How To Leverage SEO for Exponential Growth With Expert Bear Newman

Unlock the strategies that can send your business skyrocketing in growth as we sit down with digital marketing guru Bear Newman. This episode takes you through the transformative journey of SEO mastery to create a commanding online presence that ensures your website isn't just a drop in the digital ocean. Bear joins us from Bear Fox Marketing, where he has already turned the tide for numerous clients, sharing how one particular approach multiplied a client's web traffic six-fold in just half a year.

Bear doesn't hold back on the hard-hitting topics, including the controversial use of AI-generated content and its effect on SEO. If you're wrestling with whether to revamp existing website material or push out new content, Bear's expert insights will guide you towards a blend that champions quality over quantity. We also dissect the art of running Google Ads that pack a punch, even for low-cost e-commerce products, and how understanding the lifetime value of a customer can be your ace in the hole.

Eager to get a taste of what Bear Fox Marketing can do for you? By the end of our chat, you'll know exactly how to join forces with Bear's team for a consultation that's high on value and free from aggressive sales pressure. Tune in for an episode brimming with actionable advice that promises to fuel your marketing efforts and help your business stand out in a crowded marketplace.

How can the guests contact?  website, email, social?

Website: bearfoxmarketing.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bearfoxmarketing/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bearfoxmarketingllc/followers/mutualOnly

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bearfoxmarketing/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bearfoxmarketing9194

GETIDA Amazon Owes You Money!   Get $400 in FREE reimbursements done for you, follow the link below.

Helium10   50% OFF first month OR 10% OFF LIFETIME subscription = PROMO CODE “FTM”

SoStocked

Start Your 30-Day Free Trial

Your 1st Month Is Free For Any Plan You Choose!

If You receive value from this content please SUPPORT The Podcast

Paypal → CLICK HERE
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
🗣️ TALK TO US ON SOCIAL MEDIA 👇

Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/firingtheman/

Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/FiringTheMan

Website ► https://firingtheman.com/
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
💥LISTEN TO THE PODCAST 👇

On Apple Podcasts ►https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/firingtheman/id1493680004

On Spotify 
► https://open.spotify.com/show/2mE

The Digital Revolution Podcast
Welcome to The Digital Revolution Podcast, where marketing experts share their expertise.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:41

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.

Speaker 2: 1:06

Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast. On today's episode, we have the privilege to interview Bear Newman. Bear is an accomplished digital marketer and author with over 15 years of experience in the industry. Throughout his career, bear has worked with numerous businesses, ranging from startups to large corporations with revenues exceeding $400 million. With his expertise in digital marketing, bear has strategized and implemented custom marketing strategies for hundreds of companies, helping them achieve their goals. We are very excited to have Bear on the podcast today diving into all things marketing. Welcome to the show, bear, thanks.

Speaker 3: 1:42

David Appreciate it Really excited to be here.

Speaker 2: 1:44

Absolutely so to start things off, can you please share with our audience a little bit about yourself and your path to becoming the president and founder of Bear Fox Marketing?

Speaker 3: 1:53

So I got really a lot of enjoyment from learning about SEO and studying it and essentially just online marketing Really enjoyed it. Got an internal job here locally in Boise, idaho, doing the keyword research for 53,000 craft products that they were going to be selling. So worked on that project took me about nine months. Don't be fooled by the face and the name. I might look like I'm into crafting, but I'm really not Crochets, not really my thing but that's what I got into. So that was my kind of start into SEO and I loved it. I love seeing the results, I love seeing pages going into the top rankings, customers coming in finding what they want to find, and really enjoyed it. So I moved from there into a random publishing company and I managed their SEO, all of their monetization strategies, everything. And when Google did a massive update to its algorithm back in 2012, the business model for that company was no longer viable and a lot of their really older revenues were dependent upon Google organic traffic and there were so many things that had been adjusted that they wanted to essentially close shop and instead of getting another company internally, I said you know what? I've had enough people ask me from expertise to figure out this whole SEO mystery. That is, I decided to start my own agency, started there for a few years and then my business partner, glenn Moore. We met up and he was frustrated with his lack of results. He has some bigger brands and I said just came to the same budget you have. You're currently paying your agency in California, the big fancy one in California. Let me show you what I can do. He's like you're on, let's see it. And in a matter of six months I was able to take and said he was going about 10% per year from the previous agency and they were up to about 6,000 unique visitors organically in Google. I jumped in and took it from 6,000 to 28,000 in about six months. There was a little little bit of a unique situation but ultimately I was kind of off to the races. He enjoyed it so much. We decided to team up and inform BearBox Marketing and we've been moving forward and having a great time ever since yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 4: 3:47

Thanks for sharing, bear, and welcome to the show, excited to kind of dig into this. I love SEO, I love marketing For the listeners. Can you share with your wealth of experience taking clients from 6,000 unique to 28,000? It's a pretty big jump. Can you share with the audience, kind of like maybe, your high level formula for a marketing plan for, say, a newer business? What should they be focusing on? What are the things that you would advise them to focus on?

Speaker 3: 4:11

Yeah. So if you're just getting started, I would really focus on the website you have and what you want the visitor to do. So each page should have a function. A lot of times people will come in the kind of bray and pray approach where they just throw up content. There's no research behind it. The fundamental key behind SEO is that it's competition based and so really there's only so many spots on that top spot. If you're new, you're not going to be favored by Google. Google essentially doesn't trust you to put you in that spot, so they put bad websites there. It makes them look bad, so they want to make sure the website is trustworthy. It starts with the onsite content, the site structure and understanding what it is you want from that page. Do you want them to call you? Do you want them to learn more about your product? Do you want them to buy what? If that case might be? And make sure that page is comparable and even better than what your competitors are. So make sure your offering is better, the content is better. The title, the little things, the title tags, meta descriptions just all the things that go into making a page solid are really high and tight and you've got a direct purpose behind each page of content that you create.

Speaker 2: 5:16

I've got a follow-up question on that. So you're talking about page health. So, to use an analogy, when you go to the doctor, they take your height, weight, blood pressure. You know these indicators of health and so when you click on a website or are working on one of your client's websites, what are those indicators of health?

Speaker 3: 5:33

Yeah, great question Really. It starts with, I would say, the title tag and people are like, okay, well, the title tag simply stated that bright blue hyperlink. When you Google something on Google, the bright blue section that you know it says what the page is. And then, beneath it's meta description, that title tag, you have about 58 characters that you have to work with 55, and 58 characters that is your title tag. That is going to make a huge difference in impact and how Google ranks you and what you're going to be ranking for. So that's really kind of one of the most critical pieces. The next piece is to make sure your meta description is there, it's on point, and then you have to have a certain amount of length and just value to the content. People will say, well, it needs to be 500 words, well, it needs to be 2000 words, and my answer to that is yes, depending on who you're competing against. If you have 2000 words when all of your competition have 500 and they're ranking number one and number two, you probably don't need 2000 words. I would focus on understanding who you're competing against and why, what they're doing, that how already has that top ranking, and make it your own and focus on the value, so you can kind of have your general parameters of how much content should be on this page, what you should be focusing on as far as the keywords being used. But then really understand the purpose of the page and what you want to get from it. But really making sure your title is there, the content is there, it's helpful. So focus on the value that that content brings for whatever you're trying to sell. And then ultimately, when we get into, there's a couple of areas. There's the onsite health and then there's the technical element of a website making sure it's fast, it can be scanned by Google. I've seen a number of sites that they actually have a fast website, but the programming was done in a way that Google couldn't read it. They actually told Google not to index the page and so they were never getting any kind of traffic. It was kind of a mess up by their developer, but I see it all the time. So just the fundamentals making sure you don't have duplicate content. A lot of people will repurpose their content, but it's so close to the initial page that they create that it starts creating duplicates and so Google gets confused which page it should rank. Is it this one or is it the one you just updated? And all of a sudden you're competing with yourself and Google's response is I don't know which one, so I'm not going to rank either one and you can kind of show yourself in the foot. So there's definitely a list you can go through. Those are the most basic ones, but it can get a little bit technical, but for the most part, seo can definitely get complicated. Google uses about 220 plus variables in its ranking algorithm. Conceptually it's really not that complicated. If you kind of do the basic blocking and tackling, shall we say, you stand a pretty good chance of ranking and not a ranking, but ranking fairly quickly, depending on who you're competing against.

Speaker 4: 8:05

One question that I seems like we can't get through a podcast lately without talking about AI. And so turns to Google and AI. You know, in our companies, we use AI content for our brands, for the most part AI with a human touch, I would add. And so, moving forward in 2024, for anybody using AI content, what do you think is Google ranking them alongside other human written content? Like, what are you saying and kind of what is your advice to your clients on AI content? So I love.

Speaker 3: 8:34

AI. I think it's great it's here to stay. It's not going anywhere. It's only going to become more and more influential with the contents being created. That being said, if you're using AI to augment and improve the quality of the content you're creating, you're probably going to be good to go Making sure it's rich people enjoy it. If you're using AI to cut corners, it will blow up in your face. Google has been the most aggressive in this past year for its algorithm or fundamental algorithm updates to combat bad AI content that I've ever seen in any year past. Obviously, it's targeted directly at AI, but their core updates are really getting aggressive. So if you are, it's obvious that Google can scan a website into a degree. It can determine if it was an AI created piece of content. If it flags it as 100% and it's considered low value, google will not only penalize that page, it will penalize your entire site, and so making sure your content is good across the board is going to be critical that you're using it to make it better and not to cut corners, okay one last follow up on that and then I'll throw it backward to David.

Speaker 4: 9:38

Now, if you have a website and you're using AI content, is there a way to go and check somewhere on Google to find out if you've been penalized for that? Or how do you know when you've been? Other than your traffic goes down you're ranking to go down. Other than that, is there a way to know if you have like a checkbox or something on Google somewhere for a panel, you know, for being penalized?

Speaker 3: 9:57

Excellent question. Yes, there is. So there's tools out there. There's a lot of tools. My personal favorite is ahrefscom. They're one of the biggest ones. They've got the second largest backlink database, or link database, in the world. They're second only to Google. That being said, they're not as big as Google, so they do the best they can to keep up. But you can sign up for your free account and you can look at the data associated with your website and your organic traffic and at the bottom of that graph where they're saying, okay, you've got 1000 or 10,000, 100,000 visitors, you can see the traffic fluctuations over the past. You know, five years, and just specifically this past year is what you want to focus on, and they actually have little Google tags across the bottom of the timeline and if your traffic drop lines up perfectly one of those massive Google updates you've been hit On ahrefs on the timeline.

Speaker 4: 10:42

they like tag it with like major core updates or something, and then if you're if you're correlating with that, okay, there it goes.

Speaker 3: 10:49

And just to throw this out there, if you find that it's actually a good thing. One of my biggest frustrations is the site's not performing like it should and I don't know why. Like is it the title tags? Is it the links? Did someone try and spam us with bad links to try and take us down? Is it the content? Is it not a par Like? What is it? It could be again dozens or even hundreds of variables. So if I can go and find that in a matter of 15 seconds, pull up my site and see, yeah, it lines up perfectly with the Google update. Go through and find out specifically what that update was targeting picture content and you should bounce back.

Speaker 2: 11:20

And at the beginning of the episode you had talked about spray and pray, right Just that, the lots of media kind of throwing it out and hoping that it works well. I think this is something that a lot of business owners run into when they're they're getting started. They have a limited marketing budget and they must ask themselves where can I put these dollars to work where they're going to work the hardest? And so what? Digital marketing channels generally produce the highest ROI, and if you can answer this without saying it depends, you get bonus points. Or at least, if you say it depends, give some context behind it.

Speaker 3: 11:52

Absolutely Hands down SEO and email. Believe it or not, those are really going to be your biggest. If your email is not making close to 50% of your online revenue, you're missing the boat. You really dropped the ball there. So definitely have a good email campaign and, again, you can actually combine the two. So to your question, I'd say those top level are the best channels. However, it also depends on the timeframe. So if you need revenue coming in tomorrow, seo is not going to cut it, and so, from a long term perspective, those are your two biggest channels. From an immediate perspective, you want to focus on something like TikTok or Facebook or potentially LinkedIn, where you can run an ad, set the ad up, turn it on, pay and you could instantly got eyeballs, impressions, traffic coming into your site and that's going to produce your most immediate ROI.

Speaker 2: 12:36

In your answer email marketing. To me that is fairly self-explanatory. You need email addresses and you need content On the SEO. I would imagine we probably have some listeners out there that have an active website. They may have a couple hundred blog articles. They're asking themselves am I better off optimizing my existing blog articles and pages or should I continue to produce more content? And so when they're making that decision, what would be? And I just throw out blog articles and maybe there's other things to consider, but is there, when someone's face with that decision optimize or produce more content what would be some helpful things to?

Speaker 3: 13:13

look at my vote initially would be to optimize, so not more content, and I have a little different philosophy on this. That what you probably have heard is content is king, everyone. Content is king. More content, more content. I disagree. I would say marketable content is king, and so if you're just producing content, to produce content, generally speaking, is probably going to be low quality content. I'd much rather have one piece of really good content that ranks really well, hundreds of pages that actually don't rank very well, so I would focus on that content and make it better. And the truth is, if you have hundreds of blog content, pages of blog content that don't produce any kind of traffic, there's a good chance that content is actually penalizing your website and you'd see bigger jumps in traffic. By selecting which pages to deactivate and actually get rid of, google will see kind of more of a focus. The content's gone and with these algorithm updates, one thing to take into account I've seen multiple instances of this where if you have 100 pages of content and 20 of the 100 are really good, you got great traffic coming in neither. 80 are just kind of there. They're not really doing much. You created the content, so you leave it up on your website. Those 80 pages can actually get your other 20 penalized and you can lose ranking for that. So that when I talked about how aggressive Google is with its ranking algorithm, it's going through and finding all the content on your site and if it's deeming that a lot of the content isn't quality, they actually penalize the entire site, and in the past they've never done that. They've done more on the actual pages and would lower them down. Now the site itself is getting hit.

Speaker 2: 14:42

Have you worked with clients where you'll go in? Your recommendation is delete this content.

Speaker 3: 14:47

Absolutely Yep.

Speaker 2: 14:48

That's interesting, that's really interesting. And you hear content is came across the board, so deleting content seems counterintuitive. But that's. If you were going in deciding to make recommendations on what pages to delete, is there a certain line that you would draw? Would you say where's 80% of my traffic coming from? Or where would you draw that threshold for deleting content below?

Speaker 3: 15:08

that I would first start looking at what pages you have that don't have any traffic coming in all that's really the biggest indicator and before I would cut them, I would ask why is it not getting any traffic? Is it because Google has a de-indexed and isn't even willing to serve it up? Is there something wrong with your site that is preventing Google from indexing it? A lot of what we call three one redirects one page to another page. You have too many of those like is there something structurally wrong with your site that makes Google not want to rank it? And if the answer is no, everything's fine. Google just doesn't want to rank it. I would start there. I would start cutting those pages and you can save the pages to repurpose later. But I would start cutting and you can do it in a systematic way. So there's 100 pages and you find that 30 of them have no traffic and see what happens to your site Depending on one Google scan your site. You should see results within really a couple of days, potentially a couple weeks. The reason SEO is difficult to say a specific timeframe is Google deliberately delays any results that you get to see in the SERPs so that you don't know what it is. You did exactly that made it jump up. So Google is combating bad websites as well as SEO professionals that can really dial in and kind of know the ins and outs and track the code, and so they're really trying to keep a good product while combating the spammers and not revealing their secrets about what you exactly should be doing to make your site dominate.

Speaker 4: 16:29

Interesting. So I want to dig into that a little bit more before we pivot. And one is what is there a traffic? Is there, like I guess, a low threshold? You said no traffic. What if it's getting 10 visitors a month, like, would there be a? What is the low point? Let's say you had 200 articles and you know and the top 10 are getting the bulk of the traffic and then it tapers off. Where would you draw that line? Zero traffic, 10 a month, 100 a month, like. How would you kind of analyze that Great question.

Speaker 3: 16:56

And this is where SEO is a little bit complicated and that it depends is such a common response in SEO because all of the variability of the site. So if you have a local website and you're say you're a plumber and you're getting 100 visitors per month and you've got a good conversion rate, you're getting new business coming in, 10 visitors for that website is great, so I would keep it. But if you're getting 100, you know, say, 50,000 visitors to your website and you've got some pages doing 10, I would absolutely cut those. I would probably go a lot deeper than that A number of numbers perspective to cut it.

Speaker 4: 18:00

The other question is you had mentioned I'm going to go do this after this podcast, so hopefully people that are listening might go do the same thing. And so one thing you mentioned was to trim them but not delete them. Maybe you add them back later, maybe you trim them, go fix them and then put it back onto the site later. Would you, instead of like going in and actually deleting that host, would you go in and make it non-visible to be indexed, and so then Google just won't see it, and then you could fix it and then go check that and make it active again, or would you just delete the post.

Speaker 3: 18:30

If you can make it no index and make sure it's done correctly, then I would probably just make it inactive and then fix it and then repost it later. Update the content and repost it later. So it showed up as a new page. I guess the problem is some of the plugins and some if you're doing it yourself and you're not really confident with the way you're doing it. Google has been known to still index that kind of content or keep track of it, and so I'm a big advocate of only giving Google the information I wanted to have and run into problems where you think it's inactive and it's actually not so it's still being counted against you kind of a situation. So, as long as you're confident, making it bulletproof that, yes, this is inactive, google is not indexing or crawling it that's the big question.

Speaker 4: 19:10

Another one for any of the listeners that are putting content down their site and they're delving into SEO. We were hit with an update I think it was which it was an update in 23, maybe summerish where we had dozens of our pages In some cases it was over 100 no indexed, and it was the reason in GSC. You can kind of dig into GSC and look in there and it'll say indexed, no scan or indexed. There's reasons why Google are not indexing these articles. There's a couple of them in there. We had hundreds on, and so we had to go in manually, look at them and see why didn't Google index them and then or some to index again. Have you seen that any of your clients? And how do you recommend if Google scans it? That's what it is. It's scanned, no index, meaning they looked at it and they're like, nah, this is just not good. How do you go and fix that to get them to?

Speaker 3: 19:56

index it. So a lot of times again, this is where it gets a little bit complicated. More into the weeds. It could be a number of factors that they used to find incredible. They don't anymore. There could be three. On redirects in place that are essentially Google responds like well, that's too deep, I'm not going to scan that. The link's broken in some way. So it just is a challenge for Google to index it. So I've seen Google a lot more proactive as far as flagging. Hey, all of this content, yeah, we're not going to index it. Go figure out why I like tools. When I first started working with my business partner, I think I used six or seven different SEO tools and you know his response was to asking if I needed counseling for my software addiction. So I'm only about proofing the data. I'm all about proofing the data. So if I've got multiple sources on all these third-price software, seo software's a lot of more projections. They do scan websites. They keep the top 10 pages of keyword projections. So they're saying, well, you might have 5,000 or 4 on pages or through 10, but the reality is a lot of those are not necessarily for sure, so they're kind of guessing. So if you can have other data to kind of validate what Google is telling you. That's something I always like to do. One of my favorite softwares is Screaming Frog. It's out of the UK. It's fantastic software. They get all kinds of insights and I've found holes. Scm, rush scan tools, ahref scan tools. They're not as solid as I would like them to be, and so if I can do two or three scans of the software, if it's really giving me problems, I have another one that you can rely on. That solid is usually what I'm looking for. So I always look to validate the data first, make sure I've got a solid understanding of why I think this is the problem, and then I move forward with possible fixes. Excellent.

Speaker 4: 21:32

One last question that I'll kick it over, david Linking. This is a big topic in SEO world and you know, if you're in e-commerce, like a lot of our listeners put in content on your sites. You hear of linking. Can you, at a high level, can you explain what linking is and then maybe describe what you advise the clients on and we'll get a little bit even deeper internal linking and external linking, and then what do you recommend on both of those?

Speaker 3: 21:54

So linking in a simplest form is simply one website with a hyperlink that blue click here linking to another website, the homepage, a page specificity within that website, but the two are essentially connected by that hyperlink. There's a couple things to look at. So we're talking external and internal. On the internal, you want to make sure your internal linking is done in a way that you can actually tell Google this page is really important. They call them pillar pages. Make sure this page is kind of a cornerstone of whether it be a service, whether it be a product. This is really important. And so any blog articles you create links back to that pillar page. That might be the page you make your actual sale on. You incentivize them to actually give you a call or whatever action you want them to take. You make that kind of a cornerstone. So you want to make sure your top navigation is built in a way that it makes that page focus and tells Google. If you think of Google's algorithm that it goes from scans, it's all automated. And if you think of it in a way where you're like, okay, it is a five year old with ADHD and what can you do to structure your site to make sure this page is this important? To me this page is second important level of importance third, fourth and fifth and really just make sure it is crystal clear. If Google finds your site, there's no way it can confuse you if you're selling stereos for Bluetooth headsets, like it's just one of those things to make sure it's crystal clear. That's kind of the inner linking. So the content is going to make sure that you link correctly with the correct in the link. So that's one thing. That's also important is understanding what keywords you're going for and then as you create blog content or whatnot, that as you link back you're using number of different phrases, a few key phrases. You're linking back and say this page is important to me for these keywords. The navigation says it, the content says it and your own internal linking says it. And then the external part of it is there's kind of two pieces here to be aware of there is a backlink and there is a referring domain. So a backlink is essentially the same thing a link from an external website pointing to your website, and again I can link anywhere on your website. And then there's a referring domain and the referring domain is a website pointing to your website. So we can get specific to a page of another website linking to your website and there's actual website. The easiest way to explain it is if Facebook had a blog post about your website and it had 10 paragraphs and it had a link in every single paragraph linked to your website. You would have one referring domain and you would have 10 backlinks, if that makes sense. So a lot of people will say well, I've got hundreds or even thousands of backlinks, but they don't have very many referring domains, and the referring domains that are linking to them are not considered very trustworthy. The backlinks themselves aren't really going to do very much. It used to be, and the reason for why it's not as important anymore is the hackers spammers, we're going to call them realize that a lot of Google's ranking algorithm was based on the number of not referring domains, but of backlink, and so what they would do is they would go to a website that had maybe a thousand pages of content and they would say, hey, add this link to every single page on your website, and overnight they would have a thousand backlinks and they would have one referring domain. And so it was a very easy way to get 10 websites like that. All of a sudden, within a week, you've got 10,000 backlinks and you're killing it. You're at the top of the rankings, everything, and your website might actually kind of suck, and so Google's way of combating that was saying you know what, referring domains more difficult to get than just a backlink, especially if it's going to be a credible referring domain, and so their focus is more on building the trust factor. The quality assurance that your website is legitimate is kind of a vote from other websites. So the more websites you have pointing to your website that you are legitimate, you're good, your trust factor goes up. And that's when we get into domain authority rankings and those kinds of things. If your website's brand new, you probably have a trust factor of zero, as opposed to a good referring domain might be a trust factor of 40 or 50. No, all the software's out there. They have their own ranking and how that they gauge a website whether it's trustworthy or not. It's usually a scale of zero to 100. Trustworthy is usually somewhere in the 40 to 60 range is a good place to be, and then higher you get, you're considered more of an authority. Awesome.

Speaker 4: 26:02

Thanks for taking that hike down into the weeds with us. Climb back out of the weeds, david. Go ahead yeah absolutely so.

Speaker 2: 26:08

As we prep for this interview, I was probably the most excited for this question. So, to set it up typically me, ken, any of our listeners they will pick a product and then they'll build a marketing plan around that product. One unique perspective that you have is you get to work with a lot of different brands and see a lot of different types of products. And if we were to reverse engineer that, if you were to come up with a rock solid marketing and then build a product around, are there any characteristics that stand out to you and that may be a price point? That may be the type of product you know, might be size, but generally, what types of products can to lend themselves to being easier to market?

Speaker 3: 26:49

That is a fantastic question, so let me see if I can answer that a little more succinctly. I'm not going to say it depends, but it does have a huge impact in what channel you want to have the biggest impact. So the reason I say that is SEO and Google ads to very strong channels. Seo is going to be your highest ROI. If it's a new product and no one knows anything about it, you have the best content in the world and you could be ranking number one, but no one's searching for it, so you're not going to generate any sales whatsoever. If you're going to focus on TikTok, facebook, where it's more of an interruptive media, so they're doing something else, you can get in front of them and say, hey, check out how cool our product is All of a sudden. If it's a new product, you have to build the awareness to have people actually start to seek it out and potentially make your sales. The way in which you wanted to approach that is going to have a huge impact on the kind of marketing plan you wanted to have People say, well, these be branding or whatnot. Branding would definitely be part of it, but just an awareness that you actually exist, and the biggest mistake people make is hey, I've got this amazing product. They do a Facebook campaign because they understand, okay, people don't know I'm here, I'm going to get their attention. And the approach or from a standpoint of hey, by, this is 50% off and no one's ever heard of it, they essentially respond what is this? Why am I being spammed with this garbage? And then they blocked your ad. So you have to understand that, even with Facebook, on a campaign like that, if you want to do that, you have to be able to explain hey, this super cool feature, do you have this problem? Speak to their pain point and have a flow. They call it a funnel, so a Facebook funnel planning the problem. They might have your solution and then kind of get them familiar with you, your brand, and then look for the sale after they're aware you're there, and then you could actually solve a problem for them.

Speaker 2: 28:28

No, that makes a lot of sense and this is something that comes up with a lot of newer entrepreneurs where they'll have a new idea for a new type of product that there's not necessarily a keyword attached to this. I've made that mistake. I put a CPA study guide on a mug. Turns out no one searches for that ever. I've got 200 of those in my basement. When somebody's thinking of a product, if they have two avenues to go down, hey I'm going to make an improvement on an existing type of product that people know and search for, or I'm going to invent a new space or a new product doesn't necessarily have new keywords to describe it and you give advice to that entrepreneur that's in those crossroads.

Speaker 3: 29:05

Yeah, absolutely. And part of that is going to be understanding the obstacles in order to accomplish each one of those. I just really just knowing what you're up against and being prepared for that. So if you've got a brand new product, awesome, the potential for the upside is huge. It's way bigger than just maybe repurposing a product. But understanding you've got to make them aware of it. You've got to have multiple channels working. You're going to take longer to be able to start making your initial sales because it's something brand new. Once it takes off you can be off to the races and then you've got the actual camera. Repurposed this product. That one, as far as making it successful, is probably going to take a lot less effort than something brand new. But again, it part of it depends on what it is and who you're marketing it to. A simple one, I'm sure you guys have seen it deodorant not that exciting, not the big deal. Dr Swatch, essentially kind of repurposed deodorant, made it their own. But there's nothing new about deodorant. And all of a sudden, you know it went from two or three million in sales with a good marketing campaign, got some traction, and now they're doing 300 or 400 million right now. So just absolutely skyrocketed. So understanding, I guess, what it is you're trying to accomplish, and then really also being aware of what your constraints are as far as your marketing campaign and how much money you can put into it. So if I wanted something that really I needed to bring awareness to, I feel like one of the best combinations would be an awareness campaign, facebook and TikTok get those running, have your website built and have a good SEO campaign to start with your branded terms. Understanding how the channels work together is going to be critical, and this is where people make the biggest mistake is. They'll be running a Facebook campaign and they'll be tracking a lot. Tracking, but not understanding all the complexities of the tracking can definitely shoot yourself in the foot. They're tracking and they're saying well, all of my sales are coming from SEO. I must be killing with SEO. So I'm going to shut off my Facebook campaign because I'm putting all this money into it and I'm not getting any sales. If you go a little bit deeper into your tracking, you'll find that the actual sales were being generated by your Facebook campaign. Facebook has a much lower trust factor than Google does, and so a lot of people will look at that, especially with a new product, a brand they haven't heard before, like is this guy legit or is it something out of China that some spammers hit me with? They will then Google your name, go through Google. If you're ranked organically for your brand name, like okay, they're legit, they go to your website and then they buy from your website, assuming the pricing is the same. All of a sudden, your organic is killing it and the truth is your Facebook was the one actually driving the traffic to your organic to make the sale.

Speaker 2: 31:28

That is a really. When you said that I had an aha moment of how to look at those two traffic sources, I really liked that.

Speaker 4: 31:36

Yeah for sure. So that's a really interesting point when you have Omni Channel, an Omni Channel company, and you're selling on multiple channels and then you're tracking or you're doing some kind of a higher level tracking on to see where your sales are coming in from. And now that Amazon is more of a search, a product search, you know, marketplace, google, same thing and so they might check two or three things and try to trust you and then go to your site and buy it, but they got in from a TikTok ad or whatever, and so that's interesting. And also you've got the I call it the billionaire battle, where you have the Zuckerbergs and all these guys blocking each other from looking through and tracking. You know all that stuff. There was a big Facebook debacle last year where they stopped tracking and all that. And so, yeah, it's interesting to like not make too many rash decisions on oh, I'm getting all my stuff from Google, so I'll shut off the Facebook or TikTok. And well then, if you, you know, at least you know well then you could also would say oh well, I just lost 20% of traffic. Well, guess what, turn that back on. It comes back. And now you know 20% is coming from there. And so just kind of wanted to reiterate that. My next question is it's kind of really it's Google ads, so we'll talk about that, for it's been around for a very long time. And so a specific question is for, like e-commerce sellers say, we're selling products that are in that $9.99, we'll just talk, we'll just say deodorant, you brought it up earlier and so deodorant, so you got a product for that's. You know, $10 for deodorant or $14.99 and you want to market that on Google. Let's say a small business has that. They don't have much SEO, they don't have, they don't have a big branding name. They want to go on Google ads and they want to, you know, drive traffic to their website for a $14.99 product. Now the click you know, say, their margins are, you know 30%, 40%, maybe the keyword clicks are, you know they're battling with, you know, the big players in that and the keyword clicks are $3 or $4 or something to get that click over. Have you seen like clients, like, can you be successful like that and what can you do to? If you do have the $9.99 product, the $14.99 product, what can you do to be successful in run Google ads Like upsells, email marketing, what is in the kind of can you describe a little bit of how to be successful with a product that's $9.99 or $14.99, or is it just not a good idea to run Google ads?

Speaker 3: 33:48

Great question. So starting it really depends on the competition. The reason I say that is because Google ads is auction based and so the more competitors you have, the more expensive the clicks are. That's going to have an immediate impact. So understanding what your average cost per click is going to be the really starting point. Bear Fox I really saw a lot of agencies out there and what their business practice was and I did not want to follow suit. Bear Fox is a we start with a consultative approach. There's a lot of services we could offer, but if we don't think we can make you successful, we won't take the business. And so, on the bearfoxmarkingcom website, we actually have three calculators on there to help you know your numbers, whether it's the SEO, whether it be pay, pay per click, where you can go on there and actually see, okay, this is my cost per click, this is my conversion rate, and then also understand the other numbers. Those are the initial kind of costs you're going to incur. What is your average order value? You know, do they? You know might be selling something for $14.99, but do you sell three of them and all of a sudden it's much more profitable at three than it was for one. Do you have some upsells you can do to increase that average order value? Do you have something? Maybe at $14.99 you can hook them, but then you've got a much better offer down the road that you can get them to upsell. And then, how many times do they buy from you? And all of a sudden, if you know they buy five or six times and they're buying three or four products at a time, all of a sudden Google ads is very much profitable, marking each other you can go after. But the biggest thing I feel like fear gets in the way. And a lot of the fear can be controlled by understanding your numbers and just making sure that they're crystal clear of and doesn't have to be complicated, just understanding. As long as you're tracking, you have any kind of track record. You can look at that and say, yes, this is the cost per click I'm expecting to get. The conversion rate is this? Our sales numbers are this? Our average order value is this and the customer lifetime value is this? So really understanding I say five or six metrics around what you're trying to accomplish with that product can answer that question and that's one thing. We actually walk them through. Any client we take on. We actually walk them through that calculator to show them that this is what we are working with. This is what we think we can make happen. This is what your competitors are doing. This is what you can expect to get. Do you need to have a three times ROI to cover your cost? Do you have a 10 times? Where are you at in your needs to make it successful and just understanding what that number is?

Speaker 4: 35:59

That's kind of like a reality checker Before you dip your toe in. You know, before you jump in, let's dip your toe and see where you're sitting. So I like that.

Speaker 2: 36:06

One other question that we have that I have is for a particular product. Ken and I are a big fan of the 80-20 rule. In fact, our company's called 80-20 Capital. How many keywords drive 80% of traffic for a particular product? If someone said I want to focus on my most important keywords generally, how many keywords is that? Is it 5, 10, 0,?

Speaker 3: 36:25

100? Great question. So I would say, depending on what you want from the traffic, if you're looking for traffic or you're looking for revenue from the traffic, it is going to be a big differentiator. So a short keyword phrase oftentimes will generate the most traffic and the least amount of sales. When you go in and make sure you have the tracking correctly, you can actually see that all this traffic makes up 60% of our total traffic and it makes up 0.15% of our sales, our actual conversions, not even kidding. And then when it looked at the other pages that were converting, the traffic was longer, didn't make up as so the keywords were longer, the traffic didn't make up nearly as much. They're top, I think, 50 pages off of 18% of traffic. And so really understanding, do you want traffic or do you want revenue? What is that end goal? And then work backwards from there to understand what keywords you're looking for to generate the actual revenue. Or maybe you just want eyeballs and be competitive. But that's where I would start is really understanding what you want from the traffic you want to get.

Speaker 2: 37:23

If you are revenue, and I'm thinking of this through the lens of Google AdWords. If someone wanted to dip their toe in the water, I would say I'm going to focus on these 10 long tail keywords, or these 100 long tail keywords, or what would this, the scope of that be? And I know it depends on the product, but is there a general rule? You can?

Speaker 3: 37:40

Yeah, I mean I would definitely say there's you're going to be probably 20% of those keywords are really going to be the ones driving your sales. And understanding what those are, make sure you've got the tracking in place. But I would say definitely a minority are going to be the ones that are going to convert. And there's one thing to be aware of is understanding that it's going to take multiple touches to get the conversion. And so the short term keywords I'll start short term. The short length keywords are going to be important to also have some ranking for that. But people get frustrated. They're like well, they clicked on my ad, they went to my website. Where are my conversions? Statistically speaking, you should expect six to eight touches off of every visitor before they actually convert.

Speaker 4: 38:18

I want to expand on that one before we, before we get into the fire out so that's a really good point there. That you make I've heard that so many times, you know, I've heard seven touch points is like this is what you, what you can expect before conversion. And so you know it's the no, like and trust. What is your, I guess? Let's say, you bring a new client in house and do all the research on board them and then, as it starts, you know, so they have a. You know, hey, my budget is X amount of dollars and the first month it comes in and their row as is, you know, way lower than what they wanted. You know it's like well, you know we have to kind of build this machine and get it moving, and so, especially if you're selling a higher ticket item, right, that they have to know, like and trust you before they convert. And so what is your, I guess, advice to people that are just starting in, like paper click? Or, you know, when they have a smaller budget and it's not converting us, you know it's not like you hit the road, you know, day one and you exchange a dollar for three, it just there's like a gradual, you know grinds. What's your advice or?

Speaker 3: 39:19

what would you like to share on that Excellent question? It's difficult because if you're doing it yourself, you're not a marketing expert and so you're kind of blind guessing a little bit. You might have some experience in it If you had someone maybe a team member or someone you could pay a certain fee to that knew what they were doing and had a lot of confidence like no, this is the ramp up period, we're doing this, this and this, and they've seen it before. They've done it before for you or for someone else. They know exactly what they're getting into and they can kind of guide you like yeah, this was expected. I'm expecting it to start ramping up at this point and this point. And if you don't have that kind of experience in running something like that, the truth matter is you might be cutting up too soon. Or if it runs, you might run, let it run way too long and you're just throwing bad good money after bad money because you legitimately don't know. So if you wanted to take it over, you could. I would say it'd be a really smart investment to pay someone to set it up correctly, get it going, and then you could in-house it or something like that, but to just start yourself with no real experience. You're kind of playing with fire without you make the right color mount.

Speaker 2: 40:18

Last question, before we get into the fire round Can you tell us a little bit more about Verifox marketing and what type of clients you work with?

Speaker 3: 40:24

Yeah, so we do a lot of work with I wouldn't say blue color industry but a lot of roofing companies, fencing companies. We do work with some of the larger companies. We work with consumer packaged good companies, so it kind of depends as far as what their goals are. We don't do a lot of. We would have some great success with software companies, saas companies as well. I'd say probably probably 60% of our business is more of the blue color, so construction companies, those kinds of things, and then we got the other 40% are SaaS companies. We have worked with the great relationship acting ADU out in California. We worked with them for like four years, helped them grow that construction company for XZDwelling accessory dwelling units backyard. But yeah, that's really primarily what we work with.

Speaker 4: 41:10

So, bara, every guest we get on the show we run them through the ringer. It's called the fire round. It's a four rapid fire questions. They're very easy. Are you ready?

Speaker 3: 41:19

Ready. What is your favorite book? 10x is easier than 2X by Benjamin Hardy. What are your hobbies? I would say exercising weightlifting and reading.

Speaker 4: 41:28

What is one thing that you do not miss about working for the man Punching a clock? I agree. All right. Last one what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?

Speaker 3: 41:39

I would say endurance. One of my favorite quotes from Ernest Shackleton, the explorer on the South Pole. His dining model was by endurance we conquer. I love that quote. That's awesome.

Speaker 2: 41:51

Absolutely. Bara want to thank you for being a guest on the fire and demand podcast. People are interested in working with bare Fox marketing. What would be the best way?

Speaker 3: 41:58

Just go to barefoxmarketingcom. We've got some forms on there you can submit and we will reach out to you Again. We always do the consultative approach, so no worries about any slick salesmen talking to you. Just want to see if we can legitimately help you and point in the right direction.

Speaker 2: 42:12

Awesome, very nice. We'll post links to all that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time today and we're looking forward to staying in touch.

Speaker 3: 42:17

Awesome Sounds good.