Andrew:	This course is about how to control what people see when they Google you, and it's led by Patrick Ambron, who is the co-founder and CEO of Brand Yourself. Let's bring Brand Yourself up here. Brand Yourself is the company, it's the first do it yourself platform that makes it easy for anyone to take control of their Google results. Patrick and I will be talking about how you can do this on your own. My name is Andrew Warner, I'll help facilitate, and I'm the founder of Mixergy.com where proven founders like Patrick teach. Patrick, I know my audience, they're going to say, "Who cares? What's the problem that this is solving?". And the problem that this is solving has something to with what happened with your co-founder, can you tell the audience what happened with him?

Patrick:	Yeah when we were in college, my co-founder and at the time friend, Pete, he couldn't get an internship. We couldn't figure out why until he realized that these employers were Googling him and they were mistaking him for a drug dealer. Someone with the same name from around the same area, you know, who sold drugs, and everybody thought it was Pete. And we realized then that Google is an incredibly important part of your reputation, but unless you knew how SEL works, and most people don't, or have thousands of dollars to pay a reputation company, there was nothing you can do. 

Now, I had a background in SEL and was able to help Pete out but we realized that there were a lot of people who had similar problems, whether they were being mistaken for someone else or just had something embarrassing out there about them, or just they were being Googled by an employer and because it was all irrelevant or somebody else with their name or whatever it was, they were missing an opportunity to make a strong first impression in that moment.

Andrew:	Right, and in my case I know there's, Andrew Warner's not the most unique name out there and so when people were searching me in the beginning they would come up with the magician, who I think is in Ohio, great guy but, you know not related to me. I want them to know about me. Or they would see some random photo that someone took of me at a party, which makes me look like a crazy person, but because you know, it makes me look like a crazy person, more people were linking to it, and as we'll see that meant that more people were viewing it on Google. 

So, it's not necessarily that you in the audience, you the member who's watching this, who we're fighting for in putting this together for, it's not necessarily that there's an axe murderer out there that's got the same name and when people Google for you they end up seeing his story instead and confusing it with yours. That's one example, another example is frankly you want to control which pages about you come up first. And as a result of what Patrick did, here in fact, this is what it's like right now let me bring it up. This is the Google search result, for Patrick, for your co-founder. How many of his results does he own right now? I see the first one is his home page, the second one is his Linked In profile, Twitter after that, how many of those results are him?

Patrick:	Yup, and as you can see Pete now owns the first sixty five results with positive relevant things that really put his best foot forward when he's looked up.

Andrew:	Absolutely. And, just so people know, you have the experience here because not only have you done this for people individually but you also run a business, in fact here's the business right here, where you do this, you automate a lot of what we're about to teach people, you do it for them. What do you guy's charge?

Patrick:	The product's free. I mean that was our whole mission, was when Pete had the problem, I used to do it for businesses as a service, but I said when it comes to people, no one should have to pay a lot of money to control their own search results. So we created this software that makes it really easy for you to do the whole process yourself, and it's maybe, it's even actually fun. But it's a free product with some premium features, but most people get everything they need for free.

Andrew:	OK. All right, and we're going to show them how they can do it themselves here, and of course using Brand Yourself is one tool that they could use or if they say, "Hey, I don't want to feel as if they're selling me anything, I refuse to use Brand Yourself", they can use everything, you in the audience can use anything and everything in here to do this for yourself and to really just own your search results. So when people search for you they find you, and they find the best stuff about you that's out there. And this is the big outline that we're going to use. We're going to talk to you about an overview of how SEO works. I know a lot of you think that you know SEO and you probably do, this is just going to set us up for a conversation later on, and maybe, just maybe introduce you to some new concepts. 

We're going to talk to you about how to Google yourself properly, not just for fun, not just because, you know, it's a vanity check, but what to do when you're Googling for yourself. How to buy the right kind of domain, it hurts me when people spend money buying a domain, then spend time really mapping that domain and doing everything that they need to, and then they made the one mistake in the beginning that's going to hurt all those other efforts afterwards. We'll talk about how to build your main hub and what is your main hub. If you've seen some people, well, you're going to find out actually. How to have the right stuff on your website, if you're going to build a website do it right. 

And we're going to talk about how to sign up for social media, not just because you're going to chat, and of course chatting is good, but how to do it for search engine optimization. When you do it with search engines in mind, you do it a little bit differently, and I've got the screen shot here that you guys are going to want to see that will illustrate how to do that right. I'm going to talk about how do to your, well this is one that I think everyone needs to do, and it's important because some of the guests who I've interviewed are really good at this. 

They will make it hard for me when I interview them on Mixergy to find negative stuff about them because they're so good at getting the right bio in the right places and it makes my job harder, but, if you do this right, it's going to make your life a lot easier and your business easier. And then finally, Patrick but together an emergency tactic. This is what happens when bad results happen to good people. Patrick, you've actually said that we're going to make search engines our bitch. Let me get the [??] you're saying it. That was the title that you picked for this. So let's get right into this. Let's give a quick overview of how search engine optimization works. We're not going to spend forever on it, because this isn't the main thrust of the course, but what do we need to know to make all our other efforts really powerful here?

Patrick:	There's a few, so SEO can be and sound like a complicated thing, but I want to go over just a few general concepts some of you may know, but I'll frame the tactics we talk about later, and it's that search engine optimization is simply the process of making sure a link on the web ranks as high as possible for the right term. And what I want you guys to realize is search engines actually encourage white hat SEO because it helps them makes sure they're not mis-ranking something or they're not overlooking a rank, because search engines have to process millions of results for the right term. And when it comes to people, especially, sometimes they'll make mistakes. 

I'll give you a perfect example. Some of you may have something like this - have a friend who might have a great portfolio site. You know, you might be Andrew Warner, and you might have all this great stuff, all these interviews you've done. And I have a lot of friends like this and you Google their name and it doesn't show up. You find out they played volleyball in high school, or something like that, or there is someone else with their name. 

Andrew:	Right. The portfolio doesn't show up but all this other stuff shows up about them, or other stuff about other people. OK.

Patrick:	Right. And Google or Bing would want to see this. And by simply making some SEO changes, so let search engines know it's about Andrew Warner, it will all of a sudden show up hot, number one. So what I want to get across is that there is SEO, white hat SEO it's called, that search engines encourage because it helps them. And a lot of people miss these things and it keeps them from ranking high. The basic concepts you need to know, there's literally hundreds, but if you can keep these ones in mind:	there's the on-page SEO, which means what's on the page that helps search engines rank it. 

There's the structure and architecture. So when a search engine crawls a site, as they call it, they want to know, what is it about? What's most important on the page? There's hierarchies through things like heading tags and the code of the site. And you want to make sure that you structure it so they know your name is the most important thing on that page. There's keywords and content. Simply put, if you want a rank for Andrew Warner, and Andrew Warner is nowhere on the page, how would search engines know to rank him for that. And on that same token, where that name exists matters, you know, the URL. Like I said, title tags, heading tags, bold words. Search engines look for important places to find the right keywords and you want to make sure you're emphasizing what's important. 

Andrew:	Here, let me bring up this visual. I think it will help.

Patrick:	Yes. And then there's relevancy. Search engines want to give you as the searcher the most relevant things possible. So if you have something that's about ten years old or five years old, versus an article that was just written, the thing that's more updated kind of seems more relevant. So you want to make sure your stuff is relevant as well. 

Andrew:	So that's why even having just quick copy and paste, essentially, blog posts, helps you rank higher, because it tells the search engine, Hey, this is active. This site is new. There's something going on here. Even if you just take a picture off of some other web site and put a caption on it to say I saw this and here's what I think of this topic. 

Patrick:	And even that's why, and we'll get into it in the tactics too, but that's why even putting your Twitter feed on there updates it automatically. Even finding it once a month, and I'll get into this in blogging, writing an industry article. I mean, just keeping it updated is really easy to do, which I'll show you, but it's so important. And that's why I'm giving these concepts now. And then there's off-page SEO, which is what's going on off the page that's really important. And there's links. So Google counts each link to a site as a vote, because if this is saying it's all about Andrew Warner and this is saying it's all about Andrew Warner, they're going to say it seems pretty relevant. And where that vote comes from matters. So a vote from CNN is obviously more important than a vote from something that doesn't seem as credible. 

So you want to make sure, and we'll show you how to do that, you have credible places linking to your hubs, so search engines know this is a really relevant result and social sharing goes along the same lines. Social media sharing is another kind of form of links that makes search engines know this is really relevant because Twitter and Facebook, they're all saying this is something about Andrew Warner so this is making it more attractive of a result. But those are the basic tenants of SEO that'll help guide the tactics I'm going through and should frame your reference. Those are the things you want to always keep in mind. 

Andrew:	OK, all right. This one visual captures it all. These are the basics and now we're going to go on to the first tactic--there it is right there--which is Google yourself and see what comes up.

Patrick:	Exactly. So, the first thing you want to do is you want to Google yourself. I like to say--because if you haven't Googled yourself, somebody has. There's a visual in here that has some stats on it.

Andrew:	Yeah, let's bring it up and take a look at these stats.

Patrick:	80 million names are Googled every single day. 75 percent of HR departments are required to Google you before they make a decision. There was a recent study done--I didn't put this on there because I couldn't find the exact thing--but it's something like 65 percent of adults actually admit to Googling a first date. The point is you're going to be Googled and what shows up matters. 

Most people fall into one of three categories, which is the next visual. Negative, and that's the worst. You fall into negative, irrelevant or not me. Negative is obviously the worst. Unfortunately, in today's world it can happen to anybody. It takes one poorly judged tag from you or a friend, one blog post from a disgruntled ex or employee. That's going to hurt you. That's an easy way to really ruin that first impression. 

Then there's the irrelevant. Yes, they're about you but they're not--they found out you ran a 5k for your company three years ago, not that you're an entrepreneur or you started this website or you won this award. It's not doing you any good.

Finally, there's the hey that's not me category which is, at worst, really detrimental like Pete's story. At best--you know, Pete, he was being mistaken for the drug dealer--or at best, just confusing. What you want to get across in this is you Google yourself because you want to know where you stand. Most people think it's just about not having negative content, but that's actually not true. Not having positive content is almost as bad just because yes, bad results hurt you but good results help you.

Put it this way. You're applying for a job and you have three people in front of you. You Google the first guy, it's all negative. Easy way to take him off the list. You Google the second person and you don't really find anything, anything relevant at least. You Google the third person and you find out, wow, they went to school here. They've done this. They won this award; they see the blog post. Who's going to get that interview? That's what the rest of this series is going to be about:	how to put your best stuff up there.

Andrew:	You know, Patrick, and I've seen this, too, for interviews. People will hit me up to either interview themselves. Say, "Hey, Andrew, I've got experience. You should interview me," or their bosses. I'll go to Google and I'll see just a new company that's just launched and nothing else and I'll go, well this guy is just not appropriate for Mixergy. He's getting started and Mixergy is a site where proven entrepreneurs come to teach. Maybe in a few years. I've done this a few times where I've said no. 

Then a friend, later on, will come on and say, "Andrew, why didn't you have this guy on?" I'll go, well because he's a new entrepreneur. They say, "No, you don't understand." This guy built this huge company before or he's had this big achievement before. How am I supposed to know about it? When I Google, all I see is the latest stuff because they're getting started with a new company and they finally are starting to accept the power of search engines and the power of social media. That's when they're getting going and only talking about that. 

Or I'll come up with someone who used--running for an example. For me it's--for some reason--the news. There are some people who are so hopped up on the news that when I search for them, all I see is their opinion on some random set of news stories that they got all excited about for a period there in their lives, but I won't know who they are and I reject them. Often I reject them because I just don't recognize how great they are because it's buried underneath the stuff that's just not showing up their greatness, that's not the stuff that they want out there. They just assume that everyone knows because their friends know how great they are. I'm not their friend. I need to look them up.

Patrick:	Yep, and you hit on the most important point there. It's your first impression. You want them to find what you would say to them if they asked you to describe yourself, or something like that. That's really what the point of this all is. 

Andrew:	Yeah, of course. Even at conferences, I see people walk around with their mobile phones and they're just Googling the people who they meet. All right, so, you wanted to go back to the example that you had with Pete, just quickly touch back on that?

Patrick:	Sure, and Pete's a perfect example of not having anything negative out there. It's not like he was being irresponsible online. But out of his control, he was being mistaken for someone else and that was hurting his actual livelihood. He couldn't get an internship. And just for background, Pete was probably the best guy in our class. We were in Syracuse University in the information management program, you know which is tech. And he was the best in our class. He had started all these clubs and never got a call back until someone told him he was applying for a job, a person that worked there with him called him up, who graduated ahead of us, "Yeah,
I just had heard that, they had Googled someone and there was, he was a drug dealer." [background laughing] 

And that's, like, going around the office. And Pete Googled himself and realized, "Holy Crap, it's me and he had never Googled himself before. And when he saw it, that's when he's like, "Oh my God, this is really bad! This is why, what do we do, what do I do?" And that's kind of where we paired up and decided we need to make a solution for everybody.

Andrew:	Yup. Alright, so first thing we know what we're looking for even if we're not drug dealers; if all that's coming up is our passion for specific news stories that are irrelevant to what we're trying to in the World or it's that embarrassing photo that we took in the shower, I guess, with beer cans or whatever for us. You've got to be aware of that. Next step, going back to the big board is, buy the right kind of domain. What's the wrong kind? Before we get to the right kind, and I still see people do this.

Patrick:	Well, the thing you need to know is buying a domain, number one, is one of the most important things you can do when you want to start controlling this, and, that's because search engines always value the domain. So you want to buy our domain names, but a few rules you need to keep in mind is, number one; remember that keyword we talked about; the exact keywords they're looking for in places like domains? 

If you're trying to show up for Patrick Ambron, too many people say, "Oh, patrickambron.com's taken, right. So, I got Pat Ambron or Patty Ambron or you separate that name and that's actually not good. You want your name together. So, a couple things; keep your name together and buy everything you can. If PatrickAmbron.com is taken, that's the best one you can get, you know, get patrickambron.me or patrickambron.net; patrickambron.tv. There's all these new domains, but you want to keep your name together because that's the keyword and that makes a big difference. 

Now, the other thing you need to know is, not all domains are created equal. So, a ".com," for example, is usually the best. Now, people really like these ".me's" and all these new ones coming in and while they're good, and they're becoming more relevant and this is becoming less of an issue, but, it's not as good as a ".com" because search engines don't value them as much yet. So, it matters that you want to get, start with ".com" and then you want to go down and make sure you get domain, you know, a good example too is you want a ".com;" you definitely want a ".com." So, if your name is taken, instead of, get patrickambrononline.com or even [xx]

Andrew:	Is PatrickAmbronOnline.com better than patrickambron.me or ".tv?"

Patrick:	That's hard to tell. As of now I would say yes; that might change soon because those are becoming more popular, but a ".com" is always really valuable. And, the point is what I'm getting is they're a couple bucks. You should get all the one's you can even if you don't plan on using your domains right now. Which I'll get into how to use them later, but even if you don't, you're keeping another Patrick Ambron from taking your domain and I'll give you a little example of this.

Andrew:	Yeah, please. Talk about maybe, the lumber yard?

Patrick:	Yeah, so there's a guy. So, I used to, I used to do stuff all the time for businesses and one time a guy contacted me. And this is while I was building the automated software. He contacted me and he ran a family business that was a fourth generation family business of, you know, lumber yard; providing lumber for things. And because they'd been around for so long he didn't really have a web presence and they didn't really think they needed one and he probably didn't need to get business, right. He didn't need it for lead generation. He had word of mouth. They've had clients for years. But, there's a guy from the area who basically ran a, he did this to a lot of people. 

Basically, he would find businesses and he bought up all the domains for the guy's name, you know, "Joe," I won't use his whole name, but let's call him JoeSmith.com. He bought all the guy's domain names and, you know, this guy's name was his reputation, and just filled them with terrible things. "This guy will rip you off," "This guy doesn't know how to do business," etc. And, you know, they weren't even his websites. And then he started getting customers calling him. And this goes back to why you should be Googling yourself cause he had no idea. He didn't really care about his online presence, because that wasn't how he got business. But, they'd call him and [xx] "Listen, I don't know if you know about this, but you have all these things showing up at the top of your Google results and they're terrible. Who is this guy? What's going on?" And the guy did it on purpose, because he looked for money. He's going to charge the guy $20,000 to take it down. And the guy had a history of doing this. 

But the point here is, even if you don't plan on building a website or you think, "I don't need to care about it, because it's not a marketing tool for me." Reputation management is a different thing and it's important for everyone. Because if you don't buy your domain names someone else can swoop it up and it could be anyone. It could be, like I said, an ex-girlfriend. It could be someone you kicked off for whatever reason. They buy up your names, and those are hard to get down because the are your name dotcom, and he bought a bunch. He bought your name dotcom, his name on the line dotcom, and all these things are showing up at the very top of the results, overcoming the guy's years of business that he had done. 

Andrew:	Oh, yeah. So, all right, what you're saying is PatrickAmbron.com is the best. PatrickAmbron.me or PatrickAmbronOnline.com, second best. The worst is don't do Patrick Ambron if that's not what you go by or don't do DudeWhoLovesCoffeeAndRunning.com because when people are searching for you, they're not searching for DudeWhoLovesCoffeeAndRunning. 

Patrick:	That's right.

Andrew:	You want to keep the name together, and you want to go for dotcom if you can.

Patrick:	That's it exactly. Remember the keyword concept. The keyword is your name. You want to keep it together, and you want to get any other part that you can. You want to get as many as you can. It's nine bucks a year if you go to GoDaddy.com or plenty of others. It's an investment because you're keeping someone else... You want to buy as many as you can so no one hijacks the results. 

Andrew:	OK. What about what I notice when I go and search your name. Let me bring it up. This is what I see when I search your name. Let me zoom in and move to the side. It's not your dotcom that's showing up first. It's PatrickAmbronBrandYourself.com that shows up, even above PatrickAmbron.com. Should we be doing this with other sites, or do we need to do it just with our domain. What's going on here?

Patrick:	Well, we will get into the other tactics. There's other things besides your domain that you can get to show up high. Now, PatrickAmbron.BrandYourself is actually just a profile you can create with our product, Brand Yourself. Even more than a domain, those are just 100% optimized for your name automatically. They're just very, very good at showing up higher than anything. 

So, that's just our own software at work, but yes, besides your domain you'll be signing up for other profiles because you're going to use those in conjunction to get your stuff to show up higher. 

Andrew:	OK. Then, I'm jumping ahead. Let's then continue back with our original plan which is to talk about the next tactic, which is to build your main hub.

Patrick:	Mm-hmm.

Andrew:	What is our main hub, and what goes into it?

Patrick:	So, this goes along to what you were saying because you might have a lot of things showing up, but it might be missing some other stuff, what you did last. Maybe, all that shows up is like your latest project, but no one knows yet a really successful original project. Your hub, it's the easiest, most important way. Just make sure you're visible. All the other stuff you want is showing up there. 

So, you want to build a hub, and that can be some sort of profile or website that has everything you want, your whole background. Now, the thing is, with free tools out there, like a WordPress and a Tumblr, About.me, all visuals of some of our favorites, like Webele (?). I actually prefer Word Press because of what it gives you, but it's the most search engine friendly. It lends itself to search engine stuff which we'll get into. 

The point is you can create a hub, and the goal here is... There is where you put everything that someone needs to know about you. Remember Google likes to rank the most relevant thing and comprehensive thing possible. So, this is your chance to make the most comprehensive resource about Patrick Ambron on the entire web. 

Andrew:	So, Patrick, this is one page that has links to all the things, all the sites that I'm a part of. So, if I blog on Tumblr, this one page links to Tumblr. If I'm active on Twitter or active on HackerNews or active on Digg, this one hub, this page, has links to all of those. Do I understand that right?

Patrick:	Yep So, you're going to do a couple of things with this. You want to put all of your relevant background information, our bio. So, let's actually start with saying, "There's a visual on here of what to do first." So, once you build your hub, here are the rules. 

Number one, structure it well like we kind of talked about in terms of SEO reasons. So, you want to put your name wherever you possibly can, like if you're doing WordPress. You can do this with any of them. Your title, you've already got in your domain because you bought your domain, as we talked about. You have it there in the navigation. You have it there in the headings, Trevor Elwell Home. 

So, at first you just want to put your name anywhere that you can. Structure it well so search engines know that it looks like the most important thing on this page is Trevor Elwell.

The second thing you want to do, and I don't know if there's a specific visual for this, but as you said, fill it with the most relevant stuff. You want to put your bio on there. You want to write a good bio about yourself that says Trevor Elwell is whatever. He's a web designer from Syracuse, New York, who does XY and Z. You want to put your education, anything that you can. Your education, your work history, your personal interests. Again, anything you would tell someone in an interview. And that's a good rule though, anything you would tell someone at a job interview about yourself or someone who is like writing a report on you or writing a biography on you or writing a Wikipedia page about you, make sure that's on there. Because it lets search engines know, wow this is amazing this is all about Trevor Elwell and there's so much great information.

Andrew:	OK.

Patrick:	Number two, you want to also put some media on there. Because again search engines look more the most relevant results. So when something has media on it goes, it raises another flag for them that says...

Andrew:	What do you mean by media?

Patrick:	A photo, a video if you can. Something that says not only is this great information about Trevor but it's giving the searcher pictures of them and that's probably really good for the searcher, you know.

Andrew:	I see.

Patrick:	Search engines are pretty logical, their trying to give you who's searching for [inaudible] the most, the best results possible. So there's media on it, it likes that and says, oh look there's more stuff that the user is going to find.

And then as you said, because this is your hub, you want to link to everything else that goes back to those links. You want to say, OK, besides this information if you want to learn more about me here's Trevor Elwell on Twitter. Here's Trevor Elwell on, you know, Tumbler, here's Trevor Elwell on Facebook, here's Trevor Elwell, you know, in the news.

You link to all the stuff you want someone to find because it does two things. A) if somebody finds your hub and gets to see all the other great stuff. And B) it's letting search engines know this is really a great resource. It has all this information on it and then it gives people even more resources that we can go out and tell that's actually really good too.

So you're making this thing a great resource for people, meaning search engines are going to rank it really high, if that makes sense.

Andrew:	OK.

Patrick:	So you want to build your hub because it's going to help all of your other stuff rank higher that you want showing up. And it's going to rank high yourself. And you're going to have something out there that's really relevant that someone is going to find when they Google you. 

And it's so easy to do these days, you really have no excuse not to do it.

Andrew:	All right. One page has it all you're recommending Word Press is an easy platform to do it in. But you've also talked about Blogger as an easy one, Tumblr, About.me makes it easier to do this. Weebly you've even recommended. What's the other one? Squarespace, whatever it is. There's great ones.

Patrick:	There's a bunch.

Andrew:	Do it. And we talked about all the things that need to go on there. Next, should we go onto the next item?

Patrick:	Let's do it.

Andrew:	Sign up for the top social media websites for search engine optimization. What's the difference between doing it with SEO in mind, search engine optimization and just doing it because you want to hang out with your friends? Which I put down earlier with my snarky attitude as I said it.

Patrick:	Yeah. Well some people fall into two camps. They join in it and they have something to be funny, you know, they have some sort of different agenda. Which is fine, you know, if that's what you do. But keep in mind social media sites will rank really high because they're so relevant. You know, Facebook's a really relevant domain as is Twitter. They're incredible sites. So you want to create a profile no matter what with you name. Because even if you don't plan on using it, it keeps someone else with your name from taking that. It's the same idea with your domain, right?

Andrew:	Mm-hmm.

Patrick:	Because if someone else with your name, if Andrew Warner Jokeboy signs up, that Twitter is going to have a really good chance of showing up really high if someone Google's you and that's what they're going to find. 

Andrew:	So you say they might have Andrew Warner Jokeboy on Twitter?

Patrick:	Something like that, yeah.

Andrew:	I see, OK. All right, which ones do we go for?

Here actually. these are the ones that you think. These are the ones that you recommend. Sign up at least for all of these

Patrick:	These I recommend. You know and everyone should at least start off with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, like I said, and Google Plus for obvious reasons.  Because Google does a good job of making sure their own thing ranks high.

Andrew:	Right.

Patrick:	Which should go without saying but these are things that show up really high so you want them. Because they're result you can control. They're a result you can fill with good content. And even if you don't consider yourself a really active social media person that's fine. At least you have a result and at least you're not letting the other guy with your name take that from you and high jack your results.

Other good ones include Meetup. Meetup for the way they structure it, and it could have been intentional on their part or not, they show up really high. And I'll show you, I'll talk a little bit about that later. And Chloral, Chloral is another good one beside those main ones, which is a question and answer site. That show up really high for people and that's why we encourage you to build one.

Andrew:	What happens if my name is already taken on Twitter or a Facebook page already has someone else? I own, I own it. I have Facebook.com/Andrew Warner. But what happens to the next Andrew Warner who says I want to rank high for this name, what do I do? What happens if the person listening to us is faced with a situation where someone else already has their name on these social sites?

Patrick:	So.

Andrew:	I'll put the camera on you.

Patrick:	It goes back to the domain. You want to keep your name as a keyword there. So you want to, you know, Andrew Warner online, Andrew Warner, you know, mix mx or something, you know for Mixergy. Andrew underscore Warner. The underscore is one way you can separate your name without it being . . .

Andrew:	Or hyphen? I heard Matt Cutts at Google recommend hyphen over underscores, what do you feel about that?

Patrick:	Oh, actually, that's actually a good point. You actually brought something. Hyphens actually are preferred over underscore. I'm just used to saying underscore. 

Andrew:	Oh, OK. All right. So, it would be Andrew dash Warner, but somehow keep it together, don't put any nonsense in between. If you need to, put something at the end. 

Patrick:	Yep.

Andrew:	Okay.

Patrick:	And I will go into it. I'll give you a little story, and then go into the specific rules really quick. I have a story that shows why you should be on these places in the first place. Even if you didn't think it was important. When we were first starting off back in the day, we were . . . I created Twitter profile, and this is while we were building the product. And while we were building the product I said, well we should at least get a name for ourselves, so when we release the product in our niche, people would know about it and know who we are. Because we're creating out content and writing blog posts. And be excited about it instead of just getting it out cold. 

So, I created a Twitter account, I did all the right things. I'm on Twitter, and one of the . . . Guys, the people who aren't familiar with Dan Schawbel, he's a personal branding expert. He's got a big voice. He gets literally tens and tens and tens of thousands of people every day reading his stuff about personal branding. Which makes a lot of sense for us, because personal branding people want to control their search results.

Andrew:	Mm-hmm.

Patrick:	So, he's on Twitter, and then one day his site goes down and he tweets out, and I'm following him on Twitter, so I see this. I need someone who knows PHP. Because my sites, so, I was like oh, I messaged him back and said, let me help you out. So, we get on the phone and I fix it for him, and I meet him this way. We have a great conversation and I help him out. He learns a little bit more about what I'm doing, and then by the end of the day, I have a weekly spot blogging on his platform. Putting brands yourself and putting us in front of an audience, a very relevant audience, every single week. And that connection would not have happened if we had ignored creating social media profiles, because I never would have met Dan, he never would have known what we were doing, and I never would have been able to help him out. So, everyone should have doing these things. 

Now, to make sure they are search engine friendly, let's go a little bit into those rules that you kind of hit upon. The first one, and going back into those rules that we talked about. Number one is, keep it clean. Remember these are public. If you're trying a search engine, optimize something, people are going to find these. And there are so many instances where people don't realize it anybody can find these things. This is a good example right here. There's literally thousands of these stories. This girl, Facebook status updated something about her boss. Calling him a pervy wanker. So, obviously she's from England. We don't say that here, but. The first comment on it actually is from her boss. Basically firing her right then and there. 

Andrew:	I guess you forgot about adding me on here. Firstly, don't flatter yourself. Secondly, you've worked here five months, and didn't work out, and didn't work out that I'm gay? I know I don't prance around the office like a queen, but it's not exactly a secret. Oh, all right. This is a really fun one, I'll let people read this and, of course, include it with the program.

Patrick:	Yeah. I didn't know [??] appropriate, I didn't want to, for all of the younger viewers out there.

Andrew:	Well, this is a good point, about what not to say online. We do see people do this all the time. What's the next big idea here? 

Patrick:	So, once you realize don't say anything that you wouldn't want your boss to read, that's a good rule of thumb right there. Going back to those SEO criteria in the beginning. Key words, structure. Number one, use your name, we just talked about that. Patrick Ambron is a good Twitter name, you know, Chill Dude 25 is not. There's other ways, even if you're name, you can see, you can put your title name there, you can put everything there. You want to put your name in there, and as we talked about, if your name is taken, you know, Patrick Ambron P-R. If you're a P-R guy or Patrick dash Ambron or something like that The next thing is, tweet relevant things. Google wants you to find good things. And they have good things. if people start sharing their tweets ans start getting value in their and you start getting followers. 

Suddenly that page, your Twitter page, is better results. So, how do you do that? I always tell people, no one cares that you had three bottles of liquor down between two of us. That's bad. But, good read, Twitter adds another international Google exec to its sales team. Interesting read, and you have a link. That's something my audience finds pretty interesting, That's the kind of thing I'll get re-tweeted on. That's the kind of thing that makes someone then find me and follow me. And that makes Google say, wow this Twitter page is really good about Patrick Ambron, everyone seems to be liking it. Same thing with Facebook. So, be interesting.  Try to be useful. No one cares what you had for lunch, that kind of stuff. 

Andrew:	All right. What's next?

Patrick:	The next thing is it goes back to again the SEO principles we talked about as linked to everything. Because let's say, you linked to your hub. You've got your hub that's really structured for Andrew Warner. Not only is this great for Andrew Warner, but it's bringing out Twitter which you really trust is saying it's also about Andrew Warner. That Twitter is really good and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google Plus. They're all pointing back and saying it's about Andrew Warner, and they're all pointing back to each other. 

So, suddenly what you're doing is you're making, when I say Google, this works for all search engines. Google is just an easier reference point, but Google is realizing all of these things are really relevant. They're all linking to each other. They're all interesting information. All of these should rank really high for this term, Andrew Warner. Over that irrelevant thing, over that drug dealer who had a news article about him and a police blotter ten years ago. 

Andrew:	Yeah. And you know what? Here's a great example of why this is all helpful. I’m going to go back to the example from your co-founder. When I search for him, yes, I see his site first, but LinkedIn is number two and Twitter is number three. I often see social media sites just pop up as the top results when I Google people who I'm about to interview on Mixergy. I think even now… I don't want to turn on the browser right now and really kill our bandwidth, but I think if you search for Andrew Warner, you will start to see even Vimeo, a site that I think people have given up on because they've moved on to YouTube. 

Vimeo shows high for me because I used that in the beginning, and every time I think I don't need another social networking site, well, you know what, I won't use it every day. But I should sign up and put something on there just so I can have that in my search results and control what's there and not have someone else's in there.

Patrick:	And that's something we realized. There's a lot of sites you should sign up for, just for that very reason, and then when… That's one of the things that our product can even help you do. We show you all the things and how to build them, just to go in and automatically create these things to help you because the more you have the better. The more you can push something else down and you can put your bio in there, the better.

So, you hit it exactly right. These things show up high in and of themselves, and then there are also tools to help your other things show up because you can link to them and Google love links.

Andrew:	I can see myself with of these many sites on a Saturday with a Hulu window up in the right part of my laptop, sitting and signing up for all of these networks and making sure that my name is properly in there, making sure that there's just good stuff in there and that they link as much as possible to all of the other things that I’m working on, as you said here in this.

Patrick:	Yep.

Andrew:	And so, that's what we need to do with social media when we want to start controlling our reputation online. Ready to move on to the next big idea?

Patrick:	Let's do it.

Andrew:	Let's do it. Here's the big board, and on the big board is "paste your bio in the online people directories". What are these?

Patrick:	So, this is one of the most under utilized ways to get content out there and create links for yourself because they're not as popular in social media, because you can't do as much on them. But there are online directories, like LookUpPage, BusinessCard, WorkFace, all these things where they are little directories to find people. They're giant directories, and they do a really good job of structuring them well and making sure there's good information on them. So, search engines love them. 

Sign up for five. It'll take you about 25 minutes, maybe. Copy and paste our bio on them, and you've linked to them. There's three links essentially that you can say, "Great. Here is Patrick Ambron, CEO of Brand Yourself. Here's his Brand Yourself profile. Here's his website. Here's his Twitter. Here's his LinkedIn. You're just putting out links, more things that let search engines know that all of those other things are really important because these incredibly well structured directories on the web that are meant to help people find people are pointing to these things. Search engines really like it, and you can just sign up for them. 

I'll give you an example of how powerful they can really be.

Andrew:	Yeah, please.

Patrick:	One of our first users of our new product, his name is Cody and he's applying to law school. When he was an undergrad, some of you may be familiar with sites like Juicy Campus. That one was specifically shut down, but there are places where college kids could go on and write anonymous things about other people. What would happen is Cody, specifically, he was with a girl, an undergrad, and I guess they broke up. He really upset her. Who knows whose fault it was? But she went on Juicy Campus, and she basically wrote that he didn't know… just embarrassing stuff 

If you Google him, and he was in his final year at law school, the only thing you really found out about him on the web, number one and number two, were these terribly embarrassing results. He said I really don't want people reading this about me. It's embarrassing. It's not…

Andrew:	It's basically saying that he doesn't know how to please a girl, that's what was on there. Because she wrote it and it just kept going.

Patrick:	Yeah and so he started doing these things and he got some stuff on the first page but, you know, he wasn't able to push it down. He wasn't able to completely overtake these because they were such big domains that he didn't know what to do. But then he used a product, he started signing up for these extra directories, you know he had done everything else, he had social media profiles, he had a website, they were showing up on the first page, but he wasn't able to completely overtake all of these other things. 

And finally, by signing up for directories, and adding all that extra link juices, all those things on the web pointing to his stuff and not the juicy campus stuff, suddenly he was able to push it down to the bottom of the first page. Then it's on the second page, and then it's on, you know, the bottom of the second page, and now probably on the third page. 

And now when the law school would Google him, they would find all this great stuff and if they even got to the second page, which 93% of people don't, they just went through a whole, you know, page of great results that explain who he is and how involved with the community he was, and what a great student he was, and it's a little bit more forgiving, they can be like, "OK, this happens to people", rather than that being the only thing representing him and the very first thing they find. So these directories are an extra edge that make a much bigger difference than people realize, and they're so easy to build. Everybody should be doing this.

Andrew:	All right, and these directories are, let me just bring them up. You're recommending BusinessCard, what is that?

Patrick:	BusinessCard 2.

Andrew:	BusinessCard 2, right? The number two?

Patrick:	Yup, that's the name of the site.

Andrew:	OK. I want Andrea to be able to pull up the link for everyone here that's taking this course. LookUpPage, and BigSite. These are the three big ones.

Patrick:	And then there's some others, too, that I would add to it if someone was getting ambitious. WorkFace, it's called, WorkFace is actually a really good one because the way the directory is signed up. I would add that one as well if you're going to start with four it would be those four.

Andrew:	WorkFace? OK. All right, so there they are. These are the sites that Patrick recommends that you add your online profile to, excuse me, that you add you bio to. Go to these directories. All right, ready to go to the big board?

Patrick:	Let's do it.

Andrew:	Let's do it. Final point here, this is the emergency tactic, this is if all else fails and you need something quick, right?

Patrick:	Yup. Yup, so...

Andrew:	What do we do in that situation?

Patrick:	As I like to say, in today's digital world, you probably hear that phrase all the time, bad results can happen to good people. There are certain cases where just something out there is about you and it shows up and it completely overtakes your results. An example of this would be one of our product's users was a high school principal. And he was a nice guy, he was actually a military guy, brought into a really tough school district to try to crack down. So, that was why he was brought in to this school, and he made a questionable judgment call. He knew these two kids, whose parents were never home, were playing hooky again. 

So he showed up at their house and, if any of you have ever seen the movie Ferris Bueller, it was very similar to that situation. And because of that, the kids were like, "I can't believe he showed up at my house" and then because of the likeness to the movie Ferris Bueller, all of these news organizations picked it up. You know, and wrote like, High school principal, you know John Doe, and I won't use his real name, you know, pulls real life Ferris Bueller. He got all of these results, and that makes it really hard to go to another school district, because you Google and look this guy up, which everyone will do, you find all this incredible press about him doing this questionable thing. And whether or not you agree with it or not, this was a really nice guy, had good intentions in mind, and this is following him around forever. And what are you supposed to do in that case? 

There's another example, there's another user of our product, Ivy league professor accused of stealing shirts from the Gap for whatever reason. Wasn't charged, he didn't do it, but because it got a little bit of press because there was some question around, was it racial profiling? Why did this happen? Every time you look him up these big news organizations followed him around and those are the cases where, you know, the way you can improve your results is by burying things right? Burying it off the first page, but when you have CBS and you have CNN and you have all these places writing about you, those are hard domains to push, to get ten results above to just get it off the first page?

Andrew:	Yeah, so what do you do in those situations? They seem impossible to beat.

Patrick:	So, there are extra things you can do. So, like we said, it might be hard to get ten things, to get your ten social media profiles higher than those CNN articles right? But there's some little secrets a lot of people don't realize, and it's, number one Google only likes to rank one domain, one result per domain per page. And what that means is, let's say you have a Huffington Post article, which is a huge domain, one of the biggest domains out there.

There's an article about Andrew Warner on the Huffington Post and they show that up on the first page as a result #1. They don't want to put another result about you from The Huffington Post on the first page usually because they already have one on there and they like to keep the results diverse.

So under that logic, rather than try to bury that Huffington Post article, what if you could get another thing on The Huffington Post that was more SEO friendly, more relevant about Andrew Warner than that article? So how do I do that? 

Taking the same example, most news sites, most organization sites, you can create a profile on it, a reader profile, HuffingtonPost.com/andrewwarner.That right there is a great start because, look, your name is in the URL.

Andrew:	So, create an user profile. Free, easy to do. So now I got one more thing on their site, another chance to knock them off the home page.

Patrick:	Now, you want to SEO that result. You want to make it more relevant. More search engine friendly than that article so Google replaces it and then bumps that other thing off because they only want one.

So, what you want to do is fill it out as much as they let you with as much information. If they let put a bio, you put a bio in. If they let you put education, you put that it. You put your name wherever you can, Andrew Warner all over it. So Search Engines know, this is all about Andrew Warner on The Huffington Post.

The next thing you do is, a lot of them allow you to keep it updated. Remember relevancy is really important? That article's eventually going to be 2 months old and then 3 months old and 4 months old. Your profile can continually be updated and you can start commenting on articles and usually they'll stream your comments or something. 

Suddenly, when it comes to The Huffington Post, that old article is not the most relevant thing about Andrew Warner on that page. Just read your profile once.

Andrew:	That makes sense. In time, I start to bump them up because my page on Huffington Post becomes fresher, more relevant because it's all about me and becomes better taken care of than that article, which is older.

Patrick:	Exactly and, what you're doing is, now rather than having to get 10 or 11 things above that Huffington Post article, you bumped it off by replacing one.

And it's a trick, and not a trick, it's search engine. But most people don't realize you can do this.

Number 2. Let's say in some cases, for whatever reason, you're having trouble doing that, and you do need to get as many positive things on the first page, ranking as high as possible on that first page, as possible.

There's some things you can do that would rank really high for your name, very quickly. 

Andrew:	Let's bring them up so you can talk about them and we can show them.

Patrick:	Number one. Write a press release. You can write a press release. It's not going to be news worthy. You can write a press release about Andrew Warner creates his own personal website. And write little press release about yourself and then you can put it out. There's news wires, there's free ones, there's some that cost money. I always recommend PR News Wire. It's going to cost you a couple of hundred bucks to get it out but they distribute it.

No one's going to pick this up, because no one's going to read it and go "Oh, my God. What a great story" but you got content out there that got distributed throughout all these outlets that will start to show up high because it's distribution, because it's going to be all over the place. Write a press release. If you need something quick out there quickly, at least it's positive, at least, it's not that negative article in The Huffington Post.

Number Two. Start commenting on relevant news articles. Go to NewYorkTimes.com. You're an Advertising Major. Go start commenting on articles about media and use your name because you can sign in as a Guest or whatever. Use Patrick Ambron or Andrew Warner. Now those articles will start showing up for your name because New York Times is such a great domain and that's going to show up high. It's not as good as having your own personal website, but again, you have a nice comment there, it has your name in it. You can even link to the bottom of it from another place and, at least, it's not a negative result. And it will show up very quickly because of how credible that domain and how indexed it already is.

Andrew:	Let me give you an example. This just happened to me, where I wanted to do some research on Frank Gruber, who's coming on Mixergy to do an interview and I thought "I'm going to search for him on TechCrunch and see if there's any negative stuff about him" 
Well, I did the search. I typed in, I was even smart enough to do site colonTechCrunch.com Frank Gruber and see what comes up. And because he commented so frequently lately on news stories related to entrepreneurs that he knows, that's what kept coming up.

I would have had to go through, I think, every article in order to find the one that was the right content, so he clearly buried it, and I forget about the value of comments because I keep thinking, who is going to bother reading comments. But the more I search for people, the more I recognize the comments show up. They use Facebook, and I guess his Facebook profile not only has his name but his company name, so when I search for Frank Gruber TechCocktail he kept popping up on TechCrunch. This works and for a guy like me who's doing research, it's stumping me sometimes.  

Patrick:	That's the thing. If you want to bury something, these comments are relevant. Like you said, maybe they're not the most relevant thing about him, but there's certainly better than having you find that negative TechCrunch article about him. That was misleading or whatever it might be. 

Andrew:	Yeah, those comments. I forget the value of them.

Patrick:	Yep. 

Andrew:	So, all right, back to this document right here. So, write a press release that you talked about. Comment on relevant news articles. Throw an event on MeetUp. 

Patrick:	Again, I talk about this a little bit in social media profiles. Because of the way MeetUp is set up, whether they did it on purpose or not, they probably didn't, but they show up really high. Their domains are structured in an SEO friendly way. What that means is one of the things besides creating a profile, you can have an event. You can call it an actually spend the time and make it an event. Call it Patrick Ambron's event for PHP lovers in Syracuse. Invite all of your friends to it. Have them RSVP. Throw a party basically, but have them place the hub of it where people can RSVP and let them know they're going to MeetUp.

Because you're creating an event around your name, that search engines goes, oh wow, look at this whole event Patrick Ambron's throwing on this great domain. Make a good event. Have more people RSVP. Actually do it and that's an easy way to get a really good result up there really, really fast, and it's going to outrank a lot of things because it's so credible. And that's something most people never think of doing but it will work. 

Andrew:	And there's that last one, and I've got an example again from earlier in the conversation that I see you guys have used this. You can talk a little bit about what this last one is, and then I'll bring up the example that I have.

Patrick:	So, we talked earlier about not all domains are created equal. There are two domains that out rank everything, .edus and .govs. And the reason is not anybody can get one. You have to be someway affiliated with a verified educational institution, like a university or a government agency which search engines know that wow, these are really creditable because it's already gone through this verification process. So, if you can have something with your name on it under one of those things, that's going to out rank almost anything. 

So, most people say, well, I don't have a university. I don't have a government site. What do I do? But there's ways to do it. For example, if you went to a university or even if there's a university in your town, you can usually join some sort of club. It can be an intramural sport. It can be the Astronomer Lover's Club at Cornell University. You can join this thing and you get a profile on them because of it, and then you have this .Cornell.edu/astronomerclub/andrewwarner. Or .govs, go to your library.  

There is something in your town where you can probably create a profile online, whether it's creating joining a library club, the library that has a .gov or a town hall type thing. Look at your local governments. Look at even your alma mater or even some sort of educational institution in your town, and you can find a way to create profiles on there, and those are going to show up high. They're going to out rank things, and it's going to be another result you can control that it will get on the first page and help you bury other things quickly.

Andrew:	This is what I noticed earlier in our conversation, going back again to Pete using them. If I could zoom in, and I even have the telestraighter [SP] out so we can try using this. Watch this. So, I shouldn't have picked blue. Let's go with red. Is that his school? Is that where Pete went to school?

Patrick:	Yeah. That's where he went to school. 

Andrew:	So, there. So, it does show up. My school, whenever they ask me to participate in anything, I feel like that. I have bad memories of going to school. I don't want to participate in anything that they're up to, but this shows the value of going and, at least, setting up a profile on that site.
 
Patrick:	And this is an example that we actually hit upon. If you're trying to figure out how to get something on my edu, this is the blog post at Pete wrote for the school. Now, the schools are all trying to create blogs now. 

Andrew:	Oh, so he just wrote a blog post for them and got the comments on there.

Patrick:	They're all looking for contributors, you know. You write about your experience at the school, and what an easy way to get something out there that's going to show up high. Look, his name is in the thing because he's the author. That's a great one. I forgot to even hit upon it. Go volunteer to write content for your school, and they'll publish it on their site, because why wouldn't they? And it looks great. Look at this. It shows up on the first page. 

Andrew:	Well, there it is. By the way, how about me? I've got a telestraighter here. I’m like pointing to things. I get to crop. This software is really through. Those are the big ideas. Let's go back over them and make sure that we've covered everything that we promised people. There it is. It's everything that's been in this course. If they want to work with you, you don't charge. There's a paid version of it, but if they want to use the free version of this site, Brand Yourself, what are they going to get?

Patrick:	So, Brand Yourself, the do it yourself software, you sign up it'll let you know where you stand. You know, if you look good or you get a score based on how good you look in search engines and what people are going to find about you. But basically it works really simple. You submit any links that you want showing up at the top. Could be your LinkedIn profile, it could be an article written about you, your personal website, anything.

We analyze that link the software does and tells you everything you can do to make it more search engine friendly and show up higher. And you can go through them, you can do them in a couple of clicks. You can boost something in literally a minute.

And it search engine optimizes it for you and then it'll track it so you see it go up. Now if you don't have a lot of content out there already. Like I only have two things and I want more, it'll even show you, here's some recommended profiles that you can build and how to build them. And then, of course, as we talked about as you saw with my results, you can also build yourself at Brand Yourself profile which is really valuable. Because it's the only profile on the web automatically optimizes to show up high with your name. And it's automatically designed to help search engine optimize all of those other things.

Now, to give you actually, just to show you how easy and how it works. There's actually a visual if you have it, Andrew. There's one in the beginning ones.

Andrew:	Mm-hmm.

Patrick:	Help with first visual where there's like a screen shot of a link in a graph.

Andrew:	Yeah. Let's do it. Here this is it.

Patrick:	This is a big thing to show you. There is an article, I think it was a Fox news article when the product came out which I thought was really great for my name. It showed up like number a hundred and something for my name. I went through it, it literally takes me a minute with our software to submit it. It tells me there are 6 things I could do. And this is the less week later. It's now I'm on my first page but as you can see it went up 87 positions.

Andrew:	You got, there was a story written about you and you wanted that story to rank high, so that when people like me look you up, they're going to see this news article about you which is full of great credibility for you.

Patrick:	Yep.

Andrew:	And you wanted to rank high, and so you started using your own software to make this page rank high. And what we're seeing here in the graph is how your software helps you rank high within, how long is this? About a week.

Patrick:	This shows a week. In a week it rose 87 positions. And what you're hitting upon is that the point is anyone, there's no reason not to use the product even if you know SEO. Because it simplifies it all for you. It helps you manage it. And if you don't know SEO, it completely makes it dead simple for you to do and it's incredibly effective.

The nice part is we hated the fact that, if you wanted to improve your results in the past and you didn't know SEO, you had to pay a reputation company thousands of dollars. That's not realistic for the average person. And now that there's nothing they do and that they can do that you can't do yourself at our product. It's inexcusable. 

So the nice part is you can take what we learned today and apply it yourself. And that's fine and you should. But this product is free. Sign up and it'll make it easier for you. And that's what our goal. Everybody should be improving their search results and now with a free Brand Yourself account anybody can.

Andrew:	Brandyourself.com. I've done this and you actually will link me out to the sites that you recommend that I sign for. And I can go and fill out the profiles on those sites and you rate it. So it's not all done on your site. You take me to the sites that I need to be a part of. And you do give me rankings and you make sure that this all happens. But you can do everything on your own. You can sign up for the program. 

I'm not here to send anyone to any place that they don't want to go to. But I am here to make sure that you guys, if you're watching this, especially if you've tuned in all this way, that you take control of that search result. That you understand that we're all Googling you and you have a way of determining what we see when we Google you.

And I specifically asked Patrick to come on here because I've seen him, we met at a party and we've talked about all the people who he helped out and I asked him to come in and to an interview about his business to talk about how he grew this business. And he said no, no way, I'm not ready for it yet. So I said all right at least can you come here and teach us what you did for all these people both before you launch your business and after you launched and we got to see it. 

So, thanks for walking us through this very generously. I'm looking forward to everyone who's watching this to, at least, pick one thing out of all of this big board that we talked about here, pick one thing that you can do, do it and then come back and let us know how you've done it. And I'm looking forward to all your feedback about that and, of course, check out BrandYourself. Patrick, thank you for doing this session with us.

Patrick:	Thank you so much for having me. I'm a big fan and I'm really happy I was able to come on.

Andrew:	Thank you. Thank you all for watching.