Quick Growth And Great Content With Aaron Agius

Managing Director and Co-Founder of Louder.Online – Aaron Agius

Aarons shares the ONE thing that fuels every marketing channel you’re after. (Use it, and your traffic will soar!)

Get THIS step-by-step HOW TO of content marketing that drives hordes of visitors and converts like crazy. What ispre-content creation? and why you must absolutely nail it if you want traffic and leads.

Do THIS if you want people ready to share your new blog post before you even write the first sentence!

Louder.online – Enter your Website URL and your Email and let us Analyze your website instantly!

Louder.online/em – Get Our Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience and Learn How to Drive Hundreds of Thousands of Visitors to Your Site Fast.

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Jaime:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Masters and today on the show we have Aaron Agius. He runs - co-founded Louder Dot Online, and I'm going to mess this up every time because I always feel like there should be a dot com, but it's Louder Dot Online, and his company of course is called Louder Online. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Aaron. I appreciate it.

Aaron:	Thank you very much for having me. I love the show so good to get an invite so thank you.

Jaime:	We love having you. So tell me one quick question. I'm going to ask you what your business does so everybody can understand what that is. But why Dot Online?

[00:02:00]

Aaron:	I guess the easiest answer is dot com was not available and I couldn't get it. This was a long time ago, ten years or so ago and so when dot online became available, and we are Louder Online so it's one-word domain, dot online and it works for us. It's actually done really well from a branding perspective.

Jaime:	Really? What was it before then, before the dot online came about?

Aaron:	We had dot com dot AU for Australia, even though we're a global company.

Jaime:	That is annoying. Okay, so tell everybody what your company actually does, so that way they know a little more.

Aaron:	We're a search and content marketing company. We draw traffic and revenue to funded startups through to the biggest companies in the world like Salesforce, IBM, Coca Cola, Intel. Most of our clients are U.S.-based and we are distributed to about 50 at a moment throughout the world. 

[00:03:00] 	there's only a handful of us here in Australia. Our biggest [inaudible] are in the U.S., some in Asia, Eastern Europe so pretty much everywhere at the moment.

Jaime:	That's impressive. So good. So you know the best of the best and that's all we want to know. Because everybody asks me about traffic in general, and not just traffic of course, but convert the right type of traffic to get the right people on their site. What do you feel like is working the best right now? Because I know you guys do everything. You do SEO and digital marketing and all sorts of stuff. What's really the sweet spot right now?

Aaron:	It's the same thing has really been the sweet spot for a long time, and it's content; great, high quality content and as much of it as possible. Because that actually fuels every marketing channel that you're after. This is what we're doing here with producing content, and your business survives off that. SEO survives off great content. There's content marketing, paper quick, your great content on landing pages, blogging; everything comes back to having great, high quality content that people are actually interested in and provide value.

[00:04:00]

Jaime:	The fact that you're here right now doing this interview sort of proves that because your time is extremely valuable. And being able to go hey, if I could level it up just in paid advertising and not have to do this, you most likely wouldn't have to do it. It's not "have to," but you know what I mean. So when we're looking at this, though, because people - no offense - have heard content marketing over and over again, right? 

	So can we dive really deep into this? Because today when I've been doing my interviews, people keep talking about content marketing. But I don't feel like we're diving into the how-to as much, to actually make it turn into traffic that actually converts for you. So how do you go about doing that? If you could walk us through step by step?

Aaron:	It is a rabbit hole, as well. It's very detailed. Everything starts with a content strategy, though. You've got to make sure that your building out a strategy that covers things from tone and style and voice to content length and structure. 

[00:05:00] 	You need to make sure the content strategy aligns with business objectives, that you've got your idea generation absolutely nailed so that you know in advance what people are searching for and it's not guesswork. That's a massive thing that we see. So many people have just created content thinking yeah, people will be interested in this, or the boss wants us to write about this, or whatever it is.

	The reality is you can go out there and find questions people are asking online answer those questions, solve people's problems in your content, and you know there's always going to be a hungry audience behind the content you're creating. That's really sort of core for us. That's pre-content creation. Then you've got to create that content, and you've got to make sure that you're doing it better than any other piece that's out there, or more frequent, better design; do something better than the other pieces that are out there on similar topics. More data, more data points, greater length; there's numerous ways of doing it. 

[00:06:00] 	So when we're creating that content, and this is another big step that people just drop off on. People think: I'm creating content, and I'm doing the right content, and it's just crickets. No one's visiting the site. And that's alright; most people forget the marketing side of content marketing. They're creating content and just doing nothing to promote it. So that's massive. We're doing everything from social distribution and paid social channels, influencer outreach, optimizing sites for search, doing link development work. It's a lot of hassle after the post is live. In fact, that's where a good 80 percent of the work effort is.

Jaime:	Okay, can we dive into that big-time? Because that's the other place that I feel like - We're told as content creators in general - me, right? - create the most amazing content, and if you can really find your voice, and blah, blah, blah and have that key differentiator that makes you different; better, better, better. We kind of get that, even though it's an evolutionary process, for sure. 

[00:07:00]	The distribution side, I actually posted on Facebook the other day, what are the distribution tactics that people are using that are actually seeing results? Because what most people do is they're like: well, I put it on all my social channels; tada! And then they go like this, and then maybe they hashtag it and that's about it. So tell us more about what we can do tactically and maybe we can only pick two or three to go into depth with but some of the things you said are extremely important and how far do we need to take them?

Aaron:	You take it as far as you can with the budget and time you have available. It's better to have one successful piece than 30 failures because you haven't put in the right time and effort. So in terms of the distribution, I actually wrote a huge guide on this with Neil Patel. Have you had Neil on the show?

Jaime:	I have had Neil. So you wrote that guide. Okay, because I've read that guide. People were pointing me to that guide so I'm glad that you're the man; good to know. So I'll just direct everybody to that guide, also.

[00:08:00]

Aaron:	The one I'm referring to is The Complete Guide to Building your Blog Audience. It's largely around making sure that you're creating the sort of content that people naturally do want to share socially and link to it through their own websites. And a lot of that fields us back into that sort of strategy that I was referring to. But then it's also about what to do once that post is live. So if you're creating a piece of content, during that [inaudible] investigation phase as to whether or not you're going to proceed with that piece. 

	You're identifying if popular pieces exist out there currently. And seeing that those pieces are getting shared socially, seeing that lots of people are linking to them, you're having a look at the comments and the engagement on those posts. So what happens is you can find everyone that's linked to those posts, everyone that's shared that socially, everyone that's commented on it and build out your own little database for really going to market, too, once that post goes live. 

[00:09:00]	Send emails to all the people that have linked to the other piece saying: "Hey, if you liked that, you're going to love this; it's an updated piece. I saw you linking to it over there; check this one out." You can say the same thing socially; tweet at people saying, "You shared this previously; I've done an updated version.'[ There's ways of reaching out to all of these people. Some of the most engaged people are the ones that have bothered to leave good comments on those other posts. So if you can grab their details, find where they exist and reach out to them, it's not much effort for them to come over and comment and share and like your stuff, as well.

Jaime:	That's small, though, too. That's the thing that's tough is most people, even if they have a team or whatever and want to do one to many, and they're like well, this is like direct emails and all sorts of craziness to try and get links. And like one at a time, right, or tweets? But it's still extremely valid, and please tell us why it's so important.

[00:10:00]

Aaron:	Because these one people typically have an audience behind them. It's sort of verging on influence or outreach. If people are bothering to create some of these good pieces that are ranked highly, and they're getting traffic, comments, all the rest of it typically they have an audience already, or they've gained an audience from having that great piece up there. So you can tap into people that have audiences across all these networks. It seems like it's one-to-one but they're quality connections and quality networking, and that's where it starts to get the reach that you desire.

Jaime:	Quick question, especially on the tweet side. I've done "hey, this is a new article;" I have a bunch of friends that have huge audiences. But somebody had told me that SEO-wise isn't actually registering any of the Twitter stuff so while they do one tweet, and yes they have a big audience, the metrics aren't that great. So I'm like, is that even worth a couple people seeing it? Even if they have 40,000 people on their Twitter feed, there's only so many people that will actually see it during that time. So is that really worth the time for the effort?

[00:11:00]

Aaron:	Definitely. Set repair in tweets. Make sure that you are sending it to them multiple times and saying: here's a great new piece that I've just done, and it's expanding on what? a tweet at them at that point, what they wrote previously. It's a great way of being able to repeat things in a different way and still get their attention. You're right; most people don't see your tweets. And that's why people who are sending out loads and loads of tweets are growing their audiences really fast.

Jaime:	That makes sense. It's annoying, though, too. I don't want to have to ask a bazillion times. It's like oh, I asked once; they did it. Now I don't want to be like okay, go put it in Meet Edgar, right? Like come on, people. That's what I do, but I know that's not what a lot of people are willing to do. So I feel like there's a lot of asks happening behind some of those pieces, you know what I mean?

[00:12:00]

Aaron:	We also make sure that we're contacting people in multiple ways. So we'll tweet out but make sure we email them, as well. We're going to get their attention somewhere. We also do it in a way that's asking their permission to send the content to get them to look at so that you're not just dumping a piece on them and saying share it with the audience; I command you.

Jaime:	I wish that would work, man.

Aaron:	We all wish it would work! But yeah, if you can reach out to people and ask permission, the whole permission marketing side of things, then you're going to see better results.

Jaime:	So quick question on that, too, because I'm thinking about especially having your team do it. So a lot of the people that I know are friends of mine, that have audiences or something that would be willing to share. And I always feel compelled that it should be me making that connection, and not my team going: Jaime created this. But there's so much work to reach out, like outreach with influencers yet they're friends of mine. What do you suggest for something like that?

[00:13:00]

Aaron:	A lot of the time staff are using one particular person to [inaudible] and just posting through it. You trust them; you build systems that make it flawless; you give them a level of responsibility. It actually - it works. It's one of those things, you know, letting go of control of certain things and hoping for the best and putting the right systems in place, and [inaudible] along the way.

Jaime:	See, I just don't want it to feel insincere. Like I've had my team - they're doing it right now. We just did a guide and we mentioned a bunch of people, and we're sending a thing and it's not from me. And I still feel like a little, but some of them are my friends, and I feel like - which is so horrible. But that being said, I feel like I just want to make sure the connection, the human connection is still there, do you know what I mean? 

	I feel like sometimes we separate a little bit too much, especially with influencer outreach. Especially if there's an influencer, should they be meeting with the other influencer to make friendships instead of trying to outsource and delegate everything?

[00:14:00] 

Aaron:	That's where the biggest impact and results come from. So yes, 100 percent but it doesn't mean that parts of that company helped by other people - I'd love to do all parts myself and be in control but you just can't for everyone. So it's about building systems and allowing automation that can help things without killing that personal connection.

Jaime:	Okay, so give me what you've got on that side of the fence. That was the whole point of me going down this content distribution rabbit hole for me on Facebook. Because I was like, what can I give to my team that they can just do all of the time? We have some of it but I really wanted to level it up. So what are the automation pieces that you have within this piece that we just talked about?

Aaron:	The tools like you mentioned, Meet Edgar; those sorts of of tools where you can get them to curate and schedule content to be posted, moderation of fan pages, making sure if fans are complaining or asking questions that they're responding properly.

[00:15:00]	You can even get to the point of responding to comments on blog posts and those sorts of things as long as systems are in place and they know what you're talking about and the purpose of the posts. There's a lot around that scheduling and automation, especially if you're doing it at higher volume that can really be handled by people who have access. Buffer has [inaudible] that really ask more people to get in and manage the queues, and loads of other tools, as well. Getting them involved from that perspective is taking a lot of time off [inaudible] and yeah, things slip through the cracks but not always and the benefits far outweigh the problems.

Jaime:	Let's say for example you have one piece of epic content that's supposed to be really, really amazing, and you start doing this outreach and you start trying to automate as much as possible. Take me through the steps of what else you would do for that one piece of content. So yes, we put it in the Edgar, yes we start reaching out like you were saying before.

[00:16:00]	But keep taking me down that path because I want to know how much we should be trying to do per post.

Jaime:	We're looking at social distribution, so you're queuing all of those things but they're only going to your existing profiles. There's almost no audience - no new audience - that's going to see that. So you need to find relevant groups. Linked-In works really well; looking at different Linked-In groups that are out there. You can connect those Linked-In groups through the Buffer, and so you can actually schedule and distribute to loads of Linked-In groups. 

	Some of them have a million and a half group members. You can get in front of some pretty big audiences by distributing it in the right way and scheduling it accordingly to when people are the most active in those groups.

Jaime:	I'm glad you said the right way, because there's also the guidelines of some of these groups. So tell us how do we do that, without looking like robots and people hating us?

[00:17:00]

Jaime:	You need to be thinking about the long term play in all of this, and not just about distributing one piece of content. So going and connect with these groups and engage beforehand, and leave comments, curate other people's content. Still about 80 percent of the stuff that we share is other people's stuff; good posts, good content. And it just means that when we're ready to share our stuff, we've built up that credibility and they know we're not just standing links and they also know that it's not likely to be just an automated dump of a link, either because we've been engaged in other areas, too.

Jaime:	But you can actually automate the other people's links that you're linking also, though, right? See, that's smart. Okay. Do you guys write - so if it is automated, are you really in charge of writing the posts, or somebody higher up on your team to make sure that this does feel authentic? And do you have a curation of that?

Aaron:	The actual social share or the content solely?

[00:18:00]

Jaime:	The social share. So let's say for Linked-In to Buffer to a group o f a million people, you're like okay, if we keep posting over and over again, something like that, we can't have it be the same thing over and over and over again.

Aaron:	Those groups will only post our content or curated content one time. Because we don't want to stand the same pieces there. So what we do is make sure that there is manual oversight as to what's included, who's being tagged, a little prescription making sure the image is set up right. Those are things that are done by our team and prior to queuing it in Buffer or another app.

Jaime:	So it is definitely looked at. Because that's the thing. If you're only going to have one, you really want to make sure it's done really, really well. Who do you tag in it?

Aaron:	Pretty much whoever's mentioned in the content and you can sometimes mention people who have linked to similar pieces but it's usually people in the content. The whole ego baiting thing works very well.

[00:19:00]

Jaime:	Oh, yeah it does. So you're probably doing that in ridiculous amounts of Linked-In groups that you've not only curated but also have been a part of for awhile so it doesn't seem so crazy, right?

Aaron:	100 percent, yeah. If you go in and try and drop links, it doesn't matter what network you're in; Reddit will kill you. If there's any place going to be a valued member of the community first, and then you'll get returns.

Jaime:	Okay, so I just tried this on Reddit. I've never been a big Reddit person. I was way back when when I was super geeking and hacking; way back then. But then when I came in, I was like, you know what? I want to ask the question about content distribution and see what other people are doing. I tried, and Reddit took the post off. I didn't have any links in it. It was just a question and they denied it, and I felt very horrible about myself. 

	But it really was they curate the heck out of it. So it's just a waste of time. And because I went through that, I'm like man, Reddit isn't even worth it to me because then I have to put a whole bunch of time and effort into it first, which is good - in general, good content. Because we don't want people to be able to do what I did, apparently.

[00:20:00]	But still, how do we get past that without spending hours and hours and hours on Reddit beforehand?

Aaron:	That's the legitimate way; spending time and getting involved in the community. [Inaudible] doing things like buying Reddit accounts that already have karma built up and doing things the dodgy way and buying [inaudible] and those sorts of things. Unfortunately, it works to a certain extent but it's just not something that I advocate. Because the purpose is not just to distribute this one piece. You've got to think where does the community exist that I want to add value to? Where can I distribute content on a regular basis. And therefore, it's worthwhile putting in that time over multiple pieces.

Jaime:	Does your team go as if they are them, or as if they are you?

Aaron:	To Reddit or to other places?

Jaime:	Linked-In, or Reddit or wherever you're putting out the social shares.

[00:21:00]

Aaron:	A lot of the time - it depends on the industries that they're in. If we're doing clients? content, then we're trying to connect in the digital marketing [inaudible] the CMO and publish through their account because they're associated. And we also want to build their brand and network through those different communities. So we can try and connect the clients up.

Jaime:	Okay, so then your team will build up the social credibility beforehand in those places for them. That's why they hire you, right? Because people are like, I don't want to spend hours doing this. Awesome, great. And you guys already have the tactics. Okay, that makes sense. Continue on. So Linked-In, Reddit, Sharing and Buffet and that all helps with the SEO side of things, too, because it's just link building, right? So what else would that one piece help with?

[00:22:00]

Aaron:	The biggest thing we do is typically the link building and the link outreach. And the reason being is that a big part of us identifying whether this is going to be worthwhile creating and getting somewhere is getting it ranked; is there search traffic behind it using Google, and is it an integrated topic; it's not just peaking now and going to disappear. And there's numerous other factors that come into it. 

	But if it is something that can [inaudible] through Google, then we're going to create the piece and spend a lot of time doing lined outreach. That linked outreach doesn't drive huge amounts of traffic through referral but it certainly does push up in the rankings, and then hold steady. That's SEO for you. We started off as an SEO company and we're now a content marketing and SEO company.

Jaime:	Which makes perfect sense because now yours feed to the two so therefore, you're doing both and you kind of have to do both now, which I love because it's no longer just about link baiting and putting links absolutely everywhere in the crappiest of places that would count.

[00:23:00]	So it's good that we're moving into this. It is kind of a pain in the butt for people with smaller teams. But that being said, I was just told the other day - I use Ahref.com, though I'm sure there's a thousand different ones. So I look at my competitors, what they're ranking for and what their links are and then I can pull from that. So you're saying that I should email those places that their links are coming from, and just try and get those, number one, and then get a few more and then I'll win?

Aaron:	Look at it as a sort of per-piece level, per-piece or per-post. Actually, look at your competitors? posts and if they've got people linking to it, reach out to those people knowing that you've created something now that's new and fresh and relevant and better, and feel free to reach out. If you're just going and looking at a competitor's site in its entirety and looking at all the links and reaching out saying "hey, you linked to them, link to me" but you've got no purpose or goal or reason or a piece; it's not going to work.
[00:24:00]

Jaime:	Then you're going to be one of those people. I get those emails. You're like: yeah, no; you're silly. Okay, great. Ten links? Okay. But that doesn't make sense. The whole point is the credibility side of it. You're not going to just randomly send a whole bunch of emails to a whole bunch of people. That being said, I was looking at some of the numbers. 

	My site has been around for a long time, but a lot of the sites only have literally like 40 links, and they're ranking and getting a ridiculous amount of traffic for that specific thing. And so it seems SEO to a lot of people is very complicated. But when I was actually looking through this and breaking it down, I was like this is not actually nearly as difficult as it seems like. You tell me; you're the guy who does it way better than what I'm randomly trying to figure out.

Jaime:	I don't think it's complicated but I have been doing it a long time. It comes down to three tier. It's making sure that your site is technically sound, indexable and crawlable and that people are going to like it. Making sure that you've got the right content, and content people are searching for.

[00:25:00]	And then making sure that you've got the right links from the right places to the right pieces of content on your site. Those are the three different areas. In terms of waiting, [inaudible] has a different opinion but a good half of the whole algorithm comes down to links; making sure that you've got great quality links to the right places on your site. 

	But of course, you can't get those links unless you have the right quality content. So it all connects in. And then the technical is the hygiene factor. That's something that you can set up in the beginning, make sure that you've got it right, and then you do regular checks but the work effort goes into content links.

Jaime:	It's funny because way back when, I had a bunch of clients and they got hit with Panda and Penguin and all those sorts of of things way back then, and they tanked. And it was the little grey hat, right? There was a lot of linking going on. That being said, I was like I'm not going to just SEO my stuff; I'm going to really just create really great content that people want to share. That was my whole thing way back when.

[00:26:00]	One of the other guys in my mastermind group only went after SEO. We started at the exact same time. His site traffic is triple mine now, and I'm like: oh, man, like I wasn't paying enough attention back then because I was so afraid that they were just going to change the algorithm anyway. Lesson learned, Jaime but yeah, go ahead.

Aaron:	No, I would have gone down your path and I recommend your path. Because you can't get it wrong by having great content. Yes, get as many high quality, valuable links as possible but if Google does change something, you've got your content base there and all your other channels and distribution channels and marketing channels, and that's not going to change. 

	Everyone wants great content. I don't know what the other person's done but if they're focused on links solely and gone out and got whatever links they could from wherever, yeah, they're going to be doing well. But unless they're really smart with what they're doing, and a lot of people aren't, then there's a potential problem there.

[00:27:00] 	That's one channel of traffic, one source of traffic. Google changes something, you can suffer. And that's why the whole process we've discussed is about content first, and then distribution to other channels. You've got SEO off that, hyper quick social distribution; all of these things come back to content. So yeah, we love SEO; it's part of the whole content play.

Jaime:	And that's the thing he was thinking is he was creating good content. But I was like: I'm gonna go down the podcast, and the distribution side other places because I was so scared Google would just wipe me away. And that being said, that wasn't necessarily the best idea, either. Not that I don't get a lot from those channels in general but I also don't own them. Not that I own Google, either, but I feel like it's not - the longevity wasn't there like it has been for him for Google.

Aaron:	That's why the email list matters. Everyone talks about it. Start it from day one; that's the only asset that you actually own. Your website, your email list; everything else is building on borrowed and, or rented land as they say.

[00:28:00]	

Jaime:	And mine and his email lists are both the same size, by the way. So I'm just saying. So it's not all traffic; it's not all about traffic, for sure. But let's talk about that for a second. So when we're going through and we're trying to rank and we're creating content that people actually care about, that's really, really good, that's sharable and we start distributing it a little bit better, we should start seeing upticks in traffic. But it takes awhile, especially on the SEO side. So give us a trajectory of we start doing this with each individual post, and we start getting some legs under it; what are we expecting?

Aaron:	You're not going to get a think unless you are getting links to those posts so make that the priority when you're through from the pre-creation stage, the creation and then your No. 1 thing is distribution; make sure you're getting those good quality links. If that's happening and we're talking SEO results, obviously it depends on a million factors including level of competition in your industry, where your website is now with domain age, a hundred different things.

[00:29:02]	But what we tell clients as a standard answer is within about three months, you should see some ranking changes for the things that you're looking to be found for. Six months in you should be getting some traffic through great rankings from being one page [inaudible]. And within 12 months, if you're not seeing anything then you're with the wrong people. But that doesn't happen. And the reality is sometimes it does take that long. And that's why you need to be focusing on that and not as your only marketing [inaudible]. 


	That's something that we see time and time again. We get loads of smaller businesses that come to us as leads saying "I want to focus on SECO. I have $2,000 a month in my entire marketing budget and I want to give it all to you." And we're like: no, we can't do that. SEO works great if you've got great content, if you're doing PR, if you're doing social, if you're doing all these different things. Solo on its own, you're not going to see the results that you want and you're going to be polling every day saying where's my rankings?

[00:30:00]

Jaime:	Yeah, because you're like; I need the money back; come on, guys. And yeah, it'll take a really long time. But that's also why people - no offense - get screwed by SEO companies because it takes awhile, and by the time they get all their money, they're like: oh by the way,, it didn't work. Ha ha, right?

Aaron:	That's one of the reasons that over time we moved from - we did do small business SEO seven years ago, six or seven years ago when the algorithms were different, when it was all different. And then as it became more advanced and required great content and all of those things, we just realized ethically we can't get returns for small business unless you're focusing on a small geographic area and there's little competition for your product or service. 

	There's a few different caveats there. But across the board, we looked at it and thought so many people are hearing about SEOs, small businesses want to throw their money at it and there's too many SEO businesses taking other people's money and not getting results and just moving on. And we just couldn't ethically do that.

[00:31:05]	

Jaime:	Thank you, appreciate it. Yeah, because there's a lot that don't care, which makes it really tough as a small business owner to actually choose somebody. I don't recommend an SEO, I don't have one that I recommend just because I haven't found one that actually gets results that are really good. So unfortunately -

Aaron:	[Inaudible] you do now.

Jaime:	But you don't work with small businesses, you just said. What am I supposed to do?

Aaron:	Yeah, small business, no.

Jaime:	See?

Aaron:	I can put you in touch with people that are smart and have realized that they're going to convince them not to their SEO alone but to do some type [inaudible] and to do some social and a few other things, build marketing funnels and all of that. You can do that on a much smaller budget. But no, not anyone that can do small business SEO that I trust.

Jaime:	That's just that, which I appreciate. Okay so quick question on the PR side of things because I get a lot of PR. I should be looking for it more. I get noted in quite a few different publications but they always do it on my main domain. 

[00:32:00] 	So should I be trying to get them to do it somewhere else? Because it's INC and Entrepreneur and a thousand amazing places. That being said, it's all the main domain and I feel like we could be using that better.

Aaron:	That would be ideal, though you're going to struggle to get - they're naturally on links and you can't reach out to these publications, ore even the contributors or editors and say: thanks for linking to me; can you change it over to here? You can do that on privately owned sites and that works really well. But those sorts of editorial publications, you can't really do it. You've just got to sort of be happy that you got a link from those places and then it's building your overall domain authority, which is a really key thing. Domain authority is probably one of the biggest things in terms of rankings.

[00:33:00]

Jaime:	Okay, so I should still feel okay. Yeah, I got a link, and not be like: man, if they had just done it to this one - okay.

Aaron:	We [inaudible] do that regularly; oh, this page, I needed that link at this page; it would have done well.

Jaime:	Everybody's got their own thing. They don't care about my gosh darn link. I totally understand that. I learned my lesson when I first started in this. And I was like: hey, can you - And she's like: no. It was Yahoo. And I was like: oh, huh, I guess I'm a little fish. Oh, yeah. Well, hey, at least I asked.

Aaron:	[Inaudible].

Jaime:	I always ask for what I want. I don't necessarily always get it. so when we're going down this path and we feel like we have all the pieces. We start having months and months go by. When we don't see results, let's say I have my own team do a lot of these pieces, and you don't see the results that you want. What do you suggest for tweaking and figuring out what's not working with it?

[00:34:00]

Aaron:	The biggest thing I'm going to suggest is making sure that you are getting those links; making sure you're using tools like ahrefs, that you suggested, seeing that the links re there. And then if you are getting links here and there against your competitors, and you really should be competitive at the moment, then I'd take it a step further and start looking at the technical side of things. Maybe cite something [inaudible] you may need assistance building code that Google just doesn't like, or there are numerous different things. 

	So I'd start with the links, as it's the biggest factor, and it is 90 percent of the time and the thing that people say yeah, I've created all this content. I'm doing what everyone says. I'm blogging and I'm doing XYZ. Our competitors aren't doing it any more. Alright, look at links. Yeah, you've got three links; they've got 420. It's not just like for like into links but it's the quickest way of being able to see the problem.

[00:35:00]

Jaime:	So you can actually look at the metrics and see the difference. Again, like you said they're weight and stuff like that. But still, it's not like - Most of the time they're like oh, it's behind the magic curtain and nobody knows what's happening. But now it is sort of something we can test a little bit better, right?

Aaron:	Yeah, if you use those tools. The No. 1 thing I'd be looking at is the numbers of links. And the second thing I'd be looking at is where are those links - the quality of links. Are you literally trying to do some black hat, grey hat stuff, volume links off forums and thinking you're going to get somewhere. And if so, there's your answer. Otherwise, looking at where the links go. 

	And like you said before, by default most people will link to a home page and there's not much you can do about it. But ideally, you want the links going to the internal pages. And so I've seen plenty of small business websites where 100 percent of their links are to their home page and not one to those inner pages that they're building for the purpose of getting ranked. So check the link locations and see how to go from there.

Jaime:	When we're talking about new - with Facebook - so I get shared quite a bit, which is awesome, or linked in general to the internal pages, but mostly on social.

[00:36:01]	So mostly on Facebook and Twitter and that sort of stuff. Do those count as much? Do you think that they're going to count someday?

Aaron:	They don't count and I believe that they may; Google changes their mind all the time. But it's not something I'd focus on. The way that it is all structured, the whole Google algorithm, is that it's too easy to manipulate those social links. Yeah, it's easy to manipulate links from other websites as well with private [inaudible] and buying links and all of those sorts of things. But social just seems that much easier to manipulate. 

	I believe that links within editorial content on other sites are going to remain a big factor for a long tim.

Jaime:	Which makes sense because if you're putting it on a site, it's not something like on Twitter that's going to be gone in two seconds. That being said, I was part of a private blog network. Their ranks went so high.

[00:37:00]	I was so impressed looking at the numbers, like geez, this really, really works. This was awhile ago. Is it worth it to have like me and a bunch of influencers all in one area and trying to go: hey, it's not like we're going to buy links because I don't like that. But in general, really paying attention to hey, this is a new post; if you could actually put this somewhere as a link that would be amazing. Can you do that stuff, and is it worth it?

Aaron:	Absolutely. The way you just described doing it is a fantastic way of getting high value links. You've built a network, you know these people, you have a relationship and you're suggesting something that's going to be of value to their audience, and you know it's a good piece. It's perfect; it's 100 percent the way it should be done.

Jaime:	Okay, noted. I'm going to go do that right now. Somebody said create a Slack channel with your friends, and I'm like, that's a good idea. And I've been putting it off for a really long time so thank you for making me move that up. It's precisely what I'm doing. Because we are trying to get links in other ways, and I've been - not trying to outsource it to my team but I just haven't been putting the forethought into that piece. But I probably should.

[00:38:00]

Aaron:	I think we need to get into the same network and help each other out.

Jaime:	Let me invite you - no. We'll see. Now I feel like - I do have - that's the amazing thing from building up social capital with all of these people, 400-plus millionaires but let alone people who have huge blogs with huge audiences. Yeah, I should probably use that a little more. It's kind of [inaudible].

Aaron:	Yeah, you're sitting on some gold, there. And if you put some smarts behind how you use that, you're going to get brilliant results.

Jaime:	I should probably do something with that. That would be good. Alright. I appreciate you telling me what I didn't realize, a lot. So thank you so much. I know we have to start wrapping up in just a minute but this has been amazing. Just for me; I'm just asking you questions I care about. Who cares if everybody else listening actually [inaudible]. But I think I hit a core. When I posted on Facebook about the distribution things, everyone was like please give me more information on this.

[00:39:00]	I had hit a nerve where people were like, I don't feel like there's a good solution to this right now. Everybody says that their thing is the best. But it's such a wide net, nobody can do all of it. And so we're like as a small business owner, we're like we have to pick and choose. But then picking and choosing is tough because the audience matters, too. So been able to have that is huge.

Aaron:	There are so many things that you can do. But the reality is that you don't have to do them all. That's why creating the right piece of content with the right strategy comes into play. The higher quality the base is, the more effective it's going to be in its distribution, especially if you've planned out the distribution in advance by saying 300 people link to that, I know I'm going to create a better piece. 

	I've got their emails; I know how to contact these people. Your results from that are going to be way better than going: just created a random piece. There's no proof that it's of interest to anyone; I just thought it would be good and I put my heart and soul into it, but it's not good.

[00:40:00]	They're going to try to put it on their Facebook page and distribute it to some places. It's not going to get anywhere. Put some smarts in behind beforehand.

Jaime:	I'm so excited now. What's funny is that I'm creating a content distribution SOP right now for my team, and it's only half done so far. And now, everything that we talked about it will be way more finished. I'm done with this since I create all this stuff. So I'm super excited. Thanks so much for coming on. I want to ask you the last question. It's what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Aaron:	Obviously I'm very much into content creation. I think creating content that you know people are asking your business, whether it's frequently asked questions, people calling you; common things that are always being asked of you, create a blog post this week to answer that in detail and in depth. And you'll immediately know there's a hungry audience behind that, and it's something that's going to be us moving forward. 

[00:41:00] 	Continue to do that once a week; create some great content on the form of a blog on your website and you're taking the first step. Get used to that writer and get used to it, so knowing how to put it all together. From there, the rest of the pieces sort of fall into place. You're already creating that value so the distribution that will come later on is going to be possible.

Jaime:	I love that you said that, especially because that's just what we did. We started going: well, we have all these interviews that are varied. Now let's create content based on specific things that I work on with my clients all the time and repeat myself a thousand times over. And I'm like I should just create something so I don't waste my voice. 

	And now we've started that, and now people are starting to respond to it. Now I'm in the distribution part. So how perfect? You're awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. Where can they find out more about you and your company, or any of this amazing content stuff that you guys are creating?

Aaron:	Sure. Come and check us out at Louder.online so L-O-U-D-E-R dot online, forward slash em.

[00:42:00]	We have a site analyzer tool there on the site where you can run your site through and have a look at some of the problems that may or may not exist from the search perspective. So yeah, have a look there and otherwise, I'm on Twitter @iamaaronagius so check me out there. Those are probably the two ways that are best to get in touch. Or send me an email: aaron@louderonline.

Jaime:	That's awesome. They're all going to be sending you tweets going: hey, I got this new piece of content -

Aaron:	[Inaudible].

Jaime:	I love it. Make sure everybody check that out for the website analyzer because I actually just went through. I just got a new website and I'm planning on doing that really, really soon, too. Because there's different - we used to use a lot of different analyzers, and I feel like different ones bring up different things so I can't wait to do yours, also. So make sure everybody check that out. Thank you so much for coming on today. I really, really, really, really appreciate it because now I have to go implement the stuff you just told me to do. So thank you so much, Aaron. I hope you have a fantastic day.

[00:43:00]

Aaron:	Thank you, I really appreciate the opportunity.

Tags: Aaron Agius, content marketing, content strategy, convert prospects, drive visitors, eventual millionaire, Fuel your marketing channel, great content, HOW TO of content marketing, jaime masters, quick growth

Categories: All, Blogging, Content Marketing, Featured Millionaire Interview, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

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