All Forum Posts by: Dan Barrett

Hello everyone in this thread! @Brian Deer @Jerryll Noorden

Apologies for my late reply. I wasn’t tagged, so I didn’t get a notification.

I do not typically directly reply to comments like this - People are allowed to have their opinions without me butting in. But since Jerryll has specifically asked me to reply...

First of all - we DID actually hang up on Jerryll. In fact, I went further, and asked our team to no longer allow him on client calls. (Jerrylll is not our client, but since he referred this client to us and wanted to be involved, he was given this privilege).

Why?

Because he was rude, talked over my employee, and didn’t listen to anything we said.

I will never, for any amount of money, allow my team to take personal abuse.

Secondly, I would note that though Jerryll says above that we "know nothing about SEO" and are "winging it," we are not doing SEO for his clients, but PPC (paid ads). He knows the difference, so perhaps this was a simple mistake.

By “winging it,” Jerryll seems to be referring to the fact that we split-test multiple pages and ads for every client in order to find what performs best. If this is, in fact, what he means, then yes - we do hundreds of multivariate tests a month. This is an industry best-practice and a huge reason for our long term success. I am happy to dig deeper into this if it’s valuable to anyone.

Third, I feel absolutely no need to defend our performance. We've been in business for close to a decade. We have helped HUNDREDS of investors. Our retention rate from our initial program to month to month services is 80% (meaning, 80% of our clients CHOOSE to continue working with us past their initial contract).

Does that mean we always succeed? No. I am incredibly open to EVERYONE about the realities of this type of marketing and the risks involved.

Anyone who tells you they ALWAYS succeed is either inexperienced, or trying to sell you something.

I am 100% willing to anonymize and share this client’s performance data, a complete list of changes made by our team, search terms that generated clicks, screenshots of landing pages run, and a transcript or recording of all client calls, so people on BP can judge for themselves.

I want to respect everyone’s privacy, so I’ll let Jerryll make the final call on that.

Jerryll, if you’d like to have a respectful conversation about client performance and how we can hash it out, my door is always open. I have great respect for what you've accomplished and would love to be able to use your feedback constructively.

Since I am too busy to guarantee I will see any given post on BP, you could always email our client help email and request to talk to me. I’ll shoot you my cell and we can discuss (if you can, try texting me first, so I know you’re not one of the five million robo calls I receive each day!)

I'm not typically on here, so to anyone else who has questions, wants more information, or just wants to say hi, you can reach me at our website (wanted to post my email, but that's not allowed). Feel free to reach out as well if you'd like me to pop back into this thread, but don't think I've seen the notification.

Dan

@Matthew R. Sorry you feel that way, but glad you got some value out of the course!

Just a heads up - all videos from the course and calls are posted, so if you missed any, or if there was a technical mix up, reach out in the FB group and let me know. I want to make sure you get access to everything you paid for.

Hey Matthew,

I very much appreciate the review of your call with Lou.

I want you to know - you can reach out to me any time, directly - whether on FB, Bigger Pockets, or elsewhere - if you ever want to talk. I'm here to make sure you have an amazing experience, and if for any reason we don't live up to your expectations, I want to know about it.

Cheers.

Dan (from adwords nerds)

@Jerryll Noorden yeah dude! we're both in CT too - my office is in Middletown. :-)

 Very true. I may be a bit jumpy - someone in the space pushes low quality PBNs hard, and I view it as taking advantage of folks with very little knowledge of SEO or what all of that entails.

But yes, as someone who looks at ten iterations of the same carrot site every day, yours is great. People really underestimate the work involved in this stuff.

If you are using the term "PBN" to refer to two blogs you own linking to each other, that is *not* how PBN is used in the industry.

"PBNs" - as marketed to investors - are multi-site networks of low quality, low content sites that provide no value to anyone (as you specifically say, the key here being to provide value to searchers).

Your idea is great! Hosting a blog you put time into, and linking to your investing site, is a fantastic strategy.

But that is NOT what most investors are doing, nor is it what anyone is talking about when they debate what "PBN" means, or whether or not PBNs are like to be penalized by Google.

Also - things change. You linked me a video from 2013 - here's an article from 2014:

https://searchengineland.com/google-targets-sites-...

And from 2017:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-algorithm-upda...

Again - is YOUR strategy, as detailed in your last post, going to be affected? No!

But please do understand that when you tell other, less savvy investors, that "PBNs are awesome, don't listen to the warnings against them," everyone is thinking something VERY different.

P.S. Your site is great! The detailed about us page in particular is fantastic.

You ABSOLUTELY should be table to track KPIs for your SEO and see the results of the work.

Rank, as you've kind of guessed, is a vanity metric. It makes no difference whether you rank for keywords that get no traffic or generate unfocused, unmotivated leads.

All that matters is TRAFFIC and LEADS. Period.

The KPI I will typically measure for SEO are:

1. Total unique visitors (basically, who's hitting my website?)

2. Time on site (highly predictive of SEO success long term, in our experience)
3. Conversions (how many leads?)

4. Conversion rate (what percentage of people converted?)

^^ That's a bare minimum. If those numbers aren't improving, nothing's improving.

All of these KPI are trackable for free within google analytics. You can also track your own rankings for free with google search console (previously called webmaster tools).

As others have pointed out, the timeline on SEO is significantly longer than other types of REI marketing, like direct mail or ppc. Someone mentioned a year-long time frame, and while that's conservative, I tell everyone I talk to to think of SEO in those terms - a long-term investment.

The reason you want to make that investment - as @Jerryll Noorden pointed out - is that the potential volume of leads is MASSIVE. There are thousands of potential searches each month to grab, which gives SEO - though long to pay off - the highest ROI of any marketing you can do.

P.S. As someone who's done paid SEO for over a decade now, I'm going to completely disagree with @Jerryll Noorden on PBNs, however. I don't deny that they often work, and that many big investors use them - They are technically allowed for the moment. The reason to avoid them is that there is, in my opinion, a 0% chance that this tactic is not heavily penalized by Google in the next 2-3 years. Several recent algorithm changes have already attacked PBN link structures, and while PBNs certainly vary in terms of quality, the risk is extremely high. It takes a great deal of time and energy to rank a site; doing so in a way that could get that site disappeared is simply too great a risk for most investors. 

That said, short term gain is great as long as you don't lie to yourself about the risk. Never rely entirely on one marketing channel, especially if you take on significant risk in that channel.

These stats look great. Should be a great deal for any investor!

@Cody Evans Pretty much everything @Lucas Machado said is spot on.

I've done a ton of PPC management, and I typically do not recommend hiring a manager below a 2k/month budget - and that's been creeping closer to 3k over the last year or so.

Here's my rationale:

1. Looking at the data we've generated across hundreds of investors in nearly every market in the U.S., the vast majority of the time any dollar below the 2k mark will get you a higher ROI when it's used to pay for more clicks, rather than management.

That's because, barring a terrible set up (do not ever let Google set up your campaign for you, for example, and don't use AdWords Express), the marginal increase in efficiency gained by hiring a manger saves less money at that spend than that money would produce if used to buy clicks.

So, budget below 2k? Buy more ads. Budget above 2k? Then management starts to make more sense. Budget above 3k? You almost certainly need a manager.

2. Any manager that is any good should be charging at least 1k a month. We charge 2k, which includes Facebook and Bing and so on - but even for JUST AdWords, anything below that 1k range raises an eyebrow for me.

Why? Because to do this work well takes time. We typically spend 2-3 hours per week, minimum, on client accounts. That doesn't even take into account landing page design and testing, which in my personal opinion is no longer optional to be truly competitive.

Let's say you find a manager that's charging $500. How are they achieving that efficiency? Typically, it's done in two ways; one, they are "white labeling" another service, meaning that they charge you $500, then send your work to another company, who does it for, say, $100. These people are almost always overseas, have extremely limited accountability, etc.

The second way is through using automation software, like WordStream. Nothing wrong with these tools, but generally they are significantly less effective than human management - and besides, if you want to use the software, just use the software. No need to pay a "manager" to do that.

As always, I'm sure there are exceptions to these points. There are tons of good people out there and I've met quality managers who don't charge nearly enough. But the above is what I run into far more often, and I'm getting into these situations literally weekly.

If you're looking to learn it yourself, I highly recommend that; it's an incredibly useful skill to have. There are coaching courses out there - I run one for REI specifically - but honestly, you can find everything you need online for free.

The two books I usually recommend are the AdWords For Dummies into book (I know, I know - but it truly is an excellent beginner's guide), and the Advanced Google AdWords by Brad Geddes for the follow up. Those two books will teach you more than most of the people claiming to be AdWords Experts!

Hope that helps!

@Taylor Witt I'm happy to answer any questions you have, just let me know. :-)