Lesson Tag: supporter

6.7 An Over-the-Shoulder Tour of High-Quality Content Creation (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • An over-the-shoulder tour of high-quality content creation & what all of this looks like in practice

Here are the concrete tips/rules I can provide for adding images without going overboard:

  • Don’t insert images directly above or below headers, if at all possible. Most of these were inserted directly below a header, which looks pretty bad formatting-wise. Try to place them in-line between paragraphs or lines of text. You’ll notice in the published post that I moved all images that were below headers/bullet points to in-between paragraphs of text, or removed them entirely when the bullet point was too short to justify the use of an image (an elaboration on that in point #3 below).
  • Don’t feel the need to add images to every section, particularly if the section is only a couple of sentences.
  • Don’t force it. Sometimes an image breaks the “flow” up too much or just doesn’t feel right. In these instances, feel free to ditch using an image there, and just try to get one in at the next appropriate spot where one “fits” without being forced. For example, you’ll notice that I removed A LOT of images from bullet-by-bullet sections, because there just wasn’t anywhere to insert an image (besides right below the header/bullet point, which contradicts the top “rule” on this list). I’ve included screenshots of examples: two large bodies of text — one of which should be broken up with an image (with a red box to indicate where), and one of which shouldn’t be (due to how short the bullet points are, and as a result, there being now appropriate place for an image).
  • If you can’t find a good image for your intended spot relatively quickly, don’t use one. Just move on and try to fit one into the next-most-appropriate place.
  • Don’t use images that are portrait-oriented — they leave too much awkward white space.

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.7 Transcript Below

Okay!

At the risk of belaboring the point, I want to talk really quickly and give you an over-the-shoulder look of high-quality content creation. This is an article you’ve already seen a couple of glances of. And of course, you saw all of the SEO elements of it. I don’t want to dig in too in-depth here because I think it could get fairly redundant because you’ve just learned all of this. I just want to show you what it looks like in practice. So I don’t want to… you know… like I said, I don’t want to belabor the point too much. But I do want you to see this, demonstrated it in the real world.

And since we’ve already looked at all of the on-page SEO elements, I’m not going to call attention to those but calling back to earlier when we started off with a kind of a skeleton of an outline and followed it through the process. And I talked about, hey, let’s have small paragraphs, smaller chunks of text, because when you get too much text, it gets really, really, really overwhelming.

And to demonstrate this… if we look at how this looks like right now. Like this is actually a pretty big paragraph that I, in some cases, would consider breaking up. But since I have small paragraphs around it, I’m not going to do that. But this makes this content so much easier to read.

If I do this… which is how a lot of people start off writing content… and I preview it… Look at that paragraph, it’s just… it’s more intimidating. When your eyes see it instantly, your brain thinks: “Oh, that’s a lot of work to read!” Whereas when you see it here, it takes up more space but that white space in between is kind of a relief to the eyes. So if you compare these to one another, I think you’ll agree that this is definitely much, much better. Much less intimidating to read. Your brain is less overwhelmed by it just by looking at it.

And the same thing with images. You could see this is a lot of text. If you imagine this space without this image, look at how much text… that would have been a lot of text in a row. Especially coming… it would have gone from up here, all of the way through text text text text text. And it’s nice to just break up that and add a little bit of white space by using an image.

And just really quickly to show you how to add an image… let me undo all of those changes that I just made. The way you add images in WordPress really quickly is you just add your own line, you can hit Add Media, and then we have everything that I’ve uploaded to my library so far or you can upload from your computer. And then you would just select the image, you say… well, really quickly you select the image.

There are other options here, like I want it center aligned. You can set this in other places, too, but it’s easiest to set it when you’re inserting the picture. You can add a caption if you want. Like this one has the caption of “Look at that idiot”, and that’s how you see that below the image. And of course, this is where you set your alt text, your alternative text, which we’ve talked about how to use that in one of the previous videos in this section.

So if I wanted to add this image, I would just fill all of that out and then I would say insert into post and it’ll drop it right there for you. And then if you wanted to change the alignment from there you could. Some themes, when you click left-align, it wraps the text automatically. If that doesn’t happen automatically, please don’t send me a message saying, “Hey Ian, how do I wrap the text?” Because it comes down to having to change the hard code in your theme and it’s just not worth it at the end of the day.

It’s nice sometimes to have text-wrapped images. I honestly just always insert my images in blog posts centered, because again, I like the white space that it adds and it helps break up the post and the text a lot, okay?

And I got all of these images from the sources I told you – except obviously for this one in my before and after picture that I obviously had myself. It would be kind of weird if I found those on stock image websites.

But you can see going through here how I used headers. This isn’t just for SEO. They also really help make things easier to browse, they make things easier to skim, and read quickly and kind of find the information that they want. So if they don’t want to read any of this crap, they don’t want to read the introduction… I feel like I wrote them in a way that’s pretty engaging and relates to the reader.

But if they wanted to skip, they could just come down here and they can see… you know… “Okay, I just want to read about Pain Management Options Pre-Removal and During Removal”. And then I used h3 subheadings… Header3s… yeah, I think that’s another good way to say it even though it’s kind of awkward… within my h2 subheadings to, again, make it easier to skim.

And I mentioned previously… let me see, I have this in one of my Notepad files… let me see… I have that file that I mentioned a few videos ago that talks about rules for where to place images. I just need to remember where I’ve put it. I know where it is and I don’t really want to pull that up on camera because I don’t want to have to go through the process of blurring a bunch of my screen.

So I will hopefully remember to paste those rules about inserting images below this video in the description on the Free Internet Marketing Project website. And if you watch this video and it’s not there, just send me a message and say, “Hey, Ian! You forgot to add those rules you talked about for placing images.”

Because for me, it’s second nature these days. You don’t want to overdo it. And I had to write some really kind of firm rules that helped one of my writers tremendously. And so I want to share those with you since I have them and I think they’ll help you a lot if you’re new to this and you don’t really know how often you should be inserting images. For me, it’s just you don’t want to overdo it but you also want to break up the text.

So actually, when I created this post, I didn’t have this image in there. I went through, I inserted all of the other images and I didn’t have this one and when… Let me just show you what it looked like to give you an idea. Because I think you’ll get it, you’ll be like, “Okay yeah, that makes sense.”

So when I didn’t have that image in there, I went through here and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that is a lot of text back to back to back… I really need to break all of this up with one more image.” And so I added that image and that’s why you see that there now. And I think, hopefully, when you look at that, you can get a feel for, “Oh, that actually does help. That white space, it kind of gives some relief from all of the texts.”

So that’s pretty much it. You know… I’ve written this in small chunks that are easier to digest. I’ve used headers to make it skimmable.

You may even have instances where you could use bulleted lists or numbered lists. If it makes sense, use those because they’re very helpful for user experience. They make it much easier to digest information. Those are also really easy. You would just come in here and say, you would click bulleted list or you would click numbered list and you would go… Point #1, Point #2, Point #3… and WordPress makes these things really, really easy, okay? So you can see there’s my numbered list.

So I’m going to undo that and… there we go. Alright. Undid the removal of that image. And yeah, so now we’re back to normal here. But hopefully, that gives you a good idea of what a high-quality piece of web content looks like.

We can see here that this is 2,052 words which is a pretty good number count. And hopefully, if you go through and you read this article on Rue Tattoo yourself, you will see, “Okay, this is what high-quality content looks like”.

And I just want to emphasize… and by the way, you can write higher quality content than this. I can write higher quality content than this too, but this is more than sufficient. This is good enough. Remember: done is better than perfect. You don’t want to obsess, obsess, obsess and spend two or three times longer than necessary for an extra 10% improvement.

So if you find this intimidating… again, as long as you can write in a way that’s mostly grammatically sound and you can spell correctly, you can write high-quality content. Just focus on adding value and use the systems that you’ve learned in this section that talk about… you know, doing your research and creating your outline first. And then going through in each one of those points you put in your outline, write a paragraph or two and write the heading… you know…

And remember to just type what comes to mind and then do all of that at once and then come back and edit it later. And you will get better at this in time. Frankly, unless you have a really good idea for a podcast or a video, you are not going to succeed in this industry without writing content that’s very high quality regularly.

Anybody that tells you otherwise is probably just lying to sell you a product. There are some exceptions – I will admit that – but I will… yeah, I’ll concede that much. But generally speaking, no.

You are going to need to write high-quality content so you might as well just start practicing it now, okay? As intimidating as it is, if you practice, practice, practice, it’ll get easier, it’ll take less time, and you will get out more and more content in time. But these strategies that you’ve learned in this section will give you a much better head start than I had and a much better head start than I think most people have in this industry, alright?

So that’s it. That’s all I got. Alright.

You know you can do other things like you can set your featured image depending on your theme. This could be a really good idea. I’m not going to do it for this particular post. But, you know, if you do set a featured image, sometimes themes have some really handy, built-in features for that. So if I set this one as the featured image… we’ll see if my theme has anything for that really quickly. So if I go back to my Dashboard, go back to my homepage… okay so yeah, that does look pretty good actually. I’ll leave that. So setting your featured image can pull out kind of elements like this. So I actually really like that. So that looks really good. Okay, so I lied. I am going to do that this time.

And typically, when I am writing myself, I do set featured images. I do recommend it for you as well. It just gets kind of complicated and you’re going to have to figure out what the correct dimensions are for your featured image. And a lot of the times, you can find that… like I think my theme was 2016. So “2016 theme featured image dimensions”… and you have to do things like Google this. And with your theme name… And this is where it comes back to: you have to be willing to research these things yourself.

So, I think it’s 2016… maybe I used 2015… But still, this page contains the information. I think it said… yeah, up to 1200 pixels wide and it would automatically crop it for you. And if it doesn’t crop it the way you want, you need to go through and you need to figure out how to crop images yourself. There’s a really good… free tool for that that is Pixlr. And you don’t even have to download software, you can edit in browser. With Pixlr, you don’t need Photoshop or any of these other fancy things. So you can use this to like crop images.

But again, these are skills, you have to acquire on your own. Just kind of things you have to research and kind of play around with and get better at. It’s just the name of the game with internet marketing, okay? Or you can just ignore it for the time being. Because remember, right now what matters most is high-quality content, okay?

So if messing around the featured image frustrates you, you can’t get the dimensions right, you don’t know how to crop an image, just ignore it for now. You can come back to it later. It’s easiest if you set it up as you go, but if it’s really overwhelming; you just ditch it. Remember, what matters now is keyword research, on-page SEO, high-quality content – that is enough to get your business off the ground as long as you stick with it, okay?

So pick good keywords; write really high-quality, high-value content; and integrate those keywords into the proper pages or proper places in your content for on-page SEO and you will succeed in time. Period. Okay. That is the simplest path in internet marketing. It’s very effective even though it takes time. It can kind of make you want to pull your hair out. It works.

Alright. So anyways. Hopefully, that gives you a good idea of high-quality content creation. And hopefully, if you visit Rue Tattoo and you read it over, you agree that this is a decent chunk of quality content, and you have to think about it from the audience member’s perspective, right?

You may not care for this article at all because you may not need to get a tattoo removed, but I guarantee as someone that’s been in this audience before and is still in this audience. This is a very helpful piece of content for anyone considering tattoo removal because this goes so much more in-depth about how much it hurts and how to help reduce the pain than any article I’ve seen online for the topic.

So anyways, that’s that. I’ve gone on longer than I wanted to but I did want to give you a quick tour and kind of recap all of these things, call your attention directly to them. And now we’ll do as far as I’m planning in the initial content, we’ll do one more quick lesson and talk about in-depth when you can expect to see rankings. And then we’ll start talking about other ways in the next section to promote your sites, alternatives to just constantly posting high-quality content to maybe get results a little bit quicker or at least work some variety into it so you don’t feel like you’re going crazy all the time, alright?

So we’ll get to that next video, if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group and other than that, I will see you in the next video.

6.6 How Often to Post New Content (AF)

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WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

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In this video I discuss:

  • A discussion about how often you should post new content
  • The pros/cons of posting new content regularly or irregularly
  • What I recommend if you’re aiming to build a profitable website on a budget

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.6 Transcript Below

Okay!

So we just finished a pretty heavy lesson. So let’s catch our breath here and talk about something pretty easy to digest and it’s a common question and I wouldn’t feel as though this section were complete if I didn’t address it head-on and that is – “How Often to Post New Content?”

I can understand why this question comes up so much and like I said, it’s something I see fairly often. And as with so many things in internet marketing, there is no hard and fast rule here as much as I wish there were.

There are extremely successful people in this industry that focus on producing less high-quality content but when they do write content, it is just… like the best you will ever see in your life on that topic. And they do it once or twice a month and that’s it. And then they spend the rest of their time focusing on promoting that content. And we’ll talk a little bit more about how that would be a valid approach to this industry in the next section.

But the more high-quality content you post, the better your odds are of getting rankings. We’ve talked about this already. Well actually, we’ll talk about it more next section. When you complicate things more and more, the odds of you failing, the odds of you getting overwhelmed and giving up increase dramatically. Probably exponentially as time goes on, they begin kind of stacking on top of one another.

And if you get too much going on, you really hurt your chances of succeeding in this industry if you try to overwhelm yourself by doing everything right, because there’s so much you can do right. And you can succeed in this industry by doing 20% correctly rather than trying to do 100% correctly which is impossible. So it’s more than enough to just focus on really high-quality content fairly consistently. And we’ll talk about that more in the next section.

And also like I said, the other options where you post really high-quality content less often. Maybe you post a 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000-word article once a month and you spend more time on promotion. I’ll talk to you a little about options for that in the next section. But it is a totally viable approach to just focus on high-quality content and posting it regularly.

So the best way I’ve ever heard this explained is thinking about it as “shelf space” with Google. Every piece of content that you put out is another opportunity. It’s buying another ticket in the Google lottery. It’s putting yourself out there and getting more shelf space, getting more potential for rankings. So that’s a really good way to think about it. Again, it’s not the only way to approach this industry. It (by a lot of people’s standards) isn’t the best way to approach this industry. But I do believe that, by far and away, it is the simplest way. And very often the simplest way is the best thing I can teach to set you up for success, okay? And again, we’ll talk about that more extensively in the next section.

But for now, what do I personally recommend? – There’s no hard and fast rule – I recommend… and when I’m creating new niche sites myself, I post at least two to three times very high-quality posts per week. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, and I’ll probably say it a number of times more as time goes on and we do webinars and live Q&A sessions and stuff like that: Never ever, ever, ever sacrifice quality for quantity, okay? If you can only get one really high-quality post out each week, do that. I would aim for at least that. And if you can get out two or three, you’re going to see results probably two or three times faster than the person that only has time to publish once a week.

Does that mean if you can only publish one piece of high-quality content per week, you should just not try? Not at all. You can still see very good results in the coming 12 to 18 months or 8 to 12 months even if your niche is a little enough competition and you’re paying attention to picking keywords well and on-page SEO – you could still see some really impressive results over time. So don’t just give up because you can’t do as much as someone working two or three times as many hours as you. But I would recommend at least one high-quality article per week. Just keep in mind if you do two or three, you’re increasing your shelf space with Google and you’re building authority faster, you’re establishing your website faster, and that is going to result in probably seeing results two or three times faster as someone else. So keep that in mind.

You know this comes back to the person that works 10 hours a week is probably going to see results half as quickly as someone that’s working 20 hours per week. As long as they’re both working efficiently and following the training here. But I really want to emphasize: never sacrifice… never ever sacrifice quality for quantity.

So how often you need to post new content? There’s no rule. There’s no right, there’s no wrong. But personally, when I’m building a new niche site, I aim for two to three high-quality posts per week – at least for the first 8 to 12 months. So either I’m going to do that myself or I’m going to hire and train a writer to do that in my business.

And typically, if that’s what I’m doing, even in fairly high competition niches, I’m going to see results. Start seeing that momentum build somewhere within the first 8 to 12 months, sometimes even as early as the first 5 to 6 months. I’ll start seeing that really noticeably build. And as time goes on, you’ll see those results kind of… again, they’re cumulative, you’ll see them kind of exponentially build on one another. And instead of a linear growth curve, they’ll start to see a little bit… or instead of a linear growth line, they’ll start to see a little bit of a curve and start to see that spike a little bit faster and that momentum build on itself.

So if I’m doing at least two or three high-quality posts per week – either myself or through one of my team members that I’ve hired – I expect to see results within the first 8 to 12 months. I’ve had that not happen in some really high competition niches and just stick with it and it always comes through in the end as long as (again) you’re focusing on picking good keywords, which we taught in the last section and you’re focusing on on-page SEO, which we taught in the last lesson, okay? So focus on those things and that is enough. That alone is enough. Trust me.

You’ll feel like you’re going crazy sometimes. You’ll feel like you’re doing everything wrong because you can’t see results. But if you’re doing these things, you’re doing it right. It’s just a matter of seeing it through in a matter of time.

But I want to give you more options – we’ll talk about other promotional methods in the next section. But before we do that, I want to wrap up this section, put a pretty little bow on it and kind of recap and go through the content that I put together that you can model your own content after as you do this in your own business, okay?

So if you have any questions, as always, feel free to post them in the Facebook group, which is free for registered members. And I will see you in the next video.

6.4 Where to Find High-Quality, Free Royalty-Free Images (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

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Or simply log in if you already have one.

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  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
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WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

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In this video I discuss:

  • Where to find high-quality stock images that you can use for FREE
  • A brief discussion about what you need to do concerning attribution and licensing
  • A quick look at some of my favorite royalty-free stock image websites

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.4 Transcript Below

Okay!

Now that we’ve talked about how to format your content, and of course, I mentioned that you want to add images. You kind of need to know where to get the images and that’s what we’re going to cover in this lesson, alright?

So there are a lot of resources out there. This is not an exhaustive list. There are a lot more out there that you can look up. There are articles that have compiled all of the best. But I’m just going to share some of my favorites today.

And in my personal experience, I’ve never needed to go beyond these favorites. And as the years go on, we just get more and more and more options in this regard – which is really nice. You just have no reason to ever infringe on anyone’s copyright with all of the options we have these days. So that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s lesson.

There are a lot of good options, like I said, and this is not at all exhaustive. But my personal favorites are: pixabay.com, unsplash.com, and burst.Shopify.com. A lot of people have kind of some confusion surrounding that last one because they think, “Oh, these are royalty-free images that I can only use on Shopify stores.” That’s not the case at all. It’s just a branch that Shopify launched that’s helpful for Shopify store owners, but it’s also really, really helpful for everyone else.

It’s not at all restricted to only being used on the Shopify platform. So you can use them on your WordPress website or on your blog or on your social media – whatever you want to do. It doesn’t have to be used on Shopify. But they have some really, really high-quality images there, which is one of the reasons it’s one of my favorites and it’s the most recent addition to my list of favorites.

You are also able… like if you do some research and you Google it, you can learn about how to use licensed specific images – which means that they have their licensing set a very specific way that it’s not necessarily as easy and straightforward as it is on my three favorites. Because most of those require no attribution – meaning you’re not at all required to say, “Hey, this image comes from this artist”, and linking back to their website and stuff like that.

You can use some images from Google and Flickr and other sites like that but the attribution is more complex to say the least and it varies a lot, sometimes from license to license. And in my experience, it’s just a lot easier to stick to the three that I’ve listed here or any other royalty-free image site where attribution is not required. And we’ll take a look at that as we get into some of these, okay?

The most important thing that I want to drill into you right now is do not use images that you don’t legally have the rights to because you can get some serious trouble for that.

I’ve had people that have violated my copyrights in the past and I just have to send a what’s called a DMCA takedown notice. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I believe, and it’s just a standard for that I send to their hosting provider’s abuse department. And once I send that off, I usually hear back within 24 hours and they will literally shut that person’s entire website down because of one copyright violation.

And then on top of that, I have the rights to take them to court if I want to spend my time doing that – which is just a huge pain in the butt . And I wouldn’t do it unless it was just a really blatant violation of my copyrights and just like really… because they’re all blatant… but just like really harmful in one way or they were really benefiting anyway around it. Most people aren’t going to take you to court over it but some people will. Especially some of the really big brands. I believe Disney is a very staunch defender of their intellectual property, their trademarks and copyrights. You know, most football sports teams, et cetera.

So anyways, just don’t walk down that road. Don’t use images or graphics or anything like that. You don’t have the rights to because it can shut you down in a hurry. It can get your entire website shut down, it can damage your relationship with your hosting provider, it can end up with you being sued in a court of law – there are just all kinds of nightmares that you open yourself up to if you use images that you don’t have the rights to. So flat out – just don’t do it, alright? Take my word for it.

So let’s take a quick look at some of these. So I want to come over here… we’ll just kind of start at the top of my favorites and work our way down. You know on the home screen, they always have some of their most recent, really, really beautiful images and these are all images that you can use without attribution – which is just insane that you get access to these really, really high-quality images without attribution.

But obviously… usually you search, right? So I can search “tattoo” since we’re talking about Rue Tattoo. And I mean we’ve got all of these images that have to do with tattoos (this is a really cool one). And of course, you’ll get some risqué stuff here and there. Yeah, it just comes with the territory, I guess. Hopefully we can all be adults and look past that. But yeah, so we’ve got some really, really, really cool stuff in here.

But also… like you can put in “dog”… you know what… I mean, come on! Just adorable! Just precious! Alright, somebody click on the image you see over here – CC0 Creative Commons: Free for commercial use, no attribution required. And every single image I’ve ever pulled off with Pixabay has that qualification, has that license.

If you’re more of a cat person… you know what, instead of “cat”, let’s go “kitty”. Yeah, we’re going to break the internet today. So you know, you’ve got…same thing – click on it and you can download it in multiple different quality formats, different sizes. And if you create an account, it’s even easier to download because right now I’m not logged in into my account so they make me insert a CAPTCHA. At least at Pixabay, it’s really not that big of an inconvenience. But if you create an account, they don’t even bother you with that CAPTCHA. Okay, so that’s Pixabay. Long story short, really, really good one –

Unsplash as well… Unsplash and Burst.shopify.com have a smaller selection overall, in my experience. But on the whole, I would say that their quality is dramatically higher and more professional. Obviously, you just saw on Pixabay, you don’t have any shortage of really high-quality… God, that’s terrifying!… you know, a shortage of really high-quality professional photos. But sometimes, you’ll search really hard keyword like… let’s say you were looking for images for “synergy”. And you know, sometimes, it could just be really, really hard to find some stuff so you kind of have to play around with different keywords. And until you find something that pops up an image that you really like, you kind of think about, “Okay, ‘synergy’ isn’t a good word. Okay let’s try ‘business’,” okay? And so, you know, you get some images that are similar to what you might be looking for with “synergy” right? So you just have to kind of have to figure those things out.

But overall, I would say Unsplash has… like you saw over here… well okay, I was about to say “No business images. That’s great”. You’ll see, you know, Pixabay has a lot of these really crappy like these graphics. It just looked like crap… like who really uses these? They would just make your website look really dated and low-quality overall, in my opinion. I never use stuff like this. Even this… my God, she looks possessed.

But over here, you know, look at all these images for business. These are super, super high quality. All very related to business. And that’s just the difference you’re going to see between Unsplash and Pixabay sometimes. No idea what this has to do with business, but you know, whatever.

So you know, it works the same way. You would just come over here, you would click on it, and then you can download. You can even down… you have a shortcut to download right here. So you know, just really helpful stuff. Unsplash is excellent. So you can see Unsplash whenever you download an image, they say: “Crediting isn’t required…” Awesome! But… sorry for dogs barking… but you can… you can… Threw me off my groove! You can add attribution as kind of a thank you, as a kind of way to say thank you. I guess kind of really good etiquette if you’re using an image in a way that it really isn’t going to affect your content one way or another. But yeah, I very, very rarely do this. Just because (1) I don’t want to spend the time doing it and (2) I just don’t want that distraction on my website. So I very, very, very rarely do this.

But, yeah. So you could just click through and… same thing… let’s see… dog pictures. Oh, no. Let’s go “puppy”. I’m telling you, we’re going to break the internet today. So yeah, just really… again, the quality was good on Pixabay for the search term. But on Unsplash, you’re going to have a smaller selection overall, but the quality is typically out-of-this-world good. Very professional.

And the same thing is true for burst.shopify.com. I’d say even a smaller selection than Unsplash but overall, you’re going to have a lot of really good options, too. And it all works the same way. You know, download free photo, and you’ve got a Creative Commons license – you can click it to find out details about the license. So yeah, that’s basically it.

So I will say, I almost always find what I need on Pixabay. But there are times where I’ll put in a search term and I’ll just see all these really kitschy, corny, crappy graphics and I’ll go: “You know what, no.” I’ll go over to Unsplash and I’ll put in the same search term and other terms around that search term, trying to find an image. And if I still can’t find it…like let’s search… see what “tattoo” looks like here. Yeah. So again, lots of really, really, really good options. But like if I put in “tattoo removal”… probably not. Yeah, not as good options. I’m just getting a lot of tattoo stuff. And the same is probably going to be true of Pixabay.

So you just kind of have to work around these things. That’s not a horrible image for tattoo removal. But fortunately, I have plenty of my own personal pictures from tattoo removal that show removal pretty well. Now but you could see in this particular instance – nothing. None of these sites have anything for tattoo removal so I would just have to figure out how to work around that. I would use a different type of picture or something along those lines. You know like maybe “bandages” – which would indicate the recovery after tattoo removal. Yeah, so something more along those lines. My God, some of these are atrocious.

But yeah, you just kind of have to figure out… good God! Some of that’s getting graphic. I apologize. So we’ve had risqué and graphic at this particular video. That’s wonderful. Those are definitely boxes I was looking to check when I started.

So anyways, I think you get the point between these three and trying different search terms you should never ever need to go get images elsewhere. And if you do, it’s probably a really specialized image that you might want to end up taking yourself anyways – which almost all of the camera phones, cameras these days are high enough quality for you to take pictures for your blog and your website.

So we’ve just crossed a threshold in technology where images should never been an issue. 10 years ago, not the case. It was much, much harder than this. You basically had to shoot all of your images yourself unless you wanted to violate someone’s copyright or you had to pay a lot for stock images, you know. Seriously, as much as $20 to $25 each for a stock image. Like this stock image right here… the only mainstream option used to be iStock photo and it seriously would have cost me for a high-quality copy of this, $15 to $25.

So we live in a great day and age to start a website. The barriers to entry even lower that they used to be. And I think, again, between these three websites, you should have all of the access to all of the images you will ever need. Alright?

So, with all of that being said, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post your question to the Facebook group – it’s free for registered members – and other than that, I will see you in Video 6.5. See you there!

6.5 Everything You Need to Know About On-Page SEO (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • All of the major elements you NEED to optimize for on-page SEO
  • Other elements that are helpful to optimize for on-page SEO
  • A tour of all of these elements in WordPress and the Yoast SEO plugin

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.5 Transcript Below

Alright!

It is time to talk about on-page SEO. We have talked about search engine optimization a little bit and kind of given some tidbits along the way. But now it’s time to really dig in and teach you everything you need to know about on-page SEO. And this is very specifically essentials. This is not intended to be a totally comprehensive lesson on on-page SEO. This is intended to be everything you need to know to get started and to get a lot of bang for your buck, as far as SEO is concerned.

It is not an exaggeration or too far-fetched to say that someone could create a whole three-day seminar on just on-page SEO. Especially once you wander into the realm of PageSpeed optimization, making sure your pages load really quickly. And a lot of the much more technical things that really only developers, a lot of the time, are going to be fully equipped to handle and address appropriately – I’m not going to get that deep. What I want to teach you is the basics and like I said what you need to know to get the most bang for your buck out of your search engine optimization efforts, as far as on-page SEO is concerned.

But I want to be very clear upfront. This is not intended to be totally comprehensive. It is intended to be everything you need to get off and running, and then you can continue developing your knowledge as time goes on. And I may dig into it more as time goes on. But these are the most critical things you need to pay attention to in on-page SEO when you’re creating content for your niche site – in order to start getting rankings, and start getting traffic, start outranking some of your competitors with your really high-quality content and then in turn making money as time goes on.

But I would say this covers at least 80% to 90% of the things that really have an impact. And then all of the other things you can do, and spend a lot of money and a lot of time on optimizing, but they’re going to have a much lower impact overall. I think it goes back to I mentioned a few videos ago: “Done is better than perfect.” I want to keep it simple and get you to 90% in a matter of 20 minutes in this lesson. And if you’re doing it yourself, probably 10 or 20 minutes per post rather than trying to get you to 100% and having to do three days worth of videos and you have to sit here and watch hours and hours and hours and get drowned in details. And then on top of that, you could spend dozens of hours optimizing your website for on-page SEO and spend a lot of money on it when it’s really just not necessary. Let’s get you to 80% or 90% as quickly and as simply as possible and let the more complex stuff lie and handle that down the road. Okay?

So without further ado, let’s talk about everything you need to know about on-page SEO.
So on-page Search Engine Optimization is essential for getting high in the SERPs – which SERPs is the acronym for “Search Engine Ranking Positions” – which is exactly what is sounds like. It’s your position within the search engines. And of course, the most important of all of those is Google because last I checked, they still owned about 70% of the search market place. Bing and Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo and all those other guys only owned 30% combined. So we’re still playing very much to please Google because they have the strongest algorithms, and as a result, they serve up the best search results and most users that use a search engine use Google above anyone else.

As we dig into on-page SEO, one of the reasons that I had you install the Yoast plugin is because it’s going to make things tremendously easier. We’ll see that here in a minute because I’m going to show you in a live environment what factors I’m talking about in this particular slide. But for now, just know that Yoast makes things so, so, so much easier. And you’re going to be very happy that that’s the plugin that you installed because there are other SEO plugins that you can install and Yoast is the only one that does what I’m going to show you.

The most important things for on-page SEO, the absolute biggest bang for your buck and I would almost say… I won’t say it’s impossible to get rankings for keywords without these, but it’s going to be at least two or three times as hard. These really serve as a strong foundation for ranking for any keyword you’re trying to rank for.

So the most important factors are you want to get the keyword in the title of your post in WordPress. That’s almost always… always as far as I know… going to get your main keyword in an H1 (Heading 1) classification, which hopefully will make more sense when we get into WordPress; you want to make sure that you use your keyword in your meta title; you want to make sure that you use your keyword in the meta description; and you want to make sure that you use your keyword, your focus keyword, that you’re trying to rank for with that article in your URL slug.

If you’re asking yourself questions like: “How many keywords should I try to rank for per article?” you need to go back in the training when we talk about those things in a previous section, okay? But these are where you want to get your keyword at a bare minimum. These are most bang for your buck. You really, really, really need to hit all of these points. Not like hit three of five or whatever, however many this is – hit every single one of them. Hit every single one of them. Make sure your keyword’s in all of these, okay?

It’s also very, very helpful to use the exact keyword in at least one header besides the title, which is automatically taken care of if your keyword is in the title – which I’ll show as we get into WordPress and I show you my article all dressed up. So we want to get in at least one header, we want to get it in image alt tags where we can at least once (and that’ll make more sense as I hop into WordPress as well), and we also want to get it throughout the content. So a small note about ‘throughout content’ – used to we would try to get the exact keyword in there as many times as we could and it was not very good for user experience, especially when we’re talking about Long Tail keywords like “how much does tattoo removal hurt”. It’s kind of hard to cram that in places and you even have to get a little bit creative to work that in at all besides the title.

So you’ll see how I did that (as we get into the content, I’ll call attention to it) but the important thing I want to say… I could be remembering this acronym wrong but I believe it’s LSIs which essentially amount to… and forgive me if I’m getting that wrong. But LSIs essentially amount to synonyms that search engines recognize. So Google has gotten really good these days and continues to get better at recognizing the kind of keywords that typically surround a topic in an authentic piece of content.

So even though I may not use “how much does tattoo removal hurt” several times throughout my post and in the content throughout my post, when I use “how much does tattoo removal hurt” – which I use a couple of times in this post or I talk about “pain” or I talk about “pain management” and “pain relief”, Google should know that all of these things are surrounding this particular topic that I’ve optimized my post for which is “how much does tattoo removal hurt”. And theoretically, as far as we know, again, Google only tells us so much. Those things help raise our rankings as well. Okay?

So when I talk about using the keyword throughout the content, I’m not just talking about the exact keyword we’re trying to rank for, you want to get in there as much as you can. But if you find yourself having difficulty getting your exact keyword in the content over and over again or you’re having trouble getting it in anything outside of like a header and an alt tag in the title, just do your best to use close synonyms that makes sense that don’t hurt user experience and don’t make your content seem artificial or robotic or like they’re trying to abuse the search engines or the search engine algorithms. So just know that, we’ll see that when we get into the article, okay? And you’ll see that if you go look at the article yourself at RueTattoo.com, if you want to take more time with it than we’re going to be spending in this video.

Engagement also seems to have a lot of impact on search engine rankings these days and that can mean a lot of things. Engagement, traditionally speaking, is like sharing on Facebook, sharing on Twiiter, getting posted to social media, getting posted to Reddit and stuff like that. All of those count as engagement and social proof. When you talk about the more fine details of engagement, we’re talking about how long people stay on your website, how many pages they view whenever they do come to your website.

And I’ve even heard people that I respect immensely, theorized that your meta title and your meta description – which are what show up as a big blue link at the top with the description below it in Google and kind of tells you briefly what that page is about. Whenever you see that and you decide: “Oh, I’m going to click this fifth result instead of the first result”, because that meta title and meta description just jumped out at you and made you think: “This is what I’m looking for.” And as a result, you get a higher click-through rate which is very much how Google AdWords and even Facebook’s pay-per-click advertising work. The higher your click-through rate, the more they reward you with cheaper clicks.

Someone I respect very much a couple of years ago theorized that Google could be using that data. That if your meta title and your meta description is so well that more people are clicking it and when they click it, they stay on your page longer or they go through more pages on your website than the top results above you, hat could help boost your rankings. And technically, that’s a form of engagement as well.

And I don’t think that’s at all unreasonable. There’s no way for us to know for sure when it comes to a lot of things that play into Google’s algorithm. There are people that go as far as analyzing Google’s patents to try and reverse engineer as much about this algorithm as they can. But at the end of the day, we just don’t know for sure. We can pay attention to what the authorities… there are some great people in the industry that do a lot of research and they publish their findings and that’s what seminars and conferences and continuing education are very good for if you’re getting into this industry. But all of those are secondary. If you do focus on high-quality content and adding value, all of those other things will come – they’ll fall into place.

And I think that’s important to note because as we get more complicated, it gets harder and harder; your chances of success decrease, decrease, decrease because you can get more and more overwhelmed, you can spread yourself thinner and thinner; and then before you know it, your head’s spinning and you can’t make sense of anything anymore. So I really wouldn’t worry too much about focusing on engagement right now, personally. We’ll talk more about social media in the next section when we talk about getting traffic to your site. But personally, I would just focus on my content, I would focus on adding value and let the chips fall where they may in this particular instance.

So as I mentioned, there are a ton of other factors. There’s page load speed, there’s all kinds of… you know, all kinds of things theorized as to what works, what may work, what doesn’t work. You know, anchor text plays a huge role, as far as we can tell. And anchor text is what keywords someone uses in their link when they link back to your site, which is technically off-page SEO and outside of the umbrella of this particular video. But we’ll talk about off-page factors in Section 7 when we talk more about getting traffic to your site.

But there are all kinds of things on-page that could have a pretty big impact on your rankings and your SEO, but the big ones are here. And again, for the sake of simplicity and not just totally screwing your chances at succeeding in this industry, because you’ve already got enough swimming around in your head, I encourage you just to focus on the big ones up here in bullets two and three. The most important and also helpful. And then let everything else kind of fall into place and build on your knowledge in time.

But if you’re just getting started and you’ve never run a really profitable website, I would just focus on bullets two and three, which I’ll show you here as we get into this in WordPress and let everything else kind of take care of itself. Because if you’re doing everything else I’m teaching, those other factors will automatically be taking care of themselves, okay?

So let’s take a look at this in WordPress, without further ado.

So I have a post drafted in WordPress. I took the text document that I showed you with all of my article for “how much does tattoo removal hurt” – the keyword I’m optimizing for. And as I told you, I put it in here and I proofread it and I added formatting all at once. You can see like I have italics and bold there. I have bold here – so that’s what I do to add emphasis to my writer’s voice.

And I also went through and I added my… when you heard me earlier in this video, if it didn’t make any sense, when I talked about Heading 1 (h1), Heading 2 (h2) – or just headings in general because there’s a lot more that h2, there’s h3, there’s h4, h5, h6 – this is what I’m talking about. You see when I highlight this, it says “Paragraph”, when I highlight this, it says “Heading 2” and this is actually a code. If we go into the text… I don’t want to overwhelm you too much, but if you go in here… you can see

,

– that’s what it does when you highlight a piece of text and you select Heading 2. So it turns it into an h2 tag, these are referenced a lot of different ways but these can be really helpful for SEO if you get your keyword in them. Okay?

The first thing I want to take a look at is you can see over here Yoast is telling me right now my SEO is good. And I always want to do enough to at least get the Yoast indicator to green. And you may be asking yourself: “well, how do you do that?” You come on down here… and I’m talking about Yoast SEO’s indicator… or yeah, Yoast SEO evaluation analysis, if you will, not their readability. My readability, personally, pretty much always comes out to red and bad with Yoast. I just don’t worry about that too much. I only focus on what they’re giving me when it comes to SEO.

So you can see if I scroll down here, I have a big Yoast SEO section. I put in here my focus keyword, so that Yoast knows what I’m trying to optimize for. And then it gives me all these pointers and it tells me what I’ve done really well, what I’ve done okay, and what I just haven’t done well at all in their opinion. You want to take this with a grain of salt, because at the end of the day, Yoast is not perfect; but I make sure to hit the major ones.

So you’ll notice that my keyword is in my title. Like I said, that’s a big one. You will notice if we come down here that my keyword is in my meta title, which is different than my post title. You will notice that my keyword is in my meta description and it’s right there at the beginning. So all of these things are suggested by Yoast and they are things that I have passed. You will also notice that I have the focus keyword in one subheading. If we come up here, I used it here towards the end. And if nothing else, it’s very hard to get some keywords in subheadings. This is an h2 subheading. But at the very least, you can always wrap it in your final thoughts, conclusion, wrapping up. You know, you could have said any one of those things and “Wrapping Up: How Much Does Tattoo Removal Hurt?”, “Final Thoughts:”, “Conclusion:” – so there are a bunch of different ways to do that. But if I have trouble getting the keyword in a subheading anywhere else, I can always fall back to getting it in the conclusion. Okay?

And as we go through here, you’ll notice… actually one of the things Yoast is saying, the keyword density is 0%, which is too low; the focus keyword was found one time in my content. You know, frankly, that’s just not something I’m going to worry about because this is a difficult keyword for me to get, to just cram in throughout an article. It’s a question. And sometimes, questions can be really, really difficult. So I have it here in the first paragraph which is another thing that Yoast suggests is to get your keyword in the first paragraph of your article.

And I also have it… where did I put it? I think I put it here. I have it in an alt tag. I mentioned one of the things that’s helpful is putting your keyword in an alt tag at least once. If you can manage it, two or three times. But at the same time, you don’t want to abuse this. A lot of people will just cram their alt tags with keywords and Google will catch on to that very easily. It’s a very unnatural looking thing and ultimately if you do too many things that try to cheat Google or very clearly abuse their ranking factors and attempt to game the system, you can get punished.

So you can see for this alt text, I put gigantic back tattoo. Because ultimately, what alt text – which stands for Alternative Text – is if that image doesn’t populate or if someone is blind and they cannot see your content, they have a text reader that reads your content to them. That alt text is meant to describe the image, if it can’t be displayed or if someone can’t see it. So you can see here “professional man with knuckle tattoos and sleeves”, I’m putting “tattoo” in here and “knuckle tattoos” in here, because again, that should show Google that I’m writing around the topic. It knows it should see these keywords around this topic. So even though they’re not directly benefiting, they are probably helping me as kind of LSIs… let me make sure I’m getting that. Make sure I’m getting that… yeah, okay. Latent Semantic Indexing is what LSI stands for. So I did remember that correctly. And if you wanted to read more about that, you can. I just wanted to make sure I was not like giving you the wrong acronym over and over again.

But Google uses an algorithm to determine the kind of things that should be discussed and the synonyms and other topics within that arena that should be discussed for a genuine, authentic piece of content. And they are constantly improving and getting better at these things. So you’ll notice, even the one where I crammed my keyword in here… a little bit of a stretch but not too much… I still described the picture “pain pills and other options”. So that’s where I put the keyword in an alt tag.

You know for Tags, I might put “tattoo removal”, “pain relief”, “pain management”. Okay. You just get… you know, if you want to research more on how to use WordPress tags, essentially, like you can Google it and WordPress has a lot of information on them. But essentially, the way I think about this is if someone is reading an article about pain management and they want to see what other articles I have on pain management, if they were to click that tag, they could see other articles on my site for pain management. So that’s how I use tags.

For category, I’ll put “Pain Management” and these… you know… these in theory should help on-page SEO a little bit as well. And that’s that. You know, I’ve got my images in there. You know, we’ll go over this in more detail later. You know, I’ll kind of give a high-quality… or I shouldn’t say high-quality… an in-depth look at what I’ve done throughout this post. Kind of wrap up this section and summarize it. But for now, I just want you to see all of these things, as far as on-page SEO is concerned, which is what this particular lesson is about.

So you can see my keyword is in my page title. You can see my keyword is in my meta title, which is what is displayed typically in the tab in your browser. If we were to view the page source, you can see my meta title and my meta description is in here somewhere… I probably just overlooked it. Anyways, it’s buried in here somewhere. It has to be because I set it in Yoast. I’m just having trouble finding it here. And now… now I am overwhelmed because I’m not a super techy guy… there we go. I got back so… that’s interesting. There it is. Meta name equals description. This is the code for a meta description and it’s universal. And so you can see that my meta description is right there.

So these major things… you can’t see it in the preview but you can see here I got “how-much-does-tattoo-removal-hurt” in my URL slug. And I got it… you’ve already seen that I got it in a heading, I got it in an alt tag… or I should say a subheading… I got it in an alt tag, and I used synonyms and other LSIs that just naturally occur as you write this content, and I also used things… I mean it counts as a synonym… but two or three times throughout this article, I say, “how much tattoo removal hurts” which is very close to “how much does tattoo removal hurt” and Google should know by this point, their technology is good enough that we can assume that they know to associate those things with one another and reward me accordingly.

So anyways, I could ramble, ramble, ramble… go on and on and on… but that should be enough to get you started. If you just focus on this, on what we talked about in this particular slide show, as far as on-page SEO goes… this is enough. This is enough if you just focus on this and you focus on high-quality, high-value content, you will see results in time.

Pick your keywords well, write really high-quality content, and then use your keywords in your on-page SEO. And if you just do that… we’ll talk about this more extensively in Section 7… but if you just did that and you stuck with it and you were consistent and you just saw things through, it’s only a matter of time and you will, will, will see rankings come and then you’ll get traffic; and once you get traffic, you can make money.

So don’t overlook on-page SEO. It’s essential, it’s critical, and these are the most important components. And if you just focus on these and nothing else… you know, we’re talking again about bullet points two and three… if you just focus on these and nothing else, that would be enough if you’re picking keywords according to the training from last section. Alright?

So, okay. That’s a tough one. I hope you’re feeling okay about this. I hope you are not super overwhelmed. If you have questions, as always, feel free to post them in the Facebook group which is free for registered members. And I will see you over there and I will see you in the next video where we’re going to talk a little bit about how often to post content, alright?

See you there!

6.3 How to Format Content for the Web (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

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In this video I discuss:

  • How to format content for the web
  • The BIG formatting differences between web content and more traditional content
  • How to strike a balance between on-page SEO and user experience within your content

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.3 Transcript Below

Hey there, everyone!

First of all, you have to forgive me if this feels a little bit disconnected. You’ll probably notice in Lesson 6.2, I’m wearing like a different outfit and then in Lesson 6.5, again I’m wearing that outfit; but in 6.3 and 6.4, things are a little bit different. And that is because the first time when I recorded 6.3 and 6.4, for some reason, they had no audio. So I recorded them a few weeks ago and now realized that they have no audio and I’m re-recording them. So please forgive me if it feels a little bit disconnected. But I promise the information is all going to stay the same. Alright.

So I want to talk to you a little bit about how to format content for the web. That’s what we’re talking about in this lesson because it’s very different than other forms of media and we’ll talk about that as we dig into today’s lesson. Alright.

So before we begin writing, I want to make sure (as I just said) to really call attention to the differences between print media and traditional media (traditional writing) and web content because there are some stark differences. And if you try and put the type of formatting and style that you would put in print media on the web, it’s going to make for a really, really, really bad user experience and overall hinder the success of your website.

So one of the biggest things that we do with web content – at least experienced writers – we settle into it over time. Everyone figures this out at one point or another as you’re building an internet business. You want to break your paragraphs into smaller chunks. I say “chunks”, so, you know, whereas in a book you may have that much text on a page… if you put that much text on the web; in someone’s web browser, especially on a mobile device – it looks really, really, really bad. So you want to break your paragraphs up into smaller chunks. That doesn’t mean you write a sentence or only two sentences for every paragraph, but you’ll see what this looks like as this section continues.

The other thing that I want to call attention to is, of course, when you’re reading a magazine or a newspaper, you have justified text. And in case you don’t know what justified text is, it’s where basically you have these perfect lines on either side and the spacing in the paragraph is a little bit larger and shorter on some lines than others because it gives that really nice clean line, and next to it another line for another column, and the next to it another line for another column and it makes for these really clean lines.

We don’t do that with web content because it’s a nightmare. It’s just a coding nightmare, a formatting nightmare, and it just wouldn’t make for a very good user experience because we would have all this kind of mixed spacing and it just wouldn’t make any sense. It looks really, really, really bad. And again, especially once you take it from a computer screen and try to make it mobile responsive so it displays the same way on someone’s phone – nightmare. Nightmare and a half, for sure. So we just don’t do that. We don’t worry about justifying text with web content.

The other thing we want to make sure to do as we go through our article – and again we’ll see this later – is as you’re writing, you want to insert images regularly to help break up that wall of text feeling. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a website, you may not have noticed it consciously, you probably just left without realizing why you were leaving; but if you go to a web site and they don’t have their paragraphs broken up into smaller chunks and on top of that, they don’t have images inserted kind of periodically throughout the text, it feels really overwhelming because your screen is just covered in text.

And I don’t care who you are, I don’t care how much you enjoy reading, that is not a good feeling. It’s overwhelming. And typically what it results in is subconsciously, without even realizing it, navigating away from the website and just going and finding one of their competitors that gives the information but they formatted it a little bit better. So don’t let that happen to your website, right? Format the content correctly from the very beginning. And I’ll talk to you in the next lesson – 6.4 – we’ll talk about where to get these images.

And you’ll also want to make sure to strike a balance between search engine optimization and user experience, alright? So of course, we’ve got all these acronyms: that’s SEO and UX. We want to make sure to strike a good balance between these two things, because yes, you want to insert your keywords where they’re helpful and they boost your on-page SEO and they lay a solid foundation for you to get rankings down the road for the keyword you’re optimizing for.

But at the same time, we don’t want to overdo it so much that it’s hurting the user experience. We don’t want a keyword stuff, we don’t want to cram these keywords in every single headline because Google has gotten good enough over the past few years that when you sacrifice user experience specifically to try and game Google and get rankings, it’s going to hurt you. It’s going to not only hurt your user experience, but it could significantly hurt your ability to rank for the keywords you’re trying to rank for. So don’t overdo it. You want to find a nice balance. And of course, we’ll look at that as we continue through this section and I’ll take you in a few lessons over the shoulder so we can see the type of content that I’m describing with all of these different kind of elements that we’re going through lesson by lesson. Okay?

So as I mentioned, you’ll see all of these in the coming lessons. I think it’s going to be crystal clear by the time you finish this section. How all of these things add up to really high-quality content that’s going to get ranked, that’s going to create a wonderful user experience and is going to really, really set you up for success down the road.

Okay, I just realized one thing I forgot to discuss was when I mentioned justified text: excessive fonts. What I mean by excessive fonts is you don’t want these really fancy… you don’t want to pick a theme with this really fancy font. You want really clean, easy-to-read simple font. You don’t want something… you know, a lot of the time journalists will use Serif fonts which is a classification of fonts that have a different style on kind of the ends of the letters. Maybe they have these lines on the end.

You’ll notice that most web content is Sans Serif which means it’s just… the best way I can think to describe this – smoother looking. But you could if you’re really curious, you can Google Serif versus Sans Serif. S-E-R-I-F versus S-A-N-S S-E-R-I-F. So that way you can kind of get an idea, but you know, you could also just take my word for it.

Most good themes are just going to have a Sans Serif font, meaning it doesn’t have those little edges and lines and stuff like that. You’ll even see in the text that I’m using on this slideshow, this is a Sans Serif font. You’ll notice that it doesn’t have any… like Times New Roman and Georgia – they have these kind of fancy on the edges of the letters, they have these extra lines and decoration and they overall just make text a little bit harder to read. And we want to lower the barrier to enjoyment as much as possible to ease of use (usability), user experience. We want to make it as user-friendly as possible and typically a Sans Serif is what does that.

So you don’t need to get that technical. You don’t need to be looking at your themes and be like, “Oh my God, I have a Serif font.” Don’t freak out about it, alright? In most cases, it’s going to be taken care of for you and you don’t need to worry about going into the code and editing that stuff. If you want to address those things down the road, once you’re getting traffic, you can hire a programmer and they can fix it really, really quickly and easily, alright? So I just realized that I overlooked that in that bullet point and I wanted to backtrack before I finish the video and address that.

So as I mentioned, you’ll see all of this in the coming lessons as we work on the content for Rue Tattoo and I think it’s going to be really, really clear before we’re done.

But as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group, we’d be more than happy to help; and if nobody else comes along to help, I’ll be there, I promise. And in any other circumstance, I guess, I’ll just see you in the next video. Talk to you then.

6.2 Preparing Content and Creating an Outline (AF)

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WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

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In this video I discuss:

  • What you need to do to prepare to write high-quality content
  • How much time you can expect to spend preparing for writing high-quality content
  • Creating an outline to work as efficiently and productively as possible once you start writing

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.2 Transcript Below

Okay!

So the first step in creating high-quality content is creating an outline. It’s going to serve as the foundation for the rest of the post. And I found that it helps really accelerate things and break them down into smaller chunks, because sometimes it can be very intimidating and almost (for me personally) debilitating to think about a topic without breaking it down into smaller chunks.

And so that’s a function of creating an outline before you start writing. I think it’s just going to optimize the entire process for you. And for whatever reason, it’s something that I didn’t start doing until several years in and it has helped me tremendously – and not only when I write, but also when I train my writers for my business in my individual websites how to write.

So, Step 1. Before you start kind of… creating the outline is to research your topic pretty extensively. And once you’ve found your keywords and you know what you’re going to write about, you should start researching before you start writing, obviously.

And this is where existing expertise comes in very, very handy. The more experience you have in the niche you are in and the topic you are writing about, the less time you’re going to spend on research. And the opposite of that is true as well.

If you’ve picked a passion-based business (and we talked about this when we were picking a niche), you’re going to spend a lot more time researching because you know less about the industry and it’s harder to create a ton of value that you can build a very successful business on. It’s not impossible, but it’s likely going to take more time researching every single time you write an article.

So this is where if you picked an expertise-based niche – like in an industry you’ve worked in in the past or if you have a certification for something, it’s going to be a big advantage and a big time-saver for you. Don’t get discouraged if you’ve picked a passion-based niche because those can be more fun and more energizing to work on. They have their own advantages that are very unique, too. But just know that you’re going to spend more time researching your topics probably before you start writing content.

An important thing to do when you are researching and putting together your outline is to make sure you’re gathering from credible sources and high-quality sources. You don’t want to just kind of perpetuate false information or write outdated information because you didn’t do enough research.

So at the end of the day, if you’re unclear on what’s actually the correct advice for whatever you’re writing about, you need to do more research until that becomes clear. Don’t just start writing because you feel like, “Ah, I’ve been researching for five hours now and I still don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just going to write this.” It’s important if you want to become an authority within your industry that you make an extreme effort to always post really credible, high-quality, truthful, factual content; because if you don’t, over time, that’s going to catch up with you.

And after you’ve done all your research… actually, typically, they kind of happen simultaneously. As you’re doing your research, you’re starting to formulate the article and that’s creating your outline.

And as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, this is going to dramatically improve your productivity once you begin writing. Because every time you finish a section, you don’t have to go, “Oh, what am I writing about next?” and sit there and think about it. You can just start writing it because you’ve probably already researched it and that’s why it’s in your outline.

At the very least, you want to have in every article… it’s very similar to if you think back to when we learned how to write in I guess middle school and high school and even college… when you’re writing an essay, it’s composed of an introduction, a conclusion, and at least three points in between. And the same actually applies very well to blogging and so I would say aim for at least that in your business. An intro, three solid points, and then a conclusion.

Remember, above all else, you want to add value to that reader’s life. So you want to make sure you’re addressing their pain points or their questions head-on and adding value to their lives based on the perspective of someone that would be facing those pain points or questions – which, if you’re in that niche, are probably pain points and questions at least in many cases that you’ve faced yourself.

All-in-all… I’ve mentioned this in a previous video, I believe. High-quality articles are usually going to come out to at least 1,200 to 1,500 words – maybe somewhere between a 1,000 and 1,200. But most of the time, they’re going to come out to somewhere in this neighborhood: 1,200 to 1,500 words.

And you know, I see people post 500-word articles… 800-word articles… you can see they just kind of throw it out there and hit Publish. And if you read those articles, there’s just (the vast majority of the time) no way to add the kind of value you need to add on that topic to become an authority in that industry. It’s just not a very helpful piece of content. It just barely scratches the surface of the topic compared to other people in the industry that are really digging deep and kind of fleshing the entire topic out. And if you’re doing that the vast majority of the time, it’s going to be at least 1,200 to 1,500 words in my experience.

The article I wrote for this section as an example (which we’ll see for the first time here in a few minutes or in a couple of minutes) is just over 2,000 words. And like I said, that may sound really intimidating, but when you put together a high-quality outline and then you just sit there and you start typing, you will be amazed at how quickly it all comes together.

And I’ve written articles that are 3,000, 4,000+ words…. I’ve had writers for me, but just a couple of weeks ago, one of my really great writers turned in an article that I believe was like 12,800 words. So that was really extreme but it was a very, very comprehensive topic. And in order to create one of the most authoritative pieces of content in the industry, we had to dig that deep to add the level of value we wanted to add. So that is a very rare exception.

And especially when you’re looking to establish your website, I wouldn’t focus on writing these gigantic pieces of content just yet. I would be focused on getting out a fair amount of content but also making sure that I’m kind of… you know… of course, not sacrificing quality. So I would be probably sticking towards the 1,200 to 1,500-word kind of low-end. Maybe creeping up to 2,000 words for my articles rather than spending days potentially writing these 10,000-word articles.

It can be very helpful. You may have one or two of those in the early stages of your website because it really demonstrates the quality of the content you’re putting out when website visitors come to your website and it could be an instant way to establish credibility and authority with a website visitor.

But for SEO purposes and to try to get you out of there kind of vying for as many keywords as possible, I’d say you want to aim for more content without sacrificing quality. Again, I’ve emphasized this in a previous lesson: do not ever sacrifice quality for content. So get out as much content as you can in the early stages while you’re getting your website established for the first few months without sacrificing quality, alright?

So, example time!

Let’s take a look at one of my outlines which I created for my first Rue Tattoo article. And it’s all pretty self-explanatory. If you want to kind of pause the video and take a look at it, you’re more than welcome to. There might be typos in here because outlines are internal documents so don’t feel like they need to be proofread and completely perfect because all this is for is for you.

It’s a tool to improve the productivity and the efficiency in your own writing. Because now that I have this together, I can kind of type out the headline for this first point – because this isn’t a headline, this is just what I want this section to be about. And then I can write a paragraph for this, I can write a paragraph or two about this, I can write a paragraph or two about this, and then as soon as I’m done there, I know what my next point is. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to sit there and kind of ponder. I don’t have to go back out and continue doing a bunch of research. I know as soon as I’m done here, I’m going right here.

And that alone will eliminate so much wasted time in your writing process – in my experience, because I used to spend so much time when I finished one point kind of thinking about, “Okay, what’s the next point I want to write about? How am I going to approach it? What are going to be my sub points?” So it’s just a matter of efficiency. If you do all of these at once and decide what you’re going to write about, you can just focus on writing and nothing else whenever you get to that point.

And so… what was I going to say? I was going to say… Oh, the other thing I mentioned was whenever you’re doing this… when I was thinking about this article, it was overwhelming. And it’s in my nature – it’s not something that’s in everyone’s nature – if I’m overwhelmed by a project, and it’s huge and it’s abstract, and I don’t know how to approach it yet, it makes me not work on it. I will procrastinate for a day or two days or three days because I’m just stalled. Because I think about it, I don’t want to think about it, it’s intimidating, I don’t even know how to go about it, and it makes me not work and not be remotely as productive as I should. And so when I do this, it clears that right up.

So in this particular article, I chose the title when I wrote the outline. Some people prefer to choose a title after they’ve written the entire post and I totally get that. But I know what keyword I want to target and that’s “How Much Does Tattoo Removal Hurt? An Honest Patient’s Experience”. I did that using the exact strategies I taught in the keyword research section. But the keyword I’m targeting right here is “how much does tattoo removal hurt”. I found it using Jaaxy and I think it’s going to be a great target. I think the competition versus search volume really makes it a great opportunity for me to target in this particular business.

And even though I’m not planning to build this website out extensively (right now, it’s just serving as a tool for me to teach), it is a niche I’ve considered pursuing in the past and so I wanted to make sure to get off on the right foot in case I do hire a writer down the road or I continue writing about it for myself. I wanted to make sure that I have a valid article and I wanted to make sure that I showed you, I led by example, and taught you how to do these things firsthand.

So right here, I have an intro, a conclusion, and in between, I have four different points. I could have done three, but again, I wanted to make sure I was adding as much value as possible and I felt like a fourth point was important and totally called for for this particular subject matter.

So this was my outline; and from this outline, I came up with this article. And you can see, again, the title is up here and I kind of go through and I go through my intro. And you can also see… I want to point out I mentioned…. well I’ll mention it in a later video… that you can see how small these chunks are. It’s almost like I’m writing in sentences. A lot of that has to do with the fact that it’s kind of spread across the entire screen right now. This is a more accurate representation of how long these paragraphs are because this is closer to the width for content on my website. But you’ll notice that I wrote in fairly small chunks and I just… we’ll talk about this later… but I want to call your attention to it now so that you can think back to it later.

But I just went through and this is a very rough draft. Another thing that I found over the years is if you edit extensively while you’re writing, you hurt your efficiency dramatically. So the first time, just write what comes to mind and write, write, write, write, write. Don’t think about it too much, don’t judge yourself too much, and then go back and edit it later.

So you can see that I typed this all up. And if you’re not typing directly into WordPress, I would recommend typing up in a plain text document. Because if you try and copy paste from Microsoft Word, some kind of funky things happen with the code (as I mentioned previously) and I just don’t recommend that. So this is a plain text document. It looks pretty ugly. But what I do is I’ll take this entire thing… because I’ve kind of got my headlines written throughout the content… I’ve got a headline there, I’ve got a headline there, I’ve got a headline there… and we’ll see these in the last video in this section in WordPress and how I work with this. But what I do is I type it all up in a text document and then I’ll paste it into WordPress and I’ll go through and I’ll edit it and format it and add images all at once. And that really helps boost your productivity and your efficiency and helps you get out more work in the same amount of time between outlining and between just writing.

I’ve seen people talk about using… they’re called like Hemingway something or another… they’re a type of word processor that you can use specifically for writing and some of them even disable your delete key. They go that extreme because it’s known in the writing community that if you just write and you worry about editing later, you’re going to write so much more, you’re going to be so much productive.

And between outlining the content and going through and making a password, you just write and then coming back and editing, adding images, and formatting later; your productivity will be twice that of another person that’s just getting started on this journey and hasn’t followed this training and isn’t going through these processes and these best practices because they’re just going to do it all at once. They’re going to think about something, they’re going to do research, write a little, do research, write a little, then they’re going to figure out “What is my next section about?” and then they’re going to delete and edit as they go through it. And I’ve seen this as I’ve trained my own writers.

This is the best strategy for efficiency and it’s the best way to get the maximum amount of high-quality work out of whatever hours you’re putting in. So if you’re putting in 10 hours a week or if you’re putting in 20 hours per week, if you follow these strategies when writing your content, you’re going to be twice as productive, you’re going to get twice as much out as you would have if you were just starting off without any direction on how to go about this.

So that’s been my experience in my own business when I’m writing and also my experience with the writers that I train.

So if you went through this article, you may see a bunch of typos, et cetera. Again, I’m editing this later. But the important thing was to get the content out there to just write it and I can perfect it later.

So you would see that this outline ties perfectly to the article that I created because, again, what I did was I deleted this right here, I wrote the headline, and then I wrote a paragraph or two about this, wrote a paragraph or two about this, wrote a paragraph or two about this… okay, that section’s done. On to the next one. Wrote my headline, paragraph or two, paragraph or two, paragraph or two… sometimes three paragraphs… and then before you know it, you’ve spent two hours and you’ve got this super high-quality piece of content – which in this particular case is just over 2,000 words – and that will help you tremendously in your business and I hope it helps you as much as it’s helped me as I’ve come up with these strategies over the years.

So that is a kind of a quick overview about how to create high-quality content. Again, we’ve got more to go through here. So this is just about creating an outline. In the next video, we’re going to talk a little bit about which we’ve touched on here, about how to format content for the web, and then we’ll go through a few more lessons, and we’ll talk about where to get high-quality images, how to add them – all that stuff. And by the time you’re done with this section in the next few videos, you will have no questions about how you create a high-quality content that you can build a very, very profitable internet business off of.

So if you have questions, as always, feel free to ask them in the members-only Facebook group. And I will see you over there and I’ll see you in the next video.

6.1 “Inch Wide, Mile Deep” — How to Create High-Quality Content (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

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  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
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Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

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Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

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WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • Who needs high-quality content on their websites and who doesn’t
  • The best “rule of thumb” for writing high-quality content
  • How much high-quality content you need on your site before beginning promotion

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.1 Transcript Below

Howdy again, folks! Today, we are finally going to talk about high-quality content.

I have said over and over and over again in the sections leading up to this how essential high-quality content is for an internet marketing business, and now, we are finally going to talk about how to do that and it all begins with “Inch Wide, Mile Deep” – and I promise that is more than the world’s worst pick-up line.

How do you create high-quality content?

As I’ve mentioned, it is another crucial component to an internet marketing business. Technically… I want to specify this again for the people that may be watching this that are really experienced or that have followed someone else and go: “Someone else told me that this is not at all required…” and yeah, that’s technically true. You don’t need high-quality content to get ranked. Technically. If you have some very complex SEO skills and know how to game Google without getting caught – which (can’t emphasize this enough in today’s search climate) is incredibly difficult to do unless you are very well-trained and practiced.

But for the average person (if we’re keeping this as simple as possible and we’re playing by the rules) high-quality content is a must for any internet marketing business. Even if you’re not going the SEO route, high-quality content is a must if you’re going to promote your business successfully in other methods that we’ll discuss later.

This is another crucial opportunity to accumulate momentum. We’ve talked about how an internet marketing business is cumulative and your efforts over time will stack on top of each other and over time amplify your results if you keep getting kind of every tier along the way correct. And this is absolutely another one of those crucial kind of opportunities along the way that will help amplify your business’ success and how quickly you see success. And it makes everything, like I said just now, everything else about succeeding much easier if you have high-quality content and you focus on high-quality content. Ultimately, it makes succeeding in internet marketing dramatically easier.

And I also want to emphasize that this does not just have to be written content. A couple of the other most common types of content in this industry are video which we’ll talk about in the next section a little bit. I’m not going to get super in-depth. I would like to dig into it more down the road but I at least want to talk about how to create really high-quality video content that gets ranked and stuff like that on YouTube.

And then on top of that, another really common one is podcasting which there are tons of great resources online for creating podcast. So if you have an idea that might really go well in the podcasting community or is something that the market is missing right now, that is also an excellent form of high-quality content that many people build very profitable internet marketing businesses off of.

But how does someone create high-quality content, right? That’s what this freakin’ lesson’s supposed to be about. I want to take a moment to say this training is not about how to write. This is not about the English grammar and punctuation and how to compose a really well-written sentence.

I think a lot of us experienced that in our traditional education and it’s going to (A) bog down the training if I even tried, and (B) I am not an English teacher, it is not something that I am equipped to teach. Even when I hire writers in my own business, that is something that I have to have in the writer; because I can teach them everything about how to research, I can teach them everything there is to know about the topic that they’re going to be writing on, I can teach them everything about WordPress – I cannot take the time to teach people how to write.

So if you are going to build a business that is built on written content (and that’s kind of the path you’re trying to take to succeeding in internet marketing over video or over podcasting) and you don’t know how to write really good English… it’s something I’ve seen a handful of people overcome without working on their English, but I would strongly advise picking up some materials and learning how to write a little bit better as if you were a native speaker at least.

For those of you that go, “I’m not a very good writer,” but you know how to write in English – that’s not a big deal. Don’t worry. I think by the end of this section you’re going to feel very well-equipped to write high-quality content and you just don’t have to be an incredible writer to do well in this industry but you do have to write… I take that back… as I mentioned there have been a few exceptions that I’ve seen over the years. It’s much more helpful for you success if you know how to write as if English is your first language. Proper grammar, proper punctuation, good spelling, you know how to edit your own writing, etc.

So that’s not what this video is about. I’m not going to teach that at all in this training. I would strongly recommend that you seek help elsewhere. You know, buying books on Amazon or researching it more on YouTube and through other sources online because there’s a lot of really good information out there on it.

And if you’re trying to become a better writer and you want your writing to be more interesting, a really good book for that (even though it’s not directly applied to blogging) is Stephen King has a book on writing called ‘On Writing’. So that is a really, really good book. The audio book is excellent as well and it can really help amplify your writing.

And we’ll talk about copywriting and stuff hopefully down the road. I’d like to give that its own section and that will be helpful as well, but long story short, this is not about how to write in English. This is about how to create high-quality content if you already know how to write in English as if it were your first language.

So the key to producing high-quality content (whether it’s written or podcast or something else) is if you focus on value and adding value into your follower’s life, your website visitor’s life, your podcast subscribers’ lives… if you focus on value, you will do great. You will write very high-quality content. And that’s just… the key is trying to help them. (I’m so like… I’m so screwed up today for some reason… like my wires are crossed or something. I apologize.)

Another perfect example is this training. I know a lot from this industry over the years and by focusing above all else on giving you this information in a really easy to understand, easy to digest format and kind of focusing my efforts there, this quality is through the roof. I hope. For all I know, you’re hating it. But hopefully, if you’ve gotten this deep, you’re enjoying it a little bit and learning a lot.

If you focus on value… so I’m just trying to give you everything I’ve got and really, really trying to just build the value and I know if I do that, everything else will follow. And the same will be true in your business no matter what niche you go into. If you focus on value above all else, you will do very, very well in this industry.

And just like anything else, practice makes perfect. I can’t even remember what it was like when I was writing when I first started in this industry over 10 years ago. Fortunately, I had a grandma that was an English teacher for 32 years and as far as writing English, creating written word, I was always pretty decent with that. I always had kind of a knack for that.

But I guarantee, when I first started writing blog posts, it was nothing like it is now. And I could knock them out really quickly now. I think the posts that I wrote for this section that I’m going to share in a later video, I probably knocked out in about two hours and there was definitely a time where that would have taken me a full day. So just know, you will make progress every single time you sit down and you write something else. You will make progress, you will get better, and practice makes perfect.

I just mentioned this: it will get faster and easier every time as well.

And don’t try to write about everything about a given topic in a single post. That is a mistake that a lot of people try to make. So you take this broad topic and then you try to write about everything there is for that broad topic. And what you end up doing is creating such a watered-down piece of content because you tried to talk about so much that it hurts the value of the content overall. Once you’re finished with the article, it’s not as high quality as it would have been if you were just focused on a tiny segment within that very broad topic. So it’s better to kind of flesh out everything about a very specific question or pain point than try and discuss everything there is about that particular topic.

Coming back to laser tattoo removal, I don’t want to try and write an article about everything there is to know about laser tattoo removal, at least not in the beginning. I don’t want to write an article about how much it hurts and how much it costs and the technology and all of these different things. I don’t want to write about all of those in one big post.

I want to write about all of those individually and then once that’s done, I might create something that’s commonly referred to in the industry as ‘cornerstone content’ where I talk about everything kind of in smaller chunks and link out to the articles that breakdown and go really in-depth for each one of those individual topics.

So it’s not always the case that you’re going to get very specific… and I’ll talk about this I think it’s towards the end of this slide actually… it’s not always that you’re going to get super, super specific; but the vast majority of the time, that’s going to produce the highest quality content – and that’s where “Inch Wide, Mile Deep” comes in.

It’s kind of a visualization. A lot of people have a tendency when they sit down to write, they want to do the opposite of this. They want to go “Mile Wide, Inch Deep” and that is not typically how high-quality content on the web is created. If you pay more attention as you’re researching topics in your own life, you will find that a lot of the content that you find very, very helpful follows this strategy that kind of follows this mantra “Inch Wide, Mile Deep”.

It talks a lot about one very specific topic and carries you through everything there is to know and maybe even more information than originally you were seeking on that topic. But it’s very, very helpful for the kind of place you are in and the problems you’re facing to be researching that topic in the first place.

So if you pay attention (I think you’ll see this across the web), every authority website does this very consistently even if you seek case studies that write 5,000 words about one very specific thing that their business did very well. So “Inch Wide, Mile Deep” should become a mantra in your business and should kind of be built into your defaults for everything you do in this industry and that will help you a lot in creating really high-quality content.

As I mentioned, this isn’t true 100% of the time, but more often than not, it’s an incredibly good rule of thumb. Sometimes you will have cornerstone content that covers a much larger area that targets like a really competitive keyword or something like that. And you link out to each one of your kind of islands that you’ve written about – really, really high-quality content about one very specific topic. Again, “Inch Wide, Mile Deep”. So you may do those pieces of cornerstone content every once in a while. But most of the time in your business, you’ll probably want to focus on “Inch Wide, Mile Deep”.

So I also want to emphasize that this alone will make your business successful. There are other ways to build a successful internet marketing business (and we’ll talk about those in Section 7), but this is a very, very effective and valid approach to succeeding in internet marketing. If you do this along with the other things that I’ve kind of discussed, it’s going to get you to success in this industry – if you stick with it. It’s just a matter of time.

Every site needs a foundation of at least seven to ten pieces of high-quality content before promoting. You could probably get away with four or five, but the idea here is you have your core pages which we discussed when we were setting up our website. So you have your core pages and you probably want at least four to five. I would even (like I said) stretch it to seven to ten pieces of really high-quality content before you start promoting your website, because otherwise, it’s just going to dilute you promotional efforts.

If you send this website to people and you have one or two or three high-quality articles on it, it doesn’t matter how high-quality they are, it’s going to look like a brand new website and it’s not going to be demonstrative of the level of authority you’re trying to build within your niche. And that’s going to hurt your promotional efforts to the point that maybe you jumped the gun a little bit, and next time they see an email when your site actually does have a sufficient amount of quality content to be impressive, they say, “Oh, I already heard from this guy,” and they don’t even click the link, they don’t even check out your website.

So I would say your focus – after you get launched, your website’s going, you’ve got your keywords, etc. – should be producing seven to ten really high-quality pieces of content before you step into promotion which is Section 7.

And you know, I’ve talked about a lot here… I’ll talk about even more specifics and methods and kind of how-to step-by-step that I go through in my own business… and in time, you’re going to settle into your own style and your own rhythm and that’s going to be the most efficient thing for you. But I will share my process throughout this section and that should be at least a good starting point for you going forward in your own business so that you can begin to settle into your own style.

So what I share here in Section 6 is my exact formula for successful SEO-based websites. And this is what I train my personal writers to do when I hire someone onto my team. This is what I do when I write high-quality content myself these days. And I can’t even imagine how long it took me to settle into this, but the processes that I share here are the same processes that I used to train people in my own business so that I can build profitable websites.

So I hope you enjoy it. I hope you find it helpful. And this kind of is a high-level overview and kind of the introduction to this topic, but we’re going to get dig in deep to the specific strategies in these coming videos. So I hope you found this video helpful.

As always, if you have questions, feel free to post them in the members-only Facebook group and I will see you there and I’ll see you in the next video.

5.6.1 Long Tail Pro Deep Dive — Hunting Down Low Competition Keywords (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • How to find keywords in even the most competitive niches using Long Tail Pro

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

5.5 Finding Keywords Using Free Keyword Tools (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • How to find high quality keywords using free keyword tools
  • The best free keyword tools currently available online
  • How to combine these free keyword tools to get useful data
  • Which keywords to target and which keywords to avoid based on search volume and competition
  • A step-by-step live demonstration of all of this in action

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

5.5 Transcript Below

Okay, let’s finally get into actually digging in and finding some keywords.

I want to start with free keyword tools because I’m well aware that a lot of the people (probably the majority of people watching this training series) don’t have the upfront investment capital to pay for premium keyword tools – especially since all of the really good ones now are monthly fee based instead of one-time fee based. I don’t why that happened. That was a trend over many years. You used to be able to get some really good ones (mainly one really good one) for a flat time fee and even they went monthly based now.

And there are some reasons for that that makes sense as far as their expenses go up – especially with a lot of the data APIs they have to pay for – but at the same time, honestly, I think most of it’s a money grab and it sucks. They did it because they can and because it’s much better for their revenue. Unfortunately. I wish that weren’t the case but that is the way it is.

But you shouldn’t feel at all like you can’t do this just because you can’t pay for the premium keyword tools. I got started with free keyword tools, and admittedly, that was a much different internet marketing climate than now. But it’s still absolutely possible if you know what you’re doing and you’re using the right tools.

It can be a little bit overwhelming so just know that finding keywords using free tools is going to be much more overwhelming because the data isn’t as interpreted and crunched for you. You kind of have to do a lot of that yourself using free keyword tools versus paid keyword tools.

But by no means should you feel like you can’t do this. And anybody that has made you feel like you can’t do this just because you can’t afford premium keyword tools is just out to get another affiliate commission out of you. People do that to make people like you feel like, “Oh I can’t succeed unless I spend more money.” And they just do that so that you’ll buy more things that are affiliate links. And unfortunately, that’s all too common in this industry and it’s just a really scummy thing that I don’t want you to feel like you have to do.

So free keyword tools are absolutely sufficient. You’re going to have to put in a little bit more legwork, but I’m going to show you exactly how to do it in this video.

So I want to talk really quickly about the pros and cons of using free keyword tools. Unfortunately, the cons do fairly heavily outweigh the pros for free keyword tools. But the pro is… and this is going to be enough for the vast majority of people watching this video I think… is that there are no added expenses. After you’ve paid for your hosting and your domain name, you’re good for a year. Those are all of your expenses feasibly if you’re using free keyword tools.

And so, I know that’s a lot of people out there just saying, “This is all I have. I only have, you know, $150 to get started my first year.” And a lot of people in this industry I feel like make you think that’s not enough because most of them charge more than that just for training in the first place. But it is more than enough.

I think the biggest expense in this industry is training – and you’re getting all of that here for free which opens up a world of possibilities – after that, it’s only hosting and a domain name. And if you’re willing to put in the legwork with free keyword tools, you’ve got everything you need to make a profitable internet business happen. So now that, you know, kind of all of this is in place… (not too toot my own horn) but thanks to this really high-quality step-by-step free training being published, this industry should be a lot more approachable than it ever was before.

So the pro (the only real pro) to free keyword tools is there’s no added expenses. And like I said, for a lot of people watching this video, that’s going to be more than enough. And I don’t judge you for that. That’s where I was when I started. So good on you for trying to improve your life! Just be prepared to put in a little bit extra work.

The bad news on free keyword tools is that they don’t give us as much at a glance data on competition. You can get data for competition (and we’re going to look at it live later in this video after we finish talking about some of the stuff in the slideshow), but it’s not as good as premium keyword tools just flat out. Some of the best premium keyword tools will make it kind of at a glance easy to see whether or not you should try and pursue that keyword – nothing like that exists in free keyword tools; only in premium keyword tools. So that can make it a little bit tricky and it makes it a little bit more overwhelming when you’re looking at the data because you kind of have to manually interpret a lot of it; but you’ll get better at it with time. That’s just the nature of the beast. If you’re looking to save money, you’re going to have to spend more time to work around some of these things.

So you’ll see exactly what I mean when we look at the free keyword tool and how we interpret competition. There are some really good ways to do it that are very dependable. Frankly, they’re more dependable than a lot of the premium keyword tools out there; but it’s going to take literally like ten times as much time. And you’ll see why if you watch the free keyword tool training and the premium keyword tool training. You’ll see side-by-side why it takes so much longer.

Another con is that the data for some of these free keyword tools is often not as accurate or reliable. That is not true for the main free keyword tool we’re going to be using – which is put out by Google themselves – so that’s the one we’re going to be using mainly and looking at the most. So this doesn’t really apply to them, but unfortunately, they don’t give any competition data. So we’ll talk about that as we go through, too.

And as I mentioned, it typically is going to take a lot more time for you to find keywords using free keyword tools versus premium keyword tools. And it’s no exaggeration to say that it will (pretty easily) probably take five to ten times as much time using free keyword tools than premium keyword tools. And again, if you don’t have the money to spend on premium keyword tools from the beginning – it doesn’t matter. You’re going to have to spend the time anywhere around it. I just want you to be prepared and know that that’s the case going forward.

So there are a number of really good free keyword tools out there honestly. If you just Google ‘free keyword tools’, ‘best free keyword tools’, you’ll find some really good ones. The ones that I found really helpful – and the most reliable, of course – is going directly to the source and that’s Google AdWords Keyword Planner (also just called the Google Keyword Planner).

You will need an AdWords account to use this. That doesn’t mean you need to spend any money with AdWords. You just need to go through the process of setting up an AdWords account. And even if your AdWords account has been suspended… which has happened to a lot of us as we started in internet marketing, trying to run some pay-per-click ads, and we got kind of slapped on the wrists (myself included)… so don’t worry even if your AdWords account is suspended… you can still use Google’s Keyword Planner.

So when you go to use Google’s Keyword Planner through AdWords… and you can find the Google Keyword Planner, just search the internet for ‘Google keyword planner’. It’ll pop up.

And the first time, if you don’t have an account, it will kind of prompt you through like a campaign creation wizard. And it’ll be like, “What do you want to buy keywords for? How much is your daily budget?” And just either: never launch that campaign or be very careful after you go through that wizard to turn off the campaign if you launched it; because otherwise, you’re going to actually be buying ads on Google which is not what you want to do if you’re trying to not spend money.

So anyways, that’s just a little bit of information about the Google Keyword Planner. But you can find it easily online: just search ‘Google keyword planner’ or ‘Google free keyword planner’ and then it’ll pop up – and you’ll recognize it because we’re going to look at it later in this video.

There are also some other somewhat helpful tools. Keyword.io used to be better than it is now. They’ve kind of locked down so much of their data and filled their site up with so many ads that it’s really annoying to use, but there’s still some useful help there. And Ubersuggest.io is another really good one that we’ll look at really briefly. It gives no search volume, unfortunately, so you have to kind of depend on Google for the search volume which is a smart thing to do – even a lot of the times when using premium keyword tools – because nobody’s data is going to be more accurate than Google’s.

So after finding our keywords, we need to… this is a workaround for free keyword tools… we need to check the competition using the free MozBar and you will need also to create a free account with Moz in order to do that. Both things that you can do very easily. Again, just using Google, just search the internet for ‘install MozBar’. Just like that. M-O-Z-B-A-R. And you’ll get the bar that we’re going to be using in this video.

The only unfortunate thing is Moz metrics used to be… we’ll talk about them here in a second… but they used to be the industry standard and kind of what everyone depended on; and they were the strongest indicators for whether a site was going to rank and how much ranking authority a website had – and that’s not really the case anymore. Majestic is another company in the industry; and instead of Moz has Domain Authority and Page Authority (which will make more sense in a second), Majestic has Trust Flow and Citation Flow. And over the years in the SEO industry – at least in the internet marketing world – Majestic has kind of taken the cake away from Moz and Trust Flow is one of the best components to look at when evaluating a website’s link portfolio and competition and how high authority that page and that domain are. But the good news is – at least for now – Domain Authority and Page Authority are still pretty good indicators. They’re just not the industry leaders anymore.

So when we use MozBar, we’re going to be using Moz’s metrics to analyze competition. And I just wanted you to know going in, I know they’re not the industry leader anymore; but unfortunately, Majestic doesn’t put out any free tools like this (at least as of recording this video) so that we can interpret competition. So we have to use the next best thing which is the second best metrics in the industry for analyzing competition and website authority.

So when we get in here… this is going to make a lot more sense in a second and we’ll reference back to this as we’re going through and kind of doing over-the-shoulder training where you’re looking at my screen and seeing what I’m looking for… but the important metrics that we’re going to be looking at when using the MozBar and trying to interpret competition – one of the absolute (actually, I would say the most important) metric when you’re looking for page authority or when you’re looking for competition – is Page Authority.

The closer you can get to less than 10 (it’s on a scale from 1 to 100), the better. Unfortunately, it’s gotten harder and harder and harder to find anything that doesn’t have at least PA 15, 20, 25 on the first page on Google. The good news is we can find weaknesses and other things which we’ll talk about here in a second… but long story short, you want to get as close to less than 10 as possible and you want to see some big holes in the other things that we’re going to talk about as far as competition goes if you want to target that keyword and have any chance at getting ranked even when your website is kind of building that authority.

So we’ll look at all that in a second but Page Authority is that specific page on their website that is ranked in Google right there in top 5, top 10 – whatever you’re looking at. It’s a proprietary metric based on a lot of different things; but a really, really heavy component of that is their link profile and how powerful the link profile is to their website. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, it doesn’t need to at this stage; but a link profile is everyone else on the internet that is linking to their site. They have created a link from a page on their site to that page that you’re now looking at in Google’s listings. That’s a link profile: what a bunch of different people are linking to and also the links from your own website going to that page. But that’s pretty advanced. We’ll get there when we’re talking about on-page SEO. So for now, I just want you to know that Page Authority is a Moz metric for the exact page you’re looking at on that site – that individual page.

Domain Authority (abbreviated DA) is what the entire domain authority is. It’s exactly what it sounds like. So whereas Page Authority is the individual page that you’re looking at (every page on a website has different authority), the Domain Authority for all of Stopping Scams – for example – stays the same. That does not fluctuate. Domain Authority stays the same across the entire domain.

The exception to that would be subdomains. Subdomains are treated as their own website. So for example… I don’t know… if I had Training.StoppingScams.com, the authority that I have for StoppingScams.com would not apply to the subdomain. So an even better example would be this is why I installed StoppingScams.com/FIMP for Free Internet Marketing Project instead of FIMP.StoppingScams.com because by installing FIMP in a subdirectory (StoppingScams.com/FIMP – so that’s installing it in a subdirectory) I leveraged the Domain Authority for all of Stopping Scams that I’ve built over the past… I guess three years is about how old the site is… so I get to leverage all of that in my ranking authority for my new content that I’m creating for Free Internet Marketing Project. If I had created FIMP.StoppingScams.com, that would not be true. It would be treated like a brand new website. It would have no Domain Authority.

And that’s not just by… Domain Authority doesn’t just exist in the world of Moz. They are the ones that kind of coined that metric but Domain Authority is a thing, regardless of whether or not you’re talking about Moz. So it’s not just like Moz created this thing that didn’t exist. It’s kind of like… I guess it’s kind of like Math. It’s probably a horrible and totally inaccurate analogy; but Math was always there. There were all kinds of laws that kind of controlled Physics and the way objects interacted with one another, et cetera; and so the underlying Math was always there but it took a while for us to discover it and we’re still discovering a lot of it.

The same thing is true for Domain Authority and Page Authority. These things exist even outside of the world of Moz or outside of the world of Majestic, but this helps us give them a name. And also, they have proprietary algorithms that crunch them and kind of represent them in a number form. That may not be totally accurate because they’re not Google and Google doesn’t release that information publicly, but Majestic and Moz are about as close as you can get to having a really good idea of how powerful that site is or that page is in Google’s eyes.

So, talked enough about that. But hopefully, that gives you a pretty thorough understanding of the concepts of Domain Authority and Page Authority – generally speaking – but as well as DA and PA when we’re talking about Moz’s proprietary metrics.

Another thing to look for is the exact keyword you are researching and considering trying to rank for is that in their meta title and description – which if you don’t know what those are, it’s okay. I’ll point it out as we’re going through live here in a couple of minutes. But that’s another very important thing, because fact of the matter is, you’re probably pretty much across the board going to see Domain Authority and Page Authority that are going to scare the hell out of you. The Page Authority is not going to be remotely close to less than 10 for most keywords you look at. So you have to start looking for the gaps in things like the exact keyword being in the meta title and the description, how well their content is ranked for regarding on-page SEO, stuff like that. So we’ll dig in and take a look at that when we’re looking through some of these keywords.

And another good thing to look for is answer-oriented sites Yahoo! Answers, old article directories like Ezine, and of course, answer sites like eHow and other things like that in the top 10 rankings are pretty good sign that probably means that there aren’t a whole lot of authoritative results there. This is not universally true, but it’s going to be true a lot because a lot of those sites rank based on their Domain Authority overall rather than their Page Authority for that individual page. And that’s actually really good for you because although they have really high Domain Authority, if you can come along and optimize them and have a more authoritative individual page, you could bump up above them. That’ll make more sense when we’re looking through the metrics live.

Another good sign is any kind of free blog site like WordPress.com… and I don’t mean a website that’s hosted on WordPress and they have their own domain name… like Stopping Scams, for example, is its own website hosted on WordPress. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about if you saw a website that was StoppingScams.WordPress.com, okay? Those are the kinds of ones that are a good sign. Same thing with Blogspot, Blogger – anything like that in the top 10, generally speaking.

Again, these last two are not universal; but more often than not, they’re going to be good signs that you could get rankings for those terms if you see those kind of really good signs; because again, they’re ranking more on their Domain Authority than their Page Authority. The competitors that are really hard to outrank are the ones that are ranking based on Page Authority. You can outrank someone that has high Domain Authority, but the really difficult thing to outrank is Page Authority.

So we’ll talk a look at all of this now – live – okay?

So the first thing I want to do is I want to pop in and show you a quick overview of a couple of the keyword tools and then we’ll take a look at a handful of keywords – hopefully without dragging things out too much. But I also want to make sure we go through enough that you actually get these concepts, because again, they’re essential for your success in the coming weeks and months and you really, really need to know how to pick keywords.

So let’s go ahead and hop in to Google.

So I’ve already popped in here ‘tattoo removal’. One of the nice things about most of these keyword tools is that you can pop in at what’s referred to as a ‘seed keyword’ and it’s going to give you all kinds of suggestions based on that seed keyword.

I do want to point out that you can change locations. Like I could narrow this down to my home city of Austin, Texas and get data just for Austin. I could do this for Texas, generally speaking; or I could do that for all of the United States; or just for Germany – or stuff like that. Typically speaking, that comes in really handy for when you’re doing research for local SEO… if you’re planning on getting local SEO clients – which, again, I hope to teach somewhere down the road. But that’s putting the cart before the horse for sure.

So when we’re talking about affiliate websites and just information-based websites, we’re going to probably end up getting traffic from all over the world. So we’re not going to concern ourselves with refining this too much. All locations is fine but I would make sure that I narrowed it down to English.

Something that people ask a lot is, “Can I run a website in French or German?” or whatever your native language is. And the answer is yes. Just make sure that you update the correct setting on Google’s Keyword Planner in order to do that.

So I guess that is one pro to Google’s Keyword Planner… that is not true for a lot of premium tools… is that you can change your language and get search volume for different languages. That is not true for a lot of premium tools. So that is also worth mentioning. I wish I thought about that for the slides. But just know that going forward.

So I’m just going to put in a broad kind of seed keyword. And as time goes on, you could take this broad seed keyword and find a handful of different ones and punch those into and come through and do this in several different cycles. I’m just going to – for right now – just show ‘tattoo removal’ generally speaking and we’ll see what this looks like in Google.

So when you’re brought into Google’s Keyword Planner after searching, you’ll get a lot of data here and you can adjust your keyword up here that we just put in on the last page. But you have Ad group ideas… and personally, I don’t spend really any time in here… I look at the individual Keyword ideas – because again, I’m not using this for Google pay-per-click. I’m using this for search engine optimization inspiration. And so, I’m using this tool very differently than it was originally created for – all SEOs do. But just know that. You’ll probably be operating in the Keyword ideas tab close to 100%, if not 100% of the time.

So we can just kind of scroll down here. I have these sorted by the Average monthly searches. And really quick note: Competition here is not SEO competition. The Competition you see here is for pay-per-click advertising which is a very different thing. There may be some overlap, but it is not dependable enough to say, “Oh, it’s low competition. I can go ahead and try for that with search engine optimization because it says it’s low competition.” That’s not the case at all. (Forgive me, I need to remember to breathe here. I’m just talking so much that I’m like running out of breath. Excuse me. Okay, that’s a lot better.)

So I mean, like Suggested bid… again, these are our pay-per-click metrics. We’re not going to concern ourselves with them too much. The main thing we want to look at is the keyword itself and the monthly searches. We can research competition individually.

So before we dig too deep, I’ve also punched ‘tattoo removal’ over here into Ubersuggest.io to give you an idea of what’s going on over here. So you can see all kinds of options here as well and they kind of break it down alphabetically (this is a really great way to get keyword ideas and long tail keyword ideas); and you know, just kind of click through and say like expand this keyword. So now, it’s going to search ‘tattoo removal equipment’; and obviously, this is going to be a much shorter list (because this was a much more specific seed keyword) but still worth showing.

So Ubersuggest is really cool in that sense and very helpful. Just know that it’s there at your disposal. Especially when you get to the point that you’re having a lot of trouble finding new keywords, Ubersuggest is really good. Even though it doesn’t give you the search volume, it’ll give you some ideas that you can then bring over to Google’s Keyword Planner and put them in and check their search volume and also get even more ideas from Google. So these things kind of stack on one another.

Again, I wish I could make it less overwhelming and less confusing; but this is just the nature of using free keyword tools. So you’re going to have to kind of find a groove of how to use these and it won’t be hard once you use them enough that you get a good feel for them.

So I’m going to re-sort by relevance (which is the default sort) and now you can see like this. As much as I would love to get ranked for this keyword, it is not going to happen remotely quickly. This is the kind of keyword that I could probably spend a year or two years trying to rank for and still probably only be creeping up page one. So I’m not even really going to pay a whole lot of attention to keywords that have really high search volume. I’m going to kind of skip down to the ones that have somewhere between 100 and 1,000 searches a month and even the ones that have between 10 and 100 searches a month.

Let’s take this one for example. I think this is a decent one because it’s fairly long tail. But you see there are a fair amount of these here saying ‘tattoo removals’, ‘removing a tattoo’, ‘cheap tattoo removal’, ‘best laser for tattoo removal’… and I haven’t looked at this really extensively before this video because I think (again) in this industry, you get coaches that hop in and they kind of stage a play-by-play and then they get in and then all the dots connect really quickly and you’re like, “Oh wow. That happened really quickly!” And you start doing it yourself and you’re like, “Why the hell is it taking me six hours when it took him 15 minutes on camera?” So, I try to keep it fairly unplanned so that it’s pretty representative of what it will look like when you’re doing it yourself.

So I’m actually going to take this one: ‘can tattoos be removed’. I might look at some others as well (I’m going to close out this tab from Ubersuggest) and we’re just going to punch this into Google. Again, assuming you have already installed the Moz free toolbar… and you can turn it off and on by clicking this little icon up here. Just a heads up: that’s how you turn it off and on because it can get kind of annoying if you’re not using it and it’s constantly popping up. So when I’m not using it, I have it turned off.

So the keyword ‘can tattoos be removed’… I’m not going to search it with quotes or anything like that… we want to see what this looks like. And the other nice thing for Moz is that you see this drop down here. It’s automatically removing the personalization from Google.

What will happen a lot of the time when people get into this industry is say, for example, I wrote an article about ‘can tattoos be removed’. And I wrote that article, I published it, checked it out at my website, I was so happy with it because I felt like it came out really, really well. And a week later, I searched ‘can tattoos be removed’ and of my God, there I am! I’m in the third position on Google! And then, people get super excited – rightfully so – but what they don’t know is Google has started personalizing search.

So you actually need to either de-personalize your search by using something like the Moz keyword tool or you just have to open a new private browsing window when you’re searching for your rankings, because otherwise, you’re going to get your hopes up and it’s going to be really disappointing when you find out that you’re not actually ranked anywhere near page one. That’s just Google personalizing search and they’re showing you that page that high because you went to the site previously.

Okay. So just disclaimer there. I’ve broken a lot of hearts with that information and it breaks my heart to tell people every single time because people are so excited; but it also explains why you rank for a keyword that gets a thousand searches a month and you’re not getting any traffic. It’s because you’re not actually ranked.

So that’s another nice thing about Moz’s keyword tool or the free MozBar is that it makes for non-personalized search results automatically.

So as we scroll down, you can see for the search term ‘can tattoos be removed’ which Google showed had somewhere between 100 and 1,000 searches a month – which sucks that it’s that big of a swing… that it is that broad like they couldn’t be more specific than that. But I know at the end of the day, that’s a keyword that I’m interested in it as long as the competition is low enough.

So we scroll down here for ‘can tattoos be removed’ and the first thing we see is a very, very authoritative site… WebMD.com and sites like Mayo Clinic and stuff like that. For anything health-oriented, they’re going to be very, very difficult to outrank. So I look at this and I think, “Could I get number one?” Very unlikely. But it makes sense that WebMD is ranked there, because at the end of the day, ‘tattoo removal’ is health-related.

So here’s another article ’10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Laser Tattoo Removal’ for RealSelf.com. I’m going to open that up and just see what kind of site that is. Okay, so RealSelf seems to be some sort of cosmetic-themed website where people talk to you, where people can review and write information about different cosmetic treatments… it looks like from dental to plastic surgery to cosmetic… or dermatological treatments which is technically what laser tattoo removal is. And you can see they’re ranked here, too. You can see they have pretty high Domain Authority overall. Here. Here.

Anything ranked on YouTube is going to have a Domain Authority of 100. But again, we’re not looking at Domain Authority too much. We’re looking at Page Authority. And another thing: whenever you see a PA 1 with a blip of all these other PA 50 or PA 47, either there’s been a reporting error from Moz or what’s also potentially happening here is that Google is giving this as kind of a localized result. (Man, I’m getting so tongue-tied today. I apologize.)

So I actually know that Eraser Clinic is a local business. They’re actually my tattoo removal clinic but they have a lot of locations around Texas. And so, that’s probably why they’re getting ranked here. This is not an advantage you’re going to have. So if you see something like a PA 1 or a PA 4 or 6 among all of these other PA 50, PA 40, PA 70 type websites, don’t think that just because they got there, you can too. It’s either a reporting error or there’s a special exception that applies to them that will probably not apply to you as a blogger. In this particular case, it’s because this website has a lot of really, really good unique content and they’re a local business – and again, that is not going to apply to you. You are not going to get that same advantage.

So this is a pretty scary keyword competition-wise. The lowest one is PA 29. And like I told you… I mean, again, without the exception of Eraser Clinic… I told you it’s going to be really hard to find PA 10 or less just in today’s search climate. It doesn’t really happen that much anymore. But I don’t really want to end up in 30, 40, 50, 70 in competing with these guys.

So the next thing you can look at too is how well are they optimized for this exact keyword. The exact keyword ‘can tattoos be removed’… you don’t see in the… remember, I mentioned meta title and meta description… you don’t see that. This is the meta title and this is the meta description right here. You do not see a single instance of that exact keyword ‘can tattoos be removed’ in this meta description or meta title. Same thing here. There is no exact match keyword for ‘can tattoos be removed’. (Good. I remembered the keyword correctly.)

So as we keep going down, ‘it can remove’… again, we see the keyword broken up throughout the content but we do not see anything with a meta title or meta description and also in the URL slug. We do not see anything that is fully optimized for ‘can tattoos be removed’. So that is the only good sign from this page. That’s a tough call.

And again, this is the thing when you’re using free keyword tools: it’s always going to be a difficult thing to call. I would be much more comfortable seeing like a bunch of PA 20-ish, maybe going up to 30; and nobody having optimized for ‘can tattoos be removed’ in their meta title and meta description. If I saw those two things combined, I would think, “Yeah. This is a keyword I’m going to write on.” If your site’s brand new, I would not expect to rank for it for several months; but again, you may have a shot at it as your website authority builds in the coming months. So I might add it to my list as somewhat moderate competition but I wouldn’t really get my hopes up for this one. I would aim for lower hanging fruit.

So it took us all that time. Granted, it will take you less time because you’re not sitting there talking about it over and over and teaching a video on this particular topic. And as time goes on (just like everything else) this gets easier and easier. But it took us all that time to rule out one keyword. And you’ll see how that is night and day compared to the premium keyword tool we’re going to be looking at in the next video. So just keep that in mind. Expect to spend some time here.

And so, let’s look at ‘best laser tattoo removal’ and see if we have any better results there. So I’ll just scroll back up. Moz’s pop-ups get pretty infuriating sometimes so you just have to deal with them unless you want to pay like $130 or $100 a month for their premium subscription. That’s the only way you’re going to get rid of these little pop-ups that keep coming up.

So again, you could see they’ve kind of localized this result by the fact that we’re seeing a map. This is the exact tattoo removal clinic that I go to. This is an ad. In fairness, they’re not up there at the top through SEO; but they are at the top through SEO up here. And again… man, we’re seeing a couple of things… I think Moz may have given me a notification about this as I hit Enter… could be wrong. Okay. They’re loading better now.

So again, when you see this PA 1, don’t think, “Oh, it’s PA 1! I’m going to be able to rank for this now.” It’s actually kind of a bad sign because Google very clearly thinks that this is a local-oriented search phrase. So someone searching ‘best laser tattoo removal’, they (Google) feel clearly like that is someone looking for the best laser tattoo removal locally. They don’t think this is someone that’s looking for the best type of laser tattoo removal. They think this is someone looking locally for the best tattoo removal business. And so, I wouldn’t even look at this one extensively because although it’s possible that we may get ranked somewhere down here at the bottom half of page one, the top half of page one for this term (pretty much across the board) is going to be dominated by local results. And so, that’s not going to be worth my time to get really deep into.

So, let’s see. Let’s look for another 100 to 1K. ‘Laser for tattoo removal’… let’s see what that one pops up. See what Google thinks is relevant there. Again, local listings. Anytime you see this map pop up, that’s an indicator that Google thinks that this is a more localized search term.

‘Tattoo removal clinic’ is definitely going to be a localized search term. (Excuse me while I get some water.) Let’s see because this is different than ‘best laser tattoo removal’. Let’s see if they think this one’s local, too. Yeah. It’s clear that Google thinks that that’s a local result as well because they’re putting the maps up top. You can see that there’s kind of a general discussion just below that. But again, like Eraser Clinic, Eraser Clinic, Westlake Dermatology – those are local businesses. Google thinks that this is a more local-related term.

So let’s kind of flip the script a little bit here. I’m going to sort by Average monthly searches. I’m going to sort ascending so that they go from the lowest to the highest. And another thing that’s worth mentioning is whenever you see a keyword like this that doesn’t make sense syntactically… like someone has just totally cut out a word here and kind of searched the way you search on the internet… and that makes it very hard to optimize an article for that keyword. And I personally just totally skip over these unless there’s a clever way to go about it – and hopefully, I come across an example – but writing an article that the title is ‘Getting a Tattoo Removed Cost’… the best way you could do that is something like that. So technically, that’s fully optimized for that keyword; but it’s just not the greatest user experience overall. And I think it’s also up for debate as to whether or not that actually has any payoff because Google’s algorithms (their bots, their spiders) now are smart enough to know when someone is just writing important English to try and appease an exact match for a keyword. So unless I could do it in a way that really made a lot of sense, I would just skip over those.

So let’s check ‘permanent tattoo removal price’. Ah, good! No local results. We’re seeing some fairly high Page Authority… not as high as before… so I would actually say that this is one that I would write for. Again, we’re seeing RealSelf. That’s apparently going to be a common theme for this particular niche. But these are all ads. This is what’s commonly referred to as ‘result zero’ or ‘position zero’ because it’s above all of the other ones. This only came about within the last couple of years. But you can see I’m not dealing with as high a Page Authority overall. Maybe the top two or three. But again, they’re RealSelf and they are not ranked for the exact match keyword ‘permanent tattoo removal price’.

So I could write an article that was like ‘Permanent Tattoo Removal Price: How Much Does Laser Tattoo Removal Cost?’ and that way, I’m going to rank for a lot of keywords. And this could just be a general topic. It would take a fair amount of research on my end because I know that my particular tattoo cost about $300 a session because it’s a really big one. But that’s not necessarily true for every tattoo. A lot of people have tattoos that are that big that they want to have removed or they have someone’s name that’s this big. Not everyone’s trying to get some almost two-foot tattoo removed from the front of their torso because they were a really, really stupid 20-year old. So yeah, that’s worth mentioning. But I would probably write an article somewhere around those lines.

So if I were doing keyword research manually, what I would do is I would have a little notepad open on my computer somewhere and I would take note of this one. I would take note of the search term; I would take note of the search volume (which of course, again, we’re only getting a range from Google); and I would probably take note of the average Page Authority throughout. You know, just kind of eyeball it. I wouldn’t actually crunch the numbers. So we see 43, 52, 36, 17, 48, 25, 30, 35, 19, 29… so I’d probably say PA 30. And I would also take note along the lines of (I’m just going to have to open up and do this. I’m going to create a new document. Show you how I would do this)… I would also take note of whether or not they were optimized for the exact keyword.

So I would come over here and I would take ‘permanent tattoo removal price’, drop it in here. Okay. And then, I would… an Excel spreadsheet would probably be better, actually. Let’s do that. I’m starting to run around so much. Again, I use premium keyword tools. I haven’t done manual keyword research extensively in quite a while. Fortunately, it hasn’t change that much. The main tools when I was doing it were Moz and Google Keyword Planner and that hasn’t changed. But yeah, so I don’t really keep spreadsheets and stuff like this anymore. My premium keyword tool that you’ll see in the next video keep track of all my list and stuff like that. But I would have a Keyword column, I would have Search Volume, and I would have Average PA, and I would have Optimized for KW?. And this is, again, going to be the meta title and the meta description. Are they optimized for the keyword?

So, ‘permanent tattoo removal price’ (sorry about that, I opened up all kinds of crap here)… okay, ‘permanent tattoo removal price’ number of searches is 10 to 100; average Page Authority was I said 30; optimized for keyword, No. Or I could just put ‘N’ there. So now we’ve got our first keyword. This keyword… we would write an article specifically for this keyword. I mentioned what I would call that article, ‘Permanent Tattoo Removal Price: How Much Does Laser Tattoo Removal Cost?’ That’s going to kind of double optimize for those two keywords and probably optimize for a ton of other keywords. But, as I went through and I wrote the article, I really only focused on doing this. I’d just throw this in there for extra (hopefully) bonus SEO points.

So, that’s one and then we would just keep going through. And I would say in one session, I would aim to get at least ten keywords like this that meet kind of the same criteria. Hopefully, we can get even lower average Page Authority if you kept looking… even lower than kind of an average of 30… and hopefully somewhere, find some keywords around average Page Authority of 20 or maybe even as well as 15. But like I said, that’s going to be really hard in today’s search climate and it’s only going to get harder and harder as time goes on.

So I think this has been really helpful overall. You know, we saw examples of like… what was it? Health MD? I don’t know what it’s called… anyways, the really authoritative website that we saw… and kind of an example of yeah, we’re never going to outrank those guys. But then also, we saw a lot of different examples for local keywords. Remember, if you see the map pop up, it’s probably not worth going for unless you’re a local business because Google clearly is going to give preference to local businesses for those terms. And at the very best, you are not going to rise above the map… you know… you’re going to be bumped halfway down the page just because the map is there.

And you know, there’s going to be all kinds of keywords as we dug deeper and deeper into this that we could have pulled from Google or from Ubersuggest. For example, like I could put in here ‘does tattoo removal hurt’. Get ideas. Sometimes you get a little error like that. Typically, clicking back and forth helps. But I guess not. There we go. This time. Cool. So you saw that I got an error and I just clicked back and forth in these tabs until it worked. Again, just tricks of the trades you learn over time. So this is probably too high a search volume for me to optimize for. But let’s see. Like this keyword doesn’t make any sense: ‘how much is to remove a tattoo’. I wouldn’t ever, ever go for that just because it just doesn’t make sense.

Keyword Planner’s having issues for some reason. Okay, I re-sorted by relevance here. So ‘does tattoo removal hurt’ is still up there at the top. I’m still getting a lot of unrelated keywords frankly. There you go: ‘is tattoo removal painful’. Let’s check that one out really quick. Come over to Google, ‘is tattoo removal painful’, and you can see at least we’re not seeing local listings. But we can see PA 72. WebMD – that’s what I was thinking about, not Health MD. WebMD is all the way down here at the bottom; but again, it’s not directly related so I wouldn’t worry about it too, too much. ’10 Things You Need to Know About Laser Tattoo Removal’… this one’s kind of a coin toss. I would probably lean towards avoiding it because we see some fairly… I don’t know… that’s tough. It’s tough because we’ve got RealSelf again and none of these guys are directly optimized for ‘is tattoo removal painful’.

There’s a lot of ‘does laser tattoo removal hurt’ and there’s a mention of it being painful here. This is actually a really good representation of what we’re talking about, how we skirt around these things. Because you can see here that this site… if they have low Domain Authority… and it’s distinctly possible that this is an accurate readout of PA 1… we can always open up the… you only get a limited number of these every day if you have their free membership, but I just click this little Link Analysis… I think you get three free per day and we can kind of look at the detail metrics. And it does look like they in fact have a Page Authority of 1 and they don’t have any links that Moz is aware of.

Majestic or Ahrefs is another premium tool, but again, they’re very expensive. Each one of those is like $100 a month. But you can get really, really in the weeds with these stuff. And at the end of the day, if you just focus on doing your best as far as these metrics go; and writing really, really high-quality content; and putting out a lot of that really high-quality content – you’re going to see results.

So at the end of the day, if you feel really overwhelmed by all of this… again as always, take a deep breath and remind yourself: big picture. I don’t need to do this absolutely perfectly, I’m doing the best I can, and I’m doing it a hell of a lot better than most people trying to get started this industry. If you can’t afford premium keyword tools, this is what you’ve got. Right? Work with what you’ve got and just stick with it. Work the course. Work the program.

This is a perfect example of what I’m saying that we’ve got some really high Page Authority sites here but nobody is directly optimized for ‘is tattoo removal painful’. The one site… the article is about a little over a year old so that’s about all that has going for it and a little bit of Domain Authority… but the one site that directly optimized… and their meta description isn’t even optimized, it’s only their meta title.

So actually once I saw that, I was about to say I’m not sure I’d write for this one. But now, I absolutely would because you can see what a page with almost no authority, a very unestablished website… just because they optimized for this keyword and there are some other things at play… remember, they do have Domain Authority… they have little bit older website than you would have at this point… so there are other things at play. You shouldn’t expect to publish an article (even a really high-quality article for this) and get ranked immediately. But this is absolutely one of those articles that you could publish – you could write about and publish.

And as you begin to build authority as you’re writing about all of these other topics and people start talking about your website and linking to your website and finding your website and staying for a while and reading, you’re going to see articles like this go up and up and up over time – which is exactly what this person is experiencing right now. They wrote a good really high-quality article, they optimized it as far as even the URL slug has a partial match for the keyword, and let’s… ‘is tattoo removal’ and so if we search ‘painful’, they… wow. They only have one mention of ‘painful’ the entire article so we could very easily optimize for this.

(And my God, this is horrible tattoo removal. Okay, right after the first treatment. Never mind. I thought they were showing these as they’re finalized. I just got lost in the industry. I apologize. I thought they were showing these as finalized results. These are just directly after treatment and they always look a little bit funky immediately after treatment.)

So anyways, this is a perfect example of what we’re aiming to do. That site is writing some really high-quality content and it does look like they’re at least doing lead generation. Ah, no. They’re a local business. Okay. So that’s another reason why they’re ranking – which goes back to what I said of them being a local business. So remember that they’re going to get some advantages that you’re not going to have.

So, would I write about this with that in mind? ’10 Things You Need To Know…’ Everyone else is just so under-optimized for the exact match keyword that I’d probably still do it. I’d probably still do it even knowing that that’s a local business. But so anyways, we’re getting really into the weeds here. I want you to see this firsthand and hear everything about how I interpret things and why I’m thinking about it this way, and why I’m saying it’s good and why I’m saying it’s bad. I would still write an article on this one. I think I could get ranked for this one. Again, it’s not giving total preference to local because we don’t have that map up top.

So I don’t know. Maybe I don’t write about it immediately, but at the very least, I add it to my spreadsheet. So I would come over here, I would say ‘is tattoo removal painful’ (delete that extra line there), and it has 10 to 100 searches a month. Oh, no. That one has 100 to 1,000. So that’s one of the reasons it’s a higher competition keyword, too.

So keeping that in mind… yeah, I probably don’t write for it; because again, higher search volumes is almost always going to mean higher competition – at least at this stage in my business. A year from now… if I wrote constantly for a year and I started building that authority, I would not be so afraid of a higher competition + higher search volume keyword. But immediately right off the bat, just the odds of getting ranked for it are not super high.

So we can see there’s an average. If I had to ballpark this Page Authority, I’d say probably around 35. Optimized for keyword? No. The only one that’s optimized for keyword was that local one and it was ranking okay.

So I would just keep going until I found at least 10 of these. Also keeping in mind, maybe you have another kind of section. You have maybe a column here and a column down here that’s like Maybes? because you’re going to find some that… you know… you’re kind of up in the air about and maybe one day you get to a point and you’re like, “What should I write about today? Hmm. I don’t know. I’m going to do this because I just don’t feel like doing keyword research” And yeah, there’s a chance that we’ll get ranked for it at some point. And you’ll be surprised how many of those over time could pay off.

And the other thing to keep in mind is if you write about this keyword, you will also potentially get rankings for a lot of longtail keywords that you weren’t directly optimizing for that are related to that topic, too. So a good piece of content’s a good piece of content. It’s going to be an asset to your business any way around it.

But just keep these things in mind, okay? Some of these competition authority notes that we’ve talked about. And just, again, work the program. Stick with it. Practice, practice, practice. This is going to be super overwhelming and possibly very confusing even if you’ve watched this video once, twice, three times and you start doing a lot of it yourself. But the more you stick with it, the better you’re going to get.

Now, this in contrast to premium keyword research tools is night and day. And this is where you’re going to see like, “Oh. That’s why people pay for premium keyword research tools even though they’re really expensive.” Because everything we just did… I don’t know how long this video has run… there it is. It’s run like an hour now. We’ve run from slideshow to going through and probably at least 40 minutes of that was actual keyword research. That’s just the process of free keyword research tools. Period. It gets a lot faster when we get into premium keyword research which is the next video.

So if you don’t have the budget for it, don’t feel bad. Don’t feel crappy. Don’t feel like you’re doomed. You’re just going to have to get really good at everything you just saw in this video. Make sure to search the Facebook group to see if anybody else has been talking about this and ask questions there if you have them.

But at the end of the day, whatever you write for as long as you’re optimizing on page, in time (if you stick with it) we’ll start ranking for long tail keywords or the exact keyword you were targeting. Just keep that in mind. Even if it feels like a waste of time today, if you do it correctly and it’s really high-quality, it may start paying a year from now, eight months from now, six months from now, two years from now as you continue building your site. Just know that, okay?

Very important note: you want to keep the big picture in mind, because otherwise, you’re going to get really overwhelmed and feel really defeated throughout a lot of this process.

But that’s free keyword research tool or free keyword research – and I guess, keyword research using free tools would be the correct way to say it. That’s as good as it gets. And you would probably need to carve every couple of weeks eight or ten hours out of your work to just research keywords and find high-quality keywords. The good news is… you know, we went through this; and of course, I walked you through every step… you could probably check out individual keywords within two or three or four minutes of one another and knock it all out much quicker than this. But just remember: it takes time, it takes practice, and there’s nothing wrong with these free keyword research tools. You’re just going to have to work at it a little bit harder.

So I’m done rambling. I hope I did this topic justice. Very, very complex topic… as we’ve discussed also very, very important.

So as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group. And I will see you over there or I will just see you in the next video where we’re going to take a look at how different and how much quicker and more efficient this is if you do have the budget for premium keyword research. See you there!

5.6 Finding Keywords Quicker and More Easily Using Premium Keyword Tools (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • The advantages of paid keyword tools over free keyword tools
  • The best keyword tool for finding high-quality keywords quickly and easily
  • A step-by-step, live demonstration of finding keywords using premium keyword tools

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5.6 Transcript Below

Okay!

If you’re an observant person, you may notice: “Hey! Ian looks a little bit different than all of the other videos. Hair’s a little bit longer, he looks a little bit more homeless, etc.”

That is because originally, when I recorded all this training, I had a different Premium Keyword Tool recommendation. I recommended them largely because they were cheaper than everyone else. And then they went and doubled their prices within a month of me recording that video and that completely changes the recommendation. There are better tools out there for the price point they’re now asking.

So if you hear me reference Jaaxy in any of the training just know that that is an obsolete recommendation. The up-to-date recommendation is what I will discuss here in Lesson 5.6. So just know that that explains the difference in appearance – why I look a little bit more hippy-like. And also If you hear that reference anywhere else in the training, just know that that’s an artifact. But this is the most up-to-date recommendation.

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about finding keywords quicker using premium tools. You know, I’ll get into this. Before we really dig in here, I want to make really clear, it’s not at all required. You do not need a premium keyword tool to succeed in this industry, okay? So many people out there that create training say “Hey! You need X, Y or Z to succeed” – that’s not the case, you can get this done with the free tools that I taught in the previous lessons. So, don’t stress out about it if you can’t afford it. Don’t think that you’re going to fail just because you can’t afford a premium keyword tool.

But a premium keyword tool will make your writing and your search engine optimization efforts much more potent and make them a lot more powerful and save you a hell of a lot of time – no exaggeration, I’m not overselling this. If there’s one place that I recommend someone invest besides hosting, it’s a keyword tool. Hands down, day in and day out. If you’ve got the extra money to invest, you’re going to save yourself so much time and set yourself up for success so much better if you invest in a premium keyword tool. It’s bringing a better gun to the gun fight, period. You know, it’s a given and a very American analogy.

So, you know, I mention the pros and cons in the previous video about free keyword tools. You know, of course, no added expenses and things like that. They turn on their head for premium keyword tools, it’s basically flipped.

Pros are you’re going to get a really good competition data at-a-glance. It’s going to be much less laborious than using the Moz bar, we’ll see that. I’ll demonstrate this later in the video when I show the actual tool. You know, it shows Majestic trust flow and citation flow as opposed to Moz page authority and domain authority, and it shows that both for the page and the domain.

For years, Moz’s DA and PA were the go to metrics for SEO because of course google doesn’t publish that data for us to see, and the closest thing we can get is a really good third party tool. Moz over the past – somewhere between the past one to two years, has been kind of overtaken by company called Majestic.

And Majestic is an expensive tool, of course Moz is too but their metrics are much more reliable these days, as far as we can tell, as far as website authority goes, as far as SEO authority goes. So, that is the go to tool for SEO authority these days for people in the industry. The fact that the keyword tool shows Majestic trust flow and citation flow as opposed to Moz’s DA and PA, it’s going to be much more reliable. It’s just going to be a much better, a much more accurate representation of the competition you face.

And overall the data is just going to be a whole lot more holistic. It’s going to be in one place, rather than having to pull from several different tools. And it’s going to be a lot more reliable on the whole than piecing it together with free tools.

Most importantly, in my opinion is it saves a ton of time, I mean a ton of time. You’ll see it when we hop in and how quickly we can knock out some keyword research as opposed to what we had to do manually and laboriously using the free keyword planner and things like Ubersuggest and comparing that with Moz bar metrics where we had to search individually, search individually, search individually.

You know, the only con here is that it’s an added expense. At the time of recording this, annual plans range anywhere from 300 to 500-ish dollars. So there, it’s not a cheap investment. But, it’s definitely investment that is very much worth making. And you’ll see that, again, if you just hang in here for a few minutes and watch this in the video. You’ll see how much more powerful and quick this is.

So the best keyword tool that I recommend is Long Tail Pro. It’s recommended by a lot of pros that have been in this industry a really long time. It simplifies a lot of really complex data into at-a-glance Key Performance Indicators, abbreviated KPIs, obviously.

And also it’s going to allow you to spend a lot more time creating and promoting your content rather than all of this time manually researching the keywords. Basically, you can take that time and invest it into the more important aspects of your business, which in the long run is going to get you to success faster and it’s also going to make you much more successful in the long run. And it’s also going to cut keyword research by 90% or more, no exaggeration. I mean, it’s just going to save you so much time.

Long Tail Pro also has some other helpful tools like Rank Tracking. They also have something called Long Tail University, that’s included with all memberships that teaches you really advance in depth keyword research. What I’m going to give you here is kind of at-a-glance tour of the tool… well, not at-a-glance, we’ll get in depth too. But every membership comes with Long Tail University, which is some really, really, really high quality keyword research training as well that you should check out.

So, this is actually outdated. I should remove that. Sorry that’s from when… I thought I had removed this. This is from when I was recommending Jaaxy. One of the unfortunate things about Jaaxy is that it required double-checking against using the Moz bar and Google’s Keyword Planner because the data wasn’t quite as Long Tail Pro’s is. Just ignore that last bullet that I just deleted off.

If you’d like to help support FIMP and you do invest in Long Tail Pro, this is my link for 30% off. If you went directly to their homepage, you’d be paying about 30% more than this. It’s just stoppingscams.com/longtailpro is my affiliate link. Of course you’re appreciate… your support is always greatly appreciated. “You’re appreciated is always greatly support!” – makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, I don’t want you to feel pressured. It’s an incredible investment in your business, I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m hyping this thing too much because that’s not my intention. It’s just that I can’t imagine my business day to day without a tool like this.

Let’s hop in and take a look at Long Tail Pro so that you can see what I’ve been talking about here. Alright. So, this is the Long Tail Pro homepage. When you log in this what you’ll see. Right now I just have a blank project but I’m going to show you how some of this works too.

This is just your kind of at-a-glance dashboard. You have individual projects in here. I’m actually going to click to Add a New Project and I’m going to title it RueTattoo.com, just so you can see how some of these features work.

You can enter your domain name, as well, so I’m going to enter RueTattoo.com (of course my auto-correct is going to try and fix it for me, which is not helpful at all). Okay and I’m going to add this. What’s really cool about this is that it’s going to tell you right off the bat: okay, this is what your link profile looks like, this is what your majestic trust flow and citation flow look like for this website.

You can kind of get an at-a-glance look at all the stuff. And it’s going to tell you that “Hey! For this particular domain name, this is the range we recommend you stick in for keyword competitiveness.” We’ll see that play in when we start searching keywords, but I just want to kind of give you a heads-up.

It’s pretty unique that you can add your domain name into your project then it’s going to give you a suggested range and say “Hey! Don’t go outside of this competition level because you’re probably not going to have much of a shot at getting ranked but you can probably get ranked within this range as long as you do everything correctly”.

In the next section down here, you can enter keywords one at a time. Or you can, in the default, is enter keyword and then it’s going to go over to Google’s Keyword Planner in the back in and bring in their suggested searches.

The thing to keep in mind here is depending on your subscription level, you’ll probably have somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 keyword searches per month. Every single one of these counts as one of your keyword searches, so keep that in mind. You can go up to 400 but you’re going to burn through 10,000 keyword searches per month pretty quickly doing 400 at a time.

I typically bump mine up to 25, I think that’s enough. And then just enter multiple keywords then we’ll see how this works too. If we just type in Laser Tattoo Removal and we hit retrieve, it’s going to retrieve some keywords. It’s gives a notification here and says it’s retrieving keywords. You’ll see them all start populating down here and you can see this little icons saying the gears are turning, we’ll just let those load up.

But while that’s happening, I’ll also mention any other keyword you put in here, they’re smart about it and they’re friendly about it in the sense that they know you have limited searches so if you want to see this keyword data again, it stays saved until you delete it out of the project. So you don’t have to use your searches all over again to pull that data back in. Any keywords you put in here are going to add to you projects keyword list rather than replacing this keyword list. So just keep that in mind.

Right now, we have 25 keywords. If I put in “does tattoo removal hurt” and I hit retrieve. You can see that the number’s going up, now we have 50 keywords in here. Okay, so I added them and they’re all displayed together. You can set filters and I could type in here or I could go into these filters and say “hey! I only want to see keywords that have to do with hurt”. Just type in “hurt” and get that information in there as well. But for the sake of this video I just want to show you kind of what this all looks like.

You can get global search data here, you can see the location has defaulted to the United States, I can update that if I want, and change to another country. U.S. is typically a pretty accurate representation of what the global search volume is going to look like in the landscape and competitiveness, etc. Yeah, so that’s basically Long Tail Pro at-a-glance.

So now what we can do is we can come down here and… the key performance indicators I talked about, the main one you want to look at is your average keyword competitiveness. Usually what I do whenever I get however many keywords I want in here is I’m going to sort by average KC (Keyword Competitiveness).

Now I can see my lowest hanging fruit right up here at the top. If your website’s brand new, I really wouldn’t go for anything outside of the 15-20 range. I know it’s suggesting “Hey! This is a new website. You can go for anything from the 25-30 range”. But the lower the better and I really wouldn’t go outside of that too much.

We’ll take a look at how these numbers are calculated here in a second. But at-a-glance you can see that Saline Tattoo Removal work which frankly I don’t even know what saline tattoo removal is. Non-laser Tattoo Removal, EliminInk Tattoo Removal (sounds like a product), Tattoo Removal Virginia, How Long Does Tattoo Removal Take – that would be a decent one. It’s a 23, but given my options here, hey maybe that’s something I actually consider. I would definitely… even if you get outside of the 15-20 range and you’re going to go to the 20-25 range, I wouldn’t step outside of the green, right? And this will change in time, you’ll notice that this correlates directly to the target keyword competitiveness it created for my domain name.

You can see that anything that’s under 25 is green. Anything that’s under 30 but more than 25 is yellow. So that’s telling me “Hey! This is the keyword competitiveness. This is the suggested range based specifically on your website’s existing authority”. That’s pretty unique to Long Tail Pro, I don’t see that done anywhere else.

Let’s see if we can punch in some more keywords here. Let’s go… “Does Tattoo Removal Cream Work” see what it pulls there. And you can see over here on the left hand side, my monthly keywords remaining or going down on every search I make, which again is why it’s important to kind of limit this to something other than 400. But you can see now there are 75 keywords in here, it’s pulling a lot of these new ones. While it’s pulling these, I’ll pull you into one of these and show you what it looks like when you click on a keyword.

Now we’re going to see for the Top 10 in Google, all of the competition details, I guess kind of at-a-glance but they’re also really in-depth. You can see for this particular keyword, we get 390 searches a month. This is pulled directly from Google, so this is very reliable keyword search volume.

And you can see the results, it’s 80% Organic, 21% Local, which is nice because I know, if you watched the free training for free keyword tools, you saw a lot of stuff for…I was like “Oh! Some of these are local so they’re ranking better” And so, you can kind of see at-a-glance “Okay I’m going to be competing against some local businesses which are going to have an advantage over me”. I wouldn’t worry about it too, too much unless the number’s pretty high. But just keep it in mind, it’s good to know.

This is probably around a fifth of the first page because they probably have a maps listing. So if I come in here and say “Non-laser Tattoo Removal”… well, I don’t have a maps listing (which is interesting), but I probably have… I mean we’ve got some ads in there for some local people. TattooVanishMethod.com that’s interesting. Let’s just take a quick look here, I’m kind of running off on a tangent. But looks like, Find a Location. All natural, huh. As far as I can see, there isn’t one location… okay, there we go.

It looks like they may be getting a boost because they’ve got so many locations, but I doubt it somehow. At least in my local area, doesn’t look like there are any local listings. But anyways, definitely if Long Tail Pro is pulling in this data, it means that a lot of people that searched are going to get local search results which we’re going to be competing against at a little bit of a disadvantage. So just keep that in mind whenever you see that metric.

All through here, we can see overall keyword competitiveness for the Top 10 Results. And we can also see the domain keyword competitiveness. But the things I really want you to pay attention to are the trust flow and citation flow for this particular page, which are these two numbers right here. This is the trust flow and citation flow for the whole domain, but this is what’s really important. Okay.

So we see this top result as 15, this one’s 6, 4, 0, 24 – this is the only really high one besides all the way down here. For me this is a very rankable keyword. If I look at the first page of Google and I see anything, the average trust flow being less than 10 or 15, that is a really ripe opportunity keyword.

Once your looking at a lot of these and you see a lot of 20-25 for brand new websites, I would be a little bit concerned and I would say “Hey look for some better keywords unless you’re at a really high competition niche and everything else is in like the 50s, 60s, 70s”. Then that’s a decent keyword.

But for most niches, you’re going to want for brand new website to find a lot of first pages, as far as when you search your keyword, you want the first page to be mostly something between the 10-15 range and below if you’re going to go for it. So for me, this looks like a pretty rankable keyword, which is really, really nice.

You have some other metrics in here which are really helpful. Like how many External Backlinks this particular page has. Again this is not the domain, this is to the page. This page right here has 1,682 backlinks, which is pretty high. It’s interesting that this one’s only showing 1 backlink because it’s so authoritative. But you can see the number of unique domains referring to the root domain, so that’s to tattooaway.com. You know, just interesting stuff like that.

So, Index URLs. How many URLs this website has in Google. How many index pages this website has in Google. Man! This one’s way up there… ah, it’s ‘cause it’s YouTube, that makes sense! So, some just really, really interesting stuff. You can go pretty dependably off of just the keyword competitiveness but off of just the trust flow and citation flow for the actual page. Right. Again, domain is helpful overall but mainly what you want to look at is page.

You don’t need to worry about citation flow too much. You may be sitting there asking yourself: “What is citation flow?” Citation flow is typically just an indicator of how spammy someone’s backlink profile is. Which isn’t something you need to concern yourself with too, too much. Especially if you’re looking at the first page of Google, they probably don’t have too spammy of a backlink profile. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be getting the rankings that they’re getting.

Trust flow is just calculated on the relevance of the links coming to that page, on the authority of the page, pages linking to this page and this page. Okay. So that’s why I say that’s the most important thing to look at because those are the most important metrics that determine rankings these days.

If we go back here to the project, we probably have more keywords in here now. Let’s see. There’s still “how long does tattoo removal take” in there. There we go. Resort. “Rejuvi tattoo removal cream” (it could be a review), 30 search volume. When you’re young, 30 search volume when your site is still young is not that bad. “How long does tattoo removal take” is still up there. “Laser tattoo removal before and after” – an interesting choice.

Same thing here, we can see all of the same data. But it’s showing the keyword competitiveness, which is also factoring in things like – you can see everything here. Calculated using page title and URLs. So if they’re using their keywords that you searched for in the page title and URL, it’s going to boost the keyword competitiveness, majestic trust flow, citation flow and backlink data. So how many banklinks this page and this domain have.

It’s just crunching all of those numbers at-a-glance. But again, you can see most of these, as far as trust flow, it’s a little bit more competitive than the other keywords. But most of these, again, looks pretty rankable overall. Even though it shows it’s a 26 within Long Tail Pro.

You have a couple of ways you can use this tool. You can spend more time digging much more in-depth and looking at each one of these individually. I’d say in the early stage is it’s definitely good for your learning, for you to get a sense of these things. But other than that, it just comes down to punching in keywords.

And let’s bump this up to 50. And let’s say… (what’s something else that has to do with tattoo?) Let’s go “tattoo removal after care”. Let’s go retrieve, and I’m going to retrieve 50 for this particular keyword. So that’ll take some time. Again…

Data wasn’t available. Interesting. Yeah, maybe it was too long of a term. So, let’s go “how long…” that’s a keyword in here, right? So I’ll just click this one and take a look at the keyword competitiveness really quickly. We can see trust flow. Yeah, so again overall looking like a pretty rankable keyword.

We’ve got, again about 20%. Ow, featured snippets, interesting. We don’t have local search appearing in this one. So again, just a lot of really helpful, useful data in here. But if we go back here, what we can do is we can really quickly, say… plus 20. You know, add 20 results based on that keyword. Add 20 suggestions to this list.

And of course, you can also… favorite (I need to find that keyword again. They’re jumping around ‘cause I just put more keywords in there.) But now we can say “hey add this to my favorites”. So, and it says “hey this has been added to your favorites”. But everything’s resorting and reshuffling in here.

“How to become a laser tattoo removal technician” that could be an interesting post for my site. “Tattoo removal prices” could be a good article, again, especially with 1,900 search results. So if we take a look at this one, trust flow: 17, 3, 12, 0, 9, 0. So it’s a little bit more competitive. But it’s probably a pretty decent keyword, especially given the search volume.

I wouldn’t expect to rank for this anytime soon. But in the coming months as my website authority builds, I could definitely see myself ranking for that. So that’s a really decent keyword overall. I’m going to favorite that one too. Return to projects. “Tattoo removal before and after”.

Let me get into some of the yellow. Ah! This is a good article because there are all kinds of different lasers that people use and some shops don’t have the most up-to-date laser technology. So this could be a really decent article.

I know it’s labeled yellow as far as competition goes but if we come in here and we look at the trust flow, the first couple of pages are kind of authoritative. The last page is kind of authoritative. But trust flow of 2, 0, 5, 0, 0, 0, 0.

I assume these have some authoritative domains which is why they’re ranking. But especially if I created a page and did some (we’ll talk about it later in the training) some promotional things like “Securing Some White Hat Backlinks” to that page if I wrote a really, really good article. You could definitely outrank some of these guys within a few months. Pretty easily, I’d say. So, this is a really good article, a really good keyword. So this is something that I would definitely consider writing for for RueTattoo.com.

So, you see how much quicker that is than going and pulling data from Google’s Keyword Planner and then checking each one of these keywords individually. You just get so much data at-a-glance. And especially with kinds of these color coded keyword competitiveness, you get to see really quickly how something is… how good or bad the competition is for a keyword that you’re searching for. Really unique, really cool, just huge time savings.

I remember back in the day, and the reason I always make it clear to people: “hey you don’t have to invest in this, it’s going to save you a lot of time” is because when I first got started in internet marketing, I didn’t have the money to invest in tools like this. I totally empathize with anyone that doesn’t have the money to invest in some of these tools. But if you do have the money and you value your time, it is hands down one of the best investments that you can make.

So again, if you do decide to invest in Long Tail Pro, please use my affiliate link, help support FIMP: stoppingscams.com/longtailpro,

If you have any questions about Long Tail Pro, don’t hesitate to post them to the members-only Facebook group for FIMP. Of course, it’s free for all members, so hop on there, ask any questions you have and I will be happy to help you with them.

Other than that, they do also have a free trial (probably something I should’ve mentioned 20 minutes ago). So if you want to hop in and check it out for yourself, you can. I think it’s a 7-day trial, So you can check it out and poke around. And if you really want to, what you could do in there is you could sign up for the free trial, do a bunch of keyword research and then cancel before it bills. If that’s something you really wanted to do.

But I highly recommend investing in Long Tail Pro. Actually, keyword tools are going to save you a lot of time. It’s going to set you up for success a lot better. You’re just going to have a lot higher likelihood for the content you write to actually be rankable than when you are passing all this data around between these multiple tools.

And you’re not getting the industry’s best data because it’s not Majestic, it’s Moz when you’re using the free tools. Majestic unfortunately doesn’t have a free tool like Moz does. You just get a lot of advantages that are going to really set you up for success in the long run.

If I keep talking, I’m just going to keep rambling. So I’m going to shut up, I’m going to finish this video. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post them into the Facebook group.

If you can’t afford it right now, don’t stress about it. Just use the free tools. But again, if you can afford it right now and you value your time and you see how much quicker this works, I strongly recommend investing in it. You can see that I have the plan below and they’re priced personally because I really believe in investing and using this tool.

If you have any questions I’ll keep an eye up from the Facebook group. Otherwise, I will see you in the next video. Or I’ll see you in the Facebook group.

Talk to you then.

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