Online Marketing Tactics that Will Increase Traffic and Revenues Today with Syed Balkhi

Owner of WPBeginner.com – Syed Balkhi

Syed is one of my go to guys when it comes to learning about SEO and online marketing. He has multiple companies, one called WPBeginner one of the best sites about WordPress. He also has brand new businesses and knows what is working now even if you are starting from nothing. We go over SEO, why we need Google+, Google Authorship, Youtube tactics and way more. I have a big list of things I need to implement after our talk, first being Google plus! (something I have been avoiding forever!)

Check out WPBeginner.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Today on Eventual Millionaire I have Syed Balkhi, a good friend of mine and an amazing online marketer and business owner. He has many sites and has proven this model time and time again, so we go over the tactical advice that you need to start growing your audience and growing that domain authority that apparently Google cares a lot about now. We answer questions like do we actually need to use Google+ and what is Google Authorship? Also how to actually implement that, even if it only takes a couple of minutes - something you should definitely be doing. We also go over syndication, how to get more traffic, how to actually get people to link to you, in a good way, not a crazy back linking, black hat strategy, lots of amazing tips that you can implement right away. I hope you enjoy.

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have my good friend Syed Balkhi on the show. He owns so many websites I can't even list them all right now. One of the big ones is WPBeginner.com but he also has a site called List25. He also has a plugin called Opt-in Monster. He does a lot and seems extremely busy. I'm excited to have him on the show today - thanks so much for coming on, Syed.

Syed: It's a pleasure being here.

Jaime: So, number one, I'm going to totally call you out right now - how old are you?

Syed: I just turned 23.

Jaime: You don't look 23. You have so many websites that I am jealous that you're only 23 years old and have a ridiculous amount of businesses already. If you had to quantify, how many businesses do you actually have?

Syed: Legally, I guess two, but in terms of projects that are going on, a good number of them. The ones that you mentioned are just three, then we have at least six or seven more.

Jaime: See, I can't even keep track of all the stuff you do! You're really into online marketing and all that fun stuff, so we'll definitely get into that after, because I think you have tons of information; you've already given me tons of good advice offline, which is great, but what I want to know is how yo even got started in this - because you're so young already! What was the path at the very beginning?

Syed: In the online stuff it was my family moving to the US. That was the big thing. I didn't speak English very well. It was right after 9/11 so my skin color didn't help me all that much in school, so it was just a kid trying to find something to entertain himself. So I would play online games all the time and schools had them all blocked so I was like "What can I do to play games in school?" I found proxies, that was the solution, and I started creating my own because all the existing ones were blocked and then I started creating arcade sites and then SEO and then just moved into all sorts of things.

Jaime: What year was that?

Syed: Early 2003 was when I started really getting into everything.

Jaime: So it's not even like that was the beginning of everything, it was after the bubble when everything was crazy. So what did you learn? Why SEO; why go that route?

Syed: When I first started doing directions, to take it back, I was getting into domains because I was into NeoPets, I'm not sure if you ever used NeoPets.

Jaime: We talked about this before - I was like "What are those?"

Syed: I would get up in the middle of the night and trade stones and my cousin got me into expired domains. So proxies were just to help me get on NeoPets and other arcade sites to play games. But I noticed that other kids were also interested in the same thing, so they were like "How are you playing games at school?" I didn't get in trouble for this, by the way. But I would tell everybody that asked me "This is my proxy. This is how you can play games," and they would all go "Which arcade site are you going to?" and I'd tell them which arcade site and then I realized I was making money off of them from my proxy but I could actually send them to my own arcade sites and take ads here and ads there and take the money. So I did that and then, as I got progressively into the industry, I realized that you need more traffic and I would read different blogs or different website articles at the time and they all said "You need SEO." "What is SEO?", "Search engine optimization," and at the time everything was "Just submit it to directories and get as many backlinks and you're going to be good," and back then, yeah, that was the thing - every big brand was doing it. So I started submitting to all of the directories that were free, because obviously I couldn't afford to pay a lot at the time.

Jaime: Because you're 13 or something!

Syed: And I was also pretty cheap and I wasn't going to pay anything. Nobody would accept my listing because they had such a long queue but I had all that time on my hands so I found a directory script and said "Okay, this is how you create a web directory," and I created a bunch of my own directories - remember I had so many domain names - I started creating directories and accepting submissions and got popular in that space. At one point I had quite a few paid directories that people would submit to and I was building plugins for those directories, themes for those directory plugins - I think I had over 50 themes for that paid script and the guy absolutely loved me. I was creating modules and so many cool things and then started shifting, because the whole thing with SEO was dynamic content - "What's dynamic content?", "Well, blogs have dynamic content and WordPress is the best blogging platform", "Okay, cool, I need to learn how to use WordPress," so in 2006 I'm really dabbling into WordPress and everything I knew at that time was just from trial and error, getting in. WordPress helped me put dynamic content on my site and then I started taking a lot of client work. Apparently I didn't know how much I should charge so I had a good number of people that were coming after me because I had all the time in the world so I would deliver it the fastest and I had all the time in the world at the time.

Jaime: Yeah, you're 16 or 17.

Syed: I was 16 years old, exactly, and I have a bunch of these clients - my mom's friends are my clients and also these local businesses are reaching out to me. I'm graduating high school at this time and I'm starting college. I was 16 when I started college.

Jaime: Oh, wow.

Syed: So I enter college and my workload is a lot, because it's college, obviously, and I need to find something better. So that's when I decided that "Okay, I need to transition somehow. Get rid of all these consulting clients," and my this time I'd already sold off all of my web directories because of Google really cracking down on them - it wasn't a sustainable business because I was considered a black hat SEO at that time, so I sold it all off and I primarily did consulting.

Jaime: How much money were you making when you were 16, do you remember?

Syed: It was pretty close to six figures.

Jaime: I'm going to make my son listen to this interview. What's your IQ? Because a lot of people will be like "Wait, you went to college when you were 16, you were making six figures when you were 16, that's ridiculous."

Syed: I never got an IQ test because when we came here my parents weren't very well off. They just skipped me a grade because they gave me a test, which wasn't an IQ test, at least not that I know of, I didn't speak English very well at that time, but I never really got a true IQ test.

Jaime: That's insane. I'm going to make you take one later and then I'm going to be jealous! So you have a lot of experience but you've also seen the changes that have happened. The cool thing, listening to your stories, is that it sounds like you're really with the changes - like "I need to do WordPress, now I need to learn this thing." So tell us where things are right now in the SEO space and where you're at with all your online marketing. You have a lot of different websites so give us the lay of the land.

Syed: Right now, SEO-wise particularly, there are two things - one is obviously Google+. Everybody knows you have to be on Google+ so that's very important. Author rank - the more active you are on your Google+, that is going to help you, especially if your site is connected. So author rank is very important. The second thing that I'm noticing a lot is the way you write. Because, back in the day, when you would write all editorially and keyword-specific and now Google is really focusing on natural language. So if your articles are written in the way you speak, for example the way Derek Halpern writes, I think that style of writing is what's going to be the future in SEO because Google is really looking at natural language. It seems to somehow read into the natural language aspects of it, so if you write too professionally or too much like an essay or a journalist then it's not going to work.

Jaime: That's really interesting. So people like that approachability.

Syed: Exactly.

Jaime: That's crazy that Google could figure that stuff out. So what sort of things do you suggest? Because, number one, people are all like "Yeah, Google+!" We're supposed to use it but we don't know exactly how. How do we do author rank and all that other fun stuff? Give me the lay on that.

Syed: If you're using WordPress, author rank is very easy. Just install WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin and you're pretty good. In the social setting just add your website and on your Google profile obviously you want to have yourself as a contributor on your own website to connect and you'll have an author verified account, you'll have Google authorship. Being active on Google+, here's the cool thing - the status with the list in it actually gets indexed. All the Google+ statuses get indexed in Google.

Jaime: Which is crazy!

Syed: It's owned by Google and Google is really trying to make a push for personalization. Anybody who is your friend on Google+, they +1 something and they have a contact with somebody else who is searching, your website is much more likely to show up because Google is showing personalized websites by default. Now you and I and everybody in the tech, we're like "Oh, we don't really need to search in incognito mode, we search in the global result," but that's not your primary audience. Your average audience has no clue.

Jaime: Let me just say - this week, two of my clients looked themselves up and said "Oh my gosh! I rank at number one!" and I'm like "Yeah, no - log out."

Syed: Exactly. I went and gave a talk at a university and the students had no idea what personalized search was. They had no idea what global search was, what incognito search was. They had no idea that they were being shown personalized results. And this is the next generation - these are you potential new customers. They have no idea, so you really have to be proactive about using Google+ because that's the biggest search engine. The second thing that I'm noticing a lot is YouTube. That is the second largest search engine.

Jaime: Also owned by Google!

Syed: Also owned by Google and videos are getting a very high preference. It's much easier to rank for a major keyword with a video, and videos are being consumed a lot more with their integration in search results - like towards the top Google will show one or two or sometimes even three videos. Let's say you're not the New York Times and you're not ranking number one or number but you have a video, you could rank number three or number four and beat the biasness insiders, the mashables, or anybody else. So in terms of SEO, video is getting very, very important. The next thing, which is a little bit more technical with search, is the rich snippets altogether.

Jaime: The rich snippets? I don't even know - tell me more.

Syed: The rich snippets are the ones that, let's say you have a plugin or a product review - you can actually show stars next to your listing. That's the rich snippets. You have a recipe on your site, you can have additional data, metadata, that says how long it takes - this is what the recipe is, this is how many ingredients, how long it takes, and so on. If you're a local business you can get your phone number and such to show up in your Google search listing and that makes your listing stand out. So imagine that you are the only person in your street because everybody else is not there, your listing stands out because it has 5 stars on it, or 3.5 or 4 stars. Let's say you have reviews from 300 people, you can see what the average rating is, how many people reviewed it, and all of that information shows and it adds more trust.

Jaime: Yes, I pay attention to the star stuff - "Ooh, this one has more stars!"

Syed: Exactly. So the user is much more likely to click on it and go to your website. In terms of search, what's going to be the next thing is these little things like the schema markups, the author ranks, the personalization; that's going to be very big in terms of change. WordPress is obviously growing; it's now powering almost 20% of all websites. It's amazing how people are using WordPress. I think WordPress is here to stay at least for a good few years, you can't really predict afterwards. But those would be the two things in search - I would really focus on that, I would really focus on video. If you're a business person, invest in getting some videos up on YouTube, because YouTube also transcribes your video.

Jaime: Sometimes they're horrible, though. I upload my transcripts because otherwise they don't know what the hell I'm saying.

Syed: You should always upload that; you should always add the keywords in your description. There's a whole thing on what should be in your video description and how it should be to get you to rank higher.

Jaime: There are so many pieces that we could go into, especially technically, to try to figure out some of this stuff. So let's pick one of them and start with YouTube and maybe in the Insiders talk we can go over one of the other ones, because I think this is important. But I do YouTube so give me some advice - I have YouTube right now and I put up every single video, we do the transcripts, we do annotations, I think I have 1200 subscribers or something. I was also told to reply to every comment because that makes more comments - I'm doing that. Tell me what else I can do because I don't even know if I'm ranking on Google for some of my YouTube videos.

Syed: One of the first things that I have in my own YouTube videos is the description. Those short descriptions - after that, you link to the article on your site that you want to mention. You also link to the video itself towards the end of the description. So the same video. You link to that. You can add a call to action, like "Click to Tweet", but that's just to build your other profiles. You want at least a transcription. If you're not doing the whole transcription, do the bullet points - summaries that have some sort of keywords. Towards the end you can say "I hope this video answered this, this, this and this" - all of the questions, so that you have that in there. Replying to comments is very, very important because YouTube is obviously looking for engagement. If your video is getting a lot of engagement then it's going to rank you higher, it's going to show you more in the related videos. The other thing that I noticed that a lot of people don't do is show related videos at the end. You know how once your video ends YouTube shows a bunch of different videos? It's going to show two of your other videos and then it's going to show other peoples? videos. What you can do is extend the frame even more and just add two of the videos and annotate that. so it's a call to action when the video ends - "Thank you for watching, here's the subscribe button," and leave that on for 15 seconds, so before they even see the YouTube related videos they see your related videos and they're more likely to click through. Now if they go and watch another video you will get engagement, so that's helping you get engagement. Ask your users to like your video, because the like and dislike ratio also matters. You can't just game the system, like "I'm just going to buy this many likes on a YouTube video." YouTube is notorious for the algorithm - they will catch you, so don't game it. Ask the users - "If you liked the video, please like it. Let me know what you don't like about it in the comments below," and people are much more likely to do it. On List25 we have something like 475,000 subscribers and we're growing really fast and it's because of that kind of engagement. When you're liking and replying to the comments, you know, if you like somebody and they comment you can upload it and that shows up towards the top. You don't want a bad comment to show up towards the top. If you +1 something more people are likely to like the same thing because it has more likes it's just the like effect.

Jaime: The like effect!

Syed: These are some of the things that you could be doing with your YouTube videos, interlinking them and so on.

Jaime: I have lots of questions for you - I interviewed Timothy Sykes and he talked about the engagement at the end of the video. You suggested putting two videos. He suggested getting people to sign up to a list. What do you suggest? Should I be sending people to sign up for a list at that point or is it better to get them to watch another video?

Syed: You can do everything. Our goal on List25 is to build and engage audiences on YouTube. You can give a call to action in the middle of the video - "Oh, by the way, if you like it, subscribe to my newsletter," or something like that. But at the very end, if you really want to get a better ranking in YouTube, you want to show the two videos and give them the option to go to another one of your videos on YouTube because YouTube is tracking how many of your videos that one particular user watches. So if that person has e-mail notifications turned on for a daily digest or weekly digest and one of your videos comes out, your video is more likely to be in that e-mail that they get at the end of the week and then they're like "Oh, let me check what Jaime put out," and they're going to go back to your videos and all of that is going to help you rank higher in YouTube searches. Obviously, both of us know how important e-mail newsletters are, but at the same time you have to pick your battles - "Do I want this?" You can have "Subscribe to my newsletter" and watch another video and see which gets more clicks. You can track the clicks, right?

Jaime: Yes, and I can also pick which video I want to do what. So the question that I have, and this is personal to me but I think it would be applicable to a lot of other people, is that I record one video, whether I do an interview or whatever, I do an intro and an outro - the outro is really about going to the site or doing some sort of call to action because I know it's on iTunes. So usually people are listening in and I ask them to take some action. But the funny thing is that it's not YouTube-specific. It's on my website, embedded from YouTube. Should I be making YouTube specific outros just for that?

Syed: You can most definitely do that, but if you're embedding the YouTube video on your site then even if somebody's on your site it's almost like showing them a related video or a related post so it doesn't have too much of a downfall there.

Jaime: Okay. But then I have to record different intros and make sure the iTunes one is this and the YouTube one is this, which is kind of a pain.

Syed: The outro is not that hard. Here's how we do it - we have a very simple Photoshop template that has the List25 logo at the top and then there's a subscribe button and you just change the two thumbnail images in your Photoshop document and the text and in YouTube we just annotate that.

Jaime: So I don't have to be like "Now click on these videos," or anything like that.

Syed: Exactly.

Jaime: How do I get that template?

Syed: You can create it. It's just a little box, two images, two thumbnails. There's not much more to it.

Jaime: A Photoshop template?

Syed: Yeah, a Photoshop template. All you have to do is draw two images and add text there. That's it.

Jaime: You make it sound too easy. Alright, I'm going to have to find someone on Fiverr who will do it for me. I know Photoshop but it sounds like a pain. The other thing that I have, one of the things that I'm doing on YouTube right now, is ranking for the names of people. Clay Collins, who is a sponsor of the show, helps me with SEO to rank for the names of the people. Would you suggest that as a good strategy, considering people usually aren't trying to rank for names? I don't know how many people are trying to search for these random millionaires that I have.

Syed: For your site, particularly, it makes sense, because that's the type of content that you have, so you will have much better luck ranking for Syed Balkhi, Tim Ferris or Timothy Sykes.

Jaime: I'm going to outrank you! No, I'm totally kidding.

Syed: You can definitely do that. For your particular site it makes a lot of sense. You can do all sorts of different things - for example, when I came out with Opt-in Monster I did a video on how to increasing your e-mail subscribers and if that video is ranking for "increase e-mail subscribers" it's going to help me get more leads.

Jaime: Did you rank that, for "increase e-mail subscribers?" That seems like a pretty good keyword.

Syed: It's making its way up there.

Jaime: I like that you're realistic too. It's not like you said "You can do it, it's super easy." Well, you said that in some cases, but you work your butt off to try to do this stuff. How can someone who's a small business owner that's doing online marketing part time, I know you're embedded in this world big time, but for someone who's not really in this world, how much time should they be spending on this YouTube strategy to make this worthwhile for them?

Syed: I don't spend a lot of time on the videos. Once you've done the description part it's pretty much "set it and forget it." More people are coming in and viewing it - now your goal is to get people to watch your video. If they're watching your video and engaging within it, then you're going to automatically start ranking for that particular keyword.

Jaime: Okay, so how do we get more people to watch our videos?

Syed: You can share it across your network. You can share it on your Twitter profile, your Facebook profile, you can send it out to your newsletter, whenever something comes out and don't spend a lot of time on the videos. Once you've done the description part it's pretty much "set it and forget it." More people are coming in and viewing it - now your goal is to get people to watch your video. If they're watching your video and engaging within it, then you're have a list, what are you going to do? But before we get into that - if you have a newsletter and have subscribers on it, is it better to send people to YouTube directly or should I be sending them to my site which has the YouTube embed?

Syed: It really depends on your strategy. If you're focusing on YouTube, it's much better. Sometimes I will Tweet out a link to my Facebook profile page, just so that I can take some of my Twitter followers over there. Sometimes I will post a link on Twitter to the site itself. You have to see what converts better with your audience sometimes. If they really like the big thumbnail picture, because Twitter doesn't allow you to do that, you can send them to your Google+ or vice versa and see what converts better. If you don't have an e-mail list, here's what I would do - when I create a video about something specific, videos are much easier for other bloggers to link to and embed. So if you're like "Can you give me a link to this article?" now my audience is going to have to go to your site to see what's being talked about. With the video instead, they can just embed it on their site and their audience can watch it on their site. It doesn't matter all that much for them to go on, so you can find different industries and reach out to them. "I just did a video about this, can you link to it?" We actually have a whole spreadsheet of contacts in different categories and when we put up a video we blast it out to all the people in that category.

Jaime: What does the e-mail say? How can you not be spammy, like "Hey, embed my video in one of your posts!"

Syed: Often you have to make initial contact first - see what's going on, are they interested in collaborating with you? we have collaborations that are done and after that you don't send out a really long e-mail explaining it, you just send a link to your YouTube video and they're like "Okay, we'll embed it." Most of the deals are with content creation sites and different types of industries, so it works. But the initial e-mail usually tells them what we can offer them - like we have a property called 2 to 5, we can mention them there, we can Tweet about them, we can Facebook share their stuff and we can put them in our Link 25 which is our weekly roundup of cool stuff on the web.

Jaime: So it's mutually beneficial.

Syed: Yeah, nobody's going to give you everything right up front, but if you can convince people to give you things without anything in return, that's even better!

Jaime: Negotiation 101!

Syed: Exactly. Depending on your target audience, who you're trying to get something out of. It's case by case.

Jaime: That's good to know. How did you build those relationships? Because we don't talk a lot about syndication, which it sounds like you know a lot about, so how do we get relationships like those?

Syed: Firstly, figure out who has more audience of the same type that you're trying to target. Two, you send them an initial e-mail explaining to them what you have and what you can offer them, would they be interested in what you have? If so, let you know. If you get a reply, you send it to them.

Jaime: Give me an example, because that sounds way too easy. Do you have an example?

Syed: Sure, so Business Insider, for example. Business Insider has different categories of finance; they have history, all sorts of different categories. You send them an e-mail saying "Hi, I'm reaching out to the editor." If you don't know anybody personally then you send it to the editor and say "We're interested in building a potential partnership with you guys. These are the stats of List25, it's a pretty huge site, and these are some of the articles and I know you have already mentioned us in this article, this article and this article of yours, so I think it's a good fit and if you're interested let's go forward."

Jaime: So you have a lot of stuff backing you up.

Syed: Exactly, you have a lot of stuff backing you up, but in the beginning, when you don't have that, you have to target it - like "I think on this particular category of yours it will make a lot of sense," so you have to really position your article for their audience. You can't just say "I have this cool article, do you think it will be a good fit?" You have to tell them that it will be a good fit for a particular area of their site, and then they're much more likely to take that action because you are suggesting where it should go and they are like "Ah, this makes sense!" So it shows you did the research.

Jaime: And are they constantly looking for good content?

Syed: Yes. If you're in the content business, yes, you are looking for good content. Everybody wants to be the first,everybody wants to have the cool content. Imagine, in terms of syndication, if you just gave them a vide that they didn't have, it gives them a keyword, so if they're ranking higher for something with that keyword, their site is much more reputable, so they're likely to take that deal. But by you even viewing it on their site you're going to more likely than not come over to ours and check it out.

Jaime: So it's mostly about giving them the embed, because that way you're getting the views.do a lot of people click through or do they just kind of start to know who you are?

Syed: A lot of people click through. We did a syndication deal - we have top 25 lists, right? So we said they could have the top 10 and then, for the rest, they had to come to List25. That article blew up on Facebook and got something like 10,000 likes and we saw an influx of traffic from that site because everyone who was reading that list was like "Okay, I need to go see more."

Jaime: Yeah - "Don't give me only 10, I want to know the rest of them!"

Syed: Exactly. You can do deals like that. Even when you don't, if your site is really good and people are interested, they're more likely to click. We always see an influx of traffic - if other articles are hitting big, we're going to hit big too. When you're pretty small and you're growing, it's better to have a little bit of something than a lot of nothing. That's how you grow, incrementally, and at one point all those users who came from this site or that site just all come over and say "Okay, I like this site."

Jaime: So a lot of people are going "Okay, this is awesome," like you said 10,000 likes and I'm like "Aw, man, I don't have anything even close." For people who are just getting online, I mean you've been doing this for a long time, so for people who just don't have the traction that you have, how do you get a syndication deal? Is that similar to what you do for Business Insider? Or should we wait until we've built up our list or our traffic enough to actually make a difference?

Syed: Syndication deals don't just happen out of the blue. You have to have an initial relationship. They have to see your content and how good it is. Once you get a onetime placement and a second time placement and a third time placement then it makes sense for both parties because if they like your content and you like the return then you can say "We're doing a lot of this manual back and forth - why don't we automate the process? I have a feed for this category and I can push just this tag onto your feed." You can do all those kind of things and WordPress allows you to do that.

Jaime: I know Yahoo! does this all the time. I was on CNN and then it was pushed to Yahoo! How do we find out the places that do syndication? Is there a list somewhere? How do we get that list?

Syed: No.

Jaime: How come? There should be!

Syed: There is no list because every industry has something different. For a beginner it's hard to get a syndication deal because it is so niche. A lot of the time what ends up happening is that somebody will link to us. Most people just link to us by saying "Oh, by the way, if you want to know how to do this, check out this article on WPBeginner," and that's how we get most of our mentions, even from the larger sites like the LinkedIn official blog or the Mashables, that's how we get our links. For List25 it's a different type of content, it's a totally different ballgame. You can target a whole genre of sites. We had a list of the best castles and it had a lot of stuff in France so we ended up putting it on the Yahoo! France homepage.

Jaime: So weird.

Syed: If you target a specific group, like I think it would be a perfect fit for Yahoo.fr and they're like "Oh yeah, I guess it would be a perfect fit," then they'll show it on there. I don't care if it shows up on Yahoo.com, that would be really cool, but I'm going to go for this particular area that I know.

Jaime: Where it makes sense.

Syed: Much more sense. It's harder to get Steady Strength into something like Business Insider, because that's fitness, so I have a better chance of getting into Men's Health before I get into Business Insider for that.

Jaime: Do you have systems set up, in general, of you going through and figuring out what works for what? I know SteadyStrength.com is a brand new site for you - tell me about the growth and what your plans are with that, because I think that will help people understand what you're doing with something new.

Syed: I use different tools - one of them being Raven Tools, I love Raven Tools. What I love about it is that I can do a Google search on the best business sites, like on the scale that I want to be on in six months or a year - different stages, so the smaller stage sites, which are still bigger than you, it's easier to get more from them, versus Men's Health and whatnot. So you're doing an analysis on where they're getting their backings from.

Jaime: So Raven Tools is sort of SEO, figuring out where they,

Syed: SEO figuring out, yes. Then we have our internal system, a CRM, you can use Salesforce or anything for that, just to get all of these contacts in. so any site that has a fitness category - you can have Vas or staff to do that; I have a full time staff doing this.

Jaime: Because if they're already linked to sites that are similar to me, they're going to link to me.

Syed: Exactly. You can use Boomerang so if you don't hear back from them you can, say three days later, send them the same e-mail again.

Jaime: The Gmail tool.

Syed: So that automates the process. Then you can say "I got a response from this lead," and sort them into warm leads and hot leads and cold leads.

Jaime: I really like the way you do that systematically, too. Because most people go "That might be acool site, let's contact them and see," but your way is so much better - and not shady, black hat, a whole bunch of back links or whatever, these are reputable sites that you're building relationships with.

Syed: Yes.

Jaime: Is that the future of SEO? Just us trying to build relationships with reputable sites?

Syed: I think the future of SEO is more about building your domain authority than anything else. I don't care if link is a no-follow.

Jaime: Really?

Syed: Yes.

Jaime: Why?

Syed: Because I feel that it helps your domain authority. For example, if the Wall Street Journal gives me a no-follow link, it's still a back link from Wall Street Journal. It's the domain authority that matters, I think. Over the long run it doesn't matter. That's Google's end goal too, right? Because they want you to target users and that's what I care about - I care about Wall Street Journal users. So even if the Wall Street Journal gives me a no-follow link, I'm perfectly okay with it because I'm getting people, but I think it also helps your domain authority, so your overall domain score goes up if you had a link from a domain with a high score, even if it's a no-follow. If you use the Moz Open Site Explorer tool it will even show you your no-follow links and it will say, okay, it's a no-follow, but it's from a domain of 99 or whatever the domain authority is.

Jaime: I remember a while ago we chatted on the phone and you went through and figured out how many back links I had and it was really sad and pitiful, so I need to do more of this too, definitely. Tell me about Steady Strengths - how long it's been out and how far you've grown it - just so that we can see what's powerful.

Syed: Before I talk about numbers - growth is always exponential. You start growing and it just keeps on growing exponentially, at least from all of my projects that I've noticed. We started Steady Strength, the concept, in May. We got everything launched, I think by July, and in four months we are now at over 2000 subscribers on the site and our page views are consistently increasing, we have worked out a deal with Sears, at their studio, so we're doing a workout plan for them, a collaborative workout plan for the Christmas thing that's going to come out.

Jaime: You only have 2000 subscribers and you're working with Sears already?

Syed: That's right. Again, it depends on who is the right person that you reach out to. If it clicks, it clicks. You get a phone call - "This is what we're doing, this is what we have," then you get on another phone call, "This is what we're doing, this is what we have, this is what we can offer," and they're like "Okay!" and if it clicks, boom!

Jaime: Do you even have a business model behind Steady Strengths right now? Are you selling anything on the site?

Syed: We're not selling anything on the site right now. The whole concept is to get as many eyeballs and build trust as we can. Obviously there are workout plans that we're working on. I also own the domain Workoutvideos.tv.

Jaime: Of course you do.

Syed: So obviously that will eventually go towards that route and help build that domain.

Jaime: That's awesome. I could talk to you for much longer but we've gone for quite a while. The last question I always ask is what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them towards their goal of $1 million?

Syed: I think the best thing you can do is be organized and really write things down. If you want to get it done, write it down. Get a whiteboard, get whiteboard paint - whatever you do, write it down, because I noticed that's the only way I get things done. If I don't write it down it doesn't get done.

Jaime: I love that one - that's so unique, you wouldn't have thought that would be your thing. But these systematic processes that you have, you can totally that you're the guy who's organizing it all. Very data-driven too, what a surprise! Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Where can we find out more about you and anything that might help our listeners? Tell us where to go.

Syed: You can go on WPBeginner.com or you can follow me on Twitter - @syedbalkhi

Jaime: Which I will definitely link up to. Don't even worry about spelling it, we're going to link it for everyone. Click the link, follow him, he's awesome - ridiculously approachable, even though he's like seven feet tall and 23! Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Syed, I appreciate it.

Syed: Thank you, Jaime.

Jaime: I hope you enjoyed that interview with Syed and got a lot of awesome tips - I know I did. That's why the action for you guys to take for this outro is to check out the YouTube page - youtube.com/eventualmillion. Go ahead and subscribe and I promise, if you comment, I will reply back, because that is what I'm supposed to do to get my rankings up! I really appreciate it. Let me know if you have any feedback - if you like anything specific on the YouTube page, let me know. If you don't like anything, definitely let me know - it's all a work in progress. I appreciate your help. Thanks.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

 

Tags: Google Authorship, Google+, millionaire interview, Online Marketing, SEO, Syed Balkhi, website traffic, Youtube tactics

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

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