Tag: Month

Post-Trump World, GOP Split, Black History Month | Overtime with Bill Maher (HBO)

Bill and his guests – Richard Haass, Anthony Scaramucci, David Frum, Donna Brazile answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 02/02/18) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. The post Post-Trump World, GOP Split, Black History Month | Overtime with Bill Maher (HBO) appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.

New York school, food vendor apologize for serving chicken and waffles on first day of Black History Month

A New York middle school is apologizing after serving students with a meal on the first day of Black History Month that was deemed to be culturally insensitive.

Administrators at Nyack Middle School say that the hot lunch menu was changed by the vendor without their knowledge on February 1st, the first day of Black History Month, to include chicken and waffles with a watermelon dessert which the school’s principal called an “unfortunate situation”, The Journal News reported.

“We are extremely disappointed by this regrettable situation and apologize to the entire Nyack community for the cultural insensitivity displayed by our food service provider,” Nyack Middle School Principal David Johnson said in a statement. 

“I am disappointed that Aramark would serve items that differed from the published monthly menu. Especially items that reinforce negative stereotypes concerning the African-American Community.”

REP. WESLEY HUNT BLASTS DEMOCRATS FOR CRYING WOLF ABOUT RACISM DURING BORDER HEARING: ‘NOTHING TO DO WITH’ IT

Multiple families expressed outrage over the menu selection including parent Lindsay Siegel who told the outlet that it was “really disappointing” the change wasn’t caught.

Aramark, the school district’s food vendor, issued a statement on the matter on Thursday.

PROFESSOR LAMBASTS WHITE PEOPLE AS ‘DAMAGING’ WHO NEED TO DISMANTLE THEIR ‘WHITENESS’

“While our menu was not intended as a cultural meal, we acknowledge that the timing was inappropriate, and our team should have been more thoughtful in its service,” the Aramark statement said. “This was a mistake and does not represent the values of our company, and we are committed to doing better in the future.”

Aramark also said that it will be partnering with the school to provide sensitivity training for employees who work at the school to make sure their actions align with the district’s “vision and commitment to equity-driven work.”

“We believe this will provide a good learning opportunity to deepen understanding on the impact of systemic biases and negative stereotypes concerning the African-American Community,” the statement said.

Aramark has found itself in similar situations in years past including an incident in 2011 where UC California-Irvine, an Aramark client, was criticized for serving a “MLH Holiday Special” that featured chicken and waffles.

Fox News Digital reached out to Nyack Middle School and Aramark but did not immediately receive a response.

1,083,219 People Per Month and Counting: My New Favorite SEO Strategy

Podcasting.

You’ve heard about it before and I bet you’ve even listened to a handful of podcasts. But you probably haven’t created one yet.

Just think of it this way…

There are over 1 billion blogs and roughly 7 billion people
in this world. That’s 1 blog for every 7 people…

On the other hand, there are roughly 700,000 podcasts. That means there is only 1 podcast for every 10,000 people or so.

Podcasting is 1,428 times less competitive than blogging.

So, should you waste your time on podcasting?

Well, let me ask you this… do you want a new way to get more organic traffic from Google?

I’m guessing you said yes. But before I teach you how to do that, let me first break down some podcasting stats for you, in case you aren’t convinced yet.

Is podcasting even worth it?

From a marketing and monetization standpoint, podcasting isn’t too bad.

I have a podcast called Marketing School that I do with my buddy Eric Siu. We haven’t done much to market it and over time it’s grown naturally.

Here are the stats for the last month.

We got 1,083,219 downloads or “listens” last month. To give you an idea of what that is worth, Dream Host paid us $60,000 for an ad spot…

They’ve also been paying us for a while, technically we have a 1-year contract worth $720,000.

Now on top of the ad money, Eric and I both have gotten clients from our podcast. It’s tough to say how much revenue we’ve made from the podcast outside of advertising, but it is easy to say somewhere in the 7-figure range.

Keep in mind, when I make money through ads or generate revenue for my ad agency, there are costs so by no means does that revenue mean profit.

Sadly, my expenses are really high, but I’ll save that for a
different post.

But here is the cool thing: Eric and I only spend 3 hours a month to record podcast episodes for the entire month. So, the financial return for how much time we are spending is high.

And if that doesn’t convince you that you need to get into podcasting, here are some other stats that may:

  • 32% of Americans listen to a podcast at least
    once a month.
  • 54% of listeners think about buying products advertised
    in podcasts.
  • Businesses spent $497 million on podcast ads in
    2018 (probably much larger now).
  • 51%
    of monthly active podcast listeners     have an annual household income of at
    least $75,000.

If you haven’t created a podcast, this guide will
teach you how. And this
one will teach you how to get your first 10,000 downloads.

Alright, and now for the interesting part…

How to get more SEO traffic through podcasting

Back in 2019, Google saw how podcasts were growing at a rapid pace and they didn’t want to miss out.

They wanted people to continually use Google, even when it came to learning information that is given over audio format. So they decided to make a change to their search engine and algorithm and started to index podcasts and rank them.

And depending on what you search for and the more specific you get, you’ll even notice that Google is pulling out details from specific episodes. This clearly shows that they are able to transcribe the audio automatically.

This shouldn’t be too much of a shocker as they’ve already had this technology for years. They use it on YouTube to figure out what a video is really about.

But here is the thing, just recording a podcast and putting
it out there isn’t going to get you a ton of search traffic.

So how do you get more SEO traffic to your podcast?

It starts with topics

Podcasting is a lot like blogging.

If you create a blog post on any random topic that no one
cares to read about, then you aren’t going to generate much traffic… whether it
is from social or search.

The same goes for podcasting. If you have an episode on a random topic that no one cares to listen to, then you won’t get many downloads (or listens) and very little SEO traffic as well.

Just look at the stats for a few of our episodes.

Look at the screenshot above, you’ll see some do better than
others.

For example, the episode on “7 Secrets to Selling High Ticket Items” didn’t do as well as “The 7 Best Marketing Conferences 2020” or even “How to Drive More Paid Signups In Your Funnel.”

You won’t always be able to produce a hit for every podcast
you release, but there is a simple strategy you can use to increase your success
rate.

First, go to Ubersuggest
and type in a keyword or phrase related to what your podcast is about.

Once you type in your keyword or phrase, hit search.

You’ll land on a screen that looks something like this:

Then in the left-hand navigation, click on the “Content Ideas” option.

From there, you’ll see a list of popular topics on the subject you are researching.

This report breaks down popular blog posts based on social shares, SEO traffic, and backlinks.

Typically, if a blog post has all 3, that means people like the topic. Even if it has only 2 out of the 3, it shows that people are interested in the topic.

What we’ve found is that if a topic has done well as a blog post, it usually does well as a podcast episode.

See with the web, there are so many blogs, most topics have been beaten to death. But with podcasting, it is the opposite. Because there are very few podcasts, most topics haven’t been covered.

And if you take those beaten-to-death blog topics and turn them into podcast episodes, it is considered new, fresh content that people want to hear. And they tend to do really well.

Now you have to dive into keywords

Hopefully, you are still on the content ideas report and you’ve found some ideas to go after.

If not, just scroll down to the bottom of the Content Ideas report and keep clicking next… even if only a few numbers show, don’t worry, there are millions of results and as you go to the next page, more pages will show up.

Once you find a topic, I want you to click the “Keywords” button under the “Estimated Visits” column.

This will give you more specific keywords to mention and so you can go even more in-depth during your podcast episode.

Remember that Google is able to decipher your audio and knows what topics and keywords you are covering.

So, when you mention a keyword within your podcast, your podcast episode is more likely to rank for that keyword or phrase.

But there are a few things I’ve learned through this whole process:

  1. You don’t have to keyword stuff – you don’t have to mention a keyword 100 times or anything crazy if you want to rank well organically. Mention it whenever it is natural.
  2. Episodes titles that contain popular keywords tend to do better – do your keyword research and include the right keywords within your title (I’ll show you how in a bit).
  3. Episode titles that contain questions do well – eventually, you’ll also see these episodes perform even better because when people ask questions in the future on smart assistants like Alexa and Google Home, you’ll eventually start to see them pull from podcasts.

So how do you find the right keywords and questions to
incorporate into your podcasts?

Head back to Ubersuggest and type in a keyword or phrase related to a podcast episode you want to create. This should be a bit easier now because you’ve already leveraged the Content Ideas report to come up with popular topics that people want to hear about. 😉

This time, I want you to click on the “Keyword Ideas” report in the left-hand navigation.

You’ll then see a list of suggestions that look something like this.

As you scroll down, you’ll continually see more and more keywords.

Don’t worry about the CPC data, but you will want to look at the SEO difficulty score as the easier the score the better chances you will have of ranking your podcast episode on Google. Also, look at search volume… the higher the number the better as that means more potential listens.

My recommendation for you is to target keywords and phrases that have an SEO difficulty of 40 or less.

Once you have a list of keywords, I want you to click on the “Related” navigational link on that report.

Now, you’ll see a much bigger keyword list.

In this case, you’ll see 405,513 related keywords that you can target. Again, ignore the CPC data but target keywords with an SEO difficulty of 40 or less and the more popular the keyword the better.

Lastly, I want you to click on the “Questions” navigational link…

Then scroll through the list and you’ll see a list of
questions that you can target.

According to Comscore, over 50% of the searches are voice searches. A large portion of those are questions, so covering them within your podcast or even labeling your titles based on questions is a great way to get more traffic.

If you don’t think going after questions is a good strategy
to get more traffic, just look at Quora.

With roughly 111,114,424 estimated visits a month from Google, Quora is getting a lot of traffic by optimizing their site for question-related keywords.

Conclusion

Google
is the most popular site in the world. Whether you love SEO or hate it, you
have no choice but to leverage it.

One way to get more SEO traffic is to write tons of content and leverage content marketing. It’s a competitive approach and you should consider it.

But another solution that’s even easier is to create a podcast and rank it well on Google.

And ideally, you should be doing both.

Do you have a podcast? Have you tried ranking audio
content on Google?

The post 1,083,219 People Per Month and Counting: My New Favorite SEO Strategy appeared first on Neil Patel.

You Can Have My Old Business That Makes $381,722 a Month

I was talking with my friend who works at Keap (formally known as Infusionsoft) and he was breaking down how people still make millions of dollars selling info products and ebooks.

Now, I don’t sell info products as heavily as I used to, but when I focused on it 100% of the time, my numbers were great.

Just look at the screenshot above. It’s my revenue on a bad
month of selling info products.

So today, I thought I would do something different.

Instead of just blogging about marketing tactics, I thought I would share my old business model with you and give you the exact emails, power points, and everything you need so that way you can replicate my results.

Are you ready?

Step #1: Figure out what you want to sell

Don’t worry about traffic. Instead, I want you to figure out what you want to sell.

Whatever it may be, it needs to solve a problem for people.

For example, I’ve sold marketing courses that teach people
how to get more traffic. This is a problem businesses have as they need traffic
in order to generate sales.

You can literally sell almost anything online, just make sure you are passionate about it and know that subject well.

For example, Grant Cardone sells sales training. Sam Ovens teaches you how to make money through consulting. Ezra Firestone teaches you how to create an ecommerce business.

Step #2: Start creating your product

Once you figure out what you want to sell, you need to
create it. You don’t have to finish creating it, you can do that as you generate
sales.

Before you start creating anything though I want you to read
this guide by Kajabi, which specializes in online courses…

Mega-Guide
to Creating an Online Course

Here are some general rules I’ve learned about creating a handful of info products:

  1. People want course material in video format. Don’t
    waste your time with too text-based documents or audio files.
  2. Your videos need to be short and to the point.
    People are strapped for time.
  3. Your course should be completed within 2 or 3
    months at the latest. Ideally within 6 weeks.
  4. Include workbooks, cheat sheets and quizzes
    throughout your course. You can easily create these in Kajabi.

Step #3: Create a presentation

You need to create a presentation that helps you sell your
product.

The presentation should look something like this:

If you want, you can just use my slides and modify them to
whatever product or service you are selling. You can download
my slides here.

I know looking at slides can be a bit confusing but watching
this video may also help as it breaks down the process.

Once you have created your PowerPoint, you’ll need to use a software like Webinar Jam to present to people who are potential customers (don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to get traffic in a bit).

What Webinar Jam does is make it easy for you to create a
Webinar that people can join and you can then sell them through it. That’s what
almost all of us do to sell info products… it works really well.

Step #4: Create emails and set up your CRM

Emails are key to generating income through info products.

And in order to succeed with email marketing when it comes to selling digital products, the right CRM will make all the difference in the world.

Without the right emails, you won’t do well. It’s really that simple.

There are 8 types of emails that you need to create:

  1. Invite sequence – these are a series of emails that invite people to watch your webinar. (here are my invite emails)
  2. Indoctrination – you need to build a connection with people. People are more likely to convert if they know more about you and trust you. (here are my indoctrination emails)
  3. No shows – just because someone signs up to watch your webinar, it doesn’t mean they will attend. For everyone who doesn’t attend, you’ll want to email them and get them to watch the replay. (here are my no show emails)
  4. Encore – not everyone will watch your whole webinar. If they don’t stick to the end they won’t see your offer. You’ll want a few emails that push the replay. (here are my encore emails)
  5. Objection handler – there are a handful of reasons someone may not buy. You’ll want to answer each of those objections through email. (here are my objection handler emails)
  6. Countdown sequence – you’ll want to close off your course. Letting people know that they only have a few days left to buy is a really effective way to generate sales. These emails will roughly make up 1/3 to half of your sales. (here are my countdown emails)
  7. Last chance email – on the last day you’ll want to send a few emails letting people know it is about to close. (here are my last chance emails)
  8. Free trial offer – the majority of people won’t buy from you. Offering the last chance free trial offer is a great way to roughly get 15% more sales. (here are my free trial emails)

I know that sounds like a lot of emails to create and it is, but don’t worry, just click the links above that contain the emails I used and just modify them for your product. 🙂

The key with the emails is to just not mail them out, but it’s to use automation. You can easily set that up with Keap.

The reason most of us marketers use Keap (aside from being a great and efficient tool) is because it connects with other tools that help us maximize our email revenue while also providing the most flexibility.

The flexibility you’ll gain by using Keap will help you make more money. Here’s what I mean:

  1. PicSnippets – for you invite sequence emails you’ll want to use a customized image that has someone’s name in it. Just like how the image above has “Ben’s” name in it. And it dynamically changes to the person’s name.
  2. Plus This – during the objection handler sequence I typically text everyone who watched the webinar with their “first name?”. Plus This automatically does this and what you’ll find is when you text someone their first name they will usually text back with “who is this?”. That’s when Plus This automatically responds with “Hey this is Neil Patel, I just wanted to thank you for watching my webinar. I wanted to follow up and see if you had any questions or if I can help answer anything for you.”. You’ll find that a lot of people will text back with questions, all you have to do is answer them and you’ll generate more sales.
  3. Plus This – I know I mentioned Plus This above, but you will also need it for emails related to your countdown sequence, last chance emails, and free trial offer. You want to use a countdown timer within those emails. The time should adjust based on when you send each email off and the time zone the individual is in. Plus This does all of it for you automatically.
  4. Collect payments – I also use Keap to collect payments. So, once I email someone, they can click a button and buy through pre-made payment pages that Keap provides you.

Step #5: Drive traffic

One of the key ingredients to making money through info products
is to have traffic.

And I know what you are thinking to… “Neil you did well because
you have a ton of traffic”.

Well, people like Sam Ovens and Grant Cardone don’t rank well on Google, yet they make 8 figures a year. They profitably sell info products through ads.

If you want to grow your traffic, go through the following
steps:

You now have a handful of ways to generate sales. Facebook ads are probably the quickest way to generate sales and usually, for every dollar, you spend you should generate at least 2 dollars in revenue.

If you want a longer-term approach, consider SEO and content
marketing.

And a good mid-term approach is leveraging Instagram and
building a personal brand.

Or if you really want to see your numbers grow, consider
doing all of them. 😉

Conclusion

I know everything I broke down may seem overwhelming, but it
shouldn’t be. Just take one step at a time.

Plus there are a lot of tools that make your life easy and do most of the hard work. I pretty much mentioned them all above and you can get them to play nice by using Zapier, which can connect them easily if you aren’t able to figure it out.

And if you are wondering why I stopped focus most of my efforts on info products it isn’t because it was bad business.

It’s the opposite. It’s a good business… but to scale it to
millions a month in revenue is tough and you’ll find that your profit will
drastically drop.

In other words, your upside is limited and it’s not hard to
make a few million a year in profit, but anything above that gets really tough.

So, what are you going to do with the information above?
Are you going to try and sell info products?

The post You Can Have My Old Business That Makes $381,722 a Month appeared first on Neil Patel.