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jenniboo311 · 3 years

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GQ: Spider-Man Goes Undercover on Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter

GQ: Spider-Man Goes Undercover on Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter by jenniboo311

Part 2 of the Social Butterfly Spidey series General | 4115 Words | Chapter 1/1

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The video opens with Spider-Man sitting at a table with only his torso visible, the set background a solid sky blue. He is wearing his signature mask and a simple white t-shirt, forearms bare and defined with lean muscle. He gives the camera a jaunty two fingered salute.

"Hey I'm Spider-Man," he begins in a friendly voice as he flips open the lid of the laptop in front of him decisively, "And I'm going undercover on the internet." The video cuts to a title screen as it types out "Actually Me with Spider-Man" as Spider-Man says off screen, "It's actually me!"

The screen then clears and types out a new message for its audience, "We had Spider-Man create real accounts and go undercover online."

"Let's begin!" He says as the camera cuts back to him typing into the laptop. The video shows his screen as he is typing his username and password into YouTube. Once the site logs in he selects his display picture, a cheeky shot a fan must have captured as Spider-Man swung past upside-down. "First up, let's take ourselves to YouTube."

A brief clip plays from a seven and a half minute humorous compilation of Spider-Man saves, cutting back and forth between impressive confrontations against dangerous criminals with firearms to sweetly helping older ladies with their groceries.

"From user SkepticalOfSpidey, she says," he narrates the comment as it is displayed on screen, "'Is this guy for real? How can a superhero go from dodging bullets to carrying groceries? Like how is this even on his radar? Does he actually care or is this some kind of PR stunt?'"

The video cuts to Spider-Man who replies vehemently, "I absolutely care! And I think it's hysterical people consider me "above" certain things, or they're not worthy of being on my "radar", as though I'm some hotshot. Look, the Avengers are great with the big world ending stuff, and sometimes I'm part of that too, but the little guys need help too, day to day. I'm the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and no matter who you are, your race, your age, your sexuality, your income, whether you're a victim of a mugging or a kitten in a tree, you all deserve help when you need it. That's my personal mission, just to help people. So as long as I'm doing that I'm not ashamed."

The video cuts to show the end of his response being typed out on screen and Spider-Man hits the "Comment" button to post his answer.

Another short clip plays of footage from the scene of a crime where Spider-Man is knocking out a hulking goon in one hit, displaying his super strength. The subsequent comment is displayed on screen as Spider-Man reads it aloud, "'oh great, just what we need: another brawny idiot that uses his fists to solve problems. What we really need is intelligence. Can we get more scientists please?'"

Spider-Man reels back in his chair a little, seemingly taken aback. "Wow! Why are you so angry-" he consults the laptop again for the username, "Chelsea?" He shifts in the chair to get comfortable before responding, "First of all, another? I'm offended on behalf of my teammates. All of the people I work with are very intelligent, so I'm not sure where she's getting that you have to be an idiot if you have muscles. Secondly, I am a scientist, actually. I specialize in biochemistry, though I also dabble in engineering, physics, and programming. I have an IQ upwards of 250, which if you want to compare to the likes of Tony Stark, is around 270, who also kicks ass by the way."

He straightens his shirt indignantly, "Though hopefully I didn't give too much away with that. My point is," he points at the camera, "you can have both brawn and brains. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise, people. Defy the societal norms."

The comment section displays on screen again and scrolls down the page until it hits another comment. "'How strong is Spider-Man?'" He lounges back in his chair and taps the fingers of his right hand on the table idly, "Well, last we checked I could bench press about ten tons. Tony and I ran some tests about eight months ago to find out, so it could have changed since then but likely not by a large amount. So I'm going to say ten tons, give or take."

Another video clip plays that shows Spider-Man swinging confidently on his web before suddenly taking a wrong turn and eating billboard. The jarring collision dislodges his grip and he falls several feet to land on a garbage bin, whose lid caves in immediately under his weight. He reads aloud, "'Ouch. I wonder how that felt.'" Spider-Man laughs quietly, not afraid to laugh at himself. "To be honest with you Joshua, it did not feel good. That billboard actually broke my nose, though the garbage bin helped break some of the fall. There's definitely worse things I could have landed on. I don't get distracted often but it still happens sometimes. Web slinging is hard, okay?!

"Wikipedia!" he says off screen, as the visual on screen shows Spider-Man logging in to the Wikipedia webpage with the username, '[email protected]'.

"Let's see here," Spider-Man says before devolving into mumbles as he reads the information supplied on the website about himself. "Wait wait wait!" He exclaims after a moment and quotes the offending fact, "'His signature weapon is his webbing, which is created biologically and dispensed from a gland in his wrists at the base of his palms.'" The text in question displays on screen and zooms in on the text, "biologically", and then, "gland in his wrists".

"First of all, gross." Spider-Man rests his forehead in his hand, propped on the table with his elbow in a perfect picture of disappointment. "Second of all," he sits up straight and addresses the camera full on, "have you all actually been thinking I've been spurting real webs out of my hands at everything for the past few years?!" After a beat he processes what he has just said and facepalms while mumbling, "Spurting, oh God I regret my word choice."

The video cuts to the text being backspaced as Spider-Man narrates offscreen, "This is incorrect, let's delete it!"

The video cuts back to Spider-Man reaching below the table, leaning slightly to the left to dig something out of his right pants pocket, sighing heavily. He pulls out two simple black bracelets which he pointedly holds up for the camera before slipping them on. "Web shooters: 101," he says before deliberately knocking his wrists together so the bracelets make contact and activate. "Now obviously Tony Stark has gotten his hands on these and they are a little different than the originals, as you can tell by the nano technology," he explains, black colored metal creeping up his forearms to encase them in a type of bracer, "but the base mechanism is still the same as what I designed from the beginning." The nano technology finishes covering his forearms, the device quite noticeable with the stark black of the metal covering the majority of his pale exposed forearms. He flicks his hands back, palms facing upwards to show the camera, as the motion triggers a small device to deploy in the center of his palms. He reaches into his pocket once more and retrieves a couple small cylindrical cartridges filled with a milky fluid which he then deftly loads into the devices at his wrists.

"In a nutshell: web shooter," he holds up his left forearm to present the whole device to the audience. "The trigger," he presents the small button resting in his palm, "and web fluid," he continues, indicating the cartridge now inserted below his wrist. He points to a spot at the base of his palm, "They got the location of the dispenser right, I guess, but it's not coming out of a gland of any kind!" He aims carefully just past the camera and shoots a quick burst by depressing the button at his palm that makes the viewer feel as though he is shooting it at them. "I developed this formula myself, in a lab, with chemicals!" He emphasizes. "It's completely synthetic, not biological by any means, and nobody had to milk me for it." He pauses, staring at the camera for a moment before looking down at the table and murmuring uncomfortably while shaking his head, "That was a strange sentence I never want to repeat." He huffs a quiet laugh.

"Quora!" Spider-Man says as the onscreen graphic shows Spider-Man logging into the website with his fake email. "What the heck is Quora? I have no idea but let's get into it.

"'How is Spider-Man such a darling? He's so sweet and wholesome and is a big, soft, cinnamon roll'," he narrates as the question displays on screen. He shifts around awkwardly and scratches the side of his head, "Aw, I dunno! But thanks Quora, you're my new favorite website.

"'How many people has Spider-Man killed?'" He narrates as the question displays on screen. "Wow guys, that's dark!" He leans forward and clasps his hands together to convey the seriousness of his response. "The answer is none. I haven't killed anyone nor do I intend to. Spider-Man is strictly nonlethal. I only use webs to detain, I don't use blades or guns of any kind. Except these guns." He lightens the mood by flexing his right arm and kissing his bicep. He holds it together for approximately two seconds before exploding in laughter. "Oh God, how do I have friends?" He mutters to himself.

"Next!" He exclaims, searching for the next question. "'Does Spider-Man wear a mask because he's disfigured?'" The question displays for the viewer to see. "Hmm, okay well the short answer is no. That's not why I wear a mask. I don't really know how to quantify my own attractiveness, that's just awkward. I think I'm perfectly average, though I've had people tell me I'm handsome. They were all terribly biased though, so take that with a grain of salt." Spider-Man's grin can be seen in the crinkling of the fabric around his mouth. "I have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and completely normal teeth. No extra eyes or mandibles or anything. That may sound like a strange thing to say but you'd be surprised how many times I have to clarify that," He snorts. "I cover my face because dealing with so many street-level criminals puts me on the radar of a lot of people who want revenge against me and anybody I care about. So if my identity was known I'd have to constantly watch my back, and my loved ones would be in danger. Of course there are contingencies for if that happens but in the meantime I want as normal a life as possible for me and mine."

Spider-Man clicks away on the laptop until the next question displays on screen. "'Does Spider-Man give autographs and selfies?'" He narrates. "I do, but all I ask is that if you catch me out in the wild and I look busy or distracted, to please not bother me. Most times the people I save are a bit too traumatized to be thinking about getting my autograph at the moment, but if the night is slow or I'm taking a break I'm happy to give an autograph or take a photo with you if you ask. Your best bet is probably at fundraisers and charity events, if I am in attendance, since I'm not focused on crime fighting and am just interacting with people."

The next question displays on screen, "'Is Spider-Man single?'" The video cuts to Spider-Man shifting uncomfortably. "Uh, I'm not comfortable confirming that sort of thing. Like I said, people in my orbit are in danger so I don't want to bring any kind of attention to who I surround myself with, even if their names are as yet unknown. The less information going around about that the better. So all I'll say is that at the very least I am not looking for a relationship." He awkwardly clears his throat before moving on.

"'How strong are Spider-Man's webs?' Strong enough to restrain the Hulk. Seriously," he nods at the camera, "I know this for a fact. We, and by we I mean the Avengers and I, had a code green sometime last year and out of sheer desperation I let the webs fly. By the time I was done he was basically in a cocoon but hey, it worked! Hulk looked pretty cozy actually." His eye lenses squint in amusement.

"Now let's go to Facebook," he says as the video shows him logging into Facebook and selecting a new profile picture, a closeup of Spider-Man shooting the camera finger guns.

"'Who would win in a race between Spider-Man and Captain America?'" He claps his hands together once in excitement, "Me! Because I'm obviously superior to Cap in every way!" He barks out a laugh and mumbles, "He'll let me have it for that comment! No I'm joking, Cap is awesome. I'm actually not lying though. We had a race, because science, and I clocked in at about two hundred miles per hour while Steve maxed at about seventy. Nothing to sneeze at of course, but not quite up to Spidey's par!" He gives another cheesy arm flex, this time with both arms. The video cuts to Spider-Man typing out the last of his answer and finishes it with two flex emojis before submitting it.

"'Do you think Spider-Man has any hidden talents?'" He looks seriously into the camera. "Well if I told you, they wouldn't be secret talents anymore, now would they Gerald?" He cocks his head to the side in thought. "I guess I can tell you that I can dance? I took dance and gymnastics for awhile when I was a kid, which is probably why I'm so agile and acrobatic now. My enhancement made me even more agile and acrobatic, but it was already there to some degree to begin with." He gives a careless shrug.

"'Coffee or tea?' Well I try not to drink either of them to be honest. Caffeine and spiders don't mix! Sometimes I can't avoid it though, lots of late nights being Spider-Man, so in those cases I drink coffee. Funny trivia for you, but I used to love lemonade. I must have inherited some spidery traits because lemon is a deterrent and I can't tolerate it now. I mean it won't kill me, I just find it unpleasant. Don't want criminals thinking they can spray me with lemon juice or something. I'll just be annoyed and smell funky fresh while I kick your ass." His eye lenses squint as his mask crinkles around the mouth. "My beverage of choice is actually apple juice, because I'm twelve years old." He snickers and hits the submit button to post his answer, complete with a baby emoji.

"'How are you doing? Are you getting enough sleep? Do you need a hug?'" He shifts forward to prop his chin on his hand. "I'm doing good, thank you for asking. I am absolutely not getting enough sleep, but neither is anyone else I know so I'm in good company. And I absolutely need a hug. I love giving people hugs and will one hundred percent hug you if you ask me to and I'm not busy. There's lots of Spidey to go around, I love each and every one of you."

He reads the next question silently first and barks a laugh before narrating, "'What even is your life?' Dude, I have no idea. If you had told young Spidey that one day he'd be flipping all over the city fighting crime and battling aliens with a superpowered team of highly skilled famous individuals he'd probably check you for fever and then back away slowly.

"Up next, Instagram! I know all about Instagram, I use it all the time." The video shows him once again logging into the website

"'Does anyone else desperately want a reality TV show with Spidey and the other Avengers? I would kill to watch hours of Spidey being a sarcastic little shit to bank robbers and Tony Stark just being a mess.'" Spider-Man laughs. "Wellllll," he hedges, "you might not have to wait that long. I've been toying with the idea of creating a YouTube channel and posting some shenanigans on there. Now, mind you, it won't be expertly edited or anything, I really don't have the time for that, but it would be something. Keep an eye out for that soon."

The video next displays a picture on Instagram that a fan had posted of a young Spider-Man from his early days coming out of a porta-potty with a string of toilet paper streaming off the bottom of his boot. The comment reads, "'Check out this disaster. What is going on here?'" Spider-Man looks straight at the camera, unimpressed, and deadpans, "Everybody poops, Deborah."

He navigates to the next picture, which is of a kneeling Spider-Man getting mauled by an enthusiastic, fluffy golden retriever. "'Was he a good doggo?'" He reads aloud. "He was best boy. What a good doggo!" He grins big through his mask.

"Now here we go to Twitter," he says as he logs in and selects a profile picture. "This is probably the social media I use the most. I'm thinking about deleting the app off my phone for a little while though, it's starting to consume my life. It's nice being able to connect to the public with it but I'm starting to find it difficult because people get so disappointed when I have to step away. Saying no to people is hard! And I have an extremely busy life so I can't keep this up forever. I've got cats to cuddle and lives to save! Gonna have to dial it back a bit I think."

The screen displays a tweet from user EmmaRox as Spider-Man reads it aloud, "'Do you think the abs are real or does he pad his suit?'" Spider-Man snorts and slaps his chest in mirth. "Well I would think that the fact I can lift a bus is proof enough, but here you go," he says and lifts his shirt to expose his impressively sculpted abs for just a moment before dropping his shirt and shaking his head in embarrassment. "Not padded."

The video cuts to the next question as he reads, "'What do you do in your free time?'" He looks at the camera and his left eye lens shifts as though he has furrowed his eye brow. "Free time? What's that?" He snorts, "No seriously, there's not much of that to go around. If I'm not on patrol or sleeping or training, I'm trying to keep up with my personal relationships and trying not to spend all my remaining time in the lab, with or without Tony. Like I said before, I'm a scientist, so a lot of my downtime is devoted to developing better tech, and to research to advance in these areas." He dramatically sweeps his hand across the top of his head as though he is a diva flipping long hair over his shoulder as he announces, "I'm not just a pretty face, you know." The video cuts to Spidey typing out the end of his answer, finishing it off with a queen emoji.

"'What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?'" Displays the next question from user, David P. "That's a good question, David. Hmm," he strokes his chin thoughtfully, "I would have to say 'With great power, comes great responsibility'. It was advice given to me by one of the two most important people in my life, and I have carried that motto in my heart ever since. It was advice that ultimately lead to the creation of Spider-Man, actually. I have these fantastic powers, so I consider it my responsibility to do something good with them." He wrings his hands together at what looks to be an uncomfortable topic for him to speak about. After a beat he continues his answer, "The second best advice I've ever gotten, however, was 'It is better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring', which you'll also notice I take very seriously in that I am incredibly ridiculous. I mean if there's a person out there who spouts more bad puns in the face of danger than me, I haven't heard of them." He quietly snickers to himself.

"'If you had to choose three adjectives to describe yourself what would they be?'" He doesn't hesitate when he rattles off, "Genius, witty, humble." He stares at the camera seriously for a moment before he cracks and laughs. "No seriously, uh, probably awkward, smartass, and nerdy." He shrugs for lack of a better answer.

"Reddit!" He says as he logs into the page and selects a display picture of Spider-Man facepalming.

"'Do you have any pets?'" Spider-Man reads. "No. My apartment doesn't allow pets, sadly, but I love animals. And actually I do hang out with Tony a lot and I have to constantly make sure he's fed and watered because he forgets, so I feel like that's close enough." He covers his mouth with a hand to hold in his snort but a strangled one escapes anyway.

The next post shows a piece of fan artwork that is poor quality and is obviously from an inexperienced child. It depicts a heroically posed Spider-Man saving a young boy from a burning apartment complex window. The young artist in question posted the caption, "'I know it's not any good but spiderman saved me and my mom from a fire. I really want to say thank you so I drew him this picture. If anyone gets the chance to talk to spiderman can you please show him this and tell him I love him?'" Spider-Man looks at the picture on the laptop for a long moment and audibly takes several loud swallows. He looks at the camera and says hoarsely, "I love you too, bud. And I'm glad you're doing okay. It was my absolute pleasure to help you that day and I'm so glad I was there. I love your drawing and I think you're so very talented. I'm going to print this out and post it on my fridge so I can see it everyday and think of you. Study hard in school and be good for your mom!" He looks down at his lap and clears his throat, filling with emotion. After a moment he looks up and clasps his hands.

"That's it! We're done!" He says as he shuts the laptop with a snap and his eye lenses squint in a smile. "I hope you enjoyed watching and learning a little bit about me. See you around!"

The video fades to the GQ logo before ending.

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Comments: ----------------

magicalbluecookies omg that last one killed me. Spidey got all choked up Friedfishcat I live for Spidey telling us he loves us. I stan a Spiderboi not afraid of his emotions. kitty22803 Am I the only one who took a screenshot of his abs? TeamIronDad Bahahaha subtly roasting cap and iron man. I wanna be a fly on the wall of their common room, I bet they're all hilarious to watch together lovelyjourneys Does this cinnamon roll ever rest? He needs a nap! And some milk or something! saucysquatch "Everybody poops, Deborah." Dumbledork I will die if he actually makes a youtube channel, please actually make this a thing! enchanted_nightingale Nooooooo dont delete twitter! kim_cc I once got a hug from spidey!! I was crying after he saved me from almost getting hit by a car and he asked if i needed a hug. It was the best hug of my life. Isi1dur Spidey is 12 years old confirmed, someone call the press xoxheartErin Spidey, post a video of you dancing!!! Proof or it didn't happen! Slyrocker Spiderman is asked how's he's such a soft cinnamon roll, proceeds to then prove he's a soft cinnamon roll Hi NOBODY HAD TO MILK ME FOR IT UselessDiamond19 Holy crap his web shooters are so cool! chrissyglikesbooks 250?! His IQ is 250?! Einstein was 160!!!! I feel faint. amillionmiles Spidey eating that billboard is about how my week is going honestly Mira Spidey is such a smart boi! He's going to make a great husband when I marry him.

TotallyNotDeadpool Well I guess this is all we have to live for now that you're out of the MCU

#fanfiction #spiderman fanfiction #spiderman #social butterfly Spidey #social media #jenniboo311 #GQ #Reddit #Twitter #Quora #funny #humor #ao3 fanfic #Marvel #instagram #wikipedia #facebook #interview

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hawkbucks · 4 years

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Bucky and Steve’s entire friendship starts when Bucky spots Steve reading a Captain America comic on the playground, promptly sits down next to him, and goes: “You like Captain America? He’s cool, but I think Winter Soldier is better.” Steve, of course, is offended that this kid has the audacity to imply someone is better than his beloved Captain, so they argue about the finer points of the Captain and the Soldier, discussing their actions at such depth that you’d forget they’re just a couple of 3rd graders with scraped knees and wild hair. At the end, they agree to come to the conclusion that the Captain and the Soldier are equally as cool. Whenever they’re able–a.k.a when Bucky saves up enough of his allowance to afford a few issues for him and Steve (because, as much as Steve protests against Bucky buying him things, Bucky knows he wants that Falcon issue)–they head down to the comic store around the corner from their school run by a kindly man named Abraham. Abraham slips them snacks sometimes: bags of chips, candy bars, etc. If they prove they’re doing good at school, they also get free books. Tables and chairs are scattered around the store, usually reserved for the game nights that the store hosts, but Abraham allows them to do their schoolwork on those tables. They try to draw out their visits as long as they can, because they just love exploring the store, and Abraham is such a good guy, you know? One day, when Steve is over at Bucky’s house and they’re watching cartoons, Steve gets an idea. He turns to Bucky and proclaims that they should open up a store together. It’ll be the best store ever! Bucky sagely nods before he runs off to grab a notebook and pencils to plan it. Their store looks as follows: 3 stories at the minimum, and there’ll be a slide leading from each floor to the one below. They’ll have cool statues to put on display, a gigantic collection to sale, and a pyrotechnics display at the cash register at Bucky’s suggestion. And they’ll make a lot of money. It’ll be the best store ever.

Unfortunately, said best store ever ends up being pushed to the back burner once they realize that opening and managing a business isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially for a couple of kids. “We’ll just do it later, when we’re grown ups,” Steve says, and Bucky agrees. They grow older. Steve turns from the shortest kid on the playground to the guy that people have to crane their necks up to talk to (Bucky teases him and says that he’s become the real life Captain America. Steve retorts that that makes Bucky the Winter Soldier), and Bucky grows his hair out, looking more and more like a hipster everyday (which he vehemently denies. “Where’s your manbun?” “I will smack you.”). Interests come and go, but they still find themselves stepping into Abraham’s shop. Abraham’s older now, grayer, but he still slides them Snickers every once in a while. Bucky ends up enlisting in the army to help pay for his tuition while Steve goes to art school to get a degree in illustration. An incident with an IED later, and Bucky comes home with an honorable discharge and an empty left sleeve. Steve visits him as often as he can, usually filling in the gaps when Bucky’s own family isn’t over. Sometimes Natasha (a girl they befriended in middle school after she came dressed as Black Widow for Halloween) and Sam (a boy they got to know during freshman year of high school when he complimented Bucky on his prime taste in superheroes because of the Falcon button pinned to his backpack) drop in, with Natasha keeping him company by watching trashy reality TV with him and Sam listening to him vent and offering a shoulder if he ever needs one. Hell, Abraham sends him a card through Steve when he heard about what happened. (He ends up getting all of them gift baskets as thanks for being there. Sam tries to decline his at first, but the lure of raspberry tarts was too strong.) One day, Steve comes over with Indian takeout and turns on some good ol’ History Channel. “Speaking of history,” Steve says in between bites of naan, “do you remember that store we wanted to open when we were younger?” Hit with that blast from the past, Bucky nods. He doesn’t have the notebook that they used when they first came up with the idea, but he stills remembers the basics of what they put down. Like the pyrotechnics display that he wanted. Steve asks if he’s still open to the idea, and Bucky replies, around a mouthful of rogan josh, that he is. It’s… been a while since he’s gotten out of his apartment to do something other than shop for groceries, pop into the Chinese restaurant right next to the building, or visit the doctor for those couple of appointments about him possibly getting a prosthetic, courtesy of some company that’s looking to do test runs of their new line. A whole bunch of Googling and Binging and Yahoo Answers-ing and they think they might have a slight idea of how to start a business. Slight is the operative word here. Like with many things, they end up going to Abraham for help. Abraham is a godsend, answering all of their questions and offering to point his customer base their way once he closes up shop for good (Steve may or may not have gotten a bit misty-eyed hearing about Abraham’s inevitable retirement). Fast forward, and their shop is open. Steve drew up the logo (gotta put that degree to use somehow), while Bucky was the one who came up with the interior design (and no pyrotechnics displays). Natasha and Sam are hired, with both of them helping to run their social media presence. They get a decent amount of people at their grand opening despite their location being slightly out of the way, and apparently those people liked their experience because they end up getting a handful of regulars, most notably some guy named Clint that Natasha claims to know, a pair of Norwegian brothers named Thor and Loki that Sam swears are actual gods, a timid PhD student named Bruce, and a woman named Carol and her girlfriend, Maria who are the biggest Captain Marvel fangirls that they’ve ever met. Their popularity grows–especially after Abraham closes–and they soon find themselves making a healthy bit of profit. Healthy enough that they’re able to decorate their shop more (Natasha insists that they place a life-sized statute of Black Widow near the front doors) and they tack-on other things, like shirts and posters and snacks to sell. Bucky gets his prosthetic somewhere around the first month that they’ve been open. It’s a wickedly shiny silver, and Steve suggested that he place a red star sticker on his wrist (because his shoulder isn’t visible 99.9% of the time) to represent Bucky’s favorite hero, and Bucky actually does that. Sometimes people ask to touch it. He lets them. Sometimes people ask what happened. He deflects them. At some point, a guy walks in with ruffled hair and glasses and Bucky nearly chokes on the soda that he’s drinking. Sure, they’ve had their fair share of cute customers, but that guy’s cute, and he’s gonna end up making a fool of himself. It’s not like he can ask Steve to talk instead because Steve just went out on his damn lunch break. He tries not to stare at the guy as he peruses the shelves and rifles through the boxes of back issues they have set out in the middle of the floor. He tries really, really hard, taking his phone out and scrolling through whatever social media website and liking the replies to their posts. Every once in a while, he glances at the door, half-expecting Steve to walk in at any time.

Then the guy (now dubbed Cutie in Bucky’s mind) comes up and he smiles at Bucky in greeting and Bucky would probably sob if that wouldn’t make him come off as a complete weirdo. Cutie hauls up a veritable stack and places it on the counter. Despair courses through Bucky’s veins when he sees the Captain America comic on top, because he could do so much better. “Mmm, I’m just getting those because my friend likes Captain America,” Cutie says and oh, shit, did he say that out loud? “I’m partial to Iron Man myself.” “Iron Man’s cool an’ all,” Bucky replies, somehow managing to keep himself from running out the front door and never looking back, “but he’s not my favorite.” Cutie’s eyes flick down to the red star sticker on his wrist. “Let me guess: Winter Soldier?” Bucky clicks his tongue. “Yup.” Cutie laughs, and it’s a really nice sound that Bucky wouldn’t mind hearing again. When he’s finished ringing Cutie up, he mentions the membership that they have going and how members have a pull list and would he like to sign up? Mentally, he crosses his fingers that Cutie says yes because it would be a shame if he only got to see him once in his life. A damn, damn shame.

So, he should be thankful that Cutie says yes and he finds out that Cutie’s name is actually Tony and Tony just moved from Malibu and it was his friend James–whom he calls Rhodey–that recommended this place to him. (He goes through a list of James in his head, and figures that it most likely is James Rhodes, who also happens to be a member. He should send him a gift basket.)

Tony ends up leaving around the same time Steve comes back from his lunch break, and Steve must have this sort of sixth sense because he sends Bucky a knowing, amused look.

Tony drops by every 2nd and 4th Wednesday, and it’s always at 12:40 PM, give or take a few minutes. His pull list isn’t particularly long–or at least, it isn’t something that he needs to drop in twice a month for, but Bucky’s not going to complain, not when he’s able to see the way Tony’s eyes sparkle when the topic crosses over to a story arc that he’s passionate about or the way the tip of his tongue pokes out between his lips when he becomes engrossed in what he’s reading. They swap stories, with Bucky finding out that Tony used to be in the robotics club when he was in high school and how his father used to tell him that comics were all “bullshit,” so that threw him off of them for a bit. He always asks Bucky if he recommends something before he leaves, if he saw that episode of Game of Thrones, or if he’s simply feeling okay.

Tony’s visits last longer and longer and longer, until it’s basically just him and Bucky talking for hours on end, their topics ranging from comic cons to what they had for dinner last night. (Steve laments how he’s always the one stuck helping customers because he doesn’t have the heart to interrupt him and Tony when they look so concentrated on each other. He begs Bucky to just ask Tony out already because he can’t take it anymore.)

Bucky ends up asking Tony out on accident. Y’see, Tony was excitedly talking about the movie adaption of Iron Man that’s supposed to be coming out soon, and Bucky blurted out that he wouldn’t mind taking Tony out to see it, just the two of ‘em and some popcorn.

Tony says that he’d love to, and Bucky wonders if he should thank Steve for going out to lunch those few months ago.

#pull list au

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brieannakeogh · 5 years

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Dog Days of Summer- Ch 12

Dog Days of Summer- Chris Evans X plus sized reader. Dog days of summer are usually defined as the hottest of the year, some define it as lazy days. This year ‘hottest’ has nothing to do with the outside temp. You meet Chris and Dodger Evans while taking your own dog to the park.

Previous Chapter / Master List

Warnings: No warnings.

Chapter 12

On the way home you called the store and let them know about the cart in the middle of the aisle, apologizing for the abruptness. The rest of the time you stewed. You knew he had your best interests at heart, and if he had fessed up right after you don’t think you would have been so mad about it, but he hadn’t said a word. If you hadn’t ran into Matt would he ever have told you? He can’t just hide painful truths from you, especially because you hadn’t even known him that long. If he overstepped that much after just a couple of weeks, what would he do after six months? Would he try to hide things that happen on set or while he was away? You were done with being lied to and you really wanted to believe it was a one time thing, but really everything had moved so fast. Did you even really know this person aside from the interviews and things you’ve seen online? How much of feeling like you’ve known him forever and trust in him is from what you knew before, or the real person sitting beside you?

Chris touched the back of your hand, pulling you from your thoughts. Looking out to your apartment, you couldn’t be sure if it was relief or dread that the drive was so quick. He interlocked your fingers to bring your attention to your joined hands instead of out the window. “Sweetheart I’m so sorry. I knew that I shouldn’t have done it, or at least told you, but I didn’t want you to be hurt again. I had just gotten you calm and in the bath.”

“I know Chris.” Your focus still on your hands, his thumb running softly over your fingers. “The problem is, a lie of omission is still a lie and I promised myself after Matt I would never tolerate someone lying to me again. I just wish you had told me.” You release his hand. “Let’s go get Dodger.”

Chris is quiet until the elevator ride up. “Does that mean I’m not welcome?”

“God no Chris!” You turn to him, wanting to hug him but knowing you can’t right now. “I just need a little time and some space to myself.” The elevator doors open and you step out into the hallway, fiddling with your keys by the door. “Can you give me until Monday? That gives me the weekend to wrap my head around this. I really like you Chris, but I’ve got to figure out if I can trust this will be a one time thing.”

He nodded and you unlocked the door. The happy dogs sensing the mood, quickly calmed down. He leashed up Dodger while you held Popcorn to your chest. It hurt watching him go, but it’s the only way you could think clearly.

“Can I ask you something?” Chris turned back to you at the door. You nod. “In a relationship, what is the one most important thing for you?” That wasn’t the question you expected after your first fight, it was like a first date getting-to-know-you thing.

Lifting Popcorn up to your face, wanting to hide behind him you answered. “A year ago my answer would be loyalty, but it’s changed. I’ve changed. Now? Honesty, brutal honesty.”

“So for example, not that it would happen, but say I cheat. Fuck some rando girl after being away on set for 6 months. Even after all he put you through, you would be willing to forgive me if I was honest with you about it?” He sounded incredulous, but you nodded all the same.

“I wouldn’t be happy, but if we talked about it and came to an understanding, yeah I would.”

“I think you already know mine is loyalty.”

“Yeah, I know. Loyalty and trust.”

He turned back to the door, opening it. “Talk to you on Monday.” He said over his shoulder going down the hall to the elevator, not looking back at you even as the doors were closing.

You cried yourself to sleep that night. Popcorn wasn’t happy about how clingy you were being, constantly trying to wriggle away, but you just held on tighter until he gave up. Only when he started making noises of protest did you let him go his own way, calling him a traitor as he slinked down to the foot of the bed. It surprised you just how much it hurt after such a short amount of time. Finding out Matt was cheating on you wasn’t even this bad, you were just enraged at that. This you couldn’t even be really mad about what Chris did. You still didn’t like it, but understood his reasoning. Honestly you couldn’t wait until Monday and it scared you how strong you were feeling about that.

The next morning you woke up groggy, lonely and with a splitting headache from crying all last night. You went back to the little boring routine you had before Chris barreled into your life. It’s funny, nothing you and Chris did together was really what you would call exciting, but it was just more fun than laying around alone. Aggravated with yourself for thinking about him and missing him every minute wasn’t helping. What you needed was a distraction.

Online you look through different job websites, picking out positions that are near you and sound like something you would be hired for. You spent the rest of the afternoon filling out applications and sending out resumes. That night you had fitful dreams about paperwork chasing you and being labeled a psycho on the online personality tests.

Waking up again dog tired, you were coming to the realization that you might have to beg him for forgiveness just so you could get a good night's rest in his warm bed. It had only been a day and a half and you realize how attached you were to him. That was not a good sign for the days ahead, you didn’t know if you’d be able to handle him being gone frequently.

You spent the morning and afternoon checking your email for any response to your resume, answering the ones that did and setting up a few interview times. You kept glancing at your phone as you worked, debating if you should end the shut out early. Clearly your decision to forgive him had been made, now you were just hurting yourself and possibly him. If you called him early, would he think you were weak? That had been your issue with Matt. You had been a doormat and he took advantage of it. No, Chris wasn’t like that. You’d known that from the conversation on the bench at the park. If you close your eyes you can still feel the breeze and the warmth of his shoulder on your cheek. That felt like months ago when it had only been a few short days.

Mind made up you grab your cell phone. Looking at the time you remember that it was Friday and he was supposed to go out with friends tonight. On the one hand you wanted to tell him as soon as possible so he could have a good night, but you also didn’t want to disturb him. As you were fiddling with your phone, trying to decide what to do, there was a knock at the door.

Your whole body stiffened since there were only two people that could have gotten past the lobby door, Chris or Matt. Neither were expected and you weren’t sure which you were more nervous to be on the other side, for completely different reasons.

Another bang, bang, bang came through, sounding more like a fist then knuckles. Popcorn started to bark and ran over, trying to be as intimidating as a small chihuahua could be.

You walk over and try to look through the peephole, but you can’t see anything, just the wall across the way. So you shout through it. “Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

Your heart jumped back in your chest but kept the quick pace. Your mind flashing to a couple of weeks ago when that same voice stood outside your door.

Hand already moving to unlock and open the door, even with your brows drawn up in confusion. “Chris?” The smell of alcohol hit you first when you got the door barely cracked open. His appearance looked like normal, hair styled, clothes in place, but he was leaning heavily on your doorway and swaying a little. “Oh God, Chris how much did you drink? You didn’t drive here did you?” Trying and failing to look around him to see if someone carried him up to your door.

“No they rolled past and kicked me out of the car. Said they were tired of hearing me talk about you and to just make up already.”

You snort out a laugh. “Good friends.”

“I said you wouldn’t see me until Monday, but they didn’t listen.” He stared at you for a beat. “Hey you did open the door!” A look of surprise filters over his face.

“Yes I did and now I’m going to tell you to come in here.” You tug at his arm, pulling him over the threshold enough to close the door. Steering him to the couch and making him sit, you go to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee and grab a glass of water. It’s not long before he stumbles from the couch to the kitchen. Turning off the sink faucet you thrust the glass of water under his nose. “Here, drink this, and I don’t remember telling you that you could get up.”

He takes the glass and finishes it in three gulps. “Why do I have to stay on the couch?”

“Because you are drunk and can barely stand on your own two feet. I don’t want you falling and getting a concussion.”

“But I missed you!” He says with a grin, flinging his arms around you.

Patting him on the back. “I missed you too.”

“Did you? You’re not mad anymore?” He mumbled into your neck. He had started to lean more weight onto you then you were comfortable with but you braced your legs and held him up.

“No I’m not mad, I was actually just about to call you when you showed up.”

“Really?” He pulled back, swaying a little, his face lit up like Christmas and you couldn’t help but smile back.

“Yes really. I still want to talk about it, but I forgive you.”

“No, no, no. Less talk, more kissing.” He leans in and you put a hand over his face laughing at his excitement.

“Go sit, I’ll bring you some coffee.”

“Ugggg.” he whines and flops face first on your couch.

When you come back with a cup of joe, you find him snoring softly into the couch cushions. Setting the mug down, you move his head so he could at least breath properly and grab a throw off the back of the couch to cover him. His feet still stick out, so you go and get a comforter off the bed and switch it out with the throw for yourself.

With your hands on your hips you shake your head at the passed out form and quietly begin to lock up. Changing into pjs and climbing into bed with the throw, you turn out the last light and fall asleep yourself. You feel the bed dip and look over to see Chris crawling in, wrapped up like a burrito in your comforter. Giving him a warm smile to let him know it’s ok, he moves in and covers you both up, pulling you against his chest. The bedside clock says 3am, you had only been asleep for a few hours, but he seemed a bit more sober than before.

“I missed you.” He breathed into your neck.

You reach back and pet his head. “I know, you already told me once tonight. I missed you too.”

“I didn’t know where I was at first when I woke up. Popcorn decided to lay on me and it startled me awake. Not use to a small thing jumping up on me.”

“What about Dodger? Will he be ok for the night?”

“I called my doorman, he said he would take him out to the bathroom tonight and in the morning.” He buried his face into your neck. “I’m sorry.” His voice rumbled into your skin.

You tighten your arms around his that are wrapped around you. “I know. I’m sorry too.”

He sat up a bit and turned you to be able to see your face. “What for?”

“I overreacted. I had the right to be mad but I went too far. I think some of it was how I’ve been treated in the past, but you’re not them and are allowed to make your own mistakes without me putting their leftover baggage on you.” Lifting a hand out of the covers you put it against his cheek, hoping to show him how much you missed him. He leaned down and slid his lips over yours, sealing them together for a sweet kiss that let you know you were forgiven too. “Still want to date the crazy woman?”

“As long as you can put up with my fanbase and anxiety, I can deal with your level of crazy, which is pretty much average. You’re way more sane then some of the women I’ve dated.”

Before you can ask about the number of crazy women he’s dated, he’s already back claiming your mouth. Rolling you to your back, you can feel him press against your side, his cock straining against your hip. It brings up all sorts of pleasant memories, but also another. “I distinctly remember saying there would be no booty calls on Friday.” You mumble into his mouth.

“I didn’t call, so it doesn’t count. Besides, we just made up from our first fight, I think we deserve makeup sex.”

“I think we need to get some sleep and for you to sober up.”

“I’m sober. Perfectly sober.” He replied with mock indignation.

“If that was true you’d have a splitting headache.” Even in the darkness of the room you could see his lip poke out in a pout, which just confirmed your suspicions. “How about a counter offer of morning sex and a big greasy breakfast when we get up?”

“Fine, but I only want to leave the bed tomorrow for food and to take the dog out.”

Your hand runs down his back as he snuggles back up to you, his head being pillowed by your chest. “I think that is one of your best ideas yet.”

After a bit of cuddling, you both get comfortable and start to drift off. You’re teetering right on the edge of sleep when his voice interrupts the quiet night. “I got my schedule. I’m leaving next week.” If you had been any further into sleep you never would have heard him, as it is you grow very still. You thought you had more time than this and it felt like cold water thrown on you.

“Next week?”

“Thursday.”

Swallowing down the breath you were holding, relieved it was at least the end of the week. Trying to pull as much cheerfulness into your voice as you can muster, you turn to him. “Sounds like we need pack a lot into this week. I think we can do it though, we just need to get organized and schedule out a plan of attack. You might need to do that because I suck at it. I figure we need to have sex, eat, have more sex, sleep, eat, take the dogs out at some point and just continue that cycle the rest of the week. Maybe also talk about the best way to stay in contact while you’re gone too, but that can be…” You were cut off by his mouth on yours. Even in the moonlight his eyes were bright and hopeful.

“So no thought about kicking me out?” He pulled away just enough to talk, but his grip on your hip was tight.

“Never for this, it’s your passion. Plus I quite enjoy watching your movies, but I think we established that.”

“Yes, obsessive fangirl if I recall correctly.”

You smack his arm. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Now it’s abusive fangirl.” He grumbles as he rubs the spot on his arm.

“Ya big baby. Go to sleep or I won’t take you out for breakfast.”

“Threatening to cancel breakfast and not morning sex?”

“That would be more of a punishment for me, not you.” You peck his jawline and snuggle closer, burying your face in his neck this time. Letting out a sigh as he rubs your back. “We can do this right? I mean you’ve done it before?”

“Yes, but if one of them worked out I wouldn’t be single right now. Ow!”

“You’re not single right now.” The teeth marks on his shoulder still visible.

“You know what I meant. You’re very violent when I’m drunk.”

“So you admit it!” You start giggling as he protests. “Nope you said it, so go to sleep.”

“Fine, but next time you drink too much I’m going to bite you back.”

“Promises, promises.” The words rumbled into his neck as he chuckles. Soon you’re both fast asleep, but you’re dreams aren’t in any less turmoil then when you slept alone. Only this time you were chasing him, never quite able to keep up.

Next Chapter

Only took a month to update this. Sorry about that. Hopefully it was worth the wait.

Thank you everyone that still keeps up with my blog!

@spidey-babe-parker, @stevieang, @albinotigerpython, @paintballkid711, @katykyll, @avengersrulez1536, @ultrafreespirit, @wantingtobekorra, @i-had-a-life-once, @ghostssss, @babybeluuga, @bodhi-black, @kanupps06, @hatterripper31, @grandloser, @reniescarlett, @kjidhzyx, @normanreedus5150, @ilovethings-somuch, @spiderman-2013, @bloodyvalentine93, @xx-raven, @passionghost, @prettybubblesintheair, @averyrogers83, @ria132love, @patzammit, @whom-the-fack, @pooslie, @3dsaunt, @kristiedwyer, @janeyboo, @theonelittleone, @aslandia726, @itsmysticalmystery, @stanclub, @geminimoonbeamx, @lookwhatyoumademequeue, @eyesfixedonthesun22, @mrsalh32611, @whatmakesmebeme-tblr, @isaxhorror, @kateelyse96, @hidden-treasures21, @aubreystilinski, @tnupsweetpie, @mikaelasingswritesloves, @webcraft4eveh, @fanfictionandjunk, @elizabeth-marie-moon, @linesal

#chris evans x plus size reader #Chris Evans #chris evans x reader #plus sized reader #dog days of summer

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yourhelpfulaffiliate · 5 years

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How I Grew My Pinterest Monthly Views from 7.5k to 20k in Less Than Two Weeks

If you’re seriously interested in growing your Pinterest following and monthly viewers this just might be the blog post for you. This is been my main focus for the last two weeks. I really wanted to harness the power of Pinterest and gain a greater understanding of how it works and how to be successful at using it. https://youtu.be/Fgyh7BQYKZk Unfortunately I tried several strategies during this period. This of course means I have no idea which strategy affected my results the most. However I think the main thing I’ve taken from this experiment is that if you concentrate and focus on your Pinterest account it will grow. I will still talk about the different strategies I used to grow my Pinterest but I think the idea you should take away from this is like a plant if you give it attention it will grow.

Set Up Shop

When I started this experiment my Pinterest profile was a mess. I had started it about three years ago for posting personal project ideas and abandoned it since then. So the first thing I wanted to do was make sure that my profile looked as professional as possible. This means adding a logo as my profile picture and updating my profile description. I think there’s three main things you need to focus on when you’re writing your profile description. You wanna make sure you’re using natural speech you want to include as many keywords for your niche as possible within their natural speech and you want to use all the characters that are given to you. It’s much easier for people to find you if you use proper keywords. Pinterest is not the place to use keywords that are not relevant.

Add Boards for Pinterest Categories

Pinterest only has a few main categories so I think it doesn’t hurt your Pinterest profile to create a couple of boards focused on these categories specifically. I’m not saying create a board for every category but you could if you wanted to. The idea behind creating these boards is they may not be your main focus but they can still draw in people. So what you want to do is put the most popular pins that exist in that category in those boards. I figure Pinterest will give you a little credit as at least a decent curator of pens and reward you for doing that. These boards will also help you later when you start using tailwind tribes because you’re going to need boards tip and other peoples pens to.

Create Boards Just For Your Content

I created a board just for my blog posts and a board just for my YouTube videos. I’ve have positioned these boards at the top of my board list so when someone comes to visit my profile the first boards they will see are those two. I don’t want you to be confused about this. You can still post pins for your content on other boards but I think it’s important that the first place you pin them is on a board specifically with only your content. Pinterest wants you to pin your pins on the most relevant board first and what could be more relevant then a collection of more content that you’ve created. You should pay particular attention to the description of these boards and try and make them the best you can. Make sure to use easily readable speech and your niche is keywords. I will talk more about what to do with your pin descriptions later on in this blog.

The 2 Tools That Changed The Game

Upping Your Pin Design with Canva I’ve written a whole blog post just about Canva. You can find the link below. https://yourhelpfulaffiliate.com/2019/09/11/what-the-heck-is-canva/ I think Canva is a huge game changer for Pinterest users. Before I was using Pinterest my pins were mostly screenshots with pixelated text overlay. They were ugly they were confusing and they didn’t get any interaction. Since I’ve started using Canva I’ve had several pens get over 1000 views by simply sharing them because they’re so beautiful. I think SEO also has a huge part to play in the exposure my pins are getting but I think having beautiful pins should be number one on your list. I believe this because your pins are the first thing users are going to see. If you would like to sign up for Canva you can do so through my affiliate link below. This affiliate link pays me commissions at no extra cost to you. https://canva.pxf.io/yourhelpfulaffiliate Schedule and Repin Pins with Tailwind Tailwind is the official pin scheduling software for Pinterest. You can create a free account and start scheduling pens almost immediately. What’s the point of scheduling pins? Well in less you want to use Pinterest every single day manually to post new pins I suggest using a pen scheduler. This way you can schedule 1 to 2 weeks worth of pins all at one time. I think a lot of people underestimate the value of using a tool like tailwind. On top of Tailwind’s pin scheduling tool it has another awesome feature. This is called Tailwind tribes. It’s a pretty fair deal. You join a tribe in your niche and pin other peoples pins to relevant boards and they’ll do the same for you. The more repins you get the more popular you are going to be. That’s the main reason I take advantage of tailwind is to get more repins. If you would like to sign up for Tailwind you can do so through my affiliate link below. This affiliate link pays me commissions at no extra cost to you. https://www.tailwindapp.com/tribe/join?h=LPYMIDp3LCy0R8

Brand Your Pins

Before I started this experiment I looked around to see what other successful Pinterest users were doing. One of the things I noticed was that most of them included their website either at the top or the bottom of their pins. I’m a big believer in trying to do 10% more than my competition. I thought how can I do this just a little better than them. So what I decided was I would brand my pins with not only my website but I would include my logo and my slogan as well. This is all included usually at the bottom of my pins. I also try to keep the color scheme for my pins matching my logo and website color scheme. This makes for a pleasant transition from Pinterest users looking at your pen to visiting your website.

Please Pin Me

Clean up

This one was pretty quick and basic. I just went through and got rid of anything that was kind of an eyesore didn’t belong or I just didn’t want. This also means cleaning up your language and making it more natural speech. Try and make your text more like a conversation instead of static information.

Post and Repin Often

Like I was saying above posting often on Pinterest makes a huge difference. Having a pin scheduler like Tailwind can be a lot of help. But if you don’t want to do that what I recommend is that you manually repin from 27 to 37 of other peoples pins every day. I also recommend you pin some of your own pins. If you don’t have any new content such as blog posts or YouTube videos to create a new pin for you should create a new pin for an old piece of content. I frequently make multiple pins with different designs for the same piece of content. As far as repairing often I try to add at least one person to all of my main boards every day. To find this pen I’ll look for the most popular pin in that category. I will also add pins that I find interesting or useful.

Test Out Pinterest Ads

Ahh! Oh no! That means I have to spend money. That’s true most of the tips and strategies that I talk about in this blog post can be done for free and this one does cost money. You can get a Pinterest ad for as low as two dollars. If you don’t have two dollars to test out ads to grow your Pinterest profile I don’t think you seriously want to do it. For my first try using Pinterest and I spent exactly 2 dollars. I wanted to promote the pin and the blog post that I thought was my best one. I was pretty happy with the results. A large amount of people viewed my pin. Some people pinned it and some people clicked through. For my second try using Pinterest ads I spent ten dollars over a two day period. This time I was promoting a much better pin and a much better blog post. I was a little underwhelmed with the results for this ad. While a lot of people did see the pin not manyof them pinned it or click through. Since this ad this pin has preformed much better than my average pins. After about a week after the end of the ad I started seeing much more news pins and click through’s on all of my pins. So I think if your Pinterest account is in kind of a low spot it doesn’t hurt to take out a small ad to kind a get a little kick off Pinterest love.

Use the Whole Pin Description

Pinterest gives you 500 characters to use in every single Pinterest pin description. Most people either leave this blank or just copy and paste the title into the description. I think this is a huge waste of SEO space. By taking advantage of this massive SEO sign post you will get more views on your pins. So what should I be putting in this description? Much like your profile description you should try as hard as you can, use natural speech, the main keywords for your niche and fill up the damn thing. You can also include a few hashtags for keywords you can’t naturally fit into your description. I suggest a range of 2 to 6 hashtags broken up with vertical lines. This is a strategy I just started focusing on so I have not been doing this the entire two week experiment. However I did want to share it with you because I think it is going to be pretty powerful. I also want to go back and update my old pins with longer descriptions and hashtags. For example I posted this pin last night to 4 relevant boards. I used all the description space, used keywords and hashtags and I have an awesome image. With in 1 day this pin has had 479 view, 3 repins and 3 clicks. You can visit this pin by clicking on the image below.

Conclusion

Giving your Pinterest account a little attention with a focused result in mind can do wonders! I can’t want to see how much my Pinterest account will grow in the future. If you would like to follow my Pinterest account you can do so through the link below. https://www.pinterest.com/yourhelpfulaffiliate/

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jenniferbowley · 5 years

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 239 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts, the one where you hear the weird sound of Hernan rubbing his hands together.

Hernan: We’re live, Adam!

Adam: cómo estás

Hernan: I’m good. Thank you.

Adam: Gotcha. Well, welcome everybody to Episode 239 of Hump Day hangout today is the fifth of June 2019. And we have got some good stuff for you today. But real quick, we’re going to run down the line and say hello to everybody. So Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Excellent as always, super good to be here.

Adam: It’s good. Your audio sound super good today, man. Do you have any mic?

Chris: No, no. Yeah, books. Yeah, sounds good. All right. Or not? How about you? How are you doing?

Hernan: Good, man. I’m just freezing my ass off down here. So I’m drinking tea. You guys are having the nice part this time of the year. But other than that good. Happy to be here. Happy to hang out with you guys a little bit. So good stuff coming up.

Adam: Outstanding! Marco, how about yourself, man?

Marco: What’s up? You know, about six weeks ago, I was listening to the temptations. I wish that it would rain. And it hasn’t stopped since that day. Red rain. Yeah, I’m gonna stop listening to that spot maybe to stop raining.

Adam: Awesome. Bradley. How are you doing?

Bradley: Good. I’m happy to be here. Excited. I gotta we gotta run it. I gotta be out for like, right at five today, though. My daughter’s graduating eighth grade and going into high school next year. And so I want this big, like award ceremony this evening and all that and can’t believe she’s gonna be fucking High School man.

Hernan: You don’t sound super excited.

Bradley: Yeah, she grew up too damn fast. And that means I’m getting old as a problem.

Adam: Yeah, that’s crazy. I’m trying to think when we met her. What was that like three or four years ago? or? Yeah, man. That’s crazy. Anyways, Long Time Time flies. Alright, well, getting back to the hump day hangouts topic. If you’re watching us for the first time. That’s awesome. You’re in the right place. Thanks for watching. Whether you’re watching us live at https://www.semanticmastery.com/hdquestions or if you’re checking out the replay on YouTube. This is the place to be you can ask the questions at again https://www.semanticmastery.com/hdquestions. That’s where we’ve got the form the little chat box for all the questions, you can ask your questions ahead of time, you know if you aren’t gonna be able to make it live or you just want to make sure it gets answered because it is first come first serve. Beyond that, we get asked a lot you know, where should I start with semantic mastery Well, this is the place to start. You know, we’re here every week we’re answering questions. We’re watching Hernan choke to death on his drink. And but then we tell people after watching that, don’t grab the Battle Plan. All right. And that’s what you want to grab. You know, if you want to get better repeatable results, go to https://www.battleplan.semanticmastery.com. But if you’re past that you’re kind of wanting, either you’re ready to start or you really want to grow your digital marketing business, then, you know, joining an experienced community with faster access to real-world info and testing with the Semantic Mastery Mastermind is the place for you. And again, you can find out more about that at https://mastermind.semanticmastery.com and for those of you who liked using done for you services and like to speed things up and over to mgyb.co, and I’m almost done, I do want to say that if you can subscribe to our YouTube channel helps us grow helps us get our word out there. And if you come across any videos or clips that you like, please share them. You know, if you find something particularly helpful, there’s probably someone you know who might like that as well. And real quick, I wanted to say because Hernan just kind of glossed over this I bet he can actually talk now maybe he’s recovered from his drinking. I know. Yeah, kind of. But I think heard on you’re going to be doing some live q&a for our mastermind members. Kind of a live thing if you call direct

Hernan: Oh, yeah, I’m gonna be starting. I’m going to be starting I tried to start last week, but it was up kind of a problem because I wasn’t in the country. So I was given a traffic workshop. So but these Friday, I’m going to start doing kind of a serious about paid traffic, specifically Facebook ads, and Instagram ads. We’re focused on local, we can talk about pretty much anything you guys want to lead gen. In general, you know, CPA e-commerce, what do you guys want, it’s going to be exclusive for the mastermind is going to be on the Facebook group. So you need to be part of the Facebook group, if you’re in the Mastermind, you haven’t been joining or visiting the Facebook group, that’s where the magic happens pretty much besides the calls and whatnot, that’s where, you know, we get a lot of action happening or whatnot. So head over there, I think I’m gonna be doing it. Let me actually confirm you guys the time. So it’s going to be Friday, the seventh and it’s going to be at 11 am. Eastern. So it’s going to be there, it’s got to be live, it’s got to be awesome. So you know, it’s got a bit I’m going to be testing it out as well to see what kind of response we get. And you know, if you guys agree with that, that could have become a cycle. So just jump in live like, once or twice a month, just answering Facebook stuff. That’s part of the commitment that we have with the mastermind people that we want to give them as many tools as possible to grow their business. And Facebook ads is a powerful tool indeed. So

Adam: sounds good. Yeah. And that’s on top of all the regular training, everyone gets in the mastermind as well as the community. So if you’re interested, head over to https://mastermind.semanticmastery.com and join up before Hernan goes live. So you can attend the

Bradley: speaking of which I’ve got YouTube ads training that I’m going to be doing over the next several weeks in there. Because I’m doing several YouTube ads campaigns for Semantic Mastery I’ve just been recording several videos over the last couple days. In fact, we’re going to try to grow our YouTube channel subscriber base to above 10,000. So I’m setting up several campaigns using in-stream ads and YouTube for that, and I’m going to be kind of documenting and sharing, you know, the process for that kind of stuff, as well as we’re going to start increasing our Hump Day hangout attendance to and I want to use YouTube ads for that, because there’s an enormous amount of traffic to be had from YouTube, if you know how to do it, right. And it just takes consistent effort and you know, trial and error to figure out the best recipe so to speak for the ads and the messaging to get that right. And so I’m going to be doing a lot of that I also started another business that I finally revealed to the mastermind last week, I’ve been teasing it for a month, I’m not going to talk about here, but I’m going to be using YouTube ads a lot for that business as well. And it’s just, it’s going to be cool, because it’s going to be slightly different from just our standard, you know, local lead gen stuff that we’ve been kind of pushing for the last, you know, six or eight months, because it was you know, there was so much opportunity in that. But, you know, we’ve kind of done all that. And so now we’re going to kind of broaden out a little bit and do some, I think it’s really good timing that is Don’s gonna be doing some Facebook, and Instagram paid traffic training. And I’m going to be doing some paid traffic training on YouTube ads and how to get traffic that can be applied for you know, affiliate type businesses or local businesses or, you know, just getting like branding and awareness and all that kind of stuff, building up an email list, building your subscribers, lead generation, it’s just going to be kind of all-encompassing, so I think it’s a really good time to be in the mastermind.

Adam: Awesome. All right. Well, if we don’t have anything else, or rather, is there anything else? You guys, are we good to go? To one. All right, we’re good to go. Let’s hop into it.

Bradley: Alright, let me grab the screen. And we’ll get into the questions. Sweet. All right, where are we? Seven days ago. Okay.

How Do You Use The Embeds Service At MGYB?

So it looks like to Tushar is first he says embeds service at MGYB. Why be how do you recommend using this? Is it for tier one links or money sites or the embeds on niche relevant sites? Well, the embed network is for embedding pretty much any sort of iframe. Typically, people think of embed services as being used for just videos. But it can be used for Maps, Google Maps, Google, Google, my business maps, you can, you can actually iframe pretty much almost any website unless it has an iframe breaker. So you can use it for any number of things. We use it specifically for videos GMB or Google My Business map embeds as well as RYS you know, RYS Reloaded methods or tactics session, say. So, if you’re not familiar with that, it’s really powerful to do with your drive stack stuff, your files and folders and things like that, that you can embed, which is great, because, you know, if you order a drive stack to be built from MGYB and then you can use parts of that as part with the embed service. And the same thing goes with maps and beds or video embed. So it can be used for pretty much any sort of thing and embeds or actually, I don’t know how much Marco would want to get into this year. But embeds are like a do follow link even on nofollow sites. So they’re very, very powerful. And they work very well. Marco, what do you want to say about?

Marco: That said, it’s like getting a link, but it doesn’t count against your link profile.

Bradley: Yeah, it’s raining again.

Marco: Yeah, it’s raining really hard, and the thunder coming through and all kinds of good stuff. You can hear it. But anyway, that’s just the way it is. And embeds are really simple. It’s a display of your page. on somebody else’s, it’s a tunnel. And all the credit goes back to the source. And that’s just what it is. It’s a way to get a link that doesn’t get counted as a link. So if it’s not counted as a link, it cannot incur a penalty.

Bradley: Yeah, and they’re really powerful and the embed networks are primarily web to auto-embed networks that are link building manager has been building for years now. So they are themed networks. In other words, he’s been building and seasoning these links, or excuse me, these web 2.0 embed networks for I’d say, at least three years, maybe even four years now. So a lot, I mean, first of all, it’s a massive network. And second of all, a lot of these are their aged and themed well, because he’s been building and building and building. I mean, he’s got hundreds of thousands, if not over a million properties built specifically for this kind of stuff. So again, they are themed, very, a lot of them are aged. So it’s it is a very powerful thing. We’ve seen quite a lot of movement, using the embed service for like GMB map embeds. You know, I don’t do a whole whole lot of video SEO stuff, or at least a haven’t been recent. But I’m going to be over the next several months because I’m going to be doing a lot of YouTube stuff right now. But I’m doing paid traffic as well. So I’ll be testing that some more. I know it works well for videos, but I have been doing a shit ton of map stuff, Google Maps, and GMB stuff. And I’ve been using that embed service for that as well as like we, we teach in any one of our paid training courses about @ID pages, again, can’t go into that here in a free setting. But in our paid courses, we talked about @ID pages. And they’re very, very powerful to embed in some of the biggest movements that I’ve seen, are using just traditional link building like, again, the same service that we have an MGYB and an embedded service or combination of both, where you embed a property and then hit the embedded the properties where it’s embedded with additional links. And that tends to really move the needle. And what I like about that service is that it’s easy, it’s easy for us, right? Because we all we have to do is place an order, you know, and in our link building manager and his team take care of all of that. So it’s easy on me, I just have to submit details. And then you know, a few weeks later, I get the report. And I can usually see depending on the obviously level of competition, but you can usually see the results will move the needle just from the link building and the embed services combined. So it’s a very powerful service. And it’s simple, simple to fulfill.

How To Build Citations For Multiple Cities Website?

Next is he says how to build citations for multiple cities website. Do you offer GMB verification for your local clients? I asked this because I’m not sure if this is risky. And we should limit this to our own properties. Should we do this for a client with a service business that can serve multiple cities? Yeah, you can I mean, that’s something I up sold to a lot of my clients was adding additional locations and I’m using air quotes because they didn’t a lot of my clients didn’t actually go get physical, you know, additional office spaces or, or shops, because most of them are contractors. But we did add additional maps listings for a lot of my clients. However, I don’t, you know, I always recommend taking precautions if you’re going to do that for businesses like if you’re doing it for lead gen stuff, you understand the risks, right? So so that, you know, use them at your own risk. But when you’re dealing with a client, you have to be more careful, right, you do not want to do anything that could essentially pass a penalty to their main brand or their main domain, their main location. So whenever I’ve up sold maps expansion or location expansion to existing clients, then what I would do is either just use subdomains from their root domain for each location or I would avoid using their domains alt altogether and just use GMB assets, which would be the GMB website GMB posts, the map itself, that kind of stuff, and then obviously would be branded still for the main company. And if they would all have their own unique tracking numbers that would go to what I’ll forward to the, you know, main phone number for that company. Typically, they would either have an in house receptionist that would answer the phone or I would set up an answering service like like, like I’ve been doing for my lead gen stuff forever. And so all the locations would go to the same destination phone number, but all of the individual locations would have a unique physical address a unique phone number and a unique web address.

If it was going to be used with their branded domain, we would, we would always use subdomains, not inner pages. So not like location pages, it would always be subdomains. And typically I wouldn’t even build websites on them on the subdomains, I would just do a redirect from the subdomain to the GMB website. That makes sense. But in some cases, I recommended not even and it’s just again, for those clients that were worried about it, I said, you know, we don’t even need to use your domain, we can just use this the GMB website as the main website for each location. The idea is to get the leads to go to the main, you know, the leads back to your client, you’re the business, it doesn’t necessarily mean as long as you can brand it with the same logo and same like the header image. So the GMB website image, that kind of stuff that you know, the header image on that, all of that, that’s all that you really need to brand it. And the rest of it can still be left within just GMB, which is what I recommend. So it really depends on the level of risk that your clients are willing to take, I always recommend trying to reduce or eliminate risk as much as possible. So the only thing that would stay the same would be their name. But we’ve actually had a discussion recently in the mastermind, I’m not going to get too much into it but adding a pending an additional term to the actual business name to make it more unique. So for example, if you had four locations in one city, you could name it like north, south, east and west. So company name North company name, East company name, South company name West. And that actually helps to add a little bit of diversity to the business name to prevent any potential pigeon issues. But like I said, it’s still it would still be I still wouldn’t recommend actually connecting any of those assets directly to the primary businesses location or websites because you want to reduce any risk. That makes sense. Okay.

As far as building citations, I don’t build citations to GMB assets unless they are real bona fide businesses that I have x or addresses excuse me that I have access to collect mail from and I’ve talked about that on for many, many months. Now. If you’re buying GMB verify, you know, verified GMB locations. That means it’s it’s a spam address, or it’s an address that you do not have access to collect mail from or at. Does that make sense? So the problem with getting building citations is the moment that you start building citations because most citation directories or business directories require a physical street address in order to build the listing. And the moment that you start adding your business or publishing a listing on a business directory with the street address. Okay, you’re going to start you’re going to get on that that street address is going to be put on a marketing mailing list for physical mail via United States Postal Service. And what happens is that location, that address that you use will start to receive business-related mail that’s addressed to the company that you have listed as the GMB. And so if it’s going to an actual building that or to somebody’s house, God forbid, I recommend that nobody ever uses somebody’s house address, unless that’s their own house, or they got permission to do it. But if it’s going to a building or a house, and somebody starts getting email, or excuse me physical mail, with solicitation offers from marketing companies and Vista print and, you know, list providers like info USA and like all these different I know, because I get a ton of them myself, you start getting all these marketing, e mails, these solicitation mails for offers for the business, then it’s likely that somebody’s going to report that business is not being actually at that location. So I highly recommend that you don’t do that you can get results without citations. If you have a physical address that you can accept mail that then I absolutely recommend using citations because it is still very powerful and effective. But you can still get results without using citations. And if you’re using GMBs that are not, you don’t have access to the actual physical address, and I recommend that you do not. Okay. Do other things.

What Is The Best Way To Keep Up The Rankings If You Need To Change The Phone Number Of A GMB Listing?

Dustin said Hey guys, I need to change the telephone number on my GMB. What’s the best way to keep the GMB rankings only delete the old number and add the new number in my RYS tack or to adding the new number. And keeping also the old number and RYS stack. Um, well. Actually what I would do?

Bradley: Well depends. If because if you’re going to change the phone number, if you mean any properties that you have access to edit, I would want to change to add the new phone number in. But think about if you do have citations, we were just talking about those. But if you do have citations out there, that’s a real pain in the ass to go change the phone number. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend doing that yourself at all, I would hire service for that there’s a great service for that. But from Loganix, if you go to https://www.semanticmastery.com/loganix, then that’s the best service. I know for citation cleanup work. It’s more expensive than some of the other services but they’re really really, really thorough, I’ve had really good results with them. So if you have to do if you have citations, it’s a real bitch because you’re going to want to update the phone number on those. However, if you’re not going to lose the old number entirely right, then you can keep that phone number in the GMB as a secondary phone number.

So what you can do is actually go in and add or essentially click to add another phone number into the GMB dashboard. And then cut and paste the existing phone number into the second position and put the new phone number in the first position and then click Save. That way Google understands that that old phone number is still associated with that profile. However, if that old phone number is not going to receive calls any more than it being listed on a bunch of other business directories, in the event that people do try to contact the business on this business from this business directory listings, it’s going to be an invalid number. For the SEO purposes, it would still be okay because you left the old number in the GMB dashboard is a secondary number. It won’t be published. But Google will recognize that it’s associated with that business. But like I said, if you have existing NAP or citations published on the web, then I would recommend that you try to update those as possible. And again, if it’s something you have access to like drive stacks, yeah, absolutely update the number. But when it comes to citations and things like that, it’s a real bitch. It takes time and consistent effort. And so I recommend you hire a service for that. So but I want to comment on that.

Adam: No.

Bradley: okay.

Does The Semantic Mastery Battle Plan Help In Setting Up A Local Lead Gen Business?

Now, Rob says, I just recently purchased a franchise product that provides SEO Services. It’s not from you guys. Well, then we’re skipping this question. Now. I’m kidding. He says in that from you guys, the company gave some exhausted training on how to sell the services but seems like everything was leaning towards cold calling and door knocking in order to get clients somehow came across you guys on the internet purchased the Battle Plan. I have a website that franchise gave two for lead gen gave to me for lead gen but was not familiar with how to set it up for lead gen does the Battle Plan product up with that. And if there’s something else I could use with your product to get the ball rolling a little faster, sorry, for the long text. Okay, um, well, as far as lead gen using for lead gen for like getting clients really all you need is a, you know, a landing page that you know, describes your services and has a real big strong call to action to contact you. Right? Typically, it’s going to be you know, your phone number real big, perhaps your email address, if you want to publish that, I don’t like to do that or contact form. Right? You know, once, once more information, contact us, or contact me, depending on how your branding your business, contact me here and you know, have a little contact form. But so that’s just standard, right? That’s just a standard lead gen type web page. So you can set your own. Like, for example, my own agency website is just a one-page site. That’s all it is. It just says what I do. And there’s you know, a contact form at the bottom. So if there are contact buttons, you know, in several locations, if they click it, it just scrolls down to the bottom right where the form is. That’s it. That’s all I do.

Because it that’s for inbound marketing, right. So typically, you’re going to be driving people to a landing page, if you’re doing if you’re if you know if you’ve got inbound marketing setup. So that’s like settings, running ads to drive traffic to your landing page. Or it could be organic stuff. But what I found is as-as a marketing consultant myself, right, running my own agency, I found that most of the time that I’ve been able to secure clients is when I’m going out and doing outbound marketing, where I’m, I’m contacting them, right, I know, you can get inbound leads, but personally, for my own business, I don’t get a lot of inbound leads, most of the inbound leads, I do get offers from referrals from existing clients. But you know, I don’t get a whole lot of cold leads coming from Google, or you know, I don’t do a lot of pay per click marketing to get clients, but from just straight SEO, you know, I rank well for SEO, Virginia and things like that. But I don’t typically get a lot of leads from that. What I’ve gotten most of my leads from was me doing the outreach. And you’re right, I hate cold calling, I hate door knocking I hate it, I absolutely despise it. So we developed a product called video lead gen system, which I’ve been using since 2012, to build my own agency. And I recently streamlined it because we built a whole bunch of lead gen assets, I needed to find a way to get service providers to monetize our lead gen assets. And so I needed a way to streamline the video lead gen, or video email prospecting method that I had always been using because it was time-consuming, very effective, but time-consuming. So we created lead gen video lead gen system and an updated it recently, and just relaunched it. So if you’re interested in that, I’m sure Adam, you probably already dropped the link to it. But I would recommend that you try that for him because that’s a great way to get people to get noticed or to get a conversation or a dialogue started with potential prospects. Because you got to think about this, if you just recently are starting to try to build your own agency, I’m going to tell you now that it is a saturated market out there when dealing with local businesses or business owners period, it doesn’t have to be local businesses. But business owners get hammered relentlessly by marketing and advertising companies all the time, they’re getting solicitations via cold emails via cold calls, you know, by people knocking on their door seriously, like walking in and pitching them just like what your franchise company is telling you to do. That’s like the norm now. And so you really need to differentiate yourself, you need to be able to make yourself stand above the competitors or get noticed, through all that noise. And so that’s why I said the video lead gen system is a great way to separate yourself from the rest of the pack and just becoming another solicitor. Right. And so again, guys, I’m not discouraging anybody from getting into, you know, providing Client Services or becoming an agency and all that. But I will tell you that it’s a lot harder now than it was five years ago, to get clients attention or prospects attention. And that’s because of you know, it’s just an absolute feeding frenzy out there people the businesses get hammered nonstop with solicitation calls, emails and offers all the time. And so you have to really be able to stand up, stand out from that crowd. So the video lead gen system is a great way to do that it does require some work, it’s not a magic bullet. And it requires consistent follow up but we talked about all of that in the training and if you implement that, you’ll see that you will start to get much much higher response rates than you would from typical cold calls or not, you know walking in the door and calling on think about this guy’s and I’ve done door to door sales in the past, think about you know, as a business owner it like I work from home, and I can’t stand it when somebody knocks on my door like to try to, you know, whether it’s a Jehovah’s Witness or some a census purse, somebody wanting to ask questions for the Census Bureau or anything like that somebody comes in beats on my door, and I’m in the middle of working or recording a video or something like that. It it’s an interruption it pisses me off, I also don’t answer the phone unless I know who the phone calls from. And I’m really if I’m only if I’m expecting the call, as a business owner, myself, I don’t want to be interrupted. So think about when you cold call somebody or you go walk in their door, and you know, knock on their door to say that you try to sell them something, what you’re doing is interrupting them. And that pisses a lot of people off. So I don’t recommend that at all. I recommend you get more creative on your pitch and your approach and make it easy for them and convenient for them to hear your message. And that’s part of the reason why the video lead gen system works so well. Because you can send them a personalized video that explains why you reached out to them, and they can watch it when it’s convenient for them. And when you set up notifications properly, you’ll know exactly when they’re watching your video, so you can follow up with them immediately. Right. So that was a really good question. But like I said, when it comes down to the Battle Plan, no Battle Plan is going to tell you how to get results from like, get your getting your websites seen and get traffic to them and get better results for them for SEO and all that kind of stuff. But lead gen, standard lead gen templates, very simple, you can just look at like go to Google and look up lead gen. You know landing page templates and things like that and get an idea of what your basic elements are that you should have. And then the rest of it is really about honing your message right crafting your message and finding an approach that’s going to get people’s attention and get them to want to follow back up with you. Okay, turn a cold lead into a warm lead. And that’s what the video lead gen system is all about.

Marco: In our free Facebook group, Adam did a post on the 31st. of May. And he talked to us about this, how he uses the video, little video lead gen system with Loom to follow up. So he says it makes it more personal, right? They’re used to video so he sends them a video. And it says his conversions are way higher. Why don’t you talk about that, Adam?

Adam: Yeah, definitely. It’s such an easy system to use. And it’s funny because videos used to be tough to do. And I remember I copied Bradley’s method from the first version of lead gen system and using images and this that the other thing but now these tools like loom have made this so much easier, where I can put the video it plays natively in Gmail. And even if it didn’t, if it looks like an image is there, and then not only that because I went ahead, that’s just the free version, the paid I went ahead and paid for it when you know, brought out their pro version or whatever. And I can put an overlay link that goes anywhere I want on there, which is awesome. So the conversions on this stuff are super high. Like Bradley says, and anyone who’s gone through the course and put it to us knows how well this works. I mean, it’s crazy getting 3040 plus percent conversion rates and, and the method that most people get 1% or less. And then the follow up is super important. at poker we live in 2018 and DC, did a little exercise. I had people stand up. And they said, you know, assuming everybody here is involved in some sort of business where they talk with customers. I said, you guys all in this room, everybody does some sort of follow up, right? You know, everybody nodded their heads. Yep. Okay, so I said, Everybody, stand up. And I’m going to talk I’m going to say a number starting with one and working my way up and say how many, you know, automated follow up either calls or emails do you have in your business right now. So started at one. And you know, everybody was pretty much still standing up said too few people said they only got two, three more people sitting down by four, there are very few people standing and I may have this wrong, but I think by the time I got to six, there was one person in the entire room standing up, I didn’t even have six, which I’m since fixed. But your rate of response from people goes up hugely as you keep going and we all know this, you know the over supposed to maintain this contact and we’re supposed to follow up with people. But if you don’t have this process or this method to do it, you know, you get busy, you got other things you want to do, it’s not fun, but this is what gets results. So you know, highly encourage anyone who doesn’t have a great method for doing this that isn’t already giving you fantastic results to just go grab video lead gen system put it to work. And this is one of the fastest courses to return your money and then probably 10 or 100 fold over time.

Bradley: Yeah. And last thing I want to say about that is also if you’re going to be pitching or prospecting for your new business, I recommend that you really do niche down to a particular industry, because you’ll get really, really good being able to talk speak directly to that that type of business owner as opposed to being all over the place where if you’re going to be marketing to pretty much just to businesses in general, you have to really understand what’s important to every business industry and and and speak to those owners with their VA with their own vocabulary. It’s very difficult and it takes a lot of time and a lot of experience to get good at being a general marketer. It’s much easier and much more scalable to become you know, a specialist or like a boutique marketing professional in other words, where you really niche down and become an industry-specific professional. Because then you can you really only need to come up with like learn to function Have you, Larry, the pain points, the hot buttons, know what the customers for that particular business are looking for what their needs are all of that it makes it so much easier to scale. And then you can just expand your business by targeting more locations, right? expand your service area, essentially. But you’re still targeting the same business owner, same business type, I would recommend that highly. Alright, so

Does Google Favor An Authority Site With Specific Niche And Location Over A Lead Gen Site With Powerful Backlinks In It?

next Gordon’s up he says, Hey, guys, as usual, your Hump Day hang Hump Day help is greatly appreciate it. You’re welcome, Gordon. He says, I’m not sure how Google search algorithm works in one particular instance, when it comes to local search, be taking a standard lead gen site that is branded with specific business NAP actual or made up as well as having links to citations in the major directories and a GMB listing and compare it to an authority site that is targeted to a specific business niche in location. But without any of the items just mentioned, for the lead gen site. They’re both equally easy to rank or would Google’s search algorithm favor one type of site over the other? And if so, in what way? Um, I’m not sure what you’re talking about, unless you mean like, a local lead gen site versus like, a Yelp page or something, if that’s what you mean, or a big authority type site like Well, I mean, Yelp would be one of those. But like home advisor would be another one or Angie’s List or, and I’m talking contractor type stuff, but like in the real estate market, it would be like, you know, long and foster century 21 or, you know, REMAX and things like that versus a local lead gen site. Right. So my point is, it really depends when it comes to maps listings maps rankings, I found that a local lead gen site, you can typically rank, you know, better than those type of sites, because a lot of those sites won’t have a maps listing like a physical location in their particular area. But when it comes to organic rankings, yeah, it’s tough. If it’s a search with local intent, especially if there are directories. You know, if you go to a search in Google right now, guys, you’ll see that the I think Google’s broken again, and I’ve talked about this in recent Hump Day Hangout, because there are, you know, Google is nothing but an index of links, right, Google doesn’t search results are indexed results, the search engine results pages of the SERPs is nothing but an A list of indexed results, right. So page one is the top 10 results as indexed by Google, according to Google’s algorithm. But if you take a search to do something like plumber, Fairfax, VA for Virginia, right, so plumber, Fairfax, VA, you do that search, and you’ll see that there are the maps listings, which is great. And you might see a couple of local business, local businesses ranking organic listings, but you’re primarily going to see business directories, that are indexed in the organic section that when clicked upon, go to another index page. We talked about this recently. Right. And it’s very difficult to compete with that kind of stuff. So let’s just take a look real quick. If I say, plumber, Fairfax VA.

Alright, we’re going to scroll down. Let me zoom in a little bit. Okay. And you can see there blue because it’s still cooking from the last time I was I was here, but you’re going to see ads. All right, let’s make sure that we’re spelled right. Okay, so we’re going to see ads, and then we’re going to see the maps rankings, which I find are easier to do when competing in this type of space, right? Because take a look that, you know, the top three, there’s one actual company website, right? That out of the top three, so number one, and number three, our index pages have on other So essentially, when click, when you click through to this guy’s all it does is take you to another damn index, which is what Google’s pages, right, it’s an index. And then you take a look at this. And if you click through, and it’s nothing but another index of plumbers on Yelp, and that is in Fairfax. And the same thing goes for Angie’s List, right? Then you’ll see Michael and sons, Okay, number four, so that’s another company. But then home advisor, that’s another index page. So out of the top five, three out of the top five, are actually index pages. And so again, even though they don’t have a physical location there, which is why they’re not in maps, you can see that those are authoritative sites. And they are their authority is why they rank so well, organically, even if they’re not super optimized, right, specifically like data. If you take a look at the Yellow Page, it doesn’t have a ton of content here about plumbing and the plumbing services, or the services that plumbers offer and all that kind of stuff. All it is is a freakin index page. Right? That’s all it is. And so it’s not content rich at all. Yet, it’s ranking very, very well. Number one, in fact, that makes sense. So when it comes to actual, you know, which one is easier and which one’s harder, that’s why I’ve always recommended for local lead gen focus on maps. Because it’s gotten over the years, it’s gotten harder and harder to rank in organics, the organic section, excuse me, because of the business directories. And Google is gone through phases where sometimes it will this index page again, I I think it’s stupid, think about that. You go from one index to another index. That’s dumb. I don’t think that’s useful to anybody. Right? I mean, that’s just my opinion. But I really don’t think that’s useful to anybody. Why would you want to go from one index to another index, when you click through now you’re, you’re just you’ve added an additional step to find your solution. Right. So again, I think that’s done. But over the years, we’ve seen that happen with Google where they get rid of the index, the directory listings, the indexed directory listings, it’s okay to have a Yelp page for a specific company ranked in the top 10. You know, that’s fine, because that means that company had probably proof done really well at filling out their profile optimizing it, well, they probably got a lot of engagement, that kind of stuff, that would be fine. But to go to another index page, unfortunately, that’s kind of where we’re back to now. And I don’t know that it’s going to change or when it will change, it may, like I said, it’s gone in cycles over the years. So when it comes to what I think is easier to do, I think you’re much better off focusing on maps, for local lead gen stuff, then trying to do though, you know, trying to fight or compete with the authority sites in the organic rankings. And I know, some people might have differing opinions. But you know, fighting with Yelp and their authority, excuse me over here, it’s very, very difficult. The same thing with Angie’s List, home advisor, you know, it’s very, very difficult. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: Not I’m going to agree with that. But I would also say that in SERPs now, what really matters is the entity and how well you are how much you’ve taken care of the entity, how much power you’re pushing to the entity, so that so that you’re presented to Google, as trusted and authoritative also, in a niche. If you don’t do that correctly, then you have no hope of trying to rank in the, in the SERPs, right? Especially, again, against these are powerhouses. But you can as he, as you’ve shown that there is one, there is a company that’s right in there. And the way that you do that is power, you should first of all, we went through the entity webinar, right, we did that in Syndication Academy, where we showed the steps that you need to take that to solidify the entity or what I call the end game. So that when you push power into the entity, Google is going to take all of that power, as trust and authority for your entity so that you can go against these, these powerhouses and get in there. But it does take a lot of power. It does take a lot of creativity and you know, your schema has to be right. There are many things that come into play when you’re trying to do this. And as you said, it’s easier to go after the maps.

Bradley: Yeah, I totally agree with what you’re saying, though. I mean, my point is to get results and get, you know, I start with maps, there’s no question. But always definitely you want to evaluate solidify that entity, you want to try to build brand authority for that particular entity. Because it’s not that you can’t rank in the organic section, it’s just going to take you longer and more effort. And so my point is start with maps. Once you start getting, you know, leads coming in for your lead gen business or for your client, then you can focus on all the other stuff that you’re going to need to do to get ranked. And you’re going to try to attempt to rank in the organic section as well, which all the stuff that Marco just mentioned is absolutely correct. So do both, but start in my opinion with the map stuff. And that’s what you know, that’s why I’ve run my business for years.

Okay, so next one, he says is would it make a positive difference if you listed one or two random local business and a piece from that niche on the authority site to give Google a local business name, address, and phone number? Thanks again? Would it make a positive difference if you listed one or two random local business and a piece from that niche on the authority site? I’m not sure I understand that one. If you’re trying to rank order, actually what it makes? Maybe the way I’m interpreting this, as you’re saying, if you’re trying to rank organically by including any piece from other businesses, perhaps it would make it more like an authority site. I wouldn’t recommend that. I mean, it depends what depends on what you’re doing. But it unless you’re building a directory site, I wouldn’t do that. Right. I mean, I wouldn’t want to push authority over to anybody else’s site, especially competitors. So I’m not sure I understand that part of the question. I’m going to move on.

How Do You Pick What Links To Use When You’re Adding The Service Post Links On The City Page For The Second County?

Don says thanks for Hump Day Hangouts. Two questions for Bradley and your complex silo YouTube video, use the following structure. Okay, when adding the second County, it seems that the post name should be slightly different. Yes, it should be. Those videos were recorded many years ago. So I’d have to I don’t even really remember what I said in those videos. But yes, the post name should be unique, forever, all the way down to that level. However, let me just clarify something right now. There’s no need to use the physical silo structure anymore, which is what you’re looking at. And that URL structure there, which is where you know, the category slash post name permalink structure in WordPress, you don’t need to do that anymore. You didn’t need to do it back then. But I preferred it back then because I liked seeing the hierarchy of the silo structure within the URL. But we’ve tested over and over again, and you know, I haven’t done any hard tests in the last few years. But it’s not necessary to have that as a physical silo, you can do what’s called a virtual silo, which is just using the post name permalink structure. So it makes your URLs much cleaner, much shorter. Right, it’s, it’s still, you still want to build your categories correctly. And you know, your sub your subcategories. If you’re doing a complex solid structure, you’re going to have categories and subcategories, right? And pages and child pages, and then post right, which is your third level deep. But yes, when it comes to the permalink, or the slug, for the post you want to have that is unique for each post, you can’t duplicate Leak Repair, for example, as a post slug on two different posts, because it will, but WordPress, by default will put a dash two for the second one, right.

And so on the post level, I’ve always recommended that you would on the post level or even on a subcategory level. But my point is, you’re going to need to have unique slugs, right. And so that’s why it’s not necessary to have the physical silo. Because let’s say that let’s say if you were going to have Fairfax County and Prince William County, and then you were going to go directly to like, I don’t know, plumbing, let’s say, let’s just say you’re going to try to use plumbing as a subcategory for both. They’re two different parent categories, then you’re going to have plumbing and plumbing dash two, right, because the second time you try to create that subcategory, it’s going to have the same slug, it’s not going to work. So my point is, you know, I stopped using the physical silo structure, which is where you see everything in the link. And it started using virtual solid because I don’t care if there’s a plumbing dash to as a subcategory. As long as it stacked within the higher the way that you build it out in the silo structure. The bots will crawl it correctly to where it won’t bleed over from one plumber like plumbing dash to to plumbing, you know, the regular plumbing if that makes sense. They will all be separate containers basically. But you don’t have to look at that ugly URL was my point. So it makes sense. So I’ve switched to just doing virtual silo structure, which again, is just using the post name permalink because that way you can hide all of that stuff that’s hard or impossible to reconcile within WordPress. However, that said, there is another way to silo and I can’t obviously I’m not going to get into that here because it would take the rest of the time, I’d have to get out my snag and start drawing side siloed diagrams and all that. And anybody that’s been in the mastermind knows what an abomination that is. But you can silo also using categories and tags, guys, you can use tags as a way to add for especially for complex silos where you’ve got perhaps multiple locations, but you’ve got the same service that’s going to be provided in each location. Right? So instead of having location silos, via categories, and in-service silos via categories, which is difficult to do, you can, you can actually use tags to create silos too, right? So you can have like location silos or service or product or service categories, and then use tags as a way to create location silos. And there’s, there’s a way to do all of that, which is a little bit cleaner. It still takes some planning out guys, a complex silo structure is just what the name says it is. It’s complex. And so I always recommend if you’re going to do that, that you map it out first because it will take some thought to be able to do it correctly. Marco, were you gonna say something or somebody? Not? Good. Already popping might pop.

Okay, so But yeah, as far as when it goes down to the post level, yeah, make always recommended that the posts be more like conversational type titles, and the person the link structure can reflect the more like what the title of the post is, right? But if you’re just using the permalink, the post name permalink, which is just a simple, excuse me a virtual silo, then it’s not going to matter. Because your URLs are going to be rude calm, you know, root domain, com slash posting, even all the way down to the post level, which is deep into the siloed. Right? That it’s just going to be posting and at your, at your earlier pages higher up in the silo at subcategory level, it’ll be, you know, root domain.com, slash subcategory, or at the category level root domain, com slash category. Right. So it’s always just going to be whatever that page that you’re landing on is going to be as bright past the first, you know, the first level past the domain itself. And so that’s a much cleaner way to build a silo In my opinion, because then you know, it doesn’t matter. Because even if you’re permalinks, or have the dash twos and things like that, which are ugly, and I always had a hard time reconciling that with the physical silo structure was very difficult. But over the years, I learned that it’s absolutely not necessary, you can do it with a virtual silo. So you can hide all that ugly URL shit that happens when trying to do that with a complex silo, it doesn’t matter the but still crawls it the way that you build it. Right? So regardless of how ugly the URL is, if you’re hiding all that shit, it won’t matter. That makes sense.

Where Do You Typically Include The Links To The County Silo Index Pages?

Okay, question two do you typically include the links to the county silo index pages in the site-wide header, navigation footer nav link on the homepage content. Other know, and we talked about this in mastermind, I can’t get into this very deep here either, because once again, it’s we don’t have the time number one. Number two, this is something that we this is kind of stuff we cover in the mastermind. But no, essentially, with a silo structure you want from the navigation, you want to be able to link to your top-level category, pages, right, which are pages, also categories. And then on the category, the top level silo pages, you can link to subcategories. If you have them, then your subcategory pages, you don’t want to really link to anything from there, except for perhaps back up to the root domain, like the homepage, and then all of your supporting articles will be stacked or placed underneath each subcategory. And you’d want to daisy chain those together, or link from the subcategory back up to the homepage or to the top level category but not the subcategory. You don’t want to create what Marco calls a reciprocal link even on the same domain. And that’s about as far as I can get into that right here. Okay. That’s changed recently, too, by the way. So again, those are old, old videos, that the principles are still remain valid. But I have absolutely changed my strategy slightly on how I build those type of solid structures out now. And maybe it’s time for an update on that.

Should You Create Two Different GMB Assets For Two-Related Keywords Or Separate Them?

Gabriel’s up he says, Hey, guys, thanks again, for all the great content plus one here. Missing g plus, yeah, I’m currently working on building a GMB asset for solar panel installation services and solar panel installation course. Should I create two different GMB assets? Or should I use one big asset to rank for both keywords best solar panel installation? A solar panel? Oh, I see what you’re saying. So one, is it services? And one is, of course, that’s a good question. I mean, if it’s a local course, where only people that aren’t you’re going to be marketing the course to local people then like like, you know, for people to come to a school or a location to learn how to install solar panels, then yeah, I guess you could use it, I would recommend doing it for both. But if you’re going to if the course is if you’re trying to market that, well, you can always still have a GMB. But yeah, I would probably come if it’s for the same company and everything that I don’t, I would just keep it all under one entity, one asset. That’s my thoughts. But that’s just because you can actually accrue more authority that way, then try a separate them. Marco, what do you say?

Yeah, I wouldn’t separate them either going to have them on the same website. I don’t see why you would need two different GMB. They’re totally relevant. So there’s relevance there. That’s everything that you need. And then pushing those two. I mean, in the course, and I don’t want to get into it too much. We show that we show a way where you can do both just through posts. Right. And it’s still in in the same GMB. But you know, you post about the course and you post about the service. And you can keep them separate. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. And again, I would I, you know, I try to reduce assets, if possible, when it comes to stuff like that, try to keep them all housed on one entity, essentially one web entity, right, which would be, you know, a website that you could add, like, we were just talking about silos, for example, right, instead of having two separate assets, it’s more work to maintain two separate assets, and you’re actually, it’s going to take longer to build the authority to each individual asset than it would be to have the cumulative effect of having both of them under one asset.

And if he’s using the GMB auto poster or the briefcase, then he can get the RSS feed out and actually going to his T one and use both post right both types of posts, and power up his tier one that way, and create the relevance for both throughout his tier one assets. And, of course, you have to do our way as reloaded, you have to do the drive stack. And you can also stack it in there right to stack targeting each of the what would be top level categories.

How To Keep The Domain Authority (DA) Of Previous Citations Without Confusing Google With Different NAP Data Of A New Citation?

Yeah, um, so the next question was from Steve, he says, Hey, guys, thanks for your time. If I register a domain, and when I go to do the citation, see that it already has citations from the previous owner? What is the quickest way to keep the domain authority and build new citations without confusing you? Okay, so when you say citations, that leads me to believe that you bought a domain that was being used for a local business, right? Because local businesses are the ones that typically get citations being published in business directories, right. So name, address, phone number plus website URL. And so as far as keeping domain authority, I don’t care about domain authority. So I’m not, you know, honestly, I’m not going to recommend how to keep the domain authority because I just don’t care about that metric. I stopped caring about that metric years ago, it doesn’t make any fucking difference. I swear to you if you know how to build relevancy, domain authority doesn’t mean shit, right? Unless you have incredibly high domain authority numbers, in which case, then it does have an effect. But for anything below 80, you’re not it’s not going to make a difference whether you have domain authority or not if you know how to build relevancy. So that’s irrelevant, right. But as far as you talking about citations, if you mean, if you just mean links, there’s not much you can do. But if you’re talking about site, because they’re, they’re already built to the site, you could disavow them. I know, there’s going to be conflicting opinions on that. But, you know, I would also check to see if they’re toxic or spammy links, that kind of stuff. But if you’re talking about citations, where that domain was being used by different business, and just published citations on the web name, address, phone number, and web and web address, that are linking to that, and now you’re going to use it for a new business with a new name, new address, new phone number, new brand, then I would recommend that you would hire a citation cleanup service. Again, I talked about that earlier, like Loganix, or Loganix. I don’t know whether I’m saying it right or not. But uh, semanticmastery.com/loganix, that will get you to it’s, like I said, it’s a bit expensive, but it’s hands down the best service I’ve used for, for cleaning up inconsistent NAP issues, right. So they’ll go out and contact all the directories where they find that now incorrect. citation and name, address and phone number. And the requests that be updated, they’ll submit the new details. And they’ll do that for I think, a total of four rounds. So they’ll do it like every two weeks for a total of eight weeks, or something like that, to were like, because sometimes you have to contact those directories multiple times to get them to actually do it. So that’s what they do. It’s expensive, but it works. And it works, you know, about 70% of the citations that are found that to be incorrect, will be updated. And that’s that, I found that to be really, really high compared to a lot of the other services out there that say they can do it that get are pretty much lackluster results. So again, if you’re talking about that, when you’re saying citations, if you’re using that term correctly, and it’s listed that web, that domain is listed with another name, address and phone number from another business, and now you’re going to use it for a new business with a new brand new name, new phone number, new address, all of that, then you are going to need really clean that up out there. Because otherwise, you’re going to create ambiguity. And it’s going to dilute your efforts and build new citations is going to make it hard to get results. It’s always more important to clean up bad data than it is to build new data, which just dilutes bad data. Does that make sense? Start with that start with the cleanup.

Would You Recommend That The Inner City Pages Have The Same Style As The Homepage?

JOHN says one cousin is a good idea to make the other pages on the site the same style is the homepage. I’m trying to rank the homepage city page for a city but I’m also trying to rank other pages for other cities. Now, do you think it’s a good idea to just copy my site tone page style? Not the content, just the style? And if I copy the content, just rewrite? Or is that a good idea? Yeah, I mean, that’s fine. As far as like the layout of the page, I don’t think that makes much of a difference. I could be wrong. But in my opinion, it’s more about having the content unique and optimized for the specific cities that you’re trying to rank rewrites are fine. I’ve done that a lot, especially for lead gen stuff where I’ll go out and like by an article, or by five articles, and I’ll have each article rewritten three times. Right. So now I’ve got 15 articles. And it’s a lot to have an article rewritten and have a new article written. Right. So that’s what I would do is go buy authority content, pay a lot of money for an 800 or 1000 word article. And then I would send that to an article rewriting service and have them rewrite it, you know, three, four or five times. And now I’ve got multiple versions of that one article. By the way, I always would put in tokens into the article, like for the location name, just put it in brackets put in, you know, in brackets, location, or city or something like that, as opposed to actually putting a city name in there. And that makes it easy to just use, Find and Replace, to be able to swap out location names. Once you know when you have it all rewritten with those tokens as opposed to city names. And then you have multiple versions of the article, each version, you can use the Find and Replace function to replace with a new city name. So it makes sense. It’s much easier to do that. So yeah, as far as the layout, that shouldn’t make any difference. It’s more about the content and what it’s optimized for. Okay, and why the web is coming up? Yep. Monday, June 10. 3pm.

Can You Embed A GMB Post?

Can you embed a GMB post Marco says you can. I haven’t tried it but Marco says you can.

Marco: I have and still can. Okay, cool.

Bradley: Got a shirt today. Look at that. That’s cool. We got to wrap it up in about three minutes. Looks like we’re about done anyway.

How Do You Recover A 3-Pack Rankings?

So last question, says a real business with a physical location GMB was ranked in three pack for multiple keywords but is now outside of top 10 only changes where we started GMB post press advantage prs and sent money robot links to and embed to add ID page and G site but never directly to the money site. It may be in Google dance. So we have stopped money robot links in embeds. We will continue to make GMB posts and press releases would appreciate your input and suggestions to try and recover three pack rankings. Um, yeah, that I don’t I mean, I don’t know without having more detail on it. It could just be a dance, but I doubt it that typically doesn’t happen for what you’re talking about. Like it was in the top three, and now it’s outside of the top 10. Got it something had to have been triggered. See, embed to add ID page and G site but never directly to money site. Yeah, I don’t. And also depends on how you set up we had a long discussion going on in the mastermind just recently about how the ad ID page is connected to a money site if you’re using a self hosted website for the money site, as opposed to just GMB assets. Guys, remember, if you’re just using GMB assets, you can get away with absolute murder. Right? If you’re using a self hosted website is the primary website though you have to be more careful because you can’t just spam the shit out of your, your your assets that are going to be all linked and pointed back to a self hosted website. Right? Because the rules are different. So it depends on how you have your ad ID page setup is the canonical setup to your homepage. If so, and you’re spamming that, which is what money robot is, then you’re essentially passing spam back to your money site. Right? So there’s other ways to do that break that chain to where it’s not spam isn’t being pointed directly to your money site, run it through a Google Site instead. Right? So you can canonical lies your ad ID page to your G site that’s part of your drive stack, and you’re in your money site be linked from within your dive stack, right, so that all your spam links to your ad ID page and your embeds and all that other stuff that you’re using total spam for, which is fine if you’ve got the structure if you got it set up correctly. But if you got it canonicalization to your homepage, where do you think that all that credit is being that credit from the spam is being passed to? Right? So you think about that. So you got it, you really got to know how what you’re doing when you’re going to use Spam. Spam is perfectly effective. But you got to know how and when to use it properly. Right. So again, I can’t without knowing more specifics of your project. I don’t know how you’ve got all your this chain set up. But my guess is you probably have somewhere your spam links are actually being passed directly to your money site somehow some way, which could be through a canonical from the ad ID page. Could be that simple. But it could be more than that to are you embedding your money site into your ad ID page and in spamming the shit out of it. Don’t do that. Right. Use your Google properties, which is what we teach. So again, there’s without more detail on this specifically, which by the way, if you are in the mastermind, we can take a look at it and analyze it and help you figure out the problem and fix it. Right That’s what we do. But can’t do that here on Hump Day. Hang out. Anyways, looks like we’re done. That was perfect timing. Everybody. Thank you for being here. No mastermind webinar this week, but we will see you guys next week.

Thanks, guys.

Alright man. Bye, everybody. Later

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 239 syndicated from https://medium.com/@SpanishFly

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taehyung-the-baehyung · 7 years

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Im on summer break rn and I have one more month to go!! I'm happy that I can sleep in and chill but I'm??so?? bored?? like yeah I can meet up with friends but I do that like 2 days a week and the rest is just ?? ahhh do you have any recs? anything to check out? anything to do?literally I don't care if it's a band, a book, a video, show, hobby or just a freaking baking recipe,, I need stuff to obsess over and I need lots of it ://

WHY IS THIS ME?

honestly, i’m the type of person that has to be learning something. i don’t miss homework and tests or anything, but i miss learning. so i’d say just go learn or do something new. go visit museums, drive around aimlessly and go wherever interests you, learn a new language, etc.! i’ll tell you what i’ve been doing and some other recs below the cut (cause it got kind of long 😅)

fill up my inbox ❣️

• i’ve been learning some html/css over at codeacademy and that’s a great website. i’ve always been interested by coding and i think theme makers here on tumblr are so talented. from the little html i’ve dealt with, it’s very intriguing so i want to get really good at it! i recommend learning coding, even if it’s a little bit. it’s a great job skill and to say you learned it yourself would be pretty cool. @roxiestheme & @magnusthemes are two of my favorite theme makers and a lot of the time these amazing theme makers will have tutorials or learning resources to help you out if you’re interested!

• i’ve also been trying to learn some korean and keep myself brushed up on my italian, so i’ve been going through resources for both– watching movies and shows (kdramas are a great way to spend time, i tell ya :D). @bitesizekorean & @19tc are two my favorite korean langblrs and i’ve been taking italian for 6 years now so i just generally stick to reading news articles, finding netflix shows that have italian audio, etc. learning new languages is always fun, even if it’s just a couple basic phrases! italian, spanish, korean, hindi, etc. it’s all out there to learn!

• i used to read a lot when i was younger but now the only thing i read is fanfic…which is perfectly fine, but i miss whizzing through entire books and not even blinking before picking up the next one! i had two months to read but i highkey procrastinated on this one…although finally last night i started a new book and am liking it so far. i recommend making a goal for yourself to finish x amount of books by the start of your semester! currently i’m reading china dolls by lisa see and up next will be behold the dreamers by imbolo mbue

• obviously i write a lot and lately i’ve been motivated by consistently seeing stories that i personally felt were better than mine. i’ve reached a point where i’m writing regularly but can’t see any improvement, so i’ve been doing writing exercises and reading a lot about writing. if you are interested in starting to write i highly highly recommend @writeworld and @lizard-is-writing on tumblr (you can always always always come to me as well! i may not be an expert but i can definitely be a supporter as you start!) i’ve also been reading bird by bird by anne lamott which i like because is really encourages me to stick to my writing and not abandon it out of discouragement (which i’ve done in the past…) i recommend trying to dabble in a new art or continue a passion of yours that you’ve always had! whether it’s writing prose, or poetry, drawing, calligraphy, painting, collaging, you name it– try something new with that creative brain of yours! go find things on pinterest if you need a little spark! moodboard making is also something fun you could try right here on tumblr that’s pretty popular!

• another thing that is semi related to the one above is journaling! this helps me write everyday, but it also helps me sort out how i’m feeling and why. i’m a very self-reflective kind of person so although it’s always happening in my head, it’s great to have a place to really work through the way my mind works and articulate it. my favorite journals to use are these book journals which take old children’s books or novels and they insert journal pages between the original book pages. absolutely charming if you ask me. BUT i’ve been journaling for years so i have like a million and three filled journals and while i love looking through them, i thought it might be interesting to try out typing them as well so i’ve started one on tumblr, which makes my life easier since i’m basically always on this damn website xD it’s convenient so far, and i like that i can sort through things by tag. but i kind of prefer the physical journals so i might revert to my old ways…

• and lastly, i take only average care of myself. i don’t eat enough (i’m pescatarian and super picky so i’m like 80% sure i’m not getting enough protein) and i only workout when i feel like it (when i’m home anyway, i’m pretty good about it at college since the gym is literally like two feet away…). this summer one of my goals has been to really workout and learn about fitness. i watch a lot of youtubers and read up on basics about how certain foods can affect different parts of your body. tiffanyrotheworkouts have been my go-to at home workouts and abby pollock has been amazing in terms of teaching you about muscle groups and then going into certain workouts to use when you’re at the gym. i definitely recommend trying new things to keep yourself active! take walks by yourself around your neighborhood, go hiking, go for a run, head to the gym, dance around to your favorite music at home. i’ve always been bad at this, but i’m trying really hard to not stay planted in front of my laptop.

other things that are super fun to do:

• bake some desserts

• learn a recipe from a different culture of cuisine

• go to museums (one of my favorite things to do)

• explore your city / town and find those hidden spots that you end up loving

• go on a bike trail

• find new music on spotify (always keeps me busy for a long time)

• go shopping and upgrade your wardrobe

• learn photography

let me know what you decide to take on or if you discover something yourself to do! oh and here’s one more:

• talk to your favorite tumblrs! (aka i love interacting with y’all please come talk to me)

#kavya says #damn i went hardo on this #but it was fun #cause now i have a list to follow too #i hope you find something to keep you inspired #anon sarah ☼

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smelllikeholyhell-blog · 5 years

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Theory, Or: Interclass Activism and a Punk Development

This post serves mostly as any other post on any other website; I wanna write stuff and feel special I guess. That said, allow me to give my background as to why I consider my stance on this to be one of any more-than-minor experience regarding anything.

In my childhood, with an obscene absence of parental or adult authority of any kind, I turned (more often than not) to local punks because that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. As a result my path through politics has been one of increasingly weird twists and turns that really don’t make a lot of sense. From a small period of christian conservatism in the late 00s, to a nihilist in the early 2010s, an almost groomed-to-be neo nazi as a stepping stone between the two. I had a lot of voices going in and out of my ear and a lot of influences in my path that ultimately led me to where I am today; I smell like shit and I’ve thrown a lot of shit at cops. If I had to choose how to summarise my politics it would be that.

A short disclaimer before going further: Growing up I was a “white, working class” child with no family. The “white working class” myth in America is not only a disgusting, pandering myth. It’s an outright erasure of every non-white citizen within the working class and an attempt to arrange a hierarchy of importance based on outmoded racial demographics. That said I’m not entirely sure on how to approach my birthright identity in any a way more constructive than that, so bear with me while I stumble through that phrase with an increasing reaction of stomach bile every time.

As mentioned; I was ‘white working class’ as a child, this is in the 2000s so that’s hardly of any significance or importance, but when I say working class that is a stretch. My mother was a crackhead, in and out of rehab and only around to be abusive and steal. My father was also a crackhead, albeit the kind that can hold a job. My uncles were drug dealers, my grandma had a weird fucking life and I don’t want to get into that but she was a worker, and the only grandparent alive at the same time as me. This structure in my home life left a large gap of leadership, guidance or comfort and my childhood was divided evenly between time spent outdoors trying to be anywhere but home, and time spent locked in my room hiding from the world. I was diagnosed with ADHD in early childhood, major depressive disorder at 8, generalised anxiety at 11, PTSD at 13 and BPD at 17. Suffice to say balancing all of these things in different intervals, being bounced between different facilities and (as a result) not receiving a continued treatment for anymore than one concurrent issue led to a lot of issues with conventional learning.

This did not stop me from learning, early into my adolescence I established myself as a well-spoken and stalwart voice in my communities (both online and irl) for what I considered to be moral and practical political guidelines. But the formation of the politics that served as the soapbox for those guidelines was something of an event itself that can be traced back to a Ramones CD I received as a birthday gift when I was 5. The case was cracked, the CD was scratched, but I could make out enough of the songs to love it and listen to it everyday until I turned 7 and received a Rancid CD from an uncle who was tired of hearing the Ramones. Shortly after, when I turned 8, a local gave me a Crass CD burnt (very poorly) onto what was a Mariah Carey CD at some point or another. This CD was defaced very horribly and was quickly thrown out within 4 months of coming home with me, but such is life.

The Crass CD contained a few songs. Banned from the Roxy, General Bacardi, Do They Owe Us A Living, but most importantly for my impressionable young self; Big A Little A. An iconic and time-tested anthem of independent thought and self-sufficiency, a song that rails simultaneously against the systems of oppression so prevalent in the 70s and 80s in the UK, and a song that promotes free expression. It absolutely devastated me in a way I can never put into words, it was transformative like very few things ever have been since and very few things ever will be again. But most importantly it began my path towards anarchism as a school of thought and general principle.

Let’s derail to more relevant information; as a child I struggled to read. Not because I couldn’t or didn’t know how to, I read very well in fact. But I was terminally bored. No matter what it was or what was on the line or what I had to do. I was bored. I would start a book, get 5 pages in, close it and go back to my computer. Go back to the music or the game or whatever, as long as it wasn’t that. As I’ve gotten older I’ve just accepted that I really...don’t like reading. I enjoy writing, I love it, but the act of reading as a way to pass time is one of the most intensely draining and soulsucking experiences in my life, valid as it may be. Most of my political upbringing was based around a mixture of things. Music, conversations, speeches and most importantly a system of failure that is uniquely experienced by every person in the lower classes regardless of identity and race. The system of having your infrastructure devastated, your schools packed, your teachers dismissive of you based on your financial ability to retaliate, and the saving grace of free lunches. Lunches which would be your only food everyday for weeks, sometimes. And in my formative years I spent many weeks and months homeless, not quite “fighting” for survival and in a situation comparatively far less severe than what my nonwhite counterparts have endured, but a difficult one nonetheless.

In many ways around this time I was extremely lucky to grow up in an area as diverse as can be. In a lot of classes I was one of maybe 4 white kids, where most children were latinx or black. I owe this time period a great deal as it allowed me the freedom to learn early how to hold other cultures in a good amount of respect, while also understanding my place at a maintainable but appreciative distance from them. I would later undo this through several years of drug fueled abuse of being given the oh-so-fabled n-word pass by a few black friends, though I can graciously say I moved past that and physically shudder every time I think about that time. But being homeless in this situation, in this region of America and with the great deal of privilege I was handed at birth, offered me an equally great deal of autonomy and my ability to learn where I wanted to learn and how I wanted to learn. If it meant staying up until 5 AM to go on scene trips to the local campus after hours then so be it, but if I wanted to hear what someone had to say I heard what someone had to say. This learning process, while informal and atypical, was the deciding factor in who I became to this day. But there are interclass repercussions for how I’ve learned.

As a young anarchist I attended every event I could. If it was a black bloc I was there. A protest, I was there. Vandalising, squatting and stealing were my favourite pasttimes and I regret absolutely none of it. I can say I’ve punched a cop or two in my time and that’s a pretty fun thing to say albeit entirely alienating when talking to people who aren’t anarchists. Most importantly though; I didn’t show my face. I learned security culture, I learned how to load a gun, I learned how to hide. I did all of it without books and I can say that most of my personal friends have a decent theoretical idea of practise and absolutely no idea how to sustain the execution of it. This, unsurprisingly, has not stopped those people from looking down on me at some point or another. Most still to this day with varying levels of severity. Usually when the topic of anarchy is prevalent I’m asked to give very diplomatic answers or partake in very diplomatic discussions

“What would happen to me in this situation?”

“How would this situation be handled?”

“Who’s your favourite writer?”

“Are you a syndicalist or a mutualist or an egoist?”

At the end of the day most of these discussions generally serve an entirely hypocritical and self-defeatingly toxic pecking order in anarchist circles. Who can theory the other person to death first? so to speak. At its best this behaviour is pedantic and childish. At its worst it just serves to divide current groups and prevent them from further cooperation, the very same cooperation which every single anarchist community inherently relies on for the most minor accomplishment of basic survival. In the last couple of years I’ve adopted a way of dealing with this which is simply in saying; I don’t have time for theory. This isn’t a lie, it isn’t a deflection, it’s the truth. My own time on a day-to-day basis is preoccupied with self-preservation in any capacity that that happens. If self-preservation is a complete distraction from my problems then so be it, no one will ever enforce a schedule on how I deal with my problems unless it’s me or my biological clock. If self-preservation is getting drunk when I wake up, that’s that. If it’s disappearing to go work on something for a few days, that’s that. If it’s networking with other anarchist to establish a network of ideas that’s that. But self-preservation is self-preservation, it is at its core just the act of survival in a capitalist society, one which is built to ensure anything but that survival.

I have noticed that my approach to this is not entirely uncommon in working class circles of anarchist praxis, it’s actually the overriding majority. The anarchists filling potholes are not the same as the anarchists lecturing one another. Debates on the internet for sport do nothing to help communities that are hopelessly marginalised into nonexistence on an hourly basis around the world, so we have to ask ourselves; Where did that mentality come from?

Where is that needless competitive edge in anarchist circles emerging from? My honest input on the matter is muddied, incomplete and unproductive but if I had to place my bet on where it comes from I would place it on a combination of two things. Both of equal performance and importance in their role to this toxicity; the inane publicity of debates, writings and lectures. And the role of competition in capitalist society--the ‘drive to win’ that is drilled from birth. It seems to me most anarchist circles in America and the UK are plagued by self-serving ideologues. People who look at the reputation of Marx, Paine and Chomsky and think to themselves that those people have contributed even a fraction an amount of the importance that unions have in leftist and post-leftist thought and praxis. People have conflated the “teachings” of these men (dogmatic as they are) with the tangible benefits and visibly positive effects that organisations like the IWW have had.

Obviously the teachings of Marx can inextricably be tied to the rise and solidification of union labour in the west, and I will never shortsell that fact no matter how much spite or disdain I hold for marxism. That said the execution, the maintenance and the daily operation of those organisations are independent of their foundational teachings. A framework is not praxis. A foundation is principle, it is logic, but it is not maintenance. To sustain an organisation like the IWW for as long as it has existed is an act not only of spite for a damaging system, it is done out of a sheer perseverance. The ability to transcend the fundamentalist teachings of labour thought and dogma. More importantly it demonstrates the ability to adapt across eras. People familiar with the radical changes, shifts and constant ebb/flow war on unionisation in America can truly appreciate how well the IWW has withstood the test of time.

While the IWW is a far-from-perfect organisation and still presents me with the constant hang-up of withholding total freedom from the working class, it still also presents me a security and benefit that will not happen anywhere else, anytime else. It’s an organisation whose legacy lives on through song as much as any other medium, yet people who are influenced by music and speech are looked down on in so many circles. Obviously this post has to end somewhere so it should end productively.

The total deconstruction of the snide self-serving ideologue status of white anarchists (ironic as it is to pin as a culprit given this post’s existence) is this; It is inherently ableist on its best day and it is gatekeeping classism on its worst. It is both counterproductive to cooperative efforts and a complete betrayal of the concept of solidarity by way of competition.

If you find yourself in this position or confronted after having taken that position, ask yourself the following;

Does the child of the average working class family have the time for theory? Will theory tangibly help them survive? Has theory protected them from homelessness, hunger or sickness? Will theory provide for their family?

The answer to these questions, historically and demonstrably is ‘No’. It will continue to be ‘No’ for as long as the working class is trapped in a system that enslaves us all. Theory can help structure direct action, but theory on its own is a waste of time that will not benefit anyone who truly needs the benefits they can receive, in a system that will happily kill them.

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tianamulan · 7 years

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So I really really really love podcast and I thought I would make this masterpost of podcast recommendations!! There’s a little bit of everything, and I’ve organised it all, so I’m sure you’ll find something you’ll like! I mention possible content warnings, episode lengths and amounts, good places to start, etc. I will update this post as I find more podcasts! Enjoy~

Fictional Podcasts

Limetown: 6 episodes, 30-40 min each. Crime Investigation of a town whose residents all mysteriously disappeared one night. Has sci-fi elements. Possible content warning for animal abuse/testing in episode 3, and deaths throughout. End of episode 2 is also potentially disturbing.

[Website] [Soundcloud] and in iTunes store.

The Message: 8 episodes, ~15 min each with a 30 min finale. A message from space needs to be translated, and our main character Nicky is podcasting the whole time. Obviously very sci-fi. Diverse cast, including a non-binary person! It’s pretty intense, and because the narrator talks directly to you which includes warnings it could be a little distressing but it’s 100% fictional. Content warning for hospital situations and characters on their deathbeds.

[Website] and in iTunes store.

Life After: 10 episodes, ~30 mins each. This is made by the same team as The Message. Ross works for the FBI, and has lost his wife recently. He’s obsessed with listening to audioposts that she made on a audio-social media site. Content warning for cults and hacking.

Available in iTunes store.

Steal the Stars: Currently airing, as of Aug 2017 they have 4 episodes out. It’s about government officials who are guarding and studying an alien who crash landed on earth years ago. There’s also a love story.

[Website] and available in iTunes store.

The Truth: Every episode is different! Often very dark, but some are more light hearted. Very very visual. My favourites include Starbursts, The One about the Dead Dog, and It’s Your Funeral (Pt1 & Pt 2).

[Website] [Soundcloud] and in iTunes store.

D&D Podcasts

Okay just hear me out before you scroll past this section. I have never played dungeons and dragons in my life, I’m not even a fan of fantasy. But I really love these podcasts. It takes time to understand the rules, but it’s so worth it. The stories told are so original cuz everything can change by the role of a dice, and the characters have free will and don’t have to listen to the narrator. The people in these podcasts are so passionate too. But if you are sure that it’s not your cup of tea then you can move on now.

The Adventure Zone: 3 brothers play D&D with their dad. They’ve just finished their first Campaign as of Aug 2017, so you’ll have a completed story if you start now. There’s 69 episodes, each around an hour or so long, so it’s a lot of content to get through. They’re goofy as all hell. It takes some time to recognise the voices if you don’t know the McElroy brothers (they make other podcasts I mention later). Merle is a dwarf cleric (essentially a priest), Magnus is a human fighter, and Taako is an elven wizard. The Dungeon Master (DM, person who tells the story of the world and plays all the non-main characters) is super talented, lots of great voices. The fantasy in this is very non-traditional, so not like medieval britain, so there’s things like trains and space travel and a costco. Hilarious, very original, and emotional. Also the music is sooo good here’s the soundcloud for just the music. also there’s a pretty active fandom if that’s important to you.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Sneak Attack!: 4 player game with 5 friends (including a married couple). As of Aug 2017 they have over 100 episodes, and bonus eps, all about an hour long. Sherwood is a gnome druid (basically a forest wizard) who is antisocial to everyone but animals and plants. Greaek is a dwarf fighter who introduces himself to everyone he meets he’s a good boy. Brenna is a half-elf bard (musician) who plays the banjo and bagpipes and gets into lots of arguments with Greaek, who is her irl husband. She’s the voice of reason in the group. Akio is a human wizard who dreams of owning a noodle shop, and owns a chicken named Alfredo. Also he’s a necromancer. The DM is amazing, and the whole group is just really nice and wholesome?

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Science & Culture

Radiolab: Beautifully edited, usually about science/tech but mostly about telling a good story. Most episodes are about 40 mins to an hour, and there’s also shorter mini episodes. Good episodes to start with is Colors, Laughter, and Escape!. My favourites include What’s Up, Doc?, The Living Room (content warning for death and illness), Debateable, On the Edge, and Cities.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Reply All: Podcast about “the internet”, but it’s much more than that. Their content is all over the place. Episodes are typically 35 mins long, with the occasional longer ep. This is a podcast I would start from the beginning to get used to the format. Today’s The Day and Hello? are two of my favourite audio pieces ever, they make me so emotional, but I don’t think you’ll get this feeling unless you’ve listened to their ‘normal’ podcasts and gotten to know the hosts. This podcast is very good about content warnings for episodes, both at the start and when they’re about to discuss the content.

[Website] [Soundcloud] and in iTunes Store.

Flash Forward: Used to be called Meanwhile in the Future. Each episode focuses on a possible or not-so-possible future, first starting with a dramatisation of what that future would be like (usually news report kinda stuff), and then an in depth discussion with real experts about how possible that future is. In the first season the episodes were about 15 mins but now they’re up to 40 mins long. A good place to start with would be from the start! All the episodes are great in my opinion, but for examples of the range of topics discussed, you can try Sunward Bound and Don’t Lie to Me.

[Website] [Soundcloud] and in iTunes Store.

Imaginary Worlds: About fictional universes and our relationship to them. Episodes usually between 20-30 mins, and often topical to a recent event. My favourites are The Year Without a Summer (about Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and volcanoes), Rolling the Twenty Sided Dice (about D&D, would highly recommend if you are unsure about the aforementioned D&D podcast), and In Defence of Captain Hook (about Peter Pan, the last 5 mins of this podcast is amazing).

[Website] [Soundcloud] and in iTunes Store.

Invisibilia: This podcast is about human behaviour/psychology. Episodes are an hour long. I would recommend The Personality Myth to start (but also starting at episode 1 is good). They are usually good about content warning but obviously they often talk about mental health so do with that what you want. As of August 2017 they have just finished their 3rd season.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

This American Life: The most annoying thing about this podcast is there’s only ever the last 4 episodes they’ve aired available at a time, but you can “save” the episode you like on iTunes. It’s about american culture and stories and stuff, sometimes a little hit or miss for me but I’m also not American but there’s still a lot of great episodes. The episode that just came out in August 2017 “We are in the Future” is Amazing, about afrofuturism.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Sawbones: This podcast describes itself as “a marital tour of misguided medicine”. Dr. Sydnee and Justin (not a Dr.) McElroy talk about the history of medicine and all the weird stuff we did in the past to try to cure people. Sydnee has the most knowledge in this pair and Justin is mostly there to ask questions and make jokes. Very fun tone throughout usually but obviously they take time to talk about more serious stuff. My favourite thing about it is just how much this couple love each other.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Oh No Ross and Carrie: Two friends go out to investigate fringe-science stuff so you don’t have to. They have joined cults including Scientology, have their pets get psychic readings, and try juice cleanses and soylent. I’d recommend any episode that covers something that you’re interested in! Episodes are typically 40-60 mins.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Comedy

My Brother My Brother and Me (MBMBAM): The same 3 brothers from the Adventure Zone. Justin, Travis, and Griffin have been making this podcast since 2010 and they give “advice” but mostly just laugh at their own jokes. They answer a lot of Yahoo questions, you know the type. Here’s a taster for their type of humor. They also have a new TV show, and the first episode is available for free, which can help you put a face to the name/voice. They’re never rude or mean but can be very dirty boys so don’t listen w/out headphones. Also probably in public with headphones cuz u will laugh out loud for SURE.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Dynamic Banter: Two dudes talk who also mostly just laugh at their own jokes. They like movies a lot. Here’s a 8 min clip where they talk about alternate titles for Tom Hanks’s classic film Big. Episodes are usually about an hour long.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

It Feels Like the First Time: Three guys are watching Lost, the 2004-2010 TV show about people who crashes on a ~weird island~. If were planning to watch/rewatch Lost and want to listen to more than 1 hour of three guys making jokes about the show then you should listen to this podcast. As of August 2017 they’re halfway through the final season, so there’s plenty of content for you to catch up on. This podcast comes out weekly and talk about 2 episodes of the show at a time.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

The Mortified Podcast: People read their childhood/teenage diaries outloud in front of a crowd. It’s embarrassing and cringe-y and hilarious and relatable and will make you more empathetic to your younger self and the kids and teens in your life because it’s hard out there. Episodes are about 25-35 mins long, usually featuring 2 different diary reads on a similar topic, like Prom or Summer Vacation.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Miscellaneous

Terrible, Thanks for Asking: Nora McInerny is the host of this podcast. It’s about how terrible things are sometimes in life. Nora and guests just talk about the horrible things that have happened to them, like death of loved ones, abuse, mental illness, etc. Obviously, it’s not a casual, feel good listen, it is not for everyone and I would advise some people to not listen to this ever, but it’s emotional and raw and important. The episodes are 40ish minutes long.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Nancy: This is a relatively new podcast, as of August 2017 there are 19 episodes. It’s about the LGBTQ+ community and issues, hosted by Kathy Tu and Tobin Low. The first episode, for example, is about Kathy’s coming out story, and how she needs to constantly come out to her mother who isn’t listening to her. These two hosts are really fun, and so are their guests, and i’m sure that LGBTQ+ listeners will relate to their conversations.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Strangers: Podcast host Lea Thau tells stories about strangers. Or at least they’re strangers to you. It’s not as depressing as “Terrible Thanks for Asking”... usually. Episodes are anywhere between 20 and 50 minutes. Her “Love Hurts” series might be a good place to start, although it isn’t her typical episode structure, but it’s all about her interviewing exes about why they didn’t work out. This podcast is usually good about content warnings.

[Website] [Soundcloud] and in iTunes Store.

Mystery Show: Podcast host Starlee Kine solves weird mysteries like what is Jake Gyllenhaal’s real height, or a video rental store that disappeared in 1 day, or the owner of a really really cool belt buckle found on the ground years ago. There’s only 6 episodes, and there won’t be more. They’re between 25 and 70 minutes long.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

Harry Potter and the Sacred Text: The tagline for this is “What if we read the books we love as if they were sacred texts?”. Hosts Vanessa Zoltan and Casper ter Kuile discuss one chapter of Harry Potter per episode, and analyse it using techniques usually reserved for religious texts. The hosts are Religious and Divinity scholars. Episodes are half an hour long, and as of June 2017 they are about halfway through the Prisoner of Azkaban.

[Website] and in iTunes Store.

#podcast #masterpost #podcasts #mine: personal #mine: other #i'm sorry for mobile users that need to scroll through all of this lmao

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wellmeaningshutin · 7 years

Text

Short Story #44: Narration.

Written: 2/16/2017

Studying, for Patrice, was a difficult task because the library had all of the required texts that she needed to read from, she was unable to afford them on her own, had no financial security net to help her with this dilemma, and, on top of these problems, she could only really focus in the dark. That last bit always seems a bit odd to people, so she often keeps this a secret, and its always embarrassing for her when she’s pushed to explain why this is. Rubbing her hands, beginning to mumble, rocking back and forth, she would have to explain, “When I was growing up, I only lived with my father. He got custody over me after my mother had had one of her episodes, when I was very young, practically a baby, and had, in a sense, exposed me to boiling water. Naturally, after this he was very cautious of my safety, and began to worry about the outside world, the people not in our house, the strangers that he couldn’t read and who there were billions of. I think it was because my mother had seemed so pleasant at first, and had turned out to be, in a way, a monster, that he gained this new world view.”

“Anyways,” People were usually visually uncomfortable by this part of the tale, and, if she was lucky, would begin to try and change the subject, but many were determined to seem polite and stick out the story, feeling like this poor, nervous girl may need support, not realizing that she hated this whole song and dance, and would rather talk about passing clouds, cracks in the cement, the amount of snails nearby, really just anything else. It wasn’t the bad memories that had come with the story, she was well past those thanks to several years of psychiatric care, but it was due to the discomfort of the listeners. “-at some point in time, I was too young to remember, he sealed all of the outside windows, nailed them down, and painted both sides of the glass pure black so you couldn’t see in or out. Every door had several layers of locks, that he had the only keys for, and he would usually only let me leave my room to go to the bathroom, eat dinner with him, or, nothing else really. At some point, this is the important part, he became worried-maybe because of something he saw on the television-that there may be cameras or something in my bedroom, strange people watching me, using the information they could somehow get to steal me away. So, to counter this, he unscrewed the light bulb in my room, and I had to sit in complete darkness, only able to see with a headlamp that he gave me.”

“I spent most of my time in the dark, and a lot of that time was usually spent studying, which was the only thing I could do for entertainment really. When I would leave my room to use the bathroom, or eat, I would enjoy the light and everything around me, and it would be a fun and distracting trip. When I finally hit eighteen I wasn’t aware of my rights, and was still trapped in that house for quite some time, with no way to contact anyone from the outside to get me out. How I left the house isn’t important, but by the time I was out I became too fixated on this amazing world around me that, even though I read so much about, I couldn’t believe the way everything looked. Growing up that way just kind of made darkness my default, and when I’m not in it, its just too hard for me to sit down and focus.”

By this point, people would either pat her on the shoulder, giver her a “there there”, and remember to never pry too much into this poor, damaged girl’s life, or they would sigh in relief and make some excuse to go somewhere else, anywhere else. She always preferred the second behavior.

One thing she always left out of the story, that bit about how she escaped that house, was always one of the more… Oh, I just realized that I’ve been rambling on for quite some time about Patrice, and haven’t even had the opportunity to pay attention to what she’s currently doing. As of now, from what I can see, since it is rather dark in here, is that she is sitting, alone, at a desk in the dark library she had broken into, reading some text book. The clock on the wall behind her is too dark to read the time, but since the library staff usually leave around eleven, it is safe to assume that it is somewhere around eleven-thirty, midnight, or even one in the morning. Her next class is at eight, so she may not hang around here for too much longer, but if she has a test coming up she might even have to push towards five in the morning, which she has done before. She just coughed.

You may wonder, “Why doesn’t she simply just steal the books, so that she could study in a dark room at home, instead of losing so much sleep?” Well, first of all, she is not a criminal, has morals, and its somewhat disgusting that you would ask such a question. It would be downright selfish of her to keep any of those books at home, instead of returning them to their shelves, because that would deprive other students of the book’s information. Also, she adjusts her sleep schedules so that she wakes up at eleven, at night, and so this late hour is like morning to her. So she’s not losing really any sleep at all! Shame on you for questioning the way this poor girl does things, because in the end you’re the unreasonable one for not assuming that there was a good reasons for the way she operated.

Now, as I was saying before, she never really talked about how she got out of her father’s home and struck it out on her own. I’ll try to explain this as quickly as I can, so focus can return on to her. I think I have a good amount of time, because she is still studying, and there are really no events that are worth mentioning, describing, or narrating, so I could afford to indulge in some exposition while we wait for some event to take place that would warrant my attention. Anyways, she always knew her life wasn’t very normal since she spent so much time reading and learning. It was clear that there was a big outside world, that it was relatively safe, and that her father was a nut, much like the mother who gave her the gift of a large burn mark on her left leg. It was just hard for her to figure out a way to leave the house, since she was nothing but a prisoner.

Due to this, she was very fond of the stories about princesses trapped in prisons, castles, towers, caves, harems, because she felt like those were the only stories that related to her world. In real life, however, there was no prince out there to save her. Resigned to her fate as a prisoner, she at least wanted to make her quarters a little more inhabitable, so, risking a lot, she managed to smuggle a spare light bulb, from the bathroom, into her own room and was able to at least have some light and beauty in her own little world, and at least made sure to put a blanket against the slit under the door so that her keeper wasn’t aware of the light. After about two weeks of this, her hero finally came, and she was saved from her castle.

However, the circumstances of how she was saved had very little heroism to it. See, her father had been right about there being cameras set up in her bedroom, people watching her, because the previous owners of the house had set up a cam girl operation, one of those websites where you could pound off to girls sitting in their rooms, doing normal girl things. Her room was just one of many streams on that site, but it had been largely been forgotten about since it was shrouded in darkness, and it was mostly a fluke that it had even stayed on the sight. For the first week, the feed to her bedroom had been somewhat popular, but mostly just because she was a new girl. After a little while people had forgotten about her, moved on to somebody fresher, who didn’t mutter to themselves, and made an effort to dress up a little better, or even masturbate.

Four days before she was rescued, police had raided the website’s headquarters, which were actually located in the back room and basement of some hole-in-the-wall Greek restaurant, because it turned out that a third of the girls being streamed on that sight where unaware of the cameras, and a couple were underage. For some reason it was the underage part that finally warranted police intervention, but that’s a whole different issue that I don’t really want to get into right now. Anyways, when they look over all of the streams, contracts, all the information really, they decide to shut down the site, arrest the perverts in charge, and go door to door, to all of the houses of the girls who were unwilling, so they could help dismantle the hidden cameras.

When they got to Patrice’s house, they noticed a whole lot of wrong there, and were quickly turned away and ignored. It would’ve been a whatever deal for them, but when they looked over her file, they realized that she was the girl who was locked in her room, and was only let out every so often. The whole thing didn’t seem kosher, so they came back with a warrant, and she was able to get out of that house for good. However, her father was never in very much legal trouble, whatever they could pin on him, which was a lot, ended up blowing over, because a lot of the people in the justice system thought of him as just a worried parent, and decided it would do him no good to punish him for doing what nature had programmed him to do.

So, he went on with his life, she had to go through plenty of therapy to help her adjust to the outside world, and a day didn’t pass where she felt like she was safe. It always seemed like her father was going to come back for her, and drag her back into that house, that room, in a misguided attempt to keep her safe. Even though she dyed her hair, changed her name, and moved a couple states over, she never felt safe.

It’s reasonable why she chose to leave all of that out, right? I can’t really blame the girl, with everything she’s gone through, and I can sort of relate to her. My father was a juggler, and I know that people would always see me differently if I told them that, so I never bring up that detail of my life. We’re all damaged in our own ways, I guess. Anyways, let’s see if anything is… Huh. She’s not at the desk right now, lets take a look around to see if we can find her, maybe she went to the bathroom? Before we do that, though, lets take a look at what she’s studying. It seems to be like a textbook, hardcover, but I can’t really make the title out since its really dark in here. That’s strange. Her chair seems to have been knocked over, do you think she got up suddenly?

It doesn’t seem very scuffed, and, wait, is that? No that can’t be. There’s an awful lot of it too. Seems to be a trail of it. Let’s just follow this trail, of a mysterious dark liquid that I don’t want to give a title yet, and see where it takes us. Its so damned dark in here, its like I can’t navigate anywhere without jamming an elbow or knee into something, and sometimes, when I step into this mystery trail, my feet slip and slide around, its hard to remain upright. If I wasn’t busy with exposition I wouldn’t have to have to hunt down this story, but I guess I’m the opposite of her in that aspect, because it just seems like I cannot focus in the dark.

Now, while I’m trying to find Patrice, and trying to keep my temper at bay, let me tell you another story to fill the time. I would talk about our darling little protagonist, but since I cannot find her, even mentioning her reminds me of my failed duties of a narrator, so I’ll talk about myself. I mentioned the sad aspects of Patrice’s past, and hinted at my juggler of a father, but its easier to talk about other people’s misfortunes and embarrassments, that’s probably why gossip seems to qualify as an actual hobby, so I’ll talk about something that’s pleasing to me, but interesting enough for you, dear reader.

When I was a child, I had very little interest in the world, because even though I was free to go anywhere, and experience whatever I wanted, since my father was always willing, even wanting, to drive me places, he would always have to juggle wherever we went. I don’t want to talk more about that vile man, just want to explain why I became such a dull child. One thing, however, that interested me was miniature golf. At least, it interested me in theory. Commercials, for a local miniature golf spot, would play about thirty times a day on my favorite channel-I spent most of my days glued to the television-and it always seemed like a magical world to me, I always wanted to go. However, it seemed like an optimal place to be shamed by that vile man, golf balls were easy to juggle, so I never went, and-oof. Sorry, this time I managed to actually fall.

Oh my, this is really what I was hoping it wasn’t, isn’t it? She can’t be alive still, can she? I’ve been following this for quite some time, and it seems to be a lot of it. Hm, what is that over there? It seems like something is moving slowly, that must be our story. Let me just, try to make my way over carefully, until I get close enough to see what’s going on. I don’t even want to see what my oxfords look like when all of this is over, and I’m disheartened that I’ll probably have to throw them away.

Okay, I’m getting really close, and.. Here we are! Alright, so it seems like Patrice is being dragged by some large figure, and I can’t quite tell if its a man or a woman, but it definitely seems like its a human. Her head is moving from side to side, as she is being dragged, but I’m not sure if thats a conscious effort, or a result from the way she’s being dragged, which is by the person holding up the girl’s arms, she’s on her back, and the dragger is walking backwards while hunched over. It seems like they’re wearing a large coat of some sort, but the material is beyond me. It seemed like the person may have been dragging her towards the front of the library, out of this reference room, but its passed by the doorway and seems to be content with following the edges of the room.

I can’t figure out why its moving her so, or what its motive seems to be, although it is possible that due to the overwhelming darkness, and the position its head is in, that it just didn’t see the exit and is now just wandering around blindly. This isn’t much of a story, is it? This is just boring, and I’m rather annoyed that this person has decided to injure our poor protagonist, but especially annoyed that its injuring this story by doing nothing that is worth describing! I would show this person what for, just like I showed my heinous father, but sadly I cannot effect anything here, and can only describe what I see.

Oh, it seems like the figure has bumped into the eastern wall, and is now looking around confused. Now, its lowering Patrice down, gently, and seems to be rubbing her head, and mumbling something to her. Let me get a little closer so that I can hear. It sounds like… “-way out. I’ll get you help, its just so fucking dark in here. Wait here, don’t make a peep, apply as much pressure as you can. I’ll find the exit, then come back for you.” Hm, that’s a weird thing for a murderer to say, I wonder who this person might be? They have the androgynous voice of a heavy smoker, and my curiosity is now increasing. Now they seem to be walking off, looking for an exit, while it seems that… yes, Patrice is very much dead right now, so lets follow this interesting character.

They’re as blind as I am, and are also slipping and bumping, so this person definitely seems relate-able. Maybe after they find their way out, I’ll start narrating for them. Alright, we’re near the exit, and this time it seems like our new protagonist has seen it. Now they’re going back for Patrice, but, oh my.. I wish I could call out to warn them, but I guess all I can do is describe. Two figures have made their way into this room, from the exit, or should I say entrance, and our protagonist has not seemed to notice. It seems like one of them may have a weapon, maybe a knife? Whoever they are, if they kill our new protagonist they will certainly not become the new one. I do not narrate for such awful people, and if I did I would be over in the retirement home, right now, telling you the things that my father is doing.

#Well Meaning Shut In #Free Write #Short Story #Writers on Tumblr #Books #February

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daggerzine · 3 years

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Twin City revolt! A chat with Christian from Minneapolis label mpls ltd.

It was September 2019 and I was at my first Gonerfest in Memphis. I had posted a few pics of the bands I’d seen when a pal from Mpls named Amy messages back, “Oh, my friend Christian is there. You and he should really meet since you’re both huge music fans!” Within the next hour Christian Fritz and I were face to face and chatting music.

Not only did we like a lot of the same bands/labels/scenes (namely Sarah Records, C86, Flying Nun, to name but a few) but he told me that he had a label as well, one called mpls ltd. He was nice enough to send me a bevy of records that he’d released and it was everything from cheery/noisy indie rockers Sass to tripped out freaks like Flavor Crystals and everything in between. Yes, Christian is documenting the varied and talented music scene in the Twin Cities and beyond. Read the interview, check out some of his bands (or all of ‘em) and you may learn a thing or two and discover a new favorite. After all he is “Bringing the sounds of Minneapolis to the world, and the sounds of the world to Minneapolis.”

When did the music bug first hit you? Was there much music in your house growing up?

It goes back literally as far as I can remember. My mom gave me a Singer tabletop record player that she got with her sewing machine when I was maybe 4 or 5 years old. My dad’s albums were off limits, but he had a box with maybe a couple of hundred ‘60s pop and country 45s that I would play for hours at a time. I used to tell everybody that record player was my best friend which would terrify my parents.

Do you remember the first record you ever bought?

I grew up in rural Minnesota, and the first two 7”s I bought together with my own money at the local Ben Franklin were John Lennon’s “Nobody Told Me” and Nena’s “99 Luftballoons.”

First concert? First indie/punk show?

Probably my first live music experience was seeing Billy Joe Royal of “Down in the Boondocks” fame with my family during one of our outings to the Minnesota State Fair at one of the free stages there, but my first real show was seeing Sonic Youth on the Daydream Nation tour at First Avenue when I was 16. It was my first time being in downtown Minneapolis, and the entire experience was mesmerizing for this young rural hillbilly. My friends and I worked our way to the front, and Kim Gordon stomped on my hand when I idiotically tried to reach for her bass pedal mid-set (I totally deserved it and wore that bruise like a badge of honor for days). One of my friends got kicked out for violating First Avenue’s then “stage dive three times and you’re out” policy. While in retrospect I cringe at a lot of my behavior that night, it was also when I finally discovered a world I hoped to be a part of really did exist.

Tell us about the beginnings of the label, when did it start and why? How did you decide on the name?

For as long as I have been in love with music, I have also wanted to make records. I even remember drawing records with crayons at an early age and trying to figure out a way to make them play (unsuccessfully). When I was in college at Saint Cloud State University in the early ‘90s, I tried my first attempt at starting a label called Timbre and released a 7'' by a local punk band called The Nothingheads. I was contacted by someone in Seattle who said they already had that label name (to this day I have never seen a release), so I changed it to Idyllwise which was a word I made up so that nobody else could take it. Josh Koch from Saint Cloud had moved to Australia and joined the band Patterson’s Curse with Matty Whittle who was in God and Greg Bainbridge who had played with Kim Salmon, so I jumped at the chance to release their debut EP in the States. Future releases were in the works from Minnesota bands Chast and Silver Rocket Band but I really had no idea what I was doing, got in way over my head, and the whole thing fell apart.

Flash forward to 1999: I had been working on my own breakbeat tracks, and decided to surprise some friends and make a professional looking demo by having a 7” pressed. Even though I had no intention of launching a label, I wanted the record to look like it was on one. I was listening to a lot of 70s soul on Philadelphia International at that time, and it occurred to me that I was living in Minneapolis and I didn’t have any money. Hence, “mpls ltd” (Minneapolis Limited) was born.

Although I was involved with a few releases, things didn’t really evolve from “vanity project” to “label” until 2004. My good friend Vince Caro had just finished recording his band Basement Apartment’s latest album “Transistor!” and asked if he could use the mpls ltd name just to have the CD released on a “label.” I asked to hear it first. We were listening to it in my living room and were probably somewhere around track #5 when I knew I wanted to be involved, and asked if we could partner together on the release. That changed everything.

Were there other labels out there that influenced you to start a label?

Princeton Minnesota had a short-lived gem of an independent record store when I was in high school called McCarty Music that really didn’t fit the community, but I was so glad it was there for as long as it was. Carolyn who ran the store introduced me to the sounds of many brilliant bands on labels like 4AD, SST, and Touch and Go. Also as soon as we got driver’s licenses, my friends and I would drive from Princeton to Minneapolis just to go to Northern Lights or Let It Be Records any chance we got. I loved how those breathtaking early Sarah Records 7”s all included postcards with pictures from Bristol, and I would also buy anything on Creation that I could get my hands on. The brilliant bands from all over this earth that somehow found their way to Homestead Records before the days of the internet also had a major impact on me, in that “someday I hope I can do this too!”

How many releases does Mpls Ltd have so far?

52 as of the end of 2020, plus seven 7”s from a short-lived “super split singles club.”

How did you get the records out to the world in the beginning (and even now)? Distribution?

In addition to my primitive website, I spent a lot of time in the early days pleading with places like Carrot Top and Parasol to carry my releases with mixed results. When Flavor Crystals opened for The Brian Jonestown Massacre on their 2009 US tour, distributors from the UK and Europe started approaching me. Before the Bandcamp era, it felt like my bands could focus on tour sales and I could focus on retail. Now the artists and I discuss how our overall strategy is going to work before we do each release.

Weirdest/worst review one of your records ever got?

I can’t think of any that were terrible, but there were definitely some that were weird. The most recent one that comes to mind was Razorcake’s review of Partition’s “Prodigal Gun” last year. I was stunned when it was reviewed by Rev. Nørb of Maximum Rocknroll fame, but he talked a lot about how purple the vinyl and artwork was, with quotes: “I personally think this record is somewhat cool because it’s so purple, but I realize your situation might be entirely different” and “This vinyl is seriously the purplest vinyl I’ve ever seen in my life. Don’t be surprised if they find Barney dead at the bottom of the vinyl vat.” (He did also say “this sounds kinda like a cross between Exene Cervenka and Kathleen Hanna fronting Flipper” which spoke to me.)

Are all the acts on the label from the Twin Cities or at least Minnesota?

While the label has a stronger Minnesota representation, I’ve released records from bands all over including UK act The Projects whose members included Mira Aroyo of Ladytron, Scotland’s Abagail Grey who was produced by Chris Geddes of Belle & Sebastian and Tony Doogan, and even a 7” from Damo Suzuki of Can.

How do you explain the plethora of great Twin Cities bands over the years?

The amount of amazing music that comes from here past and present is kind of insane! While the Twin Cities Metro is a large area, it’s also small enough where it’s easy to make friends with people in the music scene here. I moved to Minneapolis in 1995 after doing five years of college radio at KVSC, so I was already a superfan of many local bands including The Hang Ups, Babes in Toyland, and Saucer when I arrived. I never imagined getting to be good friends with some of those members. Witnessing the evolution of Real Numbers, I shouldn’t have been surprised as I was to eventually learn that Eli Hansen is as excited about the whole Sarah Records scene and bands like Felt as I am. I got three original members of The Litter onstage at the Kitty Cat Klub for mpls ltd’s 20th anniversary party in 2019, and I am not sure if I can ever top that.

Current favorite bands (anywhere…not just local)?

I have been very much into the new albums from Adele & The Chandeliers, Michael Beach, The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness, Flyying Colours, Moon Coven, and Jane Weaver so far this year. The Baudelaires who played several shows with Flavor Crystals on their Australian tour are finally getting ready to release their next record, and I cannot wait! I bought a ridiculous amount of fantastic new vinyl throughout the pandemic, and I am beyond excited to finally experience live music again.

Five bands you wish you could release records by (defunct or not)?

Broadcast, Dolly Mixture, The Go-Betweens, Sparks, and Windhand.

Any advice for other people wanting to start a label?

Always expect the unexpected (for example: the pandemic was additionally terrifying while I was waiting for test pressings of two records as I realized that nobody would be touring or playing any shows for quite some time), trust your instincts, and don’t forget this is supposed to be fun. Things will inevitably get stressful at times, but you will also learn as you go. In the immortal words of Gibby Haynes “it’s better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven’t done.”

What’s next for the label?

I am expecting test pressings for the new album from Minneapolis sludgegazers Another Heaven any day now, and there is a collaborative effort between Flavor Crystals and The Telescopes in the works.

www.mplsltd.com

www.facebook.com/mplsltd

Christian and his assistant

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uncle-ak · 4 years

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What Do You Say When…?

"I decided to share this with you because I know you wouldn't judge me for it…"

September is suicide prevention awareness month...

It felt so promising, the start of a new decade. The #2020Visionboard events that took place at the beginning of the year allowing us to envision better, thoughts of daring greatly, plans of stepping out of our comfort zone, exploring new territories, and or growing/expanding our horizon... We are in the last quarter of the year; it feels like we have been battling one thing after another since 'the ball dropped,' be it individually from the loss of a loved one to a worldwide pandemic that has completely changed our view of life and living. It’s almost like we were halted in our tracks. Not to talk of politics and racism…

I can’t put to words the rollercoaster of emotions I have been through between January and now. From watching a barely two-year-old girl child being laid to rest in January, then Kobe Bryant, followed by a series of heart-wrenching moments some of which are mentioned in my previous blog post. In addition to deaths from relatives, friends, and or their loved ones, coworkers, those I’ve worked with, and or were working with.

Have you had moments where the words, my sympathy, my condolence, Rest in Peace … etc were too hard for you to say or type? Moments where you felt numb, speechless? Moments when you said ‘not again,’ or you couldn’t explain the emotions/feelings brewing within from hearing about another death or any unexpected news? What do you say when...?

I work in a Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) aka Nursing Home and I have been there for a little over four years. I have known and worked with most if not all of the long term residents. The geriatric population was my first choice out of grad school primarily because it reminded me of growing up with my grandparents. Watching them wanting to maintain some level of independence even as their body and mind slowly went through the aging process is what drew me to work in that setting with the aim to facilitate independence as much as possible.

On the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak, changes were put in place in an attempt to decrease the spread and preserve health and life. It has been heart pausing to overhear comments like “I just need someone to talk to,” when walking down the hallway. Then you contemplate going to have a brief conversation because you aren’t scheduled to work with them and productivity scores are ringing at the back of your mind but you can’t just walk by like you didn’t hear that. Sometimes the conversation has you wondering; what do you say... to make them feel better, but it sometimes ends up being that all they really wanted was someone to stop by and hear them out.

When I changed my major from pre-pharmacy to psychology in undergrad, the goal was not to pursue a career in counseling psychology even though that’s what people thought. I went on to pursue a Masters in Occupational Therapy (background story) and I still get asked if I’ve considered a career path in counseling and the answer is nope! Part of being an Occupational Therapist occasionally requires me to put on a ‘counseling’ hat but not always as in the case of those who solely provide counseling services. I do love the mind/brain; in undergrad, I had fantasized becoming a brain surgeon thanks to Derek Shepherd in Grey’s Anatomy but the thought of cutting open the skull let alone when they are awake which is the case in certain brain surgeries, I decided I’ll do just fine interacting with the mind/brain externally. Preventive health and health management later became an area of interest in 2018, it has been a journey of discovery which still encompasses mental wellness (a passion of mine).

I've had a number of people share personal stories about themselves with me and they usually use this statement or some variation of it… "I decided to share this with you because I know you wouldn't judge me for it…" I’ve been told too many times to count dating back to 2016. More frequently this year than the past years combined from both men and women, some older than me. Sometimes people just want to share something about themselves without being judged, labeled, or put in a box/category. Listening brings me fulfillment because it brings relief to others. Last year I became a certified Mental Health First Aider (CPR in the area of Mental Health) to update my knowledge and skills as well as learn something new in the field of mental wellness. I've learned and continue to learn to listen in a way that makes people willing to share at their comfort level. What people share and the depth of the conversation depends on how ‘safe’ they feel with regards to what they are about to share and the listener’s ability to actively listen; there's a way to tell if someone is actively listening or not. It is a body language thing.

I've come to learn that not everyone knows how to actively listen nor has the ability and or skills, but everyone at the very least can 'hear someone out' depending on the hearer's state of mind/headspace. It is also ok to communicate if your state of mind/headspace doesn't allow you to actively listen to someone or just 'hear them out' rather than act like you are listening but your mind is in a thousand and one different places. I think people would appreciate that honesty upfront rather than 'fake listening'. Hearing someone out doesn't necessarily mean they want advice on how to handle a situation. If they do, they would ask, and even if they don't ask, if we listen actively, we can sense that they may want an opinion. There’s a way to listen for what isn’t being said but is implied. They may not necessarily apply your thoughts/opinions but it will make them feel better that they were heard.

So if someone asks for your opinion and does something otherwise, don't crucify them for it because what they are challenged by may be harder for them to explain in a way that makes sense to you, and maybe they’ve tried your opinion in the past and it didn’t turn out well. Just remember that “everyone is fighting a battle that no one knows about.” Hope that Chadwick Boseman aka T’Challa’s story is an eye-opener for us all. There is always more to what meets the eye and not to judge a book by its cover. Ask open-ended questions to give room for conversation and listen to understand, not to respond.

So, how have you been braving the year thus far despite all that it has been throwing at us? Any self-care strategies (aka coping strategies) that have helped you through to this moment? Anything new that you’ve learned? Sharing is caring, it may help someone out.

For me, I re-read certain books I’ve read before; What I Know For Sure, The Wisdom of Sundays and The Path Made Clear all by Oprah Winfrey. I read new books; No Such Thing as Halfway by Achu ‘Riflex’ Ebong Mba (currently available via his website ), The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer, The Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi. I’ve been writing as well even though my last blog post was in June. I've been writing mostly for and to myself (not journaling), which is different from writing for others like blogging. I've been doing Zoom workout since April three times per week which has been a lifesaver given that I am a healthcare employee. It has been a ‘coro test’ testing my lung capacity and boosting the immune system; aside from the weekly COVID testing torture we have been mandated to do since July, yes the annoying nasal swabs.

Sometimes music therapy helped and long solo walks in my neighborhood. I've done more hiking this year than I have done combined since I started in September 2015 through last year. I remember when I first shared that I was going hiking back in 2015; oh my, the negative comments that came flying all from those who had never been hiking before. Well, here we are now all basking in the beauty of nature. Watching this unfold taught me that people bash what they don't understand or something they haven’t done or they tried and it didn't work out for them. If it's something you really want to do and it speaks to depths of who or want to be, then figure out how you want to handle all that is being thrown at you and brave it out. At the very least, you’ll learn something/a skill that can be applied in another area of life.

The past months haven’t been all glamorous, there have been days where I lay on the couch for hours not feeling like doing anything unless my bladder or bowel nudged me to move. I haven't had a full-time workweek since April; it's been tethering around 15-20 hours a week or less. I'm still grateful that some cha-chin is coming in. Grateful for the knowledge that helped me save weekly since 2016. Having to put a hold on the weekly savings this past July was a hard pill to swallow. Given that I'm an hourly employee, the drop-in hours meant a drop in income. Initially, I thought of dropping the savings amount and frequency to once a month to see how it goes, but it seemed to cause some anxiety.

Amongst all the other challenges, I'm grateful that I haven't had to dip into my savings thus far, grateful for life, health, family, loved ones, and friends. The drop-in hours at work provided room to explore other areas. That thought of exploring other areas didn't initially happen. With the initial onset of the lockdown, there were days of wallowing even though as an ‘essential employee’ I had an excuse to leave the house to go to work for a couple of hours on some days of the week averaging around three days. I'm grateful for knowledge and resources that sparked and nudged me in other directions such as figuring out how to grow my other passions (IG: nannez_fruitdlight and beyonddabookclub; Personal IG: mz_nanne one piece/post at a time to what I envision it to be in the long run, exploring other avenues/options of improving health and wealth. There are still some occasional moments of not feeling like doing anything but it is less frequent than before.

It’s been that type of a roller coaster… then Chadwick Boseman decided to show us how much of a real-life superhero he has been. I had added a pic he took with Lupita Nyong'o on my vision board in 2018 (my vision board was initially done in 2017) because something about their role in Black Panther spoke to me at a deeper level of inspiration. Even though it was ‘just a movie’ it represented and still represents something significant. Some quotes from him that speak to me personally;

Chadwick Boseman

“Sometimes you need to feel the pain and sting of defeat to activate the real passion and purpose that God has predestined inside you… Sometimes you need to get knocked down before you can really figure out what your fight is and how you need to fight it.”

“When I dared to challenge the system that would relegate us to victims and stereotypes with no clear historical backgrounds and no hopes or talents. When I questioned that method of portrayal, a different path opened up for me; the path to my destiny.”

“Because I said no at certain times, it made me available for things that got me to where I am... Know who you are first, purpose unfolds more and more every day. Be open to what essence is.”

“Savor the taste of your triumphs today, don’t just swallow them all whole without digesting what is actually happening here. Look down over what you have conquered and appreciated what God has brought you through.”

Thank you Chadwick Boseman for living and telling your story the way you did. Thank you recurrent and new readers. Now over to you; what have you been up to? How have you been braving the year thus far?

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dantelaw21 · 4 years

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 293

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Click on the video above to watch Episode 293 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

what’s going on everybody? Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 24th of June. It’s Episode 293, which comes to be 69 episodes after Episode 224. What do you say? Right 69 episodes so let’s go welcome her Nan here and which is going to do the proverbial roundabout because Mr. Adam is not here. I don’t know what he said. But hey, Bradley, how are you doing, man?

Good. Happy to be here. It’s hot as hell they are now right now though. It’s like, middle of summer and nasty but yeah, things are good. Besides that. Awesome,

Chris. How about you man?

Yeah, it seems pretty good here. Whereas nice no rain. It’s not as hot as we spread. Lee like evenings and stuff are still chilly and cold. Like seems a pretty lovely, awesome new Marco. Oh, date.

Do you see it? I’ve been telling you I know I’ve been joking for years about the weather in Costa Rica never really showed it because I don’t like to have a camera on my computer. I said this is my work. This is my workstation and I want to and I like to stay focused. But now I’m doing more video more stuff. So I decided that for a year straight I am going to show my camera every Wednesday on Hump Day hangouts so you guys can see for yourself. This is it. This is it. Somebody asked me I don’t get sick of this weather. Suck. No, don’t you guys get tired of that heat that oppressive humidity and just nasty heat her nan 810 sometime around where he lives and the coal. Mine is 10 don’t you guys see. Don’t you guys get sicker? That’s no up to your ears. I got this. I got this up to my ears.

There you go. Powerful, so

Okay, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Hump Day Hangout. If you’re here for the first time welcome. This is Semantic Mastery crew we try to help you as much as possible with anything and everything that has to do with digital marketing, answering your questions, SEO, growing your digital agency, whatever it is, and this is free being free, you will keep on being free. So drop your questions here. And we will try to help you out as much as possible. Now, before we jump into the questions, a couple of things. The first one is that Fourth of July sale for both Semantic Mastery and MGB is coming and it’s usually I would say our second largest sale of the year followed only you know, the first place might be Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the second-largest cell of the year is Fourth of July. So if you’re into saving money, and if you’re into getting results for your clients, stay tuned. Make sure that you’re open next week’s emails because Guess is going to be pretty awesome. We’re going to be giving you guys some really cool discounts and stuff, it’s going to be pretty, pretty cool. Anything that you guys want to add to that.

We actually pulled people, right. And we asked them, what they wanted from us what they needed from us. And so our sale is going to be according to what people said they would want from us. So we do listen to you guys. We do try to give you as much as we can. That’s why we have been live free hours for what? Going on six years now. Yeah, don’t even air for six years. Think about it, and we’re here live every Wednesday, answering your questions. Just because right, we want to give back to the community. That was the original idea behind Hump Day Hangouts. And it stays. The idea behind Hump Day Hangouts, we’re giving back to the community that gives us so much that allows me to learn so much and allows me to tinker with Google as much as I do. So this is a thank you, from us to you, sir.

Alright, so that’s basically it. If you guys want to learn how to take your agency to the next level, go to 2xyouragency com that is the number two-letter X your agency com if you have a couple of clients, you want to take it to 10 clients, 15 clients, 20 clients, however many and then guess what, once you have that amount of clients, you don’t need to worry about fulfillment because we do it for you at mgyb.co. So you go to mgyb.co you go there, you get all of your fulfillment leads ready to go. So all you need to focus on is to build your team and grow your business. So I think that’s it, we should jump into questions right.

Before we go to the crisis, guys, go to our go to the YouTube channel and hit the subscribe button. Right, help us out. We like helping you but help us grow by going and subscribing, getting those notifications so that you can stay abreast of what’s going on with Semantic Mastery heavy hitter club MGB and everything else around Semantic Mastery.

Yeah, subscribe so you don’t miss the Fourth of July sale. There you go.

All right. Well, we got a lot of questions already. So I want to jump right into it, though. Let me grab the screen.

Zoom will cooperate.

Okay, you guys are seeing my screen, correct?

Yes. All right.

Ah, I think I’m okay.

Does Press Release Distribution Correlate With Rankings?

Yeah. All right. I’m just making sure I didn’t have any sensitive tabs open with clients. Nothing I need to worry about looks fairly decent. All right. We’re gonna start right off with this question from five days ago. He says I have subscribed to Access Wire for doing press release distribution for clients. Question one does press release distribution correlate with rankings in any way. And then question two is If yes, are there any best practices you tested? Yes. And yes, it does. Because here’s the thing and you know, we’ve got a relationship with Jeremy. One of the CO Owners of Press Advantage, which by the way, and very soon in the next couple of weeks to three weeks, something like that. We’re going to do another webinar with him and opening it up a special again, for people that want to have their own subscription accounts to Press Advantage, which is the same distribution service that we have available in MGYB. For anybody who’s doing a lot of volumes, I always suggest having your own Press Advantage subscription. There are other providers out there Accesswire being one of them. There’s many of them now, actually. And there is a big difference between the distribution networks like there are certain common there are certainly common distribution sites, they get used by almost all distribution services or by a fair of a vast majority of them. But they’re also depending on the relationships that are forged between the distribution company and the distribution partners are outlets right where they dependent, so that’s usually something that it’s a relationship that has to be built. And that’s why you know, yeah, yeah, it really does make a difference to have a good distribution service one that has, you know, selects good sites with good traffic, good metrics, that kind of stuff. Nothing real spammy. Here’s the problem. I don’t know necessarily about Accesswire. I have tested them in the past, but it’s been at least two years and I’ve only done like a couple of one-off press releases with them. I was always testing against Press Advantage. There are some really good ones out there Press Advantage being one of them.

Another one is Quantum Newswire, which this one of our mastermind members actually developed that it’s a really good service as well. But what you have to be careful about and again, I’m not speaking directly about Accesswire, because I don’t know haven’t tracked it in a few years, a couple of years, at least, is that some distribution services will pad their numbers or inflate their numbers with like WordPress sites and such. That they call distribution sites, but really they’re just republishing Press Releases what press releases are too but part of the benefit of press releases is that they get published on high traffic sites that are like media sites, right news sites. So just creating a WordPress site to republish press releases isn’t necessarily a good thing. In fact, it could even be toxic if those sites are really spammy sites. A lot of the media distribution sites that are distributed to that are part of an actual media network. They are typically high traffic high authority sites, so they typically don’t consider as spammy or toxic whereas a lot of the networks or distribution networks that I’ve tested a lot of the guys and I have got a lot of the reason why I’ve stuck with Press Advantage is that they’ve had a really good selection of sites is my point. And there that’s growing like Jeremy has been working on developing relationships with so Press Advantage has been dealing with developing relationships for you now with companies, in fact, I don’t know what I can reveal here, but some new ones are coming. And that’s part of the reason why and or already available. But anyway, that’s part of the reason why we’re going to have another webinar with him and then in the coming weeks, but that said, Yes, it does.

There is a correlation with rankings, because again if you’re not careful when you get you to distribute press releases to spammy sites, they can actually end up being toxic. So that’s there are a couple of things that you can do. If that’s the case, use the press releases to link back to your tier one entity assets as opposed to your money site directly. I saw there was another question from one of our members, Nathan Smith, I believe further down about using press releases to link directly to your money site. I do because of Press Advantage being a good distribution service. But again, if you’re not sure, or you haven’t tested and you don’t know what the distribution looks like yet, then I would recommend linking back to tier one entity assets instead of directly to your money site. So what are those right GMB maps, GMB website if you’re using if it’s for local, you could link to the SEO shield properties, which is what we recommend? So Google Drive Google Site Google Drive stack, you know the files and folders and Id page. You could link to your major social media, your syndication network properties, there’s a number of things that you any tier one entity asset, really. And so that’s what I would recommend just to be on the careful side if you’ve got a subscription Accesswire, publish a couple of press releases, linking back to tier one entity assets first, then look at the distribution reports and go through it with the fine-tooth comb and see if there’s anything in there that’s you know, particularly spammy if so then I would recommend, you know, looking for another service or just using it the way that I just mentioned. Okay. Does anybody want to comment on that?

No, I mean, yes to the question is yes, they are correlational. We do find that doing regular press releases, helps with rankings now whether it’s because of the links, because it was because of the distribution, just whatever it is. Now, I will say that whenever I run a press release, it does get hit with link building. I don’t just do a press release, and then nothing behind it. So whether it’s the link building to the press release or the press release itself, then we don’t know unless you run a like a separate test just press releases, I know you’ve done that. And press releases and label that’s something that I’m going to get into in here for free. At any rate, when you do them correctly when you stack them like it’s taught in local PR Pro, it’s fantastic. It’s fantastic for pushing the map into the three-pack, pushing those polls, boosting the post, and pushing from the post over to the website through the do follow link that you can get. Doing it all that way but you still pushing relevance and power over to the website. But you’re putting a buffer in between a buffer that will help your map rank anyway. And then when you stack those, and you build links to those, as you’re stacking them, right around the third, fourth or fifth press release in the stack, you see things just kind of take off. But if you do just one, it may or may not help, depending on the competition in that niche, but when you stack them, and you do the link building, you run those embed gigs and link building. It works really, really well. It’s probably a combination, right? Because we do talk to Jeremy on a regular basis, we ask for a lot of stuff that he does for us, right? Like the media, the page has developed over time because he’s out he actually asks us what we would like and we tell him and he does whatever he can, within reason, right? We can. We can’t get everything that we want. I’d love to but we can’t so And then the other part I forgot what the second part of that question was.

What Are Some Best Practices When Distributing Press Releases?

He said, If yes, are there any best practices you tested?

Local PR pro? Yeah.

Yeah. And in fact, as a kind of an add on to local PR Pro, which we made it public, so it’s available and that’s why I was pulling up on YouTube. It’s available publicly on our channel. If you just go search for YouTube, press release SEO or press release silo stalking or whatever, you’ll see it comes up or you can go directly to our channel. So YouTube youtube.com slash semantic mastery and use the channel search feature and just type in press releases SEO. And you’ll see this is the video we did about 11 months ago. It’s an hour long. It’s a webinar and update webinar that we did for our Marco and I did for MGB. But again, it’s just it’s publicly available, where we talk specifically about how the press release stacking kind of changed slightly it evolved right which is now we silo press releases the same way that we would silo blog posts or GMB posts are all of the above, right? So go check that out. It’s an hour-long, but it tells very specifically the strategy on how to silo press releases and stack them. And that’s where the magic happens. That’s what Marco was just talking about. You get four or five press releases into it, and you’ll start to see significant movement when we proved that over and over and over again. So that’s what I recommend. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that strategy when I get to the question that I saw Nathan post earlier. We’ll get to that here in a few minutes. Okay. There’s a good question though.

Is Content Curation Still Helpful As Of 2020?

Alright, so the next question is from Benjamin or I’m sorry Ben jam. He says I followed your recommendation and purchase Jeffrey Smith. Seo Bootcamp. Okay. Yeah, I remember this. Remember you from last week. He says, I no longer have any questions about how to silo a website. That’s right because he’s the man when it comes to that stuff. He says his process for writing posts is more involved compared to curated posts though in order to create the top, though in order to create topical depth was about To start with creating curated posts for the content kingpin, now I’m wondering the best way to proceed. The SEO Bootcamp process uncovers the topical keywords for each silo, and the questions associated with them to use and writing seven to 900-word posts, hiring a writer to write researched and well-written articles sound expensive. And yes, it’s very much is when you hired a subject matter expert to write posts. It’s it can be very expensive, or even just a good writer might not even be a subject matter expert, they might go research to be able to write good posts, but that’s expensive to try to use curated posts. Is there something that is this something that can still be put in the hands of a writer in the Philippines for $10 a post or is it going to cost more? Okay? So my answer to that is, you know, Jeffrey has his method. I follow his on-page methods for siloing and things like that. Not 100 I don’t follow all of his methods because it’s a lot of work and we’ve been able to, you know, some of the methods that I use, I’m able to still achieve results. It really depends on what you want to do. I don’t typically go for those longer posts, what I, what I do is a curated post, my bloggers handle all that. That’s because I’ve got a couple of really good bloggers that I’ve trained over the years that do curate content curating, that are really, really, really good at it. And I’ve taught them some SEO tactics as well, so that they understand how to interlink properly, which tags to use, depending on the type of silo structure, we’re using all that kind of stuff. So I like to use curated posts, because it’s efficient, it’s less expensive, it’s easier for people that, you know, they don’t have to research it for every blog post. So it’s a lot more and a lot less expensive.

So, can you still use curated posts for topical depth? Yes. However, keep this in mind. You know, you can kind of make a hybrid out of the two, which is kind of what we do. You know, occasionally not all the times, but occasionally I’ll tell my blogger to go scrape all the questions, you know, the FA Q’s for a particular topic for the project that we’re working on. So where do you get those questions? Well, there’s a keyword scraper out there that you can use. I know there’s also you can just go to answer the public Comm. And you can type in some keywords and it will come back and show you commonly asked questions, you can go to Google and ask questions as if you were somebody looking for the product or service that you’re logging about, right? And ask questions as if you were inquiring about that product or service and then see what the accordion boxes are in Google search results with questions people also ask right? And each time you click one of the dropdowns to reveal that it’ll show the question but you to reveal the answer, which is just curated snippets of Q and A’s from other websites. That’s all that accordion box is. You can use those questions in your own content and a curator can still use those questions and in fact, think about this. The questions plus the answers are right there in the accordion meant, you know the accordion box In the Google search results, like I said, each time you click the drop-down menu or the drop-down arrow, it actually shows reveals more questions and answers. And so you can scrape those, and they actually give you the link to a snippet and then a link over to where that question is answered on, you know, on that particular site that there’s that they’re citing, right? That they’re attributing it to. So you can actually use that in your curated content. guys think about that. So it’s a very easy way to start adding FAQs or questions and answers to blog posts, that your, you know, your VA is publishing or whatever. And the curating content can be right there unless it’s a direct competitor, which I don’t ever recommend linking to a direct competitor. But a lot of the times they’re not direct competitors. And so you can actually take the copy the question and answer right from the Google search results. And paste that into a blog post. Make sure you cite the source of the answer, just like you would any other type of curated content. And there you go.

So again, you can go about it. Both ways. Jeffrey Smith has his own specific method. And he’s very, very good at being able to rank like crazy for some really difficult terms with little to no backlinks. Because of the way that he structures and does long depth content, you know, long, well researched long-form content for blog posts, because of the volume that we do that my, you know, my agency does, and my bloggers do I prefer the curated content. And it reads, well, it looks good and everything else. So again, it’s up to you how you want to do it. My method is to use a silo structure by linking the way that I’ve been taught by Jeffrey Smith and from Marco, my partner. But you know, again, I like because of the volume that we do, it would be too cumbersome for us to do. There’s long-form content all the time for posts and not to mention expensive as well. So it’s really a preference, you can get away with doing it. Either way or create kind of a hybrid of the two. Any comments on that?

Yeah, our keyword research gig in mgyb.co is based on the training that we’re talking about, where we go into all of the different tools that are available. And we pick up as many keywords relevant in the niche as possible, we get as many as possible, we go into all of these tools, we go into SEMrush, you don’t need a subscription to SEMRush. You don’t need it for Uber suggests you don’t need it for the answer of the public, you don’t need any of these because we give it to you. These questions will also pop up in answer the public we give you that and oh, and also the questions that are brought up and when we do the SEMrush research and every other resource, so you know that and you get it. It’s all categorized for you. We take care of all that so that you don’t have to, so that it when you get that back, you can hand that over to your writer, and then your writer is responsible for finding the content. Now, what Bradley said makes perfect sense because you take that keyword research And you can still build the topical relevance by inserting the proper keywords in the way that Jeffrey teaches it and interlinks. in that manner, nothing stops a good writer from curating and adding the topical keywords are relevant keywords and interlinking. Those, I mean, what’s to stop, I don’t understand why curation has to be so difficult. It’s the simplest thing in the world you go and you find here. Here’s a list of topical keywords that you have to add to this long-form 700 to 900 words, you’re going to work those in and then you’re going to interlink to other pages, or to another page, however, they choose to do it the tags also, but that’s the curator can do of it. You don’t have to have and I’m doing air quotes, original content. It’s original because it’s curated and listen to proper attribution simply means that you’re giving credit to the audience. Double source, nothing says that you have to link to the original source of the content. Remember when you were doing proper citation, the proper attribution when you were writing a paper in college, those of us who went before the internet, right? You used to cite the source in your paper, right? And you do annotation. Yeah. And you would cite it that way that that’s proper. And that’s fine. Look at the way that Wikipedia doesn’t know they do no, follow it. But sometimes it’s not necessary. They just cite the source. And you don’t even have to hyperlink it. It doesn’t have to be a hyperlink to be proper attribution because you’re giving credit. And if you’re not using the entire article, you’re using a part of the article, maybe a paragraph, which is which in most cases is the proper use of that paragraph because you are citing the source and giving proper attribution without having to add even a nofollow link. So it depends on how you approach this, I would totally approach it. And I do from that standpoint when I have the keywords in that niche, and you’ll find this.

I know, a lot of you guys are new at this, when you start getting heavy into entities, and you start using the Google’s natural language processor, and you start using some of the online tools like Tex razor, to refine your content, so that you get the most relevant content on that page. Well, you’ll get a list of words that you can use, and your writer has to be able to go in there and use those words in that content, so that you’re also working with the natural language processor, and what Googlebot is looking for as far as entities on that page. So everything has to be related. Everything has to be relevant, not just content for the sake of content and for the sake of keywords. It has to all make sense at both the unstructured data level, which is content, written content. And the structured data level which is the schema. Google wants LD plus JSON. So when all that matches, and then you hit that with the power that’s available through our SEO power shield, the thing that happened when you saw that guy in, in the Facebook in the free Facebook group, I think, where he got his dry site backlinks, he couldn’t believe the result. I can’t believe you guys control service this way. It’s not that we control service is that we know what the bot is looking for a Wi-Fi, the bot constantly. That’s it. And it doesn’t have to be complicated like it’s being made here. They’re not mutually exclusive. Let me finish with that.

So I just wanted to demonstrate what I was talking about. So I just went to Google one for you know, for Tree Service stuff, which I do most, a lot of. It’s like I just typed in a question How much does Tree Removal cost? Right? So here you go. Here are questions right here, people also ask. And if I click on any one of these, you’ll see that it also starts to reveal additional questions for each time I click, it adds Three, two, or three more, right? And so you can go right through here. Now, if we scroll down to the bottom of the page, it’s seeing my IP and knows that I’m in Culpepper, Virginia. So some of these may very well be most of these are likely not going to be competitors, but they possibly could be. But if you see right up the top here, it gives you some additional menus or items there. So I just clicked an ad, you know, to add California. And just because, again, you know, it doesn’t matter where we’re located. If you’re, if you’re just using it for topical relevancy, then I can click through here and start copying some of these questions and answers, the ones that are relevant, and pasting them into curated posts. Does that make sense? and cite the source. So again, just it’s just like you could copy this right here, just like you see it here. And then paste that into a blog post. There you go. And then just make sure you’re citing the original source. So again, that’s a way you can start working as questions and answers into posts that are curated. Because that’s a lot more. It’s very efficient. It’s really up to you how you want to structure your content production. I prefer the curated method just because that’s what my team has been doing since really since 2000. I used to write the posts or curate posts myself until I realized how time-consuming that was going to be. And then I basically created content kingpin and started training virtual assistants, which it wasn’t content kingpin at the time, it was training for virtual assistants, but then we turned it into a product because it works so well. So anyway, it was a great question, though. Thanks.

So the next one is from DC, SEO. He says, Hey, guys, no questions for me this week. I just want to issue an apology to MGYB for publicly questioning the keywords submitted for my shield. Okay, I remember this from a week or two ago. Anyways, he said it was totally my fault. I let my son watch what I was doing and how I work and because he saw that I was Using a couple of keyword tools, one of which happened to be keyword shitter, which I’m which almost never you normally use, he wanted to actually join in naturally as an 11-year-old, he took great interest in the name played around playing around with search terms I was using and I ended up uploading the wrong file. Oh, wow. So please accept my apologies. Apologies. One brain fart from me and everyone ended up with a headache. Well, no problem DC SEO and it’s a that’s big of you to come to say that on Hump Day Hangouts. So thank you. We appreciate that. Marco, do you want to comment on that?

No, thank you. Thank you. I mean, it’s really good that someone first called us out publicly. And I didn’t I really didn’t know what he was talking about. It really surprised me that we would do something like this and I did say that we take care of it. But when we went to look, this is what we ran up against. And thank you, DC for coming back in and straightening things out and letting everyone know that it wasn’t Mistake No, we do own up to our mistakes. By the way, it’s as if we don’t make mistakes. When we do, I just want everyone to know that that we make it right one way or the other.

Do You Think Google Lied About Their Documentation On SameAs Schema?

Okay, so the next one says, Hey, guys, according to Google’s documentation, sameas schema support has been dropped around two years ago. Do you think they lied? and for what purpose? Yeah, Google lies all the time. Like, they’re pathological liars. Google also said that guest post links don’t work. Google also said that you know, building backlinks won’t work. Google also said, I mean, we could go down a long laundry list of things that Google usually when Google tells you something doesn’t work means do more of it. Guess Google lies to you all the time. Google lies to you. So yeah, that does mean that we could really move on to the next question. Marco, do you want to comment on that?

Yeah, I would just like to ask, like, how did they reference that same schema support has been dropped? Because we saw we see, and I see this all the time in the natural language processor, Google’s own schema tool, right, that analyzes entities on written content, that it references, same as schema. And so how I can support be dropped for sameAs schema? If NAP is using the sameAs schema makes absolutely no sense. It just shows you. I mean, I love the link to that. If you haven’t, just drop it in here or drop me a note in the free Facebook group. And I will take a look because I know and I can show that Google is using famous schema. Yeah, I’ve shown it by the way in heavy hitter club webinars. We’ve gone into the natural language processor. And we’ve shown how Google references entities through say that.

Yeah. And so I’m just going to finish reading the question. Yes, I still include sameas and sameas isn’t just for local business schema. It’s for an organization or corporation schema. So I use it all the time. And I absolutely use it. And I, you know, I always talk about the ones that use my main tier one entity assets, main social profiles. And then for local businesses, I always go look at whatever citations also or profiles or whatever show up for a business name search and Google Plus phone number. So I do whatever the business name is. And then also add the phone number in the same search query and hit, you know, search. And then I extract or pull all the URLs off the top two pages that show up in Google that are relevant to that business, which they should be when you do that type of the search. And I add those to sameas as well and it works. It works really well. So anyway, he says, I personally think they use reciprocal links for verification and possible ml as many social profile icons show up in the knowledge graph and search without any usage of sameas schema since the Yoast and other SEO plugins removed same as for that reason, do you think it is worth it to add that schema to the money site manually? Or to throw some plugin made from a Google’s not Google’s nonbeliever? Same as Meta Keywords? Yeah, again, I add schema, I’m even starting to use more of structured data for, you know, even like marking up blog posts and such. Because remember, structured data guys are code, it’s specifically talking to the bot. So there’s no reason not to use it in my opinion, you know, I still use my favorite tool for generating schema is this one. I’ve said this many times before, but you can just go to technicalSEO.com, and there are tools and they’ve got, you know, schema generator over on the left-hand sidebar. And this is what I use mainly, I even use Jeffrey Smith, SEO ultimate plugin or ultimate pro plugin on all the sites that I manage now, but I still use this tool right here to generate most of the structured data that we add to pages and posts and things like that because this is just what my team has been trained on. And there’s really no reason not to use it. So but there are I mean, anything that you can mark up with structured data you can so when it comes to sameas if you can squeeze it into an organizational corporation or local business schema, why not? You know, it’s not going to hurt. So and as Marco said it, yes, they still use it.

How Do You Deal With A Prospect Who Asks To Rank For The Same City And Niche Of An Existing Client?

Okay, Mohammad is up, he says, Hey, guys, there’s this car dealer asking me for SEO services in a city where I always work with a dealer. How should I handle this? I don’t know, trying to rank two businesses in the same niche in the same city as possible, both practically and morally? How would I rank both? Am I wrong? Do I turn them away? How would you respond to the inquiring client in this case? That’s a good question. You know, I’ve had that issue only occur a couple of times. Typically, I won’t, because it does create a kind of conflict even for me. So typically, I won’t do it unless I am transparent about that. If that makes sense, and say well, let’s see. You know, I’ve already got a client in this city. So yes, I can do SEO for you, I can’t guarantee you that I’m going to, you know that you know, I’m not going to tell you that I’m going to push you above them, I will do equally as good for both of you. That’s the only way I could see addressing it. I’ve turned work away though, because of that being an issue for me. So that’s just, you know, my opinion. I know, others probably have other opinions as well. But the only way that I would do it is if that was disclosed, and they were made aware of it. And if they were ever agreed to it, it can proceed moving forward with you, then so be it. It’s out in the open, there’s nothing to hide and there’s no moral or ethical, you know, problem there if that makes sense. But any opinions from you guys, how do you guys handle that stuff?

Yeah, I only take one client per niche person. Like I can’t, because there’s only one number one and my focus is entirely on making that one client. Number one, I cannot make two people number one. Someone is going to end up number two and not happy. Even when they knew ahead of time that you already had a client, they will be unhappy. I would say find someone who’s really good Mohammed, recommend that person, and get a finder’s fee. That’s how I handle it. Sometimes I just hand them off to our mastermind members. Hey here, go close this guy. He’s hot. But I can’t take the lead. I can’t. So to me that this is a matter of ethics. First of all right? If you don’t tell the guy, then you can only make one person number one, even when you do, someone’s going to be unhappy. To avoid that headache. And here’s the funny thing.

I still have one of them as a client, but one of my first really good clients was a roofer and he was an identical he had an identical twin brother, who also owned a roofing contracting company. So there were two roofing contractors, identical twins. They lived in you know neighboring or adjacent counties, but they had the same service area. And it was funny as hell because I met the one guy and signed him on as a client. And within I don’t know, two or three months he, you know, was bragging about me to his brother and his brother hired me his brand, but it was funny because when his brother contacted me, you know, he said, Yeah, my twin brother told me to contact you because you can, you know, you’re good at SEO and blah, blah, blah. And it was funny as hell because they were, you know, it was 100% transparent. They both knew that they were using me for you know, for SEO, they hired me for SEO, but it was a fun relationship with them. Because every time one of them would move above the other one, I’d get a call from the one that got knocked down. He’d be like, why do you like him better than me, you know, and it was actually a lot of fun. One of the brothers ended up running into some financial issues at some point and he canceled services with me about a year ago really. And I still do some things for him, but it’s he’s not on a monthly reading. Like the other client is, but it was just it was a really fun kind of relationship dynamic between theme and those two identical twin brothers. But that’s unique in that they were identical twin brothers and they weren’t really, I mean, they were competing, but it was in a friendly way, versus like to, you know, businesses that don’t know each other. So that’s why I said the only way that I could see doing it would be if it was if you were transparent upfront and just said that you’re going to work on both of them equally. And but as Marco said, somebody is always going to resent where they are. Whoever is not on top is going to always have resentment. So I agree, I would just turn it away.

What Tiered Syndication Network Is Beneficial To A YouTube Channel?

The next question is from Eric. He says, Hello, I’m interested in purchasing your syndication networks from my YouTube channel. I’ve watched the course SEO syndication network from Bradley Benner and I just wasn’t sure what would be more beneficial for YouTube channel, the single Tier, or the multi-tier. Okay, that’s a good question. Also, can you give me an idea of what results I could possibly have for my youtube channel using your syndication network? I know it will help with my search. results on Google, but will it help with my actual YouTube rankings?

And yes, Okay, so the first part of that question is what will work better for the YouTube channel a single Tier or multi-tier network? I always preferred using multi-tier networks for YouTube channels YouTube video for YouTube SEO best basically. Here’s the thing though, guys, like just having one multi-tiered network is not going to I mean, it could I don’t know what niche you’re in or what keywords or difficulty level of you know, what type of competition you’re facing or anything else. What really works well is to create the multi Tier or build you know, or purchase the multi-tiered network, and then powered upright and by the way, with YouTube guys, you can keep adding networks, right, you can keep adding tier one networks, multi-tiered networks, you can use the same channel to continue triggering. We never recommend that for blogs for blog syndication, but for YouTube syndication Honest to God, you could, you could put 15 multi-tiered or two-tiered syndication network. To one channel, you could go way beyond that it’s unlimited. And you will get better results the more you have. However, it’s not just the syndication network that provides the results. It’s also powering it up. So that’s link building, you can do embed, embed gigs as well to the syndication network properties, or link building to the syndication network properties. That way you can power them up so that each time you upload a video and it syndicates out across the network, that they’re, you know, being syndicated to profiles that have been built up with a lot of inbound links if that makes sense. So, it really depends on what your budget is and how aggressive you want to be. But you know, start in my opinion, my recommendation would be to start with one syndication one multi-tiered syndication network, start seeding that network with content from your YouTube channel. So in other words, start syndicating content from your YouTube channel. Also, look into YouTube SEO. Sorry, YouTube Silo Academy. I think we still sell that.

We don’t know what we sell we suck at the market. Yeah, I don’t know if that product still up or not, but it should be and if not, it’s in one of our bonus sites. For sure. It’s like a $7 product or at least it was, but YouTube dot silo Academy. It’s like I said, it teaches you how to silo YouTube channels with playlists. So that’s very important to so what I’m getting at is start seeding that first network with content, then you can start building links to that network go to what I would recommend and see what type of results you’re getting. If you need more than you can either continue to power up the existing network because it now seasoned it’s a little bit more aged, you started to build authority to it through link building. And you can always add on additional networks as needed. So you can add an on another single, single Tier or multi-tiered network and then keep adding up and then subsequently start powering those up as well. So, again, I always prefer it for YouTube, like when I was doing a shit ton of YouTube SEO, which I don’t so much anymore because I do a lot of YouTube ads, so Google ads for YouTube. But when I was doing a lot of YouTube SEO that I would usually start off with three or four multi-tiered networks for any new YouTube channel project that I was working on, because I just liked having that massive amount of power right off the bat. Okay.

Can you give me an idea of what results I could possibly have for my youtube channel using syndication networks? Well, again, it’s an SEO tactic more than anything. But engagement is super important for ranking YouTube videos more so on YouTube than in Google, but also in Google as well. YouTube’s algorithm is more about engagement than it is Seo signals. Google is still very much, you know, it’s still heavily weighted towards SEO signals. So it depends on where you’re really trying to rank. If whatever your videos are, if the type of content is more suited for YouTube rankings, then I would recommend that you buy engagement signals, which means traffic from Google again. using YouTube ads, we have a training course on how to do that specifically to, because that’s going to help you to rank in YouTube way better. So it depends on what you’re where you’re trying to rank. Is it Google, or is it YouTube? Or is it both? If it’s both, then syndication networks, backlinks embeds, that’s what’s going to work for the SEO side of things, right. So ranking in Google, if you want to rank on YouTube, SEO signals have play a part there’s no question, but also engagement signals are weighted heavily on YouTube. And you can buy engagement signals from Google. Don’t buy fake views from other you know, from YouTube view providers don’t do that. Don’t buy fake comments, and fake likes, and all that shit. Google’s algo, or YouTube’s algorithms got really good at figuring that stuff out. Just go buy traffic from a relevant audience source inside of Google ads. It’s very, very inexpensive. And those engagement signals will help it to rank in YouTube. Okay. Could it help my videos to go viral with YouTube? Thank you for you. Well, now, I mean, it could if remember If you rank at the top of search results, going viral typically aren’t from a search result, though, right? going viral is from people sharing it. So if you’ve got good video content, that’s what’s going to make it go viral. You know, typically, I mean, again, I’m not saying it can’t happen, but it’s that typically content goes viral because people see it, they, they start sharing it, and that one person shares it to one person that shares it to three people, those three people shared three people in there There goes, right. So But yeah, I mean, again, I would recommend buying engagement signals if that’s the case, which when I say that, I mean using YouTube ads to buy traffic. Okay. All right.

How To Use The SEO Shield To An eCom Site With No Physical Address?

He says, DC SEO says I lied about not having a question. I’m assuming the RYS expansion is the extension needed to target other key search terms? And it’s added to my SEO showed? Yes, you got it. Also, what’s the best way to approach an e-commerce site with no physical address with regards to the shield? That’s a question for you Marco.

You know, need a physical address. Unless this is a local project, and if it’s eCommerce, it shouldn’t be hyperlocal, you’re looking for something that’s national, or global. I’ve always said the approaches if you’re local, it’s local. It’s brand plus a keyword, plus location or brand plus location, press keyword, however you want to do that. That’s how you brand you relate everything to your brand and to the location where your brand is. If it’s not, then it’s brand plus keyword Association. That’s the only difference. And so how you approach that is you build that your brand, that’s your entity. So let’s put it this way. A physical address is part of a local entity, but it’s not necessarily a part of a global entity unless you want to set the corporate headquarters somewhere to give it just a little bit more validity. Right. Amazon has a corporate headquarters. So Apple says Google, whatever. Yeah, and you know exactly where those are. So if you want to kind of fake it till you make it You would do something like that you can set a post office box with a street address as your corporate address, nothing stops you from doing that. Nothing stops you from faking the address, although eventually, you’ll have to clean that up and imagine having to go back in and having to clean up that that fake address. That’s a mess in and of itself. But just for this purpose, you can go and get an SEO shield and an expansion stack without a physical address. There you go.

Is There An Automated Way In Getting The Links Of A Newly Syndicated Post?

Alright, Olaf sub says, Is there any automated way to get the links of a newly syndicated post to send them in for link building? What do I have to get them manually from each platform? Yeah. Okay. That’s a great question. You know, yes, you can set up like Zapier, or if you go set up a Zapier, for example, where you submit the RSS feeds of the blog properties and your syndication networks that will feed the new post URL into a Google Sheet. Right, Think about that. So now you’ve got one Google sheet. In fact, you could even set different tabs, right? So on the sheet, right, so you can so that the Google g sheet, you can set different sheets or tabs, whatever you want to call them on that sheet and use that same sheet for, you know, blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, and I’m just using those three because those are the three main blogs that we use within the syndication networks. So my point is, you can take the blogger RSS URL, create a zap in Zapier, where that’s the trigger any new post write any new feed item, then push that new Feed URL or excuse me, that post URL into a Google Sheet and the first tab in the sheet being blogger, the second one being Tumblr, the third one being WordPress, if you needed to separate them for whatever reason, you could do it that way. And now you’ve got you, you know, spreadsheet, excuse me with the links. You can even have the post titles pushed through, you know, you can pick and choose which data you want to push from the RSS feed into the sheet. But now you’ve got a Google Sheet that you can use to very quickly extract URLs that to paste in for link building. purposes, you could even make that, you know, you could even link build to the Google Sheet for that matter. So there’s a ton of things that you can do with that with Zapier. So yes, you can absolutely automate that. Okay, it’s a great question, by the way.

Why Does The RSS Of Other Authority Channels Be Changed Frequently When Submitting The Super Feed?

BB’s up what’s up, BB. He says, Hey, guys, what do you Why do you want for the RSS, of the other authority channels to be changed frequently when submitting the super feed? I’m not sure I understand that question. I really don’t understand that question. If you can clarify that. I’ll come back. I’ll try to answer the second part unless it’s dependent on the first he says number two because there is a minimum of text length of 300 words in each page post submitted. I wonder if words inside a blockquote tag, which is basically words from another site will be considered or counted in articles texts like yes. If it’s it’s text on the page, it’s counted as you know, it’s still counted as text. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a blockquote or not, it’s still counted. It’s still adding relevancy to the page via text.

So yeah, if you were taking, like a screenshot of text and inserting the screenshot, then maybe no, but Google can even read images now from what I understand. So it might even count towards that. Maybe not text length, but the relevancy anyway. So my point is, yeah, if you’re adding text and block quotes is not going to make any difference. It’s still adding to the article’s text link. This is what content kingpin relies on to simplify the question, let’s say an article has 250 words. And if adding a quote with 50 words will account for 300 words in the article, yes, yes, it will. And don’t get caught up in Article length. I mean, I wouldn’t suggest anything less than 300. But again, with curated post guys, you shouldn’t have a problem being able to create you know, 565 to 600 words 1000 word posts, because it’s, you know, you can curate several pieces of content into one article, right one curated posts, and in all that you have to do or your blogger curator, right, which is what I call blogger. Now, all they have to do is, you know, an opening paragraph, which could be a sentence or two really just explaining what the idea of the post is going to be, then curated content to support the idea of the post with just a little snippet of commentary, right, so the author of the post, the publisher of the post, creating a little bit of adding a little bit of content in between the curated pieces within the content, and then a conclusion, which could just be a sentence, which is typically a call to action, right? And that’s your opportunity to link to an internal page on the site. That makes sense. So again, you can make longer-form content, which I recommend using curated content, where you really only have to write you know, a couple or your blogger only has to really write a couple of hundred words, and you end up with a long-form long form post that makes sense. So it’s about adding relevancy using other people’s content. That’s the point. That’s the whole point of curating content, guys.

What Should You Do With A Side Business Website?

Alright, Fit'z up. Good day, gents. Thanks for this forum to get real-world answers that work. You’re welcome, Fitz. As always he says I have a client that wants to know what to do with the side business website. The market has atrophied because of COVID but he expects the market to come back. How can he mothball his site to weather these times but not lose rankings and have to work twice as hard when things bounce back? How would he sell the leads? How would he sell the leads to some online platforms that would benefit from customers like his but they are in different markets? I’m not sure about the second part of that question. As far as how to mothball his site, I like that term. You know, in SEO, one of the best things that you can do because typically once something ranks and you know using that method, it sticks for years and years and years. We’re running out of time, but I could show the Virginia SEO agency, g site that that keyword still ranking some of the other keywords dropped a couple of spots, it took five years for them to move it all down at all. But I specifically targeted Virginia SEO agency with that particular keyword in one press release blast a few weeks ago when I noticed that the G site for you know for for for those different terms that I usually use as an example started to slip a little bit after five years are not budging. So I targeted Virginia SEO agency with an anchor text link with that keyword Virginia SEO agency with press releases and it brought that keyword back to number one. So that’s what I’m saying is if you use the SEO shield, you’ve powered up that site, it’s ranking well the entity is strong I’m sure Marco will comment on this, then it takes a lot to move it guys. So that’s what I would do. I can’t really answer the second part of your question because I’m not sure what you mean.

But Marco, do you want to take a stab at that?

Yeah, I don’t understand that second part there. How could he sell the leads to an online platform that would benefit from customers like is but in a different market? I mean, you can sell it online. platforms that handle different leads from different niches right? There are those ring partner being one of them, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you’re not gonna get paid much but at least someone will be handling those leads and potentially make money leaving something in mothballs and untouched if everyone else so this is where all things being equal if everyone else is leaving there’s mothballed and untouched, that there’s a reason for his website rankings to move. But if there’s someone actively engaging the niche, then it’s likely that you will drop I mean, it took five years for Virginia SEO agency to drop but that was getting other signals that we’re getting people to come in. So this is this was ranking it was ranked number one it was getting people to come in and contact Bradley they did actually fill out the contact form. That’s a very important signal and it would get these on a steady on a stage. basis. Now what people have done is like the people like clutch SEO and a few others. They’ve also been at this and they’ve been at this really hard and they’ve been coming at this keyword for years for you to try to take Bradley. Bradley hasn’t been doing any work to it notice. None. And these guys are just 14. So it just goes to show that if you mothball it, eventually, activity, relevance trust, and authority is going to come in and take over and the activity part of it is going to take you down because there is none. With your project. That’s the only thing I would warn against. But definitely do everything else that’s available to you and stick it there as hard as possible. It gets mothballed. Fine. The people are still coming in and you’re selling the leads. I mean that that’s all that you can do. Right. I don’t see anything else that I can recommend regarding this.

Yeah, I was just looking to see if that I did one press release. I don’t know three weeks ago now maybe a month ago. Now spend a plate to push that and I use that Virginia SEO agency has keyword anchor I wouldn’t recommend doing that to a money site guys, but this was to a G site. So all the press releases got published had Virginia SEO anchor text link pointing back to the G site. And that pushed it boom right back up to number one. And that that press release isn’t even showing in the news, you know, Google News anymore. So that’s interesting, but it’s still pushing that keyword back to number one with one press release. So yeah, but and again, as Marco said I hadn’t touched that in five years hadn’t done a damn thing to it and that’s honest to God’s truth. And then it started to slip a few weeks ago finally after five years and I pushed that one keyword backup with one press release, believe it or not, again, that’s a Google site, I wouldn’t recommend doing that to your money site.

Without it at work. When Bradley and I talked about this, I told him do it do a PR stack. And and and go after the terms like Virginia SEO, SEO, Virginia, and push it all backup. Don’t just do one. Yeah, we haven’t accounted for that. Let’s get a Press advantage to push it up or get ready to build links to it.

Yeah, no, I do it. It doesn’t work. What would you do that?

Alright, so I got a couple more questions I’d like to get through these next three really quick because and we’ve only got a few minutes left but two of them are really related to press release stuff that we’ve been talking about a lot today for some reason, and whatever you want to try whatever you do, don’t click on that bottom link.

Okay. Yeah, you’re gonna see my fat face.

That’s two Bradley’s ago.

Yeah, that was a long time ago, man. A lot bigger than anyways, go that you guys have a good laugh from that.

Do You Link The Same Money Site Page or Post You’re Trying To Rank More Than Once?

Anyways, Nathan says do you link to money site page posts that you’re trying to rank on every press release? You do? Do you ever link to the same money site page post, you’re trying to rank more than once? Yeah, but typically, again, if you go back to what I was talking about earlier, and go watch this webinar that we did. It’s on our YouTube channel, guys. It’s free. Go watch Press Release SEO and PR stacking, just go search for it, you’ll find it. Watch that. Okay, because that is the method that I use, which we’ll say is a perfect segue into the question down hereby to Shar, he says Bradley, you may have answered this post, but just make sure it’s okay to point multiple press releases at your blog on the money site. For example, if I write four blog posts every month, can I do a press release for each blog post that is also linking to that blog post? I’m worried at what point does it become spammy? That is exactly what I’m talking about. Okay, so remember guys, with the syndication networks, the strategy that we talked about is content marketing from your blog, right? That so you publish content that’s the route and within, you know, place it within silos, so you publish posts within silos, and then your internal linking within every single post supporting article that you’re going to publish within a silo. You’re going to be linking back up to your top of silo right your silo landing page, or daisy-chaining to the next, the previous post in your in the silo, whatever. However, your internal Linking within your silo. The point is, you’re probably publishing a press release with an internal link to what you’re trying to rank on your site. Right. So it’s an inter it’s an internal page or post on your site that you’re trying to rank. So each post that you publish is going to contain a link to that, then that’s going to syndicate out across your syndication network. Okay. Then I publish. Again, my blog is not like some of my clients get, you know, three posts per week, but they’re only paying for one press release per week. So one of those blog posts per week, we’ll get a public press release that is essentially promoting or highlighting showcasing the blog, one of the blog posts. Does that make sense? And the press release links to the blog post. So the blog post URL, does that make sense? So my point is, you’re pushing power from the press releases to the blog post. The blog post contains the link back up to the page that I’m trying to rank so you’re pushing juice in from the press releases to a blog post, which is one press release. That’s published for one blog post. So the next time you publish a blog post, it’s a different URL. It’s a different deep link on your site that you’re linking to from the press release. Do I sometimes link to the same page perhaps with more than one press release?

Yeah, but not often, because I like the deep linking strategy that I just described. And again, it’s, you can see exactly what I’m talking about in that webinar there. And that just tends to work really well again, because guys, think about this. If you’re siloing blog posts together. You can also publish a GMB post if it’s for a local project that is linking to the blog post right and just grab a snippet of content from your blog post and use that as the text for your GMB posts use the same featured image, right so you’re mirroring your blog post silo structure in your GMB posts. Then you do the same thing with press releases, publish a press release for every blog post, or for as many as you can afford. That makes sense, however aggressive you want to be. And the press release writers are going to write about the blog post, they’re going to link to the blog post if that’s the target URL you provide. I also like to usually provide another tier-one entity asset URL. But you can also remember you can, you can tear that. My point is guys think about this. If you’re stacking, you’re doing a silo linking and stacking your content and your silos on your blog. You can mirror that in your GMB posts. You can also mirror that in press releases, right. So if you’re linking from the press release to the blog post that the press releases highlighting, you can also link back to the previous press release and that same silo again, that’s a press release silo. So you’re mirroring the same sort of structure in your blog. GMB, by the way, you don’t have to have a GMB. I’m just saying for doing local, you can also do it there. You should also do it there and also in your press releases. So that way, you’re not hammering the same URL over and over and over again, you’re hammering the same URL over and over and over again from your blog with an internal link, which I would recommend varying the types of links within your blog post write different keywords. ads, naked URLs, all that kind of stuff. But you’re pushing links into different parts of your site through the press releases and or the GMB posts. And then you’re siloing those press releases as well. Does that make sense? Okay, guys get that again, just go watch this webinar. And it will make perfect sense to you. And it’s super, super powerful guys. And that’s a free webinar.

Okay. And if everything is linked correctly, and the way that it’s supposed to juice is going to flow anyway. And that’s the one thing that I know Nathan is in our mastermind. So he knows exactly what I’m talking about. Everything is interlinked the way that it’s supposed to, to accrue PageRank to accrue ranking score, that you don’t need to insert, press releases or any other type of link building into the same page time after time after time. You can build it in other places, and everything from that link building will benefit everything in that stream will benefit from it if you’ve done it the way that you’re taught. And if you Go and do it your way that’s up to you, but we teach you the right way.

How Do You Set The Images In A Google Image Search Carousel?

Alright, so the last one, it’s five o'clock, so I got to wrap it up guys, but I want to answer Jonathan’s cuz I kind of skipped over it. Jonathan says image SEO question. I have a search query. I have a search query that has a first and last name with the only SERP feature being an image carousel. How would you go about getting the images you want to show in the carousel? Thank you. Okay, well, I’ve been able to comment, first of all, optimize the images. So alt text, meta metadata, and stuff that you can optimize the images that you want. Also, make sure that you can build links to images, guys think about that. There’s a number of ways that you can do that. So you can build links directly to your images. Now, I wouldn’t buy spam links to like the image URL hosted on your money site. But if you can publish that same image in one of your entity assets, and then hammer that, you know, image file URL on that in one of your entity assets, with backlinks that’ll help it to rank as well. And I’m sure Marco has got a few tricks to help you with that too.

No, no, it’s not trick tricks. We just see it from the SEO shield. Because we’re mirroring everything we’re including the same images. When that gets links into it, it powers everything up. Land solutions network has a bunch of its own images in the image carousel. When you look at the brand. We do a brand search for Nat solutions that were good has it the image carousel, it has the video carousel doing it and if there’s a cheap GMB, adding images in the GMB will benefit, right from the link building everything else that you do to the GMB if you’re stacking your posts the way that you’re supposed to. If you’re interlinking, the post the way that it’s that is taught in local GMB Pro, then all of that is going to benefit from everything that you do. The whole point is that you do it correctly from the start. So you’re not cutting off the link juice at any point in the process.

And here’s what one trick, and then we’re gonna wrap it up guys, we can close it down. But if you’re using press releases, we’ve talked a lot about press releases today. So I feel like it’s only fitting that I bring this up. Again, through mygb, it’s going to be distributed through Press Advantage, you’re going to it’s going to be first published on the Press Advantage domain through the organization page that will set up for if you don’t already have it if you have your own subscription, and you’ll know what I’m talking about, you get an organization page, publish a press release, include an image in the press release, because that’s super powerful in itself, press release images often will rank in those image carousels, okay, because they’re republished on so many media sites, make sure that the file name is optimized when you upload it to breast advantage or give it submit it to us. Then if you have your own Press Advantage subscription, you can add your own image, you know, all tags to it, which again, you can squeeze keywords like the name, in this case, the first and last name, that kind of stuff. Then once it’s been published, if you look at the HTML code of the press release that’s been published on the Press Advantage domain. You get the image file URL. Now you can take that and you can hammer that with backlinks. And that’ll help that to rank in the carousel I know because I’ve done it. So anyway, you can also, by the way, if it’s if it was for a local project, you can do something similar with images that are hosted on Yelp, for example, you can hammer and also Google Google Maps. If you upload images to a Google Maps profile, GMB profile when you go to view that in maps, you can extract the URL of that image from the address bar of your browser, and you can hammer that with links and that will help that to rank as well. So I think I gave away a lot there. Alright. Thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys next week. Thanks, Marco for sticking around.

Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 293 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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youngwinnertragedy · 4 years

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 293

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 293 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Good. Happy to be here. It’s hot as hell they are now right now though. It’s like, middle of summer and nasty but yeah, things are good. Besides that. Awesome,

Chris. How about you man?

Yeah, it seems pretty good here. Whereas nice no rain. It’s not as hot as we spread. Lee like evenings and stuff are still chilly and cold. Like seems a pretty lovely, awesome new Marco. Oh, date.

There you go. Powerful, so

Yeah, subscribe so you don’t miss the Fourth of July sale. There you go.

All right. Well, we got a lot of questions already. So I want to jump right into it, though. Let me grab the screen.

Zoom will cooperate.

Okay, you guys are seeing my screen, correct?

Yes. All right.

Ah, I think I’m okay.

Does Press Release Distribution Correlate With Rankings?

What Are Some Best Practices When Distributing Press Releases?

He said, If yes, are there any best practices you tested?

Local PR pro? Yeah.

Is Content Curation Still Helpful As Of 2020?

Do You Think Google Lied About Their Documentation On SameAs Schema?

How Do You Deal With A Prospect Who Asks To Rank For The Same City And Niche Of An Existing Client?

What Tiered Syndication Network Is Beneficial To A YouTube Channel?

How To Use The SEO Shield To An eCom Site With No Physical Address?

Is There An Automated Way In Getting The Links Of A Newly Syndicated Post?

Why Does The RSS Of Other Authority Channels Be Changed Frequently When Submitting The Super Feed?

What Should You Do With A Side Business Website?

But Marco, do you want to take a stab at that?

Yeah, no, I do it. It doesn’t work. What would you do that?

Okay. Yeah, you’re gonna see my fat face.

That’s two Bradley’s ago.

Yeah, that was a long time ago, man. A lot bigger than anyways, go that you guys have a good laugh from that.

Do You Link The Same Money Site Page or Post You’re Trying To Rank More Than Once?

How Do You Set The Images In A Google Image Search Carousel?

Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 293 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

beyondvapepage · 4 years

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 293

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 293 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Good. Happy to be here. It’s hot as hell they are now right now though. It’s like, middle of summer and nasty but yeah, things are good. Besides that. Awesome,

Chris. How about you man?

Yeah, it seems pretty good here. Whereas nice no rain. It’s not as hot as we spread. Lee like evenings and stuff are still chilly and cold. Like seems a pretty lovely, awesome new Marco. Oh, date.

There you go. Powerful, so

Yeah, subscribe so you don’t miss the Fourth of July sale. There you go.

All right. Well, we got a lot of questions already. So I want to jump right into it, though. Let me grab the screen.

Zoom will cooperate.

Okay, you guys are seeing my screen, correct?

Yes. All right.

Ah, I think I’m okay.

Does Press Release Distribution Correlate With Rankings?

What Are Some Best Practices When Distributing Press Releases?

He said, If yes, are there any best practices you tested?

Local PR pro? Yeah.

Is Content Curation Still Helpful As Of 2020?

Do You Think Google Lied About Their Documentation On SameAs Schema?

How Do You Deal With A Prospect Who Asks To Rank For The Same City And Niche Of An Existing Client?

What Tiered Syndication Network Is Beneficial To A YouTube Channel?

How To Use The SEO Shield To An eCom Site With No Physical Address?

Is There An Automated Way In Getting The Links Of A Newly Syndicated Post?

Why Does The RSS Of Other Authority Channels Be Changed Frequently When Submitting The Super Feed?

What Should You Do With A Side Business Website?

But Marco, do you want to take a stab at that?

Yeah, no, I do it. It doesn’t work. What would you do that?

Okay. Yeah, you’re gonna see my fat face.

That’s two Bradley’s ago.

Yeah, that was a long time ago, man. A lot bigger than anyways, go that you guys have a good laugh from that.

Do You Link The Same Money Site Page or Post You’re Trying To Rank More Than Once?

How Do You Set The Images In A Google Image Search Carousel?

Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 293 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

0 notes

daynamartinez22 · 4 years

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 293

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 293 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Good. Happy to be here. It’s hot as hell they are now right now though. It’s like, middle of summer and nasty but yeah, things are good. Besides that. Awesome,

Chris. How about you man?

Yeah, it seems pretty good here. Whereas nice no rain. It’s not as hot as we spread. Lee like evenings and stuff are still chilly and cold. Like seems a pretty lovely, awesome new Marco. Oh, date.

There you go. Powerful, so

Yeah, subscribe so you don’t miss the Fourth of July sale. There you go.

All right. Well, we got a lot of questions already. So I want to jump right into it, though. Let me grab the screen.

Zoom will cooperate.

Okay, you guys are seeing my screen, correct?

Yes. All right.

Ah, I think I’m okay.

Does Press Release Distribution Correlate With Rankings?

What Are Some Best Practices When Distributing Press Releases?

He said, If yes, are there any best practices you tested?

Local PR pro? Yeah.

Is Content Curation Still Helpful As Of 2020?

Do You Think Google Lied About Their Documentation On SameAs Schema?

How Do You Deal With A Prospect Who Asks To Rank For The Same City And Niche Of An Existing Client?

What Tiered Syndication Network Is Beneficial To A YouTube Channel?

How To Use The SEO Shield To An eCom Site With No Physical Address?

Is There An Automated Way In Getting The Links Of A Newly Syndicated Post?

Why Does The RSS Of Other Authority Channels Be Changed Frequently When Submitting The Super Feed?

What Should You Do With A Side Business Website?

But Marco, do you want to take a stab at that?

Yeah, no, I do it. It doesn’t work. What would you do that?

Okay. Yeah, you’re gonna see my fat face.

That’s two Bradley’s ago.

Yeah, that was a long time ago, man. A lot bigger than anyways, go that you guys have a good laugh from that.

Do You Link The Same Money Site Page or Post You’re Trying To Rank More Than Once?

How Do You Set The Images In A Google Image Search Carousel?

Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 293 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes