Grab Ryan's book here: 'The SEO Blueprint': How To Get More Organic Traffic From Search Engines Now

 

You can find Ryan at https://theblueprint.training/

 

 

Ollie:

Hey, everyone. How's it going? It's Ollie here. Very warm welcome to the Ecommerce Freedom Podcast. So today I have with me on this episode a really exciting guest called Ryan Stewart, and Ryan is the author of the book, The SEO Blueprint. 

 

So Ryan runs an SEO agency, has been mastering SEO for, it looks like, many years - 10 years. And today I wanted to dive into a few of the fundamentals of SEO. So as you're building your eCommerce business or any other business you're working on, you can make sure you're putting these tips into practice and really thinking about how to generate organic traffic and get people to find your stuff online, whenever you're creating content selling products or just building web pages and websites.

 

So Ryan, it's really awesome to have you on the show today. How are you today, man?

 

Ryan:

I'm great, man. Thanks for having me.

 

Ollie:

Oh, you're very welcome. So what I'd love to dive in and do from the very beginning is hear about your story. I'd love to know, you know, what led up to this moment when you decided, you know, let's launch a book, let's write The SEO Blueprint. I'd love to know, almost like a cliff notes version of what's happened over the past 10 years.

 

Ryan:

Great. So I got my start in corporate consulting, quickly realized that it wasn't for me. I also went back and got my MBA during that time to thinking that I wanted to climb the corporate ladder, do this and that, but while in school I realized that it wasn't for me and quickly just started turning to basically your typical searches, especially back then for anyone who's been in the industry for awhile, which was like, make money from home.

 

And I came across a bunch of garbage, but kind of settled on social media back then. And this is back when like, Facebook was really up and coming. Instagram was just becoming a thing and I knew Instagram was going to be something, I just couldn't figure out how. So I decided to try and start a business around that.

 

And this was like the earliest stages of influencer marketing things. I've basically found a bunch of big accounts. They were like the original meme accounts and started trying to broker deals with them and businesses. Long story short, learned a lot, didn't make a lot of money, ended up folding that and..

 

But one day I was at a coffee shop and I was talking to this kid that I was working with on the Instagram stuff and this gentleman sitting next to us overheard us and he was like, hey, basically social media is great, but there's this thing called search engine optimization where you can basically manipulate a website to rank it first in Google.

 

And he basically explained to me that if you ranked in the first position for Google, you're basically gonna make money. So at that point I just became obsessed, dove in, started learning about everything that I could build in my websites, built a couple of lead generation websites, affiliate websites, and then started blogging about it.

 

And when I started blogging about it, this is probably back in 2011, 2012, people started coming to me, wanting me to help them with their SEO. So that's how my consulting and client business was born. Did that for two years, had a partner, partner ended up stabbing me in the back, lost a lot of money, had to start over.

 

And that's when I started my agency, Webris and Webris quickly grew to about 1.2 million in revenue in about 18 months, ended up selling that agency to a larger agency at Philadelphia. Took some time, built an eCommerce website, sold that and started some software on the side, and also launched the Blueprint Training, and the Blueprint Training is an end-to-end training platform for SEO agencies. And that's really where the seeds of this book came from.

 

So, we have a brand now, it's called The Blueprint. Within that blueprint, like I said, we've got a bunch of online trainings for SEO agencies. We built a custom tool suite that runs in Google Suite for agencies. And now we have the book, in the book is a very in depth summary of the course, broken down into what we call the five phases of SEO.

 

This is the same approach that I used to instill within my clients. One of the larger reasons why we grew so fast, but also lays out a lot of.. kind of the behind the scenes processes for how you could do very advanced SEO at scale.

 

And that's where a lot of agencies struggle. Really, anyone with SEO is on the execution side of things because there's so much to do and so little time, right? So this book really helps you to understand how to put the pieces in place and how to run these very, very, very advanced campaigns with a lot of moving pieces at scale.

 

So a couple months ago I also bought back the rights to my agency. So now I have my agency up and running again. So I've got The Blueprint Training, I've got Webris agency, The Blueprint book, which kind of falls under the Blueprint training.. And then we also have a software company that we're getting ready to take to market this summertime.

 

My business partner is an automation expert and we basically built an app that allows marketers to leverage Google BigQuery, which is a cloud process engine, very complicated - really meant for tech, but hopefully we can take it to a much larger market one day. So that wasn't quite the cliff notes version, but a lot has happened in 10 years. So that's kinda my background there.

 

Ollie:

Wow. I know, it sounds like you're definitely qualified to write The SEO Blueprint, man. Sounds like you've done a lot. Covered a lot of ground. That's amazing. Cool. All right, man.

 

Well, one thing that really struck me about your book, this is one of the reasons I contacted you, because when I read a book, I love it to have a really solid structure. It just makes me more motivated to pick up the book, to read it, and to actually finish it. And your book's got very solid structure. I really liked that.

 

So could you perhaps walk us through the five phases approach to SEO, what they mean, and how people can apply it to get started, and really use SEO to help their business.

 

Ryan:

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad you vibed with it too, because fortunately for me, one of the ways that my brain functions, I'm very process-oriented. If you asked my fiance if I'm an organized person, she would say, hell no. But when it comes to my businesses, I'm very, very structured, very oriented, and very process-focused because I found out early on that, you know, fortunately when you have some companies that don't work out, you learn a lot from them.

 

And one of the biggest learning lessons that I had, number one. was don't partner with the wrong people. And number two was any sort of time-consuming or service-based business where you're selling people's time, you have to have air type processes. It's the only way you can scale.

 

So going through that process of rebuilding my second agency, I was able to build the service from the ground up and I literally just started on a whiteboard writing down basically everything that needs to go into in a perfect scenario for an SEO campaign.

 

Right. From there I started grouping things logically and then also chronologically in terms of when they should be done, both to maximize the return on the campaign. In other words, getting the most organic traffic, meeting the client's expectations, keeping them happy, and then also structuring it over a long period of time because SEO takes a long period of time. But also because we're working on six to 12 month contracts, right?

 

So I ended up coming up with what I call the five phases. The five phases are something that I ended up kind of not trademarking per se, but making it kind of the staple of what our agency did because it became a very good pitching tool for clients as well. Just like you said, how it's easy for you to read and digest it, i's also easier for companies who don't have much context in terms of the finer in and outs of SEO to look at something that's as structured as this.

 

And I'll talk about them in a second, but to look at something as structured as this and understand where their money's going. They want to see they have a plan, a framework that you've gotten results in the past and that's, it's a result of what you're doing.

 

So it was not only an organizational tool for us in terms of how to structure campaigns, but also a very viable pitch and marketing tool. Because like I said, if you want to hire a company for SEO and one of them comes at you with a bunch of these great ideas, but they're all over the place versus a company that says, we have a framework, we have a process. We've done this a million times before, you can trust us, right? It's a much different approach. And it worked really well on a large reason why we able to scale so quickly.

 

But I'm breaking into the five phases. So phase one is what I call the discovery process. And again, this process, if you're listening to this, I know there's a lot of Amazon folks out here. If you're doing SEO for your own site, you don't necessarily have to do all these things. And I addressed that in the book.

 

This is really kind of the whole kitchen sink if you were going to do this as a service for clients, but a lot of these things are still valuable to you because there's certain things that people want to skip over on SEO because they think they're not important. And then six months down the line they're like, oh crap, I missed something pretty big. And that's why it is important to really go through this and use it as a checklist, if you will, when you launch your campaign.

 

But the discovery process is where we go through, we discover literally the most of them that we can about that website. So whenever we're working with a client or a new website, we don't know much about it and we have to try and download as much information as possible so we can build the right way.

 

So some of the things that we do here are like an analysis of analytics. We built our own tool that scrapes data from a couple of sources and then aggregates it into Google Data Studio. So we built this really cool dashboard report that basically gives us a health check in the past performance of that website. We'll go through that. We'll actually go in and audit their Google Analytics account, make sure that they have conversions set up.

 

We'll also do like a very detailed onboarding process, like asking the stakeholders questions. We will have a couple of meetings. Again, just trying to get as much done as possible. And this is all, it's about like the first week or two. So that's phase one.

 

And again, if you're listening to this and you do services for clients, one of the cool things about these phases again is once you start to understand the things that go into these phases, you can start to stretch them out and or shorten them based on the type of clients you're working for.

 

For example, if you're working with an enterprise client, you could stretch out the discovery process over months because there's so much information to be had versus if you're working with a local coffee shop, you're probably gonna want to get done in a couple of days cause they don't have the patience for a lot of reports and a lot of phone calls.

 

So again, this framework is applicable to anything, but you have to have the EQ, in a sense, to understand how to map this to what you're doing. So that's phase one, the discovery process.

 

Phase two is what we call the improvement process. So just like anything, but especially with SEO, is that the quickest return always comes from existing assets. So making improvements to the things that you already have.

 

So unless you're working on a brand new website that hasn't been built yet, most websites are going to have the bare bone structure done in terms of the most important pages. And we look at a website just like you would look at a marketing funnel. So there's bottom funnel, mid funnel and top funnel.

 

A bottom funnel page is going to be something like an eCommerce product page. That's where the conversion happens. That's bottom funnel. Mid funnel would be something they'd be like reviews page, case studies page, top funnel would be like a blog post, right?

 

So what we want to do is we want to start by focusing on those bottom funnel pages. So like I said, if you're e-commerce it's going to be like your product and category pages. If you are a software company, it's going to be your, maybe, benefits pages, your features pages. If you're an agency or B2B service provider, it's going to be your service pages, right?

 

We want to focus on how we can fix those. So keyword research on page optimizations, making sure that those pages are built properly. That's what we want to go through in this process. Again, especially when we're working with clients, but also if you're doing this for yourself, we want to get the fastest return possible, but we also want to get the fastest return possible that's going to drive measurable business results, sales, leads, phone calls, et cetera. So that's what the improving process looks at. It's a very, like I said, very detailed look at keywords and keyword usage on very specific pages.

 

So phase three is then what we call the building process. So after we go through and optimize those bottle bottom funnel pages, we then want to start to do what we call stacking keywords and content.

 

So going back to that funnel model, looking at the mid and top funnel pages here. So we'd like to start this with what we call a keyword gap analysis. Meaning, we built a tool that will pull in 10 of your competitors and all the keywords that they're ranking for, and then crosswalk it with all the keywords that your website is right before. So then what we can do is we can look at what we call the gaps. So those gaps represent all the traffic that your competitors are getting that you're not.

 

So we take those gaps and keywords and we turn those into content topics and page topics, and then we start to build those into pages on the website, right? So again, phase two, we looked at fixing the bottom of funnel pages. Phase three, we're looking at improving and I'm building new content on top of that.

 

Phase four is the promotion process. If you're familiar with SEO, you've probably heard of link building before. If you're not, Google looks at a link. In other words, if a Huffington post writes an article about the top 10 stores for sneakers and you sell sneakers, you're probably gonna want to be on that list, right?

 

If they write about you and then link back to your website, Google crawls that link and it basically sees it as a popularity vote. So the more of those links that you can get from relevant and authoritative websites, the higher your content's going to rank.

 

So this phase here is usually just all about getting your website out in front of relevant sources and figuring out a way to get them to link back to. That's a very in depth process. I don't want to get into it here, but phase four is really all about promotion and link building.

 

Phase five is very quick. It's just what we call the evaluation process. So it's reporting, it's looking at all the things that we've done, making decisions and then scaling this out across the whole website. More content, more links, et cetera.

 

So that's the five phases again, in a very, very long nutshell.

 

Ollie:

Awesome, man. It sounds like.. yes, there's a lot of information in there. And also a lot of nuggets, and I've pulled out a few things that maybe I'd like you to expand on a little bit if that's okay. 'Cause it could be super, super valuable.

 

So with Amazon, I think what a lot of people are focused on is bottom funnel stuff. And what I imagine you mean from that is anything where.. we're looking at people actually making a decision. So, is that email signups, sales calls that have been generated, things like that?

 

Ryan:

Yes.

 

Ollie:

Fantastic. It makes sense. So is there a way that people could use some of the stuff that you've done to get more of that bottom funnel stuff happening on Amazon? Using your frameworks.

 

Ryan:

Yeah, there is. And again, I'm not an Amazon SEO expert or ASO expert, if you want to call it Amazon store optimization, but a lot of the same principles do apply. And as we've been talking about, I did launch a book, so I'm familiar with the book optimization process. And when I compare that to what it would be for like a landing page optimization process for a website, it's not too different.

 

So first of all, starting with research, like what is it that people are searching for on Amazon, number one, going to Amazon and search and direct before you need to understand that. And then number two is what are people searching for in Google that Amazon pages are ranking for? Right?

 

So this kind of a two part approach. We don't want to just get more exposure within the Amazon platform, which is huge obviously, but also more exposure in Google because Google ranks a lot of Amazon listings for keywords.

 

So keyword research is really important here. Again, number one, understanding what people are searching for within Amazon and then applying that to your titles, your categories, your descriptions, your traditional, what we call on-page optimizations, right?

 

And then that's going to be the same thing for with what people searching for in Google. We want to make sure that our Amazon pages are also optimized with the same keywords for Google. So those two things are huge. Optimizing your page and then what I'm finding is really the two biggest things is conversion rate of your Amazon page and reviews, right?

 

So conversion rate meaning from what I understand in speaking to a lot of consultants, Amazon is going to rank products that have the highest conversion rate. So if you get a hundred people to your paid tier to your product page a and five convert, then you have a 5% conversion rate. The more people that you can get to convert, the higher Google's gonna, I'm sorry, the higher Amazon's going to ended up liking you internally.

 

And then of course reviews. So getting verified reviews from real customers and customers who have a good track record with Amazon and spend a lot on Amazon. Those are huge. So if you can do all of those things, then, according to what I've done and with minimal experience, again, I don't want to pretend like I'm an Amazon expert here, but based on what I've done for clients, especially the part for optimizing Google, you know, a lot of, so a lot of people will come to us consequently most and say, hey, look at Amazon's crushing us with these, you know, with the fees, with all these like new terms and services, we can't keep up. We want to build a Shopify store in Migrante commerce.

 

And I usually tell them that that's a bad idea because Amazon gives you a leg up. And this is a main difference to me between selling on Amazon and trying to sell through Google, is that Google looks at websites in terms of trust and authority, right?

 

So when I talked about the promotional element and link building, those links are a very big part of what they look at in terms of trust. So the more links, the more press you're getting more links and more talked about, you're getting, the more authoritative your website's going to be.

 

So if you sell jeans, and you have to compete, then compete with Gap and Forever 21, you have a massive uphill battle. Whereas if you're on Amazon, that authority isn't necessarily a thing because the Amazon hasn't got different factors. Again, the conversion rate, the reviews, things like that allow some of the smaller companies to compete with some of the larger companies.

 

So I don't always necessarily suggest people moving. I understand why you'd want to have a Shopify store. I encourage people to do both. But I also encourage you to understand the differences in the nuances in terms of just overall volume in sometimes taking that haircut on Amazon, on Amazon is worth it because you're getting so much more volume.

 

And there's a lot of small nuances to that. Like, you know, I had a conversation last night with someone who does affiliate SEO and he said he hates using the Amazon affiliate stuff because of the fees that they take. But I told them, I was like, yo, like as a consumer, I'm buying on Amazon nine times out of 10, like I don't want to have to enter my credit card into your store. It's adds friction.

 

So sometimes it's worth taking that extra haircut that Amazon charges you because there's one click checkout. I know if I order on Amazon, I'm probably gonna get that shit today. And that's huge for me, you know? So depending on what it is, you have to look at your product, you have to look at your customer, you have to look at their behavior, and definitely understand the nuances between selling on Amazon and selling on like a Shopify solution, trying to get organic traffic there. They're not, there are similarities, but they're not the same in terms of how the customers will actually interact with those platforms, if that makes sense.

 

Ollie:

100% and yeah, one of the things I tell my clients all the time, as I said, game of margins really, Amazon are going to take their cart, but you're going to win. If you can get your stuff a lot cheaper than everyone else because then the fees don't bother you anymore. And that's how you win with Amazon. So I'm totally with you. And when you say, you know, don't imagine that if you just shut down your Amazon store, try and start up a Shopify, there's going to be easier just because you don't have those fees.

 

Yeah,  that makes a lot of sense. So one thing you mentioned there was keywords ranking for keywords and this is a thing we do with Amazon products. We launch a name is usually to get to page one for one of the main keywords people type in. We actually have a software called merchant words.

 

I don't know if you've heard of it and it tells you that the, the keyword volumes for keywords on the Amazon platforms. So do you have any, like how do you guys use keywords? I mean, do you try and get ranked for really super competitive high volume keywords? Do you try and find undiscovered keywords? And you mentioned like you try and find gaps. Can you try and just maybe just expand on your philosophy when it comes to keywords?

 

Ryan:

For sure. Yeah, I mean, so to answer your initial question, we do both because again, going back to the jeans example, if you sell jeans, you can't skirt around the fact that your product is jeans, right?

 

There's some kind of like fancy footwork in terms of keyword research you can do to maybe target some of the less lesser traveled roads, which means looking at what, you know, again, like a lot of SEO is just research. It's doing the work upfront and again, going back and understanding who your competitors are, what their authority is versus where your authority is for your website. We're talking about selling, I'm like a Shopify solution on Amazon, right?

 

Understanding what those gaps are. And then if you want to rent, if your main core product is, is jeans, right? Maybe there's some things that you can do, like if you have nuances in your jeans, like if they're acid washed or if they're ripped jeans, or if there's some trends coming up that you can maybe alter your product a little bit for in terms of the keyword targeting, then absolutely.

 

But there's certain times when like if you saw hand sanitizer, there's not much that you can do to try and get around the fact that it's just going to be brutally competitive and you will probably never rank for that keyword.

 

That's a very important lesson that I have to constantly explain that during my consultations with clients is that I respect the fact that you're ambitious, you've a great product, you make great jeans, but you're too late. You know, like these other companies have already won and Google does not want to give exposure to an unknown website that could be untrustworthy. That's going to reflect poorly upon Google. Right?

 

So in that sense, if you find yourself in that situation, number one, continue to work to optimize for your main keywords because that's a part of the business and if you give it years of time, you will get there.

 

But in terms of more quick turnaround, this is where content is so important for SEO. Because what you can do, again if you sell jeans is what you can do is you can become a publisher and you can create content that you know, that your audience wants and you can kind of take the back door into that traffic.

 

Meaning again, for example, if you would come up, if you sell jeans, you can be writing articles, you can be doing videos, you can be creating social content that are about like fashion trends and about like blue Jean trends and like getting influencers involved to help promote your content and things along that nature where people will still discover you for jeans and then pass through to your product pages. And then you can also leverage things like remarketing, if they come to that blog post, then start to remarket your products to them.

 

So, you know, I look at SEO now as if you're in a situation where it's just too competitive, you've got to take a slightly different approach, right? You have to be willing to, number one, accept the fact that this is a long game. Number two, that you're going to have to invest in content, in advertising, influencers to get around these things.

 

But you know, we're at a point where digital channels are so integrated now that I don't look at SEO in a kind of, in a silo anymore. And the fact that I look at content as the glue for everything, like we advertise a lot. We're spending over $50,000 a month for our companies across our portfolio for advertising. And I can tell you, without a doubt, the most important part is constant. It's that creative. It's the asset that we're putting in front of them.

 

And that asset is the same thing that I'm pushing on the blog to get more organic traffic. But I'm also doing the video and putting it on Facebook and Instagram, the longer video putting on YouTube.

 

So that concept and that strategy starts with SEO to me because it starts with that keyword gap analysis that I talked about, right? Understanding what your competitors are doing to get traffic, doing the keyword research to find new opportunities and then understanding how to formulate that into the right type of content that you can then push the different district channels.

 

If you can do that and you can follow the process that I've laid out in the book, even if it's brutally competitive over time you'll get, you'll get traffic for those keywords. But also just as important, you can get a quick turnaround traffic if you go after those top funnel type keywords again, like, you know, best jeans to wear in Miami, at nighttime, I don't know, something like that. Right. But just different things like that. 

 

Ollie:

That's awesome. So you're saying instead of, you know, if you're selling jeans instead of trying to get in front of the people who were just typing in jeans and then you've got, you know, Levi's and all these other big Jean companies, you're typing something in such as, I don't know, middle aged men fashion wear and then someone clicks on the content that you've put out and then ends up going to your website that sells jeans in a backdoor way rather than directly competing, right?

 

Ryan:

Exactly. Yes.

 

Ollie:

That's fascinating. That gives me a lot of food for how to get people more external traffic to their Amazon listings. Cause you could potentially build up some content that links to your products that you sell on Amazon and just litter links throughout the website.

 

Ryan:

Yeah. You could also redirect it to. If you can get a page rank then you can just select, for example, my book right now. I built a book landing page that can serve as a place to generate links cause I've been pushing it a lot of influencers and being like, hey, you know, could you share this? Blah blah blah.

 

But for the short term we decided to just redirect it right to the book because again, we're cutting out that extra step. So there's a bunch of things that you can do and yeah, I mean you can redirect, you can use links. You can just link internally. There's a whole bunch of things you can do. But the key variable here is just attention, right? It's just we have to get attention from the right people at the right time in content is just, it's by far the most effective way to do so right now.

 

 

Ollie:

Awesome, man. So when you were talking about backlinks as in, some people listening might not know what a backlink is, is basically just when someone clicks on the link to your website, right? It's just a link to your site on someone else's site. Is that basically what it is? Basically. It's just a fancy way of saying that.

 

 

Ryan:

Yeah. What I like to refer to it as is, think about it. If you're writing a blog post, right, or you're writing a high school research paper and you talk about how the Corona Virus is affecting 40% of people, right? You're gonna want a site where you got that information from with a link, right? So that link right there is helping the website that you link to.

 

So on the commerce side of things, if you want to get your pages to rank, you have to figure out what it is that you can do to get other websites to basically talk about you and then link it back to you. So there's a whole bunch of ways you can do it. There's like traditional PR where you can tell like the founder's story. You can do like different data and case studies and then pitch that to different companies.

 

You can just go out and offer to write content for other websites. That's how I started my career in SEO is I was, I found all the biggest SEO blogs out there and I was like, Hey, I'm a good writer. I've got this really good article about how to do link-building can I, can I send a draft to you guys? And then within that article I would link back to my website. So there's, and then there's influencers.

 

There's monster PO, there's a whole bunch of ways that you can do this. The key thing is just number one is finding the right type of websites. So meaning again, if you sell jeans, it doesn't you do you any good for a website that's about dogs to talk to you, right? You'd want to be on like fashion bloggers, lifestyle, maybe fitness, just industries and verticals that are relevant to yours.

 

And then also that that website is quality. So again, going back to the concept of authority with Google, there's websites that are viewed as Google as pain right, that are just low quality, they don't have good contents there. They've got stolen read content, copied content. You don't want to be on those websites cause that's gonna send a negative signal back to your website.

 

So, and the reason technically speaking, why links are so important is because Google, the Google bot, which is, they call it a spider, it basically crawls from website to website through links. That's how the whole internet is, is linked together.

 

So Google is easily on to and are able to understand if it's getting sent to your website consistently by like Huffington post and Forbes and inc that your website is being constantly featured by top authority websites that are talking about your company. So therefore you must be popular in, therefore they want to start showing you more and more in search results.

 

Ollie:

Love it. Awesome. And yeah, you've explained that really well and painted a really clear picture. So one more thing. I just want to pick up on, before we start to wrap things up is, so you mentioned influences using influences to help you with backlinks and to help you grow the outreach of your content and things like that.

 

So let's say someone's got a product that they're selling on Amazon and you know, they want to get some traffic sent to the listing and maybe they're thinking of using influencers to do that. Do you have any like, solid strategies for getting influencers to actually work with you consistently? I mean, is it a case of giving them money or do you just send out emails or what's, what's the strategy?

 

Ryan:

That's a great question. If you were to ask me that two years ago and I would've said pay them, but the industry has become so saturated now that they're requesting so much in my opinion. You know, you see a lot of people talking about like using micro-influencers, like people with like 10,000 and under and just kind of like giving them free product. That's one option.

 

Another option, like this is also why in my opinion, it's so important to be creating your own content, your own value. Because you always want to own the conversation. You always want to have your own channels be bigger than your paid an urgent. That's right.

 

So content is by far the best way that brands can just build their own following. And that if you do launch a new product, like this book that I launched, you know, I've been able to amass an email this over 50,000 people, which makes it a lot easier to sell stuff and get people to my Amazon listing.

 

And then because I then have that asset to, I'm then able to go to people like yourself who have their own following and be like, hey Oliver, I've got this new book that came out, I'd love to send you a copy. If it's something that you like, then I would love to talk about, maybe we can do promotional exchange, you know, I'll send something to my list.

 

You send it to yours, I'll tweet something. You tweet something. So that's a strategy I've been deploying, which is much more of like mutual gratification. Like I could offer to pay you 100 bucks, but like do you really care about a hundred bucks? Not really. You know?

 

So the point that I'm trying to get to is, you have to understand whatever industry and whatever influencers you want to work with, understand what motivates them, right? If they're motivated by money, then pay them. If they're motivated by cloud, then build a big Instagram profile.

 

I know it sounds easier said than done, but like if you can feature them on your profile, they'll probably be more willing to feature you on there, you know? So there's just also, I mean, at the end of the day, everything about businesses, the exchange of value, so understanding what the other person values on the other side of that screen is all you have to focus on. And that's with anything. And that's what's selling a product that's selling a service. That's what trying to get pressed.

 

That's with trying to get people to talk about your book. It's about taking that one-to-one approach and reaching out to that person directly with a custom written note. I'm saying, I've been on your profile for awhile, you know, really love what been doing. Are you interested in working together? And that's it. And just having a conversation, stop with the mass emails.

 

Stop with the generic stuff. People can see through that. And also, especially when we're talking about physical products, we're coming into a time where influencers especially want to work with companies that they believe in, right? Not that's just peddling some crap. The world has enough crap.

 

So people want to work with a product and a company that has a vision that they believe in. So again, it's really important to understand who you should be targeting, how you can talk to those people in the value that you can provide them, not the other way around.

 

Ollie:

Yeah. You've come up with so many interesting points there. And what I wanted to say was use this as a case in point. I mean, why did you decide to do this interview?

 

Ryan:

I take all interviews, you know, I do, I'm a, to be honest with you, I don't even really check on people's audiences. I just feel like it takes 30 minutes of my time. It's easy for me to talk. This stuff is what I enjoy talking about. No matter what.

 

If I'm not talking to you, I'm probably talking to my team about it, you know? So, if I can come on in and help out your audience in any way, shape or form, build a relationship with you. Again, podcasts are actually a great way, that I've built up kind of my personal contact list for this book.

 

I have a interview series that I do too and I've been inviting people on. I give them a copy of my book and then I asked them to promote it afterwards and it's the same thing with this. I just look at this as a means to connect.

 

It's also free promotion for me. Even if you only have five people, if those five people buy the book, it's worth it to me or they stumble into one of my programs. This is the way that brands are built, you know, by continuous uphill climbs and doing everything that they can possible. And just understanding how to effectively use my time and I enjoy it too. This hasn't really worked for me, so, I'm happy to be here.

 

Ollie:

Yeah, likewise man. 100%. And you know, the point is you're getting value from this. So one of the reasons why is obviously you enjoy it as well and it helps you. So if people want to find influences, they want to connect with them, get them to promote their stuff, then there has to be a benefit and have a mutual benefit for it to happen.

 

I mean, if I approached you and just said, you know, can you just kind of give me something for free? I have absolutely no benefit to you. I mean, it wouldn't have worked, but there's a mutual benefit.

 

So, yeah, that's fantastic. All right man. Well we covered a lot of ground today. Hopefully, people who were thinking how to use SEO more effectively, they got a few nuggets from today hopefully.

 

If you're listening to this, you're going to go check out Ryan's book. You can grab it on Amazon. What's the best thing to search is just SEO Blueprint and then Ryan Stewart. Would that be the best way to find it?

 

Ryan:

Yeah, it's just called The SEO Blueprint. It's got a bright blue cover, SEO and huge blue letters across it. And yeah, my name is Ryan Stewart. You can just drop that in as well.

 

Ollie:

Great. And I'll also put a link to the book on the show notes. So if you go to eCommercefreedom.com, you should see this episode pretty high up in the list. Check the show notes. You'll see a link there as well.

 

And is there anywhere else people can find you Ryan, do you have a website people should go to?

 

Ryan:

Yeah. So if you're interested in learning about SEO, again, this book is tied to our online training platform community. We've actually got a plenty of free stuff up there. Free slack community. That's the blueprint.training.

 

If you're interested in SEO consulting, you can just reach out to me directly, or agency services, and you can find me on social media @ryanwashere on Twitter and Instagram. I'm also very active on YouTube. I post every week. If you just want good free marketing content and you can find me on YouTube and just Ryan Stewart for that.

 

Ollie:

Perfect. All right, man. Well, it's been a joy having you on today and yeah, I really hope that the launch of the book goes well and hope to speak to you again soon.

 

Ryan:

Thanks brother.

 

Ollie:

Awesome, man.