbo Links Mentioned: Turbo Theme - Use Code PODCAST20 to save 20% off the purchase price of Turbo Out of The Sandbox Themes Full Transcript: Kurt Elster: Hello, welcome back to the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I'm Kurt Elster, recording from Ethercycle headquarters outside Chicago, in beautiful Park Ridge, Illinois, on the second floor, all the way up in the clouds, of the Pickwick Building. Eh, that joke's lame. Forget it. Anyway, so I'm excited. I've got a great guest today on a topic that literally all of us can relate to. At least I hope we can all relate to it. Picking a theme. Picking a theme is really hard and the reason is, they're not all made alike, right? So we've got an internal rule now, is hey, if it's not from our approved ... First we said, listen if it's a third-party theme, that's not in the Shopify theme store, I don't even want to mess with it because it's, there's probably a reason. Then it became, well, even within the Shopify theme store, none of them are bad, but some are certainly better than others. So, it became, all right, we're just going to come up with a shortlist of themes that we know are solid investments for stores, are going to be reliable, are going to future-proof your store. And just stick with those. And that has been such a winning idea. And it wasn't ... Well, it was coincidence that you know, four of our five favorite themes were produced by one developer. Out of the Sandbox. So you've certainly seen, whether you know it or not, you've certainly seen Parallax in stores. You've seen Retina in stores. And more recently, and more often, you're going to start seeing Turbo, which is a really phenomenal theme. All three of those are Out of the Sandbox themes. Now, of course, there's other themes they make. But like, with these three themes, very rarely do I ever need any other theme. And they just happen to be from the same developer. So once you've picked a theme that's solid, you know, if you stick to the Shopify theme store that'll really help you out. There's only 45 themes in there. They very rarely submit a new theme. It's unbelievably stringent. Or publish a new theme. They're super stringent. Which is great. So only 45 themes in there. And I think that's a good thing. There's more than enough to be dangerous in there. But then once you've got your store set up, you've got your theme set up, then you get maybe an email from someone or you see a post somewhere and you think, "Huh. I should see what kind of page speed I have. I should check this tool that's Google PageSpeed Insights tool." Then it gives you a terrible score, right? It goes, "Here's our calculator, or score," so it doesn't really give you the actual size of the page or the load time of the page. It just gives you a score based on essentially a punchlist of things Google recommends you do, and then they can detect whether or not you're doing, and it gives you a score based on that. It gives you one for desktop, one for mobile. Oftentimes, you know, when you run a Shopify store through these things it will come back at like 50 of 100. So it looks like you have an F. Oh, my gosh! And people get, they panic. Oh, my store's so slow! A. Slow down. Performance is important, but I don't think that Google PageSpeed tool is that great. But here's why performance is important. So even if you are in a major city, you've got like 350 megabit down, you can get internet that fast, that's wild now. You're on your phone. You've got LTE, that things getting 50 megabytes, 50 megabit down. Fine. Cool. Then you get on, say, the subway. And now you find yourself on 4G or 3G or even Edge and none of that matters anymore. So even if you have the most sophisticated customers living in a big city with the best devices, even they are still going to have these issues, where performance absolutely matters for them. There is one theme out there that its big selling benefit, its development, from the ground up, is focused on performance. And it happens to both be extremely good in terms of layout, flexibility, et cetera. It's called Turbo theme. And it is, again, from Out of the Sandbox. So joining me today is Brad Miller. Brad Miller's the founder and CEO of Out of the Sandbox. Designs some of Shopify's best reviewed and most popular themes. I totally agree with that sentiment. Out of the Sandbox has been designing these themes, online shops, and setting trends in eCommerce since 2011. Around the same time I got involved with it. They've won Shopify design award for groundbre- for the Retina theme, one of my favorites. Like I don't need to know anything about your store to know you could probably benefit from choosing Retina theme. Now, with the release of this new Turbo theme, Out of the Sandbox has continued to push the boundaries for high performance eCommerce. Truthfully, I thought a lot of this was lip service, fine, until I played with the theme. I couldn't believe it. It absolutely isn't. There's lots of clever underlying technology in there. So Brad, let's talk about it. Thank you for joining me. Brad Miller: Kurt, thanks for the, that was an incredible intro. I'm super impressed. That's like, wow. That sounds really good. It's very nice of you to say. I'm a huge fan of your work, so having your endorsement is incredibly appreciated. Thanks for that. Kurt Elster: Oh, thank you. No, it means the world to me. My honor and pleasure, and I'm, you know, I did that truthfully. I did, except for that last little bit, introducing you, because I didn't want to get anything wrong, all of that was off the top of my head. Speaking to my genuine real world experience. So okay. You've got ... How many themes does Out of the Sandbox sell right now? Brad Miller: We have five unique themes. Each theme comes in a variety of different styles. But all the different styles are included in the theme. We have five unique themes. Four of them are in the theme store. One of them, Turbo, is our latest theme, is exclusively available from us. Yeah, like you'd said, Turbo is the first theme with a focus on performance. We really wanted to develop it with Shopify Plus merchants in mind, who are doing high sales. They required a high performance site. The primary performance factors being the download time of the site. But also the general, kind of, user experience. As you navigate through the site, as you add a product to your cart, and then as you go to checkout. We wanted that to be super fast, super seamless as possible. We've really grown and matured with Shopify. Like you mentioned, we've been doing themes since 2011. So we've seen a lot of merchants who have just got started with Shopify, you know, maybe they're on the Responsive or the Retina theme. Their business grows. You can see this with Shopify as well, introducing the whole Shopify Plus plan for these kind of higher volume merchants. So we really wanted to create a theme that was more geared towards these types of merchants. We see a lot of them just using our default, basic themes in the theme store. Which are great for getting up and running quickly. But there wasn't really anything with more advanced features that people are looking for, or that people have been going to agencies, paying tens of thousands of dollars to develop. We really wanted to focus all of our efforts into this ultimate theme. That's Turbo, what you see today. Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah, and truthfully, to your last point, you know, if you have a custom theme developed, in our very first Shopify store, it's still up right now, from 2011, Amlings Cycle dotcom, is a custom theme we developed. Designed and developed. And we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. But you know, now today, when we develop a custom theme, it is easily a $20, $25,000 project. So, but unless you're a huge brand, I don't think there's a particularly a great return on investment there. I think it makes a lot more sense to start with a great premium theme and then, if you have to modify it a little bit, sure, fine, great. To do what you want, add apps, et cetera. But in the past we had used, in some of our most successful stores, like Everspans dotcom and many others, we've used either Parallax or Retina. It's just our go-to themes. Recently we did a project for a large cutlery brand that sells all over the world and they came to me and go, "We already picked Turbo theme." I said, "That's great. It's from Out of the Sandbox, I'll use it." It is the first time I'd used the theme. Truthfully, I thought to myself, "Oh, the focus is on, the whole thing is that it's performance-based. That all the focus is on performance." It isn't the case. It is just, like, unbelievably well-thought out. Run me through some of the features. How does this thing achieve its incredible performance? Like for example, I mean, to it's name, what's going on there that makes it different and better than other themes? Brad Miller: Sure. Yeah, I mean, to your point, I will mention, yeah. There is a focus on performance, but at the same time, we didn't want to sacrifice any of the design or flexibility of the theme itself. Because I mean, you can accomplish something that performs really well, if you have no images on your page. If it's just a bunch of text and something super basic. But we wanted to do something that performs extremely well and also looks amazing. Looks like the best eCommerce site that you could ever want to put together. So we did that using a variety of different things. One thing that we did introduce is a new setting that we call ludicrous speed mode. Kurt Elster: Wait, you're making a reference to the Easter egg in Tesla cars. If you have the performance model and set it to ludicrous, this thing will launch like a bat out of hell. Brad Miller: Exactly. We wanted to do something a little bit more experimental that would get you that extra kick that you just can't get on any other kind of Shopify theme. When you enable this, it creates this kind of instantaneous page transition when you're navigating through a site. So we use kind of an underlying technology called Pjax or TurboLinks. It will dynamically load a page as you hover over a link. So you land on the homepage, it loads up quickly. But as you navigate or move your mouse around, as soon as you kind of hover over a link, that url is being pre-loaded. So when you click it, it's instant. The page switches, and it's insanely fast on mobile. I mean, as soon as you tap down on a link the content is always loading. So there's a lot of pre-loading. A lot of caching. And it just makes it super smooth as you kind of flow through the site. You go from the homepage, collection page, product page. That's really kind of the core of what makes Turbo special. Of course, it's an optional setting. It does a lot of fancy things related to the pre-loading pages and that. So you can turn that off and have kind of the traditional full reload on every page. But it is a special feature. It is unique to the Turbo theme. Kurt Elster: Tell me why it's, so you said it's experimental, and I notice it's like the first general setting in there is ludicrous or standard. When or why would I not want to use it? In what situation? Brad Miller: I would, if you have a lot of apps and a lot of stores do eventually find themselves with a lot of apps, which we can touch on later, because it does affect performance. But not all apps are created equal. Kurt Elster: Certainly. Brad Miller: Yeah, yeah. As you know, the App Store's a bit of a wild west. Not all apps are necessarily coded to the same standards or tie in to the same things. Or the implementation is completely different. So a lot of them will require kind of a full-page refresh to initialize or do whatever it is that they do. So we do have that option. We recommend using for shops that do have a ton of apps installed or a lot of third-party customizations. That being said, we have worked with a lot of different app developers. I don't think there's a single app developer we reached out to and provided a copy of the theme to work with that hasn't been able to update their app to work with the theme. So we're very proactive in doing that as well. If we do happen to come across any issues, with an app and our theme, or any of our themes, really, we're more than happy to work with app developers, provide them with copies of the themes for them to test with. Kurt Elster: And I noticed ... That's great. That's fantastic. I noticed in the theme, it does something clever with images. Can you talk about that? Brad Miller: Yeah. So I mean, we use a library called Lazy Sizes. Lazy Sizes is kind of a full responsive image lazy loading library that we've utilized throughout the theme to kind of maximize image performance, because that's one of the number one factors when it comes to download speed. So utilizing this library, all the images, all the banner images, slide show images, every image throughout your shop is lazy-loaded onto the page after the page is kind of initially downloaded. It uses the exact size image for whatever kind of device you're on. Whatever resolution that device is. So that really kind of minimizes the overall download size of your site by using the exact size images that that customer requires, I guess. Whether it's on their mobile device, or a big widescreen desktop. Kurt Elster: And it accounts for screen density? Brad Miller: Yes. Kurt Elster: So whether or not a device is Retina or not? Brad Miller: Right, it will double up the size if it is a Retina screen. Kurt Elster: Oh, that's very cool. So recapping kind of what that does, it's got this feature that I have not seen in any other theme. It's doing two things. A. It is taking some of the pain out of this in automatically figuring out, based on the device, so being responsive. Responding to the device it's on. Figuring out the correct image size, based on screen density and what's being displayed. So that you're not, say, taking a giant poster-sized image and shrinking it down to a thumbnail. Right? Because that's where all- Brad Miller: That's right. Kurt Elster: Truthfully, that's one of the, probably number one when we see a store that like 12 megs and no one knows why. It's because there's images that have been missized and they're huge. Then the second is just too many apps. But you have solved the ... It sounds like you've got solutions to both those things. But especially the images. Then the lazy-loading thing is very clever. So reducing the total size of the page helps, you know, that's what we think of first when we think, "Oh, make the page faster. Make it smaller." But the other is the appearance of how fast it renders. Brad Miller: Yes. Kurt Elster: So if I can show the framework. Like if you fire up Facebook on a slow connection, you'll see it do this, where it shows just kind of like the outline of what posts look like, right? It's doing that to make it look like it's loading faster with a transition. So what your theme is doing, it loads up all the text content and the layout. And then it loads the images, right? Brad Miller: That's right. And we do so in a way, where there's a nice little blur effect to it. Kurt Elster: Yes. Brad Miller: So we might initially load a very small image and kind of blur it out and then as the larger version is loaded, it's then replaced. It's a really nice kind of fade-in effect. So like we said, we want- Kurt Elster: This concept is called, isn't it called progressive enhancement? Brad Miller: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I guess you could call it that. But it does create a nice effect. Like we said, it's like we want it to look great, but also perform amazing. So that kind of plays into that, as well. Kurt Elster: Yeah, it's not just, you know ... Another thing. We've been hired to do, like, oh, this theme is slow. Fix it. Make it faster. Brad Miller: Yeah. Kurt Elster: And one of people's concerns is always like, "But when you make it faster, it's still going to look good, right?" Brad Miller: Yeah, right. Kurt Elster: You're not going to strip everything out of this. You say, "Yeah." I mean, yes, absolutely. And there's a lot of ... That's just a thing you learn from experience and I would never expect someone to know how to do that stuff. Like a store owner. Brad Miller: No, that's true. Yeah. Kurt Elster: Whereas this theme is taking care of that stuff, which I love. It's very clever. Beyond- Go ahead. Brad Miller: Sorry, I was just going to say, but you're right. Going back to that Google PageSpeed thing. I mean, all of these are kind of itemized things that that test will kind of bring up. Whether you do have these huge large images, it will recommend you compress them. Or decrease the size of them. Or something like that. So we really, all of those common things that come up, we want it to touch on. Other things like dynamically minifying the html, which is also unique to the Turbo theme- Kurt Elster: Oh, I didn't know what. Brad Miller: Yeah, well it's not something that ... So Shopify will minify your CSS if you use the Sass file extension. Kurt Elster: CSS, yeah. Brad Miller: Yeah. But it doesn't minify your html and that's a common warning that comes up on the Google PageSpeed stuff so we implemented a couple clever lines of code to minify the html. Kurt Elster: That's crazy. Brad Miller: Yeah, we also defer all JavaScript loading. Kurt Elster: That's a big one. As far, especially, you know, with, because every app is ugh. They don't talk to each other, and every app is like, "Oh, I'm going to load jQuery," and pretty soon you're loading like four discrete versions of jQuery. Brad Miller: Yes. Yes, definitely. Oh, I know. That is an issue. But yeah, there's other things that kind of go into the theme to make it feel faster and stuff like infinite scrolling on the collection page and the minicart functionality and everything else. Kurt Elster: That's very clever. All clever stuff. I love all of it. The end result is, install the theme, you really don't have to worry about performance. The end benefit of that is A. You provide, and I think this is the most important one, is you're providing a better experience to your customers. Always. No one wants to wait. Like why should I have to wait? We like things that are fast. Fast food. Fast cars, et cetera. The secondary effect there, and this is the one people focus on, but I don't, I really don't think it's as big a deal, is that Google says, "Oh, we've got ... If your page loads faster, that's a ranking factor." Yeah, that's true. Because Google want ... But why are they doing that? It's because they want a great user experience for people. Brad Miller: Yeah. Kurt Elster: But I certainly don't think there's a situation where Google's going to say, "Hey, this is the best ... This result is the best answer to the user's query. Oh, but this site has a slow load time. Let's push that to the bottom." Like, I don't think that's happening. Brad Miller: Yeah. Kurt Elster: Think it's more if two items are tied they're going to, whichever one is faster, let's bump that one up. Brad Miller: I agree. I mean, Google does weigh in the whole user experience. You land on a site, you stay on a site. You continue to browse the site. That definitely plays into it as well. But, you know, 40% of shoppers will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load. So that definitely plays into it. Kurt Elster: I'm writing that one down right now. 40% of customers will abandon a site that takes, how many seconds was it? Brad Miller: More than three seconds to load. So you've gotta display something pretty quickly or you're going to risk having bounces. Kurt Elster: Yeah. Absolutely. And like four years ago, we were concerned about load time. You know, when people were still fighting about whether we should do responsive or web apps and that silly stuff. And we were concerned about performance then. That same statistic existed, you know, about people bouncing. Only it was a longer time. So as time has gone on, the amount of patience they have, has lessened. Brad Miller: Yes. Yeah. Totally. Totally. People expect a site to be very quick, very snappy. Very impatient, especially if they're shopping around online. I mean, why would they stay on your site versus, you know, hop back to Google and go to the next one. Kurt Elster: That's the critical phrase right there, is most people view, you know, they've got a store, they go, "Well, my competition is doing XYZ." You're biggest competitor is not another store. It's the back button. Brad Miller: Yes. Kurt Elster: They land on your store. Like if you were so lucky, to get them onto your site. And then you give them a subpar experience. They're just going to click back. They're going to go back to doing whatever the heck else they were doing before. Brad Miller: Right. Right, no I totally agree. Think so. Kurt Elster: Okay. Some other thing. Like I love Turbo. We've established that Turbo is good and fast and you are good and wonderful. Brad Miller: Okay. Kurt Elster: But it's got some other features I like, too. I mean, it uses sections, very flexible layout. Like this promo bar across the top, all kinds of navigation options. Are there any other nonperformance-related features that you're, in there that you're proud of? Brad Miller: We just dropped a huge 2.1 release the other day. We're really committed to building this thing out. We've listened to our customers on support. We know the features that they're looking for and we are committed to just continuing to iterate on Turbo and deliver these features. So the last release, we include a multi-take filter. Product take filter on the collection page. Which is super nice. There's also the ability to display recently-viewed products throughout your shop. Whether on the home page, collection page, product page. We developed a new alternate page template. We call it page dot details. You can essentially create the homepage layout on a secondary content page. This is a request that does come up very frequently. Everybody loves, I guess the focus and attention Shopify has provided to the homepage with all these new kind of content sections and drag and drop blocks around. It's all very nice. But it really only works for the homepage or it works best on the homepage. So we've implemented a lot of that in its own kind of page template, where you can utilize a lot of those sections. We've included that. We've included a new custom mega menu builder. A lot of merchants are looking for a lot of mixed content within a giant mega menu. Not only one. They want multiple mega menus that can also support mixed content. So we really put our heads together on that one. I think we put together a nice little custom mega menu solution utilizing the new blocks and sections to build that out. So that's now included. Kurt Elster: That's very cool. Brad Miller: Yeah. Another one I think you'll like is that we now have the ability to display price savings on the product page. I should mention, all of these settings are all optional, right? These are just features and settings there if you need them or disable them if you don't. But you can display price savings, similar to Amazon, saying how much you've saved based on the compare out price of a product. And the percentage- Kurt Elster: Oh, so it will say, so it does little quick calculations. It goes, you go, oh the price of the product's 40 bucks and normally it's 80 bucks. The compare price is 80 bucks. So then this things says, "You saved $40." Brad Miller: That's right. Kurt Elster: Pretty cool. Brad Miller: But we didn't stop there. We also implemented that on the cart, so even- Kurt Elster: Oh, I was hoping you'd say that. Brad Miller: Yeah. Which is actually, you know, a very difficult thing to do. In the minicart, we display the total cart savings, so it's a nice little incentive, you know. Once you fill up a cart with all these sale items, and you kind of see the total that you're saving. So that's also included as well. And of course, we're still adding to our collection of different sections on the homepage. So we threw in a big search section, contact form section, map section. Kurt Elster: Wow, very cool. Brad Miller: We've got a long list of different sections on our back log-in that we're going to continue to kind of add to those. Kurt Elster: That's great. I mean, what I love about that is that in the past it used to be like, not only do you have to find a theme that had the feature you wanted, but it also had to have, you know, the basic layout you wanted. Sections, and what you're doing with sections solves that problem. Brad Miller: Yeah. Kurt Elster: Where now I really don't have to think about the layout quite so much. You know, I know I can, I've got enough flexibility. I don't even have to modify this theme to get it to do what I want. Brad Miller: Right. No, we're pretty excited about sections. I mean, implementing sections in our theme was almost a complete theme rewrite. It was a ton of work to do. Kurt Elster: No, yeah. It is complicated. Brad Miller: Yeah. But now that it's done, we're really trying to unlock some of the power with utilizing sections and blocks. So I think, we recently released an update. We redid the entire sidebar throughout our themes, where it's kind of based on content blocks now. So it just makes things a lot more flexible. You're able to kind of choose the content you want. You're able to reorder it on the page. There's a lot more flexibility now with Shopify's new sections editor. Kurt Elster: So you've sold me on Turbo theme. This is now, like, my go-to. There's no reason to use anything else. Et cetera. I mean that. I mean, I say it sarcastically but no, I genuinely mean that. It's just that, it's probably my new go-to. What is the price of admission for this fantastic theme? Brad Miller: So we've priced it at $350. Which is higher than any kind of theme store theme. But I still feel the price is very low. It has an incredible amount of value. We thought about pricing this actually much higher, but we still wanted to make it accessible for agencies to use. Just the amount of development effort, time, dollars, and the continued support that we're committed to developing into this theme. You're getting a lot for that $350. You have this development team backing it. We have our whole support team supporting it. We've got a theme updater app to talk about in a minute, where you can get the latest releases and versions and new features automatically. That's a one-time price. There are no kind of ongoing subscription fees to have a theme installed in your shop. Kurt Elster: So just like the theme store, I buy this theme directly from you. And then for life I get updates on it, I get support on it- Brad Miller: Exactly. It's, yeah, that's the deal. And I'll throw this out here, too, we've got a little promo code for the listeners. If you use the discount code, podcast20, you can save 20% off the Turbo theme. So that Out of the Sandbox dotcom. Kurt Elster: Use code podcast20 to save- Brad Miller: Yeah. Kurt Elster: ... 20% off the purchase price. And does that work just for Turbo, or any theme? Brad Miller: Just Turbo right now. Yeah. Kurt Elster: Okay, cool. But why should I buy any other theme other than Turbo? Brad Miller: Well- Kurt Elster: No, I like Turbo a lot. No, and I will, I'll play devil's advocate. I saw, you know, when it was first launched, and I thought, well, it's just a performance thing and it costs 350 bucks. Maybe it's too expensive relative to other themes. But if you think about it, like, you know, even if you find a cheap developer off Upwork, you're still going to pay 500 bucks for performance optimization on the theme you already spent $150 on, so why not just skip that and start with a theme that has, you know, performance plus all these other features? So it really does, as a value-based fee, I think it, you're right, it's probably low. Brad Miller: Yeah, I mean, if you actually start to compare features and how much these individual features would cost as apps in the app store. Kurt Elster: Right. Brad Miller: You'd be surprised how quickly that adds up. And that's really what we're going after. Kurt Elster: So you had mentioned the theme updater. Brad Miller: Yes. Kurt Elster: I have seen it, and I am scared of it. Tell me what the theme updater does, and why, whether or no I should be afraid of this thing. Brad Miller: Okay, sure. So I'm sure you've had lots of experience installing a theme in a client's shop. You've maybe tweaked the template files a little bit, you know, you've added some customizations and things. And then, all of a sudden, maybe Shopify comes out with a new feature. Maybe there's a bug fix or the developer has released an update that includes some fixes in the theme. Now you're kind of stuck with the theme that you have. There is no mechanism to automatically get those new updates with Shopify. So it's kind of up to the merchants to pay a developer to go and grab the latest version and install it in their shop. Or have all these other customizations applied again to the new theme. So the whole theme updating process with Shopify is, can be costly. It can take a lot of time as well. Kurt Elster: Well, you said that the theme updating process, it's essentially it's nonexistent. Brad Miller: It's not a theme updating process, yeah. Kurt Elster: Get the new theme and re-start over. Reinstall it. Brad Miller: Right. Kurt Elster: That is basically what you have to do. Brad Miller: Yes. You have to, yeah, go back, get the theme again, and essentially just the latest version of the theme. You have to set it up again, you have to go through and configure all the settings. You've gotta configure as- Kurt Elster: Installing your apps. Brad Miller: Some of the apps may require you to uninstall and install them again or run the installation process again. Kurt Elster: So how? You've definitely agitated my pain on this one. How did you solve it? Brad Miller: Okay, so it's also a huge pain for us, as well. Because on support, we do fix a lot of issues that come up or we do update the themes and make them better. We're adding features all the time. We want to be continuously developing our themes and making them better. We're not into just turning out themes for the sake of having, you know, different designs or layouts or whatever else. We're really iterating and really focused on updating our themes and making them the best they possibly can. So it's frustrating to hear from merchants who are having a hard time getting the latest version. Or if they run across an issue that we've since fixed. It's in our interest to have them using the latest version. It just makes everybody's life a little bit easier. So what we did was we wanted to create this app that kind of automated most of this process as much as possible. So when we first released it, it allowed you to install the app. It will check all the themes that you've got installed in your shop. It'll tell you what version you're running. Of course, for Out of the Sandbox themes, this works. It will tell you what your current version is and actually what the latest version is. It'll have a little link to the change log so you can see what's changed. I mean, before this, a lot of people were even unsure about what version they were using or whether themes had versions. So we really put an emphasis that themes to have versions, they do receive updates, and updates are available and free to get in your shop. So the app will look for that, it will give you a button to grab the latest version of the theme and install it in your shop. So it's just easy to get. Easy to install. It will automatically copy over all your old settings into the new version. So that alone can save you hours, you know, uploading your logos and your slideshow images and all that other stuff. It's very time-consuming. More recently, we just released an update earlier this year where it now supports customizations as well. So if you've gone into the template files- Kurt Elster: That's what I was going to ask. I'm like okay, yeah, it saves me time, but I still have to do some things here. Brad Miller: One more thing, yeah. Kurt Elster: One more thing. Brad Miller: So if you've edited the template files, or you've installed an app that has some kind of snippet in the template files, it'll automatically detect changes to your theme. It will apply those automatically to the updated theme. If you've added extra files or extra images or anything like that, it'll copy all that stuff over too, completely automatically. So, in the best case scenario, you can update your theme, a customized theme, and get the latest version, and it will be ready to go in one click. You'll get all the same settings. You'll get all the same customizations. It'll be completely seamless. Kurt Elster: I say it in the best way possible, holy shit. Brad Miller: So, yeah. This, I mean, in the past you'd have to pay somebody, you know, at least $1000 to kind of go in, figure out what's changed, apply it to the new theme. It's really incredible. Yeah, so that's free for all of our customers. Kurt Elster: That's awesome. That's really, that is fantastic. I look forward to trying it. For the reasons you've outlined, I've been scared of the thing. Brad Miller: Understandably. I think a lot of people are concerned. Well, is this, am I going to lose changes? Am I going to, is this going to wreck my theme? Anything like that. Kurt Elster: But at the same time, like, if I was genuinely worried about it, I could just download a zip file back up and then run it and if it has totally borked, reimport my theme. Brad Miller: For sure. Sure, which is, yeah. But because of those concerns, we don't actually touch the live theme or whatever them that you're choosing to update. Kurt Elster: Oh, smart. Brad Miller: We install a completely new theme. It'll be unpublished in your shop. So it'll give you a chance to go and check it out before you choose to publish and make it live. Kurt Elster: Cool. Brad Miller: And so your current theme is completely unaltered, untouched. You don't have to worry about it breaking anything. It'll install a new theme with the latest, so you can check it out. Make sure everything's good before your customers get their hands on it. Kurt Elster: That's fantastic. We're coming to the end of our time together, but you talked about making everybody's life easier via support. How many support requests do you get? So you've got five themes. Four in the app store. How many support requests do you get a day? Brad Miller: We get quite a few. So we get ... We have over 10 support agents on support, answering emails. We receive maybe a couple hundred new requests that come into the queue every day. Kurt Elster: Oh, my god. Brad Miller: Yeah. So it's a lot of support. Yeah, we do the best we can to manage that. We really do care that everybody has the best experience as possible setting up a theme, installing in their shop, we want it to work, we want these merchants to have successful shops. But at the same time, we do have to kind of respect that you know, some shops owners should probably be working with developers if they do have additional customization requirements. Or they're looking for more advanced features. So we- Kurt Elster: Yeah, for sure boundaries have to be set. On $150 theme, you know, what's the limit of how much support you can provide, realistically? But here's my question. If I, let's say I'm a store owner. I've got one of your themes. I have an issue. Do you have any tips for, and I'm sure you do, do you have any tips for what I should do when making a support request in order to get the most favorable response? Brad Miller: Sure. I think really identifying the cause of the issue. Understanding why that issue might have happened in your shop. I would say probably the number one problem that we have is a customization has been made to the shop. Something has changed, they've installed an app, or they've uninstalled an app. There's some code leftover. Maybe there's an app conflict or something like that. So if somebody does reach out to us on support, if merchants can provide more of a context into how this issue came about, it really kind of helps us identify it better. Because, yeah, like I said, there are so many different things going on in your storefront. Most of the time it's not an issue with the default theme. Of course, if it is a problem with the default theme, we'll jump on that and provide a fix. And also release a new bug release if there are any kind of issues. But that's a problem. I mean, my number one recommendation would be to be careful with Shopify apps or any kind of customizations. That template editor is pretty easy to access. It should probably come with a little quiz before you get into it. Kurt Elster: It's easy to get yourself in trouble, for sure. Brad Miller: It's very easy to get yourself in trouble. There's a- Kurt Elster: So if you say you're getting hundreds of support requests a day, and most of the time it's because a customization or app has broken something, then I think the workaround here would be, before you make any change at all, no matter how minor you think it might be, duplicate your theme. Brad Miller: Yeah. Kurt Elster: Then make the change, and then that way when something goes wrong, you could compare the two easily and know, okay, this is what caused it. And then roll it back immediately. Brad Miller: Yeah. No, I would agree with that. I mean, if you are doing customizations, you can have multiple themes installed in your shop. Only one of them is published at a time. But you can preview- Kurt Elster: Doesn't it, I think it maxes at like 30, right? Brad Miller: I think 20. Kurt Elster: 20? Brad Miller: 20. But yeah, you can duplicate a theme, you can work on that unpublished and test it out. I'd highly recommend doing this. And before you go live with any changes, you're able to kind of test it out first. Make sure everything works first. So things are not on fire in your shop. You don't break something that customers are seeing, you know? Kurt Elster: And lastly, that brings us to the end of our time together. I have learned a ton. I'm thrilled to talk to you. But where can people go to learn more about you? Brad Miller: Out of the Sandbox dotcom is our site. Kurt Elster: Out of the Sandbox dotcom. I will link to outofthesandbox.com in the show notes. I'll link directly to the Turbo theme product page. And I will include your gracious discount code, podcast20, to get 20% off the purchase price of Turbo. Brad Miller: That sounds awesome. Thanks so much, Kurt. Kurt Elster: My pleasure. And that's it for us today at the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. So please join our Facebook group, the Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders and talk to us. I am always happy to help. Or sign up for my newsletter at kurtelster.com. I do reply to any of the emails, and you'll get updates whenever a new episode goes live. And of course, if you'd like to work with me on your next project, you can apply at ethercycle.com and we can together pick which Out of the Sandbox theme is right for you. As always, thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.

Welcome to Episode 10 of the Create Your Course Podcast! In this episode, Roberta Ravella and I discuss how a podcast can help promote your course. So if you want to start a podcast, sell more courses, and increase online visibility, tune in now! In this episode, you'll discover: Episode 10: "Roberta Ravella Teaches Us How A Podcast Can Help Promote Your Course" 3:31 Origin Story - started in mortgage business - discovered that she's good at sales - transitioned into coaching related to sales 4:32 start up years, what was it like? - been coaching for more than 2 years - there is a difference between mortgages sales and what she's doing now (Seller-preneurship) - started podcast grown women growing well (4:45) 6:02 How podcasting help her growth - 11 recorded 9 published episodes 13:38 How was the experience of having a podcast + How it helps selling/promote your brand and course? - working in my core values, one of them is having fun. - at one point, she thought she will run out of guests - posting on FB Groups help in finding guests - choose guests who will highlight your brand. 19:47 - LinkedIn becoming a real platform for B2B 21:48 - repurposing content - can be clips, text, downloadable, etc - you own your content, media is changing. - everyone is online right now where podcasters/course creators can really capitalize 25:53 - set yourself apart by being real to people. - Being consistent - Being disciplined 30:48 - Ways that you can get yourself to podcasts and get guests for your podcast. 31:41 - Expanding social media reach by engaging on other people's post. 36:57 - You do not have to be on all platforms 39:38 - How Youtube helps and will be the next big thing for sellerpreneurs - is a big library of videos that people can go to. - (Because) Google is Youtube, half of your Google queries are YT videos. 42:25 - Roberta's Freebies Roberta's Links: https://robertaravella.com/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/robertagillravella/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertaravella/ Thanks so much for being with us this week. Have some feedback you'd like to share? Please leave a note in the comments section below! If you enjoyed this episode on becoming a course creator, please share it with your friends by using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post. *Freebie Alert!* Nervous To Natural On Camera In 4 Simple Steps filmyouronlinecourse.com/nervoustonatural Don't forget to subscribe to the show to get automatic episode updates for "Create Your Course" And, finally, please take a minute to leave us an honest review and rating for us. They really help us out when it comes to the ranking of the show and I make it a point to read every single one of the reviews we get. Thanks for listening! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/create-your-course/donations