Andrew:	This course will give you proven customer acquisition tactics. It is led by Brian Kaldenberg. He is the president and founder of Proofreading Pal, the site you see on your screen right now, an online proofreading and editing service. I am Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, where proven founders, like Brian, teach. Brian, what was life like before you discovered these customer acquisition tactics that you are about to teach our audience today?

Brian:	Well, that would take me back to life in May 2010. That was when we launched Proofreading Pal, and life was much different back then than it is now. It was much more difficult, much more stressful. We launched Proofreading Pal, we had our proofreaders in place, but we were not getting orders. I would go to bed at night and it would be three or four days since we had our last order, and my biggest fear was, "Well maybe this business isn't going to work out how I planned. Maybe there is just not room for me in the industry." 

My other fear was:	"What is going to happen with our proofreaders?" That is, "If we get a project, are our proofreaders still going to be around to do the project, or are they going to be burned out or tired of sitting around five or six days and only one project?" so that is kind of what life was back in May 2010.

Andrew:	You have stats, I think, that you said for the first time you are willing to share publicly. Can you show those?

Brian:	Yes, I will show those. 

Andrew:	This is for the first month that you were in business, and you also have the second and third month to give people an understanding of where life was, and there it is. I will let you take it from here.

Brian:	This is May, when we launched, and you can see we go our very first order May 3rd. The second order did not come in until May 10th, and it is lots of days without orders, and to be honest, it does not get any better in month 2. This was June 2010--the same thing--lots of days without orders.

Andrew:	I see a lot of zeros:  0, 0, 0, 0, 0. There is a 3 day that must have felt exciting, but it is surrounded by 1s and 0s and more 0s even than 1s, so this is where it was.

Brian:	Then July.

Andrew:	Here is the third month.

Brian:	Yes, the same thing, and through tactics that I am going to show you today, this is where we are now, sixteen months later into the business. I am going to show you a chart here.

Andrew:	All right, and again, this is the first time that you have shown this chart publicly like this, but in order to help the audience understand what is possible, you agreed to show it, and these numbers--this graph--looks way, way impressive. 

Brian:	Today, we are over 19 projects now, on the day, and this month estimated we are only about halfway into November, where we should go over 410 projects this month. It has been a lot of hard work, but we are here today because of the tactics we have implemented, so why don't we jump into tactic number one?

Andrew:	Sure. In fact, let me do a quick breakdown of what is coming up for the audience. You guys are going to see how to buy traffic from Google and other search engines. You are going to find out how to design your site for conversions. I am looking over to the right, because that is where my list is. You are going to see some basic on-site SEO. You are going to find out how to ensure your site has valid code and CSS file and why that is important to getting customers. You are going to find out how to optimize your site for speed. You are going to learn how to get links--a surefire way to get links. 

It is going to cost you a little bit, but you are going to get links, and you are going to find out how to do that. You are going to find out how to create a blog that does not just tell people about your business, but actually gets you ranked high in Google search results. You are going to even discover a Craigslist method for getting you new customers. You are going to find out how to keep the conversion going after you finally get a customer, and you will do that by increasing the lifetime value of your customers and--I will leave this as a mystery tip--Brian is going to teach you how to move in with your customers, and I think that is really impactful. 

We will save that for last, because I want anyone who the whole time sits like this with their arms crossed saying, "I know this; I know this; I know this,"--I want even that person at the end to say, "I hadn't thought of that," and I have a feeling that for most people including that person, there is a lot along the way that they are going to be able to pick up. As you said, Bryan, the first tactic has to do with buying ads. Why buying ads before all these other tactics? Why does that come first?

Brian:	It is because you need to learn which keywords work, which keywords convert. You need to get your feet wet and making some changes to your website to help convert, and the quickest way to get that test running is to do Google Ads.

Andrew:	OK.

Brian:	People might say don't do Google Ads, do search engine optimization. Well, it takes a long time to get your website optimized in Google for certain keywords. You spend a lot of time and money. You don't get high on Google search engines and the natural results without spending money. The main reason you do paid search first is to find out which keywords work. 

And so, we have a theory called triangulation method, and it's a real quick easy way for you to get into Google advertising to start sending traffic to your website without breaking the bank account, and that's what I'm going to show you how to do first here. We're going to go into my Google AdWords account, the last 30 days.

Andrew:	As a big picture overview of what's coming up, you're going to show them how to pick keywords. You're going to show them how to write the ads based on those keywords, and then you're going to explain where those ads need to link on your website. So, keywords, ads and landing page, and then we'll get deeper into landing page later.

I do see it now up on my screen, the Google AdWords, and the audience sees it up on their screen. What's the first thing that we do? 

Brian:	Well, first I don't want people to get scared because they see these numbers. We were not spending this much 12 months ago. We're increasing our budget every month because Google AdWords is working. So, don't see these numbers here and think, oh, I can't spend $5,000 a month on Google because that's what we're spending. We built it up into a successful campaign

The first thing is you want to separate out your content traffic from your search traffic. Create a separate campaign that's only going to house your search traffic. Then what you want to do is you want to create ad groups, and what ad groups are is ad groups house keywords and ad groups house ads. 

What triangulation method helps you do is pair key words up with specific ads, and so we have what I'll be referring several times here as what's called exact match ad groups which will have one to two keywords inside of them that are exact match keywords. Meaning the only time your ad shows up is if you type in that keyword exactly, and we have very specific ads for those keywords.

Another type of ad group I'm going to be talking about is called phrase match ad groups. Inside phase match ad groups we have phrase match keywords. What a phrase match keyword means is we'll use the keyword proofreading service, for example. Someone might type in best proofreading service our AdWords show, or someone might type in college essay proofreading service or someone might type in proofreading service 24/7. It allows us to show up for all of those keywords from the same group, and then I'll show you . . . The goal of the phrase match is to identify these keyword phrases that we might not have thought about and then move them, transition them into exact match ad groups so we can write a more specific ad. 

Andrew:	I see. So, earlier when you were talking about proofreading service as a phrase match, any additional keywords that users might type into Google in addition to those three words, proof reading service, any time they type in those three words plus others, you'll show up if you picked phrase match. 

The goal then is to see what they are typing in in addition to proofreading service and then isolate those. Maybe, they type in college proofreading service and you get a good response from that. You'll isolate that phrase with the extra word, and then you'll make it into an exact match where the ad only shows up when users type in that exact match. And that's what we're trying to do, find those keywords that are appropriate for exact match ad buys.

Brian:	The whole reason we're doing this boils down to what's called CTR. What that stands for is your click through rate. Google does not make money in Google AdWords advertising unless ads are being clicked. And so, Google will favor ads that have a high click through rate because they're making more money. 

One of our competitors might be bidding two, three dollars more per click than you, but their ad gets clicked 50% less. Google is going to show your ad ahead of them, you're going to get more clicks, and you're going to pay less per click. That's why it's so important to use triangulation method to target keywords to be able to write specific ads because the bottom line is what it really does is it helps increase your CTR score. So what were going to look at is two ad groups right not. We're going to look at editing service, which is in phrase match because it has the quotes around it. 

Andrew:	Quotes means phrase match and it's a broader search, and the brackets means what?

Bryan:	Brackets means exact match. So I'm going to first take you inside of editing service. The exact match editing service ad group. And so you see inside here we have editing services and editing service and that's it. If they type editing service or editing services they show if they don't they do not show. 

Andrew:	And the ad the show of course is the one that we see at the top of the screen which is 24-7 editing service 100% satisfaction guarantee the only way that that shows is up is if people type in only editing service. 

Brian:	So we know that, that's the only key words that our ads will show up for there fore it lets us write a very specific ad. [??] I'll go and do our ads here and you can see we have the word editing service in there. Because we want have the key words that they're searching for as much as possible because Google will bold those keywords. And so we can edit here, in the headline of ad you definitely want to have [??] keyword. And I like to try to use an adjective with the keyword as much as possible. 

Then down here you still want to try to include the keywords. But we like to use points of differentiation in here that our proof reading service might offer that our competitors don't. One of the things that we offer that not all of our competitors do is the 100% satisfaction guarantee, so we put that in there. Another thing that we do, that not all of our competitors do is two editors on every document. And so we've got the word editor in there again. We've got the word editing service is there again, and then finally it's the display URL. 

Do not forget that you can do whatever you want with the display URL. And so a lot of people just type in their URL like that and leave it. Very important, go ahead and add in another keyword if you can possibly fit it in there. You might as well because it's Google's silver bullet. So that's the art of writing ads and then write two ads and let them compete against each other and to find out which one is doing better. These ones are doing pretty similar, they're 7, versus a 6.9%. So this is the nuts and bolts of a successful exact match ad group.

Andrew:	I just want to emphasize this, because earlier we had an issue, we recorded this before. And when we recorded before you actually did a search for editing service and you showed how your competition's not putting in the keywords into the ad. So you've got bold keyword, bold keyword, bold keyword, really standing out, and they don't have anything and it looks like they're just background to your ad. 

Brian:	I think we did essay proof reading. 

Andrew:	I think that's one ad that you're showing us.

Brian:	So here's our ad essay proofreading, bold, there you can clearly see it. You can clearly see proofreading in our domain is bold. You can see essay at the end of display URL. They even bolded proofreaders, even though it doesn't match up 100% it's still close enough, and then essay. Now look at this one down here. They have proofreading and services is all. I don't see essay once. I think of all these ads are ad sticks out the most as far as how many times it's bold. This one only has two bolds. This one over here has one bold, essay is all. So they're doing a poor job.

Andrew:	And because you've got an exact match you know the specific keywords that your searcher is looking for. And you can stick those keyword all over the place in the add where its appropriate. Could you just show us maybe one phrase match so that we can see how you would pick a keyword and make it, and move it up a level to the exact match. 

Brian:	So we'll transition into phrase match. The downfall of exact match is, we're here in our exact match editing service ad group. What if someone types in APA editing service? What if someone types in essay editing service, or resume editing service? We're not going to show up for that keyword right now, because we've got exact match keywords in our exact match ad group. This is where phrase match comes into play, and so I'm going to go up here to our phrase match ad group right here - and remember, ad groups house keywords and ads. And we just put these quotes around for our own internal organization, to know that it's the phrase match ad group. 

So I'm going to go into there. Now in this ad group, we have the same two keywords, "editing services" and "editing service", with the quotes around them, so they are phrase matched. This whole ad right here will show up for "fast editing service", "best editing service", "resume editing service", "college student editing services" - it would show up for all of these different types of keywords. Which is great, but now what we want to do, is we want to look at these keywords. 

Maybe there's a key phrase that's searched for quite often, and maybe there's an opportunity to move that into an exact match ad group, with an exact match key word, with an ad that's more directly written towards that exact key word. So I'll show you how to go and find those keywords. Let's go look at the last three months of data - 08, let it refresh here - so we've now got about 400 - let's go back five months. So we've got 776 pieces of data to look at. So I click this little box that highlights these - oh I'm in the ads, I need to go into keywords.

Andrew:	I see you've clicked the tab that says "Keywords", and the reason you're doing this is because you want to see the performance of your keywords. It's going to take a moment to come up on my screen.

Brian:	There we go. So I've got these two keywords here, and I click this little box to highlight them, and now I want to know what the exact phrases are. So I click the "see search terms", and I click "selected", and then - boom. So, "editing services for writers" has been clicked 159 times, VERY high CTR of 17.5, it's got 9 transactions for me here, and I'm converting at 5.66% - that's pretty darn good - and it's costing me about $67 per transaction. Which a lot of people will think is high, but what we're going to talk about later on in this episode is how maximizing lifetime value is where you can make this profitable. So I've targeted this. This is a keyword where I think, "You know what, I could probably do better if I wrote an ad more specific for it."

Andrew:	I see, so now what you would do, is you would pull that out, you would have a separate ad written just for writers - it would maybe say something like "editing services for writers" - and that way people who are typing that phrase into Google will see your phrase that looks like the perfect match with what they've just typed in, and they'll be more likely to click. 

Brian:	Should I show them how to do that? 

Andrew:	Yeah, let's take a look at how you do that. 

Brian:	Okay, so let's just copy this from here - copy - and I'll go up to my ad groups again, and I'll create a new ad group. 

Andrew:	And you're actually about to buy this ad, right, while we're watching you? 

Brian:	Right. I put brackets around it, for our own internal organization, just so we know it's an exact match - "editing service for writers." For the top I might put, "Editing Service Writers." So this can probably say the same two - I'll change "proofreaders" to "editors" on every document, and then we'll just put "writers." And bam, we've got a more specific ad now that's written for this keyword. Then down here, I add the keyword? And I put brackets around the keyword. This lets Google know this is exact match now. If it were phrase match, I'd put quotes - we're going brackets - and see, it shows you right here, advanced.

Andrew:	There it is. Let's just pause for a second, and now people can see, under the keyword section it says, in brackets, "editing services for writers" and now you need to make your bid. And you know how much it's worth to you; it's obviously based on your experience.

Brian:	Yeah. And then I'll just hit "save ad group". Now, let's see, it's Editing Services Provider. It's a new ad group in my campaign, and the ad is pending review. So, that's triangulation method in a nutshell. And once you get use to it, it's a very, very successful tactic that most U.S. competitors aren't doing. And it's a good way for you to get your feet wet in Google, and start driving traffic to your website, to find out which key words are converting, and then we can move into search engine optimization. 

Andrew:	Ok, so one of the key phrases that you have is resume proofreader service. People seem to be typing that into Google. You have an ad with that phrase. What do people see when they end up, when they type that and then click your ad?

Brian:	Ok, so you can see here, we're moving into conversion, right?

Andrew:	Yeah. So now we're going to...One of the things you want us to understand is buy ads from the beginning, your telling people. It's a good way for you to get consistent, dependable traffic. It's also a good way for you to learn what key words work for you. But you also say the next step is to create a page that is designed for conversions. Not for beauty, not for personal satisfaction, that you feel proud of the design. It has to have conversion in mind. So let's take a look at what a conversion based landing page for you looks like.

Brian:	OK. So this is our landing page that's been optimized for the key words Benzenite [SP] Proofreading Services. The very first component that I feel is important for conversion is special proof, it's also known as testimonials. You can see at the very top of the website we have a testimonial. Another way to provide social proof is the Facebook Like link, and also show the number of people that Like. Now, you can control this. If I didn't want to show this number, I can turn it off. 

Once we went over 100 people who liked our Facebook page, I decided to have it show the number. Those two things are important. Another thing that is important, is highlight things that you feel are important to your customer, and might make you a point of differentiation from your other competitors. One thing that we know, is that a lot of our competitors don't accept and proof read documents 24/7 [??]. We put that up there real big [??] so customers know [??]

Andrew:	Sorry, the connection was choppy there for a moment. So, what you're saying is that a lot of your competitors don't accept documents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You do. That's important to a segment of your customers. They want to know that they can submit a document overnight, because they happen to finish it at one in the morning, and that there's someone there to pick it up. And that's why you highlight that on the page. You also highlight to the right of that a phone number. Does that get used?

Brian:	Yeah. We get calls all the time. [??] We're open from 8AM to 10PM every single day [??] Christmas, Thanksgiving. You name it, we will be here to answer your phone calls. That's another point of differentiation [??] customers. Our other competitors don't offer [??], a lot of them don't [??].

Andrew:	Sorry, I think we're a little choppy because that second tab for Google campaign management seems to be taking up a lot of bandwidth. So, if you turn that off, we'll probably end up getting more bandwidth for this connection. That's the ad word campaign.

Brian:	[??] better now?

Andrew:	Yeah. Yeah, there we go, much better.

Brian:	Better now? OK.

Andrew:	So, now we can go back to your page, and you'll show us what else is going on, on here.

Brian:	OK. So, another way to increase conversion is if you have really good customer service that's available, advertise it. Let the customer know. Why would you hide your 800 number down at the bottom of your website, when that's definitely something that makes people feel comfortable, that they know they can call? Same if it's live help. Just makes your website seem more live, it's actually a real chat. It's a service that you can get for free. It's from Comm100.com. That's C-O-M-M-100.com. And the way we set it up is when we're logged in [??] images here. I'm going to go away, here's my little, here's our chat right here.

Andrew:	Let's give it a moment to come up. 

Brian:	This is the chat.

Andrew:	What you're going to show us is the chat window that you see when peopling...that tells you where people are on your website through your funnel and enables you to chat with them. And you can pop up a chat window for them if you want to start a conversation with them, but you don't do that. Or you can wait for them to chat with you. And there's the Comm100, C-O-M-M-100. A free application?

Brian:	Free application. And then, the way we set it up, if I go away on here, this little window just disappears. I'm refreshing here. This chat button will go away.

Andrew:	Okay. I see.

Brian:	So that's another way. It makes your website feel more alive which increases the chance someone might order from you, especially in our business, and it lets them ask a question if they have one. Other items that are important are trust logos. We've got McAfee Secure. For us it's $800 a year. It lets people that our website is secure. It scans our website every couple of days, sends us a notification if there's any security loopholes that we need to shore up. 100% satisfaction guarantee - very important. We stand by it. It makes the customer feel that you're confident you can do a good job. 

We also have some corporate customers here that we kind of rotate through that I need to add to our list because we don't have very many. This lets people know we accept credit card, we accept debit card, and then GoDaddy SSL certificate. We go off the extended validation for our SSL certificate. Reason being is because when you start a checkout process it just adds this little green thing up at the top here. It's just a little thing. We like it. It's a little more visually appealing. The cheaper SSLs won't do that.

Andrew:	Let's give that a moment to come up on the screen. What you're saying is that on people's URL bar, on that address bar, there's a big green note that says that this site is safe and that adds a sense of security to people. I can't believe how when we test, and we've done A/B tests with these shields, how much it increases conversions. I would think that at some point people would say I've seen these logos all over the internet. I get it. The internet is safe. I don't need this security anymore. But even with my audience, a sophisticated audience, seeing a shield increases conversions. I remember asking Ann Holland who runs a website called which test one about why do people, when you run A/B tests, why do they trust those logos? Why are they more likely to buy with them and she said, "Andrew, people don't even think about it. They just see it and then they feel safe and they move on. Most people aren't spending as much time analyzing our websites as we are and that's why it just works. It quickly gives them a sense of security." 

While I talked I now see the Proofreading Pal LLC right up there in green on top and that's why you have that certificate there. How about two other areas of this landing page that you want to point out to the audience so that they can learn from that?

Brian:	Sales copy is important. We're still trying to master it. We have room for improvement but your copy needs to sell. We like to highlight our points of differentiation. There are two proofreaders for every document, one of the very few proofreading services that does that, so we always try to talk about that. Satisfaction guarantee. And then finally we have a video here. It's a little animated video. It's about 35 seconds with voice over and it basically just takes them through the just of what our service offers. So you combine all those things together and make it easy for them to buy your product or start the checkout process. Across the top, you can see it's real easy - start now, start now, start now.

Andrew:	I see. Sorry, again the connection was going a little funky but you were saying make it easy for them to buy and right at the very top of your screen you're showing five different ways for people to buy.

Also, we'll talk about the title tags and H1 tags, but the heading here on this section is superior resume proofreading and this is what people would see if they were looking for resume proofreading. You're taking them to a page that continues the conversation they started with you when they typed in a search on Google. They type that search, resume proofreading, they see the ad that you've written that includes the word resume proofreading and they come to this page where that phrase continues and they see that what they started on Google they can complete on your website with all those start now buttons. They pick the option that they want.

I'm sorry for recapping so much but every time there's even a little bit of a lag I want to make sure that the audience gets to pick up on all of it. Is there anything else on here or is it time to move on to the next step?

Brian:	I think it's time to move on.

Andrew:	Okay. Can you close this tab too and that way hopefully we'll have a little more bandwidth still for the conversation?

Brian:	Yeah, let me just log out of my chat. The next tactic, so now you're getting traffic to your site, you've learned some things, and you've set your site up to convert better. Now you know some keywords that might be working for you. Now it's time to dabble in search engine optimization. The first thing that you need to do is you have to have the foundation down first. It's just like search engine optimization is a very large algorithm. The foundation though, if you get that down first it makes all the other little add ons much more successful.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a page on our website that does fairly well for search engine optimization. It's the keyword resume proofreading service.

Andrew:	And when people type that in, let's see where you show up.

Brian:	First and second.

Andrew:	First and second results. How long have you been in business?

Brian:	We've been in business for about 16 or 17 months.

Andrew:	Okay. So we're not talking about a business that's been around for five years and has had a chance to work at being at the top. We're talking about a new business with few changes to the site have helped you get this high. All right, so what do we do? How do we do that?

Brian:	These are some of the basic items that are the most important - you have to have these. Your title tag, which is in the upper left hand corner. Resume proofreading services is our title tag. Then the next thing is your meta description and your meta keywords. This is in the code. Your meta description needs to also contain the keyword that you're optimizing for. Your meta description needs to be written in a way that contains that keyword but also is kind of attractive because typically that's what's going to show up in the Google results, what you have in the meta description.

So if you go back to our Google result here, our premium resume proofreading service is the best way to guarantee your...

Andrew:	And that's what's in your meta description and that's where Google pulled that?

Brian:	Correct. The final thing is the meta keywords and this is in the code too. Put the keywords that you're going for in the meta keywords. Now the key is don't put too many keywords in there. You want to be very specific of what you're going for. You can't dilute it. So we're doing resume proofreading services and that's it. If we added resume proofreading services and then also essay proofreading services to this page and tried to optimize for both, we probably wouldn't rank in the top ten for either. So you want to be very specific. So those are the very first things.

Then you see right here, superior resume proofreading. This is actually inside of an H1 tag which is in the code. H1 tag is basically your header tag. That's how Google sees it. A lot of sites don't even have an H1 tag. It's very important to have the H1 tag at the top and to also have the keyword inside that H1 tag.

Andrew:	Okay.

Brian:	Then your text needs to have sprinkled in the keywords. In this case resume proofreading service - your text should have the word resume proofreading and services in the copy of the page. So those are the basics of what many will refer to as on page optimization. 

Now we go a step further. I'm going to show you a few other things that are also important that most of your competitors probably won't be doing. Do you want me to just jump into that, Andrew?

Andrew:	Yes. So now we're talking about the next section of the conversation here.

Brian:	What we're talking about now is the architecture of your code. Google will reward you very slightly for having what's called strict XHTML valid code and also making sure that your CSS file validates. We like to validate with the W3C website. I've got the buttons down here to show just to automatically do it but if I click this it's going to validate this page with the W3C. You can see this document was successfully checked as SHTML 1.0 strict no errors. Now, what we're going to do just for fun is we're going to see how Andrew's site does, and we're going to validate his site. Here's what's really nice about this is:	so, he has some errors. He has actually 37 errors. It'll show you all of the errors, what line, what column they're on. So, if Andrew wants, he can have his web developer go through, and they can get these errors cleaned up. 

Andrew:	Right.

Brian:	They're just minor coding errors that W3C doesn't like. Another benefit of getting these cleaned up is chances that your website will look normal across all browsers increases dramatically. So, that's another perk of making sure your website validates. 
Andrew:	And will the course include . . .

Brian:	The other thing is the CSS file . . .

Andrew:	The course tool kit will include, of course, links to these two validators, the one that you just did right now. There's also a CSS file validator. We'll include a link so that people can check their websites.

Brian:	So, my CSS file validates, too. All you do is put your CSS file in there, and it'll validate it. That's an important thing, and it will give you a slight SEO advantage. Now, another thing that Matt Cutts. That's his name, right, Matt Cutts?

Andrew:	Yep. There it is. 

Brian:	He's the blogger for Google. He's the blogger for SEO. I think it was a year ago they mentioned that site speed is going to become a factor in Google's algorithm for how they decide to rank you naturally. And so, it's important to try to optimize your site to load quickly. 

There's a tool, and I'm going to take you in our web master tools. It's showing that we're doing slow back in September. I don't know why because our site has been optimized for speed, so just ignore these.

Andrew:	If there's a blip, you'd jump in there, and the idea is that you want us to come here to Google.com/webmaster/tools - I think most people in our audience are familiar with it, but you're saying, use it; be more than just familiar with it and check out your site speed. Once we've checked out our site speed, what about that install page speed Firefox button? What do we do with that?

Brian:	OK. So, Google recommends this. It's a tool that you can install with Firefox. It's called Page Speed, and you can run it, and you can analyze any page on your website and it'll show you how you're doing and also things that you can improve on. And so, we've actually got this installed, and I'm going to run it on our home page. 

Firebug, open Firebug. I'm going to refresh analysis. Our home page, we're ranking 95 out of 100. We typically want all of our pages ranking over 90, but the nice thing, all these little arrows, it'll give you advice on what you need to improve. So, optimize images. If I put this arrow, optimizing the following images could reduce their size by 13%, and it shows the images. Unfortunately, these are images that are hosted on other websites so we can't optimize them. The cool thing about it though is it actually provides you the optimized version, and then it's real easy to replace things with the optimized versions.

Andrew:	I see.

Brian:	Let's just go see Mixergy real quick. Oh no. I hate to pick on you. Let's skip this.

Andrew:	That page, by the way, has been doing really well for us, that welcome mat.

Brian:	So, web developer Firebug, open Firebug, analyze. Andrew is at 82, not bad.

Andrew:	Not too bad.

Brian:	There's room for improvement though. 

Andrew:	All right.

Brian:	It's got the red ones. Andrew would obviously look at first, then the yellows and so forth. So, a great tool to help you find ways to improve your site.

All of those things we talked about, on page optimization, validating your code and then the speed optimization, I like to bundle them all as part of your foundation. It's not going to get you to the top necessarily. It's almost, a good analogy is a football team. If a football team is really good on the offensive and defensive lines, they're typically a good team and if they can piece together some other parts, a good wide-receiver, maybe a good quarterback or a good kicker, they can really become an excellent football team and that's where, what I'm going to talk about now is link-building.

Andrew:	OK. So we've built up, we've SEO'd our site. It's time to get some links to help drive it further up. Can you turn off the Mixergy page? Partially because I'm embarrassed that we didn't do so well on those tests, but also I want to make sure to save as much bandwidth for you as possible. Actually the Mixergy page isn't a bandwidth, it's a suck.

Brian:	OK.

Andrew Warner:	But the more resources, the better. All right. So, yes, what do we do to get some links?

Brian:	OK. Well, the reason you need links is because Google sees them as votes for your website. So let's say you and a competitor are going after the same keyword, then all those things that I've just talked about, the foundation so to speak, you guys are pretty much equal on that. Google is then going to look at who has more links, who has better links, and that's going to be their next deciding factor as to who ranks higher. 

So a good quick way to start getting links and to do it relatively inexpensively is, the service that I like to use is called "iNet Zeal" and it's a directory submission service. They're going to submit you to multiple directories and when Google spiders those directories it will show as another inbound link for your site. Now I'm going to show you kind of a quick way to get going with this. If you go to the website, click "directory submission", go down to the regular service. Let's do 500. $70 will get you into 500 directories. They're white hat and SEO-friendly directories.

Andrew:	And it'll get you submissions to 500. What percentage of those submissions will end up leading to links to your site?

Brian:	Typically what I've found, and I've done this maybe 15, 20 times, is maybe about 80%.

Andrew:	OK. So that every 100 that I buy, I end up with 80 links, which is not bad.

Brian:	And then you can put in your root level domain. Unfortunately, you can only put in one URL, put in some key words that you want to go for and then the descriptions for each one. So I'll do one, let's say I want to optimize for . . .

Andrew:	. . . resume proofreader.

Brian:	Resume proofreader. And then down here I put "proofreading pal, specializes in resume proofreading, 24-7". And that's all I put. So it's a good way to get links coming into your site and that's iNet Zeal. Another way to get links is to make sure that you have a Facebook account with a link pointing to your site or a Facebook page for your business, YouTube, Twitter . . . what are some other main ones? Yelp and Foursquare and all of those social media sites, make sure you have a page because that's a free, easy way to get an inbound link. 

Doing online interviews like I'm doing here with Andrew is a great way to get a link. Anytime your local newspaper, a local website, a blogger, your TV news station, anytime they do an article on you, a lot of times those things are getting put on their website now. Make sure, go and look and make sure they gave you an inbound link and link to your website because it's very valuable. So those are some other ways to get inbound links and all of those things encompass together make up a very good SEO strategy.

Andrew:	By the way, you did something that was really impressive. When you got mentioned by a local newspaper that didn't link to you, you just called them up and said, "Hey, can you please include a link? It's valuable." My wife was recently in The Guardian in England. They mentioned her. They gave links to the other two people in the article but they didn't give one to her. She didn't even think, "Hey, you know what? I should make a phone call here and have them link over to my site so that I can start ranking because of their link." Call them up, get the link. 

If Mixergy mentions, well, maybe not Mixergy, don't start calling me guys, you of course, as the leader need to get the link, but I don't want people who we happen to mention to all start requesting links. Actually, I take that last part back. Every single site that we talk about here, we will include a link to within the course notes, so that if you don't remember whether it was iNet Zeal or ZealNetI or whatever, it'll be there so you can just go a click on it and get it. 

All right. So now that's getting links to the site. You want to start talking about what we can do about long-tail keyword traffic? What do you do? 

Brian:	Okay. We like to go after long tail keyword traffic with a blog.

Andrew:	Mm-hmm? 

Brian:	And, so you know the main keywords you want to go after. There are keywords that you might not ever think of, and in the industry they're called long tail keywords. So what we like to do is create a blog, and write articles about anything and everything pertaining to the products and services we offer. Hopefully, these articles will have enough obscure keywords that might match up with the obscure long tail keyword phrases being searched for, that will rank. 

We have an advantage, too, because our proofreaders write our blog posts. Most of them are very good writers, and they know what to write about, and they know what the customer's looking for. One of our blog posts was about how to choose a proofreading service. Not a very high-volume keyword, but probably searched for a couple times a day.

Andrew:	What was the phrase?

Brian:	"How to choose a proofreading service."

Andrew:	Could you type that in, and let's see where it comes up? ..."How to choose a proofreading service."

Brian:	And again, we just launched our blog six weeks ago. So we're third here, for this.

Andrew:	There it is.

Brian:	What about "rush proofreading service"?

Andrew:	And by the way, that's third under eBay and Harvard, so we're in good company.

Brian:	And then, "rush proofreading service", we're second. So I'll take you into our blog now. Same principles apply as far as SEO. We have a title tag. We have a description tag. We have meta-keywords. We have an H1 tag right here. Very keyword-rich content. A lot of people - and I know, Andrew, we've discussed this - their blog doesn't even look like it integrates with their website very well. What was the word you used? It looks like a separate entity.

Andrew:	It is! And I can't even figure out how to go from their blog back to the website that they talked about, because the headline on their blog, or the logo on their blog - if I click it, it just takes me back to the home page of their blog instead of their site's home page or the product that I'm trying to buy.

Brian:	And so, what I recommend for your blog is to try to keep it within the same architecture of your normal site, and realize that a lot of these people coming to your blog might be looking for tips or how-tos. They weren't necessarily in the market for proofreading, or whatever service you offer. They're a little more of a cold visitor, so it's important that you still have all of these conversion mechanisms. In fact we need social proof right now on our blog - I see we don't have that - but the video is still here, the trust logos, things like that.

Andrew:	Right down to the "Start Now" button that enables them to just go and step through the process to buy.

Brian:	Yep. And so, that's a benefit of a blog. Another benefit is that people can share these articles on their Twitter, their Facebook; they can e-mail them to a friend. And then finally, we like the commenting.

We've used Discuss Commenting - I know that you use that on Mixergy, Andrew - and the reason I like it is because it allows a customer to have their own Discuss account with their picture. It also allows the customer, if they've set Discuss up right in their settings, to show their comments on their Facebook wall or their Twitter. I don't do that with my Discuss account, but if someone wants to comment on my blog post and also share it on their Twitter, more power to t them.

Andrew:	All right. So, you talked to me earlier about how one of the ways that you figure out what to blog about is by going through that process that you showed us right at the early part of this course, which is going through the AdWords that already work for you and seeing, "All right, can I write a blog post on this topic, so that anyone who's searching for it can potentially see my blog post and become a customer." 

The other way you told us that you find blog topics is by going through your Google Analytics and seeing, "What are people searching for and ending up on my site? Maybe I could create a post specifically on that topic, so that when they search they come to something that directly matches what they're looking for." And maybe you can start ranking higher. So that's the way that you look at a blog, whereas most people might think, "Well, what do I feel like today? What's going on in our company today? What do we want to announce?" No. You're thinking, "What's the customer thinking? What's the customer searching for? 

How do I make that process from that search to making a purchase goes smooth and as easy as possible. Yeah, all right. So let's turn off that tab, also. We'll come back, actually I guess we should leave that tab up because it's your site. I want one tab at least with your site so we can tell people where to come back in the future. And now, the next area of conversation is Craigslist. What have you done with Craigslist? If you turned off that tab we'll come back to it.

Brian:	Well, Craigslist ... we were out sourcing Craigslist ad posting to a service in India. And they would post two times a day on the twenty most populated cities in the United States. And so, I've got a example here of, now Craigslist is kind of tightened up their security measures and so now you have to have phone verified accounts. And so we're trying to find a way around that right now because it was successful, it was generating fifty to seventy-five visits a day. So, here's Chicago Craigslist, services offered, writing and editing translation is the category. And so they would go into this category on the twenty most populated cities and they would post an ad twice a day. An ad that would something like this image ad. 

Andrew:	OK.

Brian:	And there's people out there, believe it or not, that need proof reading and they think Craigslist is the place their going to find it. And so we had success with it, it's relatively inexpensive way to drive traffic. And also you are technically providing another inbound link to your web site every time you post an ad in Craigslist.

Andrew:	OK. And instead of doing it yourself you hired a company in India to go through twice a day and post each one of those cities. And the general idea, if not the specific idea, the general idea still works. OK. So, now we've gone through all the trouble of getting a customer. They have bought from us. Most people at that point would say, "Yay, I need to go and get more." 

In our conversations one of the things I admire about you is you say, "No, I worked this hard to get the customer, now it is time for me to build that relationship with them." Because it's easier to get more business from the same customer than to go hunt down a stranger and convince them that I'm a good guy and he needs to be buying from me. And you automated a lot of the process that many people in the audience are going to have to do by hand and maybe find an automation system for themselves to do. But, I don't want them, of course, to use your system because it's proprietary but I do want them to understand what you do so they can find their own method of doing this and I appreciate you opening up the doors and showing us behind the scenes how you do this. So, this is your customer relationship management software, you built it yourself. When you log in, what do you see? 

Brian:	OK. I'll go ahead and log in here. And it's basically just free forming things that we keep track of inside of here. The first being, and I'll start talking about it before the page comes up is, we have projects waiting for follow up call. Being it as we are an online business there's not a large opportunity to have interaction with our customer. And we really wanted to be able to do that. And so, every time a customer orders from us and their documents completed, we give them a courtesy call. And we use that courtesy call to let them know their document's ready. To let them know, and I've got the script, I'll bring the script up here.

Andrew:	OK. And even the script you've very generously agreed to let people in the audience have and of course if you are not in the proof reading business, in fact if you are in the proof reading business you don't want to use the exact script. What you want to get though is and understanding of what Brian does after someone buys from him. And what Brian does is he calls them up and take us through this. What is this?

Brian:	So we've got a script for, if it a repeat customer these long ones are if it's voice mail. And then we got a script if it's a new customer. And our CRM system the customers name will show in green if it's a new customer, we want to treat them a little bit differently. Let's say the customer answers, basically these things highlighted in blue are the things that we really want to make sure we cover. So, let's say I called Andrew after his project was ready I would say, "This is Brian. I'm calling with Proofreading Pal, this is just a courtesy call to let you know or to ensure that you received your most recent order." 

If he says, you know, yeah I got it or I didn't get it. Well, then we move on. I just want to let you know that we also have an order status link which is located in the upper left hand corner of our website. You can always download your document there and your document will be available there for up to seven days. Then the final things we really want to stress is again to let them know that we're open daily 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Finally, we want to say the word proofreading pal one more time and thank them before we get off the phone. 

So education is one thing that we try to accomplish in our courtesy call. Then you see down here we have some questions that depending on how the conversation was going we might find out how they found out about us. We might ask them for feedback or if we can use that on our testimonial page if they said something nice about us and also a lot of times questions will pop up - how does track changes work which is a feature in Microsoft Word and we can then take care of that situation for them right then and there so they can move on to working on their documents.

Andrew:	I see. Right a lot of people don't understand that they can track changes in Word. One of the reasons why you have that question is that we tend to think that Analytics is going to tell us everything about our users but you made a point in our conversation before this that if someone watches this course and goes to proofreadingpal.com and buys from you, there's no analytics in the world that's going to say he heard this conversation on his MP3 player while running or watched it on his iPad in the living room and then the next day typed in proofreadingpal.com and bought. The way that you're going to find that out is when you make a phone call to them and say thank you, you should know this, you should be aware of that, this will help you next time, and by the way, how did you find out about us - that's the way you find out where they connected with you first.

Brian:	The courtesy call provides that value. The other thing that it does is that if we didn't do it at all, is our brand gets a little bigger spot in their brain from this courtesy call which increases the chance that they'll remember us next time or that we'll popup in a conversation because how many customers...does Zappos call you after you get your shoe order? I don't know. Maybe they do; maybe they don't. But it's almost like it's so different that it's the chance that we might come up in conversation just out at the bar or in class or at a conference I think increases.

So the next aspect of our custom built CRM system you'll see here is customers needing gift package. This is what Andrew referred to at the very beginning of the show. We call it moving in with your customer and so if I clicked in here it would show me we have 14 customers right now who need a gift package from us because they've either ordered from us two times or their original order was over $75. 

What we've decided to do for our gift packages is pretty darn simple. We've got two, and I'll try to hold them up here so you can see, two branded proofreading pal ink pens. They get two of those. They get a personalized thank you note from me which I sign. By the way, if I sign like 100 of these, I don't write any more because I'm always on the keyboard, my hand is always killing. Then finally a proofreading pal chip clip magnet. 

The reason I use this is because at my house we put these on our fridge and then they hold pictures up on the refrigerator. Some people probably actually use them for chip clip magnets, but I was thinking college dorm rooms, there's one thing that is always in a college dorm room and it's a mini fridge and so I was thinking they'll stick this on their mini fridge, friends are in there playing video games, and somebody asks what is proofreading pal, and boom - we are living in their dorm room and now they're talking about us. So that's another piece of our CRM puzzle. Finally, you see here we've got Facebook searches.

Andrew:	There is something too - just being a physical presence in your customers' lives, whether you do a pen or something else. When you are a physical presence in your customers life you stand out in a way that you wouldn't if you were just another website. I've actually referred over and over transcription service on Mixergy and they still can't remember the name. They will email me over and over asking me who is that transcription service that you use. Who is the transcription service you use? I used them two months ago, I can't remember their names, and I can't find them in my inbox. 

When you go offline, make a connection maybe that day you can't, maybe not that you can't that's way different from the kind of connection that you make online ordinarily. I understand the value of that. Yes, this I like especially like too, that the way that you don't just connect with them by sending them a gift pack, just make a phone call. You really are bonding with people as a proofreading company, to bond with people this way is just unusual. So talk to me about that last one? Or that second to last one and then we'll go to the last one too. 
 
Brian:	So Facebook, every single customer that we get, we try to find them on Facebook through my personal Facebook account. And we send them a message, we thank them for using our service and I want to be friends with every single one of my [??] proofreading customers. And we send them that friend request, this is basically a custom built application that let's us do this efficiently, and we're finding about 80% of our customers on Facebook and then, of that 80% about 50% will accept my friendship. And then they can kind of follow me. 

I like to follow Gary Vaynerchuk, he does a really good job. So our customers can see what I'm up to, if I'm up tailgating at a Hawkeye football game, or on a trip. Builds that extra relationship with them, and I can also see what they're up to. One of the things I have to [??] be a little bit more careful about is what I say and do on Facebook, that's one of the downfalls. I wouldn't recommend doing it if you're going to be very, very pro a certain political party or anything like that. We get our customers commenting on some of my wall posts, and then the only way to physically invite people to like your business Facebook page is to suggest to friends. And so every month or two I'll go through and all the friends that I added that I haven't suggested like Proof Reading [??] page, I'll do that. And so that's another benefit of the Facebook search. 

Andrew:	All right, final point here is the quick quote section. I see that there is a zero on that. How does somebody end up in the quick quote section and what do you do with them? 

Brian:	Our website has a way for customers to generate real time quick quotes. It gets emailed to them and if they do not become a customer within I think we've got it set at three hours they filter into this quick quote field. And then I can click on this, open it up, see their name, look at their document, see the word count and then I can email them or call them and find out. Notice you did a quick quote, we're curious what's the reason you didn't order and we can really glean a lot of information from those phone calls and emails. Often times it's related on price and if the documents something I think we would like to do, I can then throw them a coupon code and try to convert them that way.

Andrew:	I love that you do that, most people I think, me included, don't know how to bring back potential customers who've gone through the process, but haven't pulled the trigger and made the purchase. So they give you their phone number, they've gone through the process you at the very least can call them up and find out what happened and maybe do a little something to tip them over the age and get them to buy. Alright, this has been incredibly helpful. 

You've given so much, let's bring Proofreadingpal.com up, but while I say this. I'll say thank you to you. I want people to see it because I want people to see that customer service tab at the very far right of the page. There's a way to contact Brian, and I hope, I always say this. If you got anything out of this, don't just be a passive viewer in life, say thank you. When you say thank you, it goes a long way to building a relationship. Maybe not one that you want to call on today. But maybe five years from now, maybe a year from now. Maybe six months from now, you guys will end up working together. 

Maybe by contacting Brian, frankly I actually don't know what happens. It's so odd, I had someone in the audience say Andrew, you told me to say thank you to a guests, I said thank you to people even though I'm in China. Nobody can even call me because our hours are upside down from yours. But one of your guests happened to be in China. He saw that I'm in China, he took me out for lunch. We had this incredible conversation. I introduced him to China, he introduced me to business in a way that I could have never had gotten even from Mixergy courses. So I always say find a way to connect with a guest and say thank you. And now you know how to do it. 

One more thing. We've given you so much, I know sometimes at the end of these courses you feel a little overwhelmed, don't. Look for just one thing that you can do after this course. Do it, then let me know about it. I'm always looking to hear from you about what your successes are with what you've learned in these courses and also what your challenges are. Send them to me and I promise if you want privacy, you don't want me to reveal it to anyone. I'm proud to say that I can keep your secret. But I am looking forward to hearing from you about your wins and your challenges. Brian, thank you for doing this course. I'll be the first person to and hopefully many, many others will do the same thing. Thanks for teaching us. 

Brian:	Thanks, Andrew, it's been a pleasure.

Andrew:	Thank you, thanks for teaching us.