In this episode, I’m shaking things up and taking my turn in the hot seat. And what better way to do it than with the intelligent, insightful questioning of the brilliant Jay Abraham!
On the off chance that you haven’t already heard of him, Jay is a legend in the marketing world. In fact, he’s known as the godfather of marketing. He’s the CEO and founder of the Abraham Group, and has written two books: Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got and The Sticking Point Solution.
It’s fitting -- and only fair -- that Jay gets a turn to ask me questions, since he was the guest on one of my earliest Marketing Speak episodes. Once you’ve finished listening to this episode, go listen to that one too so you can hear his brilliant take on things.
In this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with the brilliant Dan Kennedy, the godfather of direct marketing. Dan has shared stages with other luminaries like Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar. He's worked as a marketing advisor and consultant to business owners and CEOs of businesses ranging in size up to $1 billion. He reached this professional pinnacle by the depth of his knowledge of marketing, which he generously shares in this conversation.
Becoming an expert content marketer takes trial and error, but you’ll start seeing progress by understanding your audience and adding value. Brian Clark knows how to get serious reach. He’s the chief blogger at Copyblogger, and he built it from a one-man operation into a massive revenue funnel with over 200,000 customers. Brian shares his advice on how to successfully grow a business through online marketing, killer content, and attracting the right people to your website.
The Marketing and SEO industry is growing, but tasks that should be simple can still take a huge amount of time. As a professional, your time is valuable, and Rand Fishkin, “The Wizard of Moz”, has created systems and tools that allow every busy SEO or marketing expert to create incredible results with tools that can do it all. Rand shares how he came up with and created Moz programs, his favorite automation and SEO tools, and how to keep up in the ever-evolving landscape of SEO.
In last week's episode, I interviewed an ex-Googler from the organic side of business. This week, I interviewed another ex-Googler, but from the advertising side of Google. You, my friend, are getting the inside scoop for two weeks in a row. If you have anything to do with the PPC or pay-per-click account for your business or for your clients' businesses, you know that it can be tedious and time-consuming work. Keyword research, optimizing bids, writing ad copy, doing A/B testing, or logging onto your account, may feel like falling into a black hole where time disappears. Kind of like going on to YouTube, but not nearly as fun. If you've struggled with PPC in the past, you may have asked yourself how a PPC expert would manage their account. An even better question might be how would the person who developed the system of AdWords run their account?
Today, you're extremely lucky as you're going to get the answer to that very question. My guest for this episode number 206 is Frederick Vallaeys. Frederick was one of the first 500 employees at Google and he spent 10 years building Google AdWords, now known as Google Ads, and teaching business owners how to use it as an AdWords evangelist. To say that Frederick is an expert in Google Ads is an understatement. In fact, the company he co-founded, Optmyzr, is all about helping business owners increase the efficiency of their Google Ads accounts through automation, enhanced reporting and a lot more. If the idea of automating your PPC sounds enticing, then you want to stick around for some highly valuable insights. Frederick and I will be talking all about things like remarketing, attribution, even Amazon ads, and a host of other advanced tactics and techniques that will make PPC management a breeze.
A Google penalty can be devastating for any business. Imagine waking up one morning to find your rankings wiped out and your traffic in a nosedive. Worse, it may not be immediately clear why you've even been hit by a penalty. The road to recovery can take months, sometimes even years for those who are inexperienced in SEO. My guest for this episode number 205 is an SEO expert who has a wealth of experience and knowledge when it comes to Google penalties and the best strategies for site recovery.
Kaspar Szymanski is a co-founder of Search Brothers and an ex-Googler who spearheaded global web spam initiatives as part of Google's search quality team. If you're a regular listener to the show, you may have heard me talk about how important it is for webmasters to understand Google penalties. If you run an online business and you're not taking Google's quality guidelines seriously, you are accepting a major risk to your profits. Thankfully, Kaspar and I will be revealing how you can mitigate that risk by following a few basic principles. We'll also be talking about what to do if you've already been hit by a penalty and the importance of E-A-T, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This episode is packed with valuable information for any business. So without any further ado, let's get into it.
Would you like to learn how to truly unlock the power of your right brain, or to be more technically accurate, the right hemisphere of your brain? If you're a knowledge worker like me, you spent a lot of time in your left hemisphere. But with simple techniques at your disposal, which you're about to learn, you will be able to engage your right hemisphere in problem-solving ideation, developing marketing campaigns, creating your daily to-do list and so much more. By now, you probably know I have another podcast called Get Yourself Optimized. It's all about optimizing your life, career business, intimate relationship, peer group, health, mindset, even your soul. The problem is, statistically speaking, you're probably not listening to it. And you, my friend, are missing out. In fact, I'm about to prove it to you because I'm about to share with you one of my early episodes from that show for this week's Marketing Speak.
My guest for this episode number 204 of Marketing Speak is Bill Donius. Bill is an expert on creativity and unlocking the power of the right side of the brain. In fact, he's a New York Times bestselling author of the book, Thought Revolution, where he interviewed 200 CEOs, managers, and regular people, and it's all about how to think differently. Bill is a former public company CEO and his clients have included Fortune 500 companies such as Walt Disney Studios, Nestle, Wells Fargo, and Kawasaki. Bill also has a TEDx talk, which is a must-watch. And now and now without any further ado, on with the show.
As marketers, we often make a lot of assumptions about what people want and how they'll behave when presented with certain information. Occasionally, we have a study or two to backup our hunches but often we rely on gut instinct and a few insights glean from the collective wisdom of our peers to get us over the line. Usually it's enough. But what if you were able to go beyond the general consensus, the conventional wisdom and access hard data about what works and what doesn't? Unfortunately, it's rare that someone takes a systematic approach to uncovering the underlying principles that drive human behavior and decision making and applies them to marketing. For the last 25 years, that's exactly what Dr. Flint McGlaughlin has been doing through his brands MECLABS, Marketingexperiments.com and Marketing Sherpa. Flint has been using the web as his testing ground in conducting behavioral experiments and real world situations to gain data on human decision making.
What has emerged from Flint's research is a replica method of offer response optimization and messaging that could change the way you think about marketing. On this episode number 203 of Marketing Speak, Dr. McGlaughlin joins me to talk about the blind spots of the marketing industry, how we can drop the buzzwords and create more authentic messaging that resonates with our audience, and various other pearls of wisdom from his book, The Marketer as Philosopher. Stay tuned for an episode that will take you beyond focus groups and shallow insights into profound philosophical questions about human behavior that will help you transcend the current marketing paradigm.
As marketers, it's really important for us to understand what makes people tick, our target audience in particular. We learned a lot from last week's episode with Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence and Pre-suasion. Now, we're going to continue to dive deep into people's brains and why they do what they do, and how we can rewrite their source code, installing new tiny habits that change their lives and their destinies. And of course, what you learn today about habit formation can help you install the habits you've been wishing you had for years. For example, hitting the gym, quitting smoking, waking up early, creating a morning ritual that you actually stick with. So this is a game-changing episode for you personally.
Today's guest in this episode number 202 is Dr. BJ Fogg. BJ is a world-renowned behavior scientist with deep experience in innovation and teaching. He runs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. He also teaches his models and methods and graduate seminars. On the industry side, BJ trains innovators to use his work so they can create solutions that influence behavior. The focus areas include health, financial wellbeing, learning, productivity, and more. Some really big names in Silicon Valley were BJ students.
BJ wrote a seminal book persuasive technology about how computers can be designed to influence attitudes and behaviors. That book, together with his early experiences, inspired an annual global conference on the topic. Fortune Magazine named BJ a new guru you should know for his insights about mobile and social networks. BJ has a new book coming out called Tiny Habits which you can pre-order on Amazon. It'll be out December 31, just in time for your New Year's resolutions. But here's a massive action you can take today, not having to wait till December 31. This will change your destiny. Register for The Optimized Entrepreneur workshop that BJ and I are teaching together at Stanford on October 1st, go to bitly.com/getoptimizedworkshop and now on with the show.
