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We’ve been in development for the better part of a year creating a thing we affectionately call “A Brain”.  This new technology writes content.  We have developed it in it’s sixth iteration to write content at the level you choose.  If you’d like it written at a college level, you need only to hit the drop down box and make the indication.  If you’d like it to write at an 8th grade level, you need only to ask.

The catch is that it is a brain.  So, you first must teach it.  We add dozens of articles that are in the same genre, then we add hundreds of long and short tail terms into it and then after the “brain” has gotten enough “weight”, we let is start writing.  it will write a page for every search term that you loaded into it.

Load All The Copy That You Want it To Learn

If you load 1000 terms, then you will have a 1000 page website that will eventually score for hundreds and hundreds of terms.  Our several tests Have proven that this “brain” works and that Google is sufficiently happy enough with the content that it is ranking pages all over the web.  We are excited and yet I fear that we will eliminate the need for a copywriter which may sound exciting but where do we go from here?

I am not so reticent that we won’t begin marketing this amazing technology, but what we may very well do is start building these huge websites for let’s say a dentist in a city and then maybe put up this site where the entire site will have a popup which could be a lead generator or even a home page graphic that sends you to the same page for whatever term you search.

I can’t begin to imagine what this “Brain” will be able to do but it is sure fun thinking about how many verticals you can use it in.  Automotive to plastic surgery and attorneys to plumbers.  If the customer is serious about dominating a vertical in their city, town or state, this technology will give them all they can handle.

I have been watching this internet space for the past 20 years. I was in at the beginning with an internet startup when we invented chat and took that as far as we could before we sold it. Since we sold, I have been watching the proliferation of “How To” classes, softwares and consulting designed to make every business successful if you just do this or that.

I have bought dozens of coaching classes and software applications which we commonly refer to as “shiny objects”. It’s funny that most “shiny objects” are bought at night before we go to bed. You see, if we buy some $47 or $97 or even $1497 product before we turn in for the night, we have “moved the ball forward” today and can rest easy knowing that we’re on our way until tomorrow when we get up, look through this new “answer to my prayers” app and figure out it’s a lot of work. We then get distracted by an email or one of the kids and then we’re right back where we started. Well, actually, we’re not. We’re back even further than before because we realized in the light of day, that isn’t the next answer that we hoped it was. Plus, we’re anywhere from $47 to $1500 lighter in our wallets. Our search for the next “Holy Grail” begins again. But don’t fret. I have the answer for you and it won’t cost a dime.

(Drum Roll) To find this answer for how to succeed, you need get up and go into the bathroom. Now take a look in the mirror. There’s your answer! It’s you and I’m willing to bet almost any amount of money that you have what it takes to succeed and the reason it’s a safe bet is because you haven’t given up yet. You’re always looking and hoping that the next product around the corner is THE answer. You are the answer! Say that to yourself. You really are!

Now here’s the process: No matter what kind of business you have or don’t have, if you focus on one marketing method and are disciplined enough to not give up, you will succeed.  If you’re a B to B business, Infousa.com has the most amazing email lists in the world. If you can’t afford that, then go ahead and spend the time finding emails one at a time. Sue and I built a two million dollar business by sending out 50 emails every day for about 6 months.

If you’re a B to C business, Facebook has the best targeting in the world and if your ads are relevant, you can get quality clicks for $.05 to $.15 each. You can go to a site like Upwork.com and find someone with extensive experience who can tell you what has to happen for you to target your perfect customer. Depending on how many new customers you’re looking for, Facebook may very well be your answer.

Maybe you provide consulting or internet services. Go find the websites of the types of clients you want to talk to and compose an email and send it to them. No autoresponders or funnels or landing pages. Just write your potential client about what you see about his website of his business. Here is a free tool that can help you find the “big dog” to target: https://emailhunter.co/ If you can’t find him there, there is a tool here that is about $50/mo which will tell you the owner of the website: http://domaintools.com/ Usually the owner of the company owns his domain. He would hate to have an employee own his brand for fear that if they left him, they would own it.

Next time I will share with you my favorite marketing trick that is so simple, you’ll be able to start right after I show it to you.

I was told this story by a partner of Sol Polk’s back in the early 80’s after we opened the first “hot tub” store in Chicago. Jack supplied me with hot tubs and spas and also inventoried and installed all the hot water heaters for Polk Brothers and that’s another good story for some other time!

Sol Polk was an old pitchman in Chicago who, along with his brothers and a sister built Polk Brothers; a home appliance retailer that closed in the early 90’s but left a Foundation of over $350 million that grants money every year to charitable foundations to this day.

Sol was traveling in Europe back in the early 70’s and met a Dr. from Delaware who was on his way to a convention to present his new “procedure” later to become a maneuver.  Yes, he met Dr. Heimlich and the Dr. explained his new discovery to Sol Polk.  Sol was so impressed that he asked if he could share it with businesses in the states and promised to never sell it.  Well, back then Illinois had a senator Charles Percy who was a past President of Bell & Howell.  Sol and he were acquaintances and Sol petitioned Percy to share this amazing new “Heimlich Maneuver with every school, institution and restaurant in the country.

Senator Percy was a U.S. Senator but did help Sol get it made law in Illinois and it is still a law today that every public place that serves food has to have the Heimlich Maneuver Placard displayed prominently in case of an emergency.

The law that Polk got enacted in Illinois states and I quote:  “Illinois requires the health department to design and distribute without charge placards containing approved methods for laymen to safely and effectively remove food lodged in a person’s throat. The instructions must be limited to first-aid procedures that do not use instruments or devices. They must be of a size and design suitable for posting in food service establishments. The instructions must, to the extent practicable, be expressed in words and illustrations that are not offensive to restaurant patrons.”

Once the law went into effect, Polk was already in full swing with his donating the placards for free to every restaurant, school, municipal building and hospital in the state. Sol hired high school students from Proviso East High School just down the street from his family business to address envelopes that he paid out of his own pocket.  The only charge to any restaurant or municipal buildings was just shipping and handling.  Therein lies the brilliance of this clever marketer.  The first year, giving away “The Heimlich Maneuver” placard, Sol Polk made a little less than $6 million.

Now $6 million may not sound like a lot but by today’s rate, it would equal: $39,976,056!  Not bad for a FREE placard that, true to his word to Dr. Heimlich, he always provided for no charge to anyone who asked for it.

Now you may be wondering what that has to do with the offer that brought you to this page.  Well, it’s that kind of offer that I can teach you all about.  The free offer that converts the majority of all email offers and sales.  They all start with a free offer, don’t they?

Every internet marketer knows about offering a digital product which costs you nothing to trade the subscriber’s email address.  What if I told you that we can copy Sol Polk by offering something of real value for free but we pick up anywhere between $7 and $47 for everyone who signs up to get it?  I’m not selling this and I don’t own it and nor do I get anything for it, but it’s a winner.

I will share it sometime soon.

We are seeing more and more of our clients’ websites hitting the first page since Google’s mobile update due to excellent on-page SEO.  I know that “Mobile-Geddon” had nothing to do with it and I also know that Google is not penalizing sites that haven’t been recoded to be mobile-friendly.  I do know that Google is treating sites that are mobile friendly better than ones that are not.  We have clients who haven’t updated their sites for numerous reasons that lost rankings within a week.

However, I have been doing this for ten years and the more we tweak the metatags and content and the less we build backlinks, the better the results we’re seeing in the last few weeks. I would never have believed it, but if the site has some decent authority; nothing special, we are seeing things happen that we haven’t seen in more than five years.  Is anyone else seeing this?

Tweak The On-Page Content

The other thing we’re seeing is that if we just tweak the on-page content and make sure we are not “keyword stuffing”, but using some LSI, and changing the URL to include some semblance of the term we’re hoping for, we are beating first page results of sites with 1200 to 10,000 backlinks and more Authority.  Google must be discounting thin backlinks nowadays. They have been saying that there will come a day when backlinks will not affect rankings, but I never believed it.  Maybe it’s starting to happen. Although, if I was a betting man, I’d still say; “Naw”.

We are seeing something that I can’t quite explain and we have over 200 sites we optimize and all of a sudden, things are changing that I’m not reading about in any of the forums I follow. I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t tell you how many of the sites we manage getting rapidly improving results with some very basic “SEO 101” changes.  I’m talking simple stuff!  Change the URL, include the term in part of your H1 or H2 and follow it with 200 to 300 words without stuffing and we’re seeing large jumps.  As soon as the changes are indexed, we’re seeing page 1 and page 2 results from nowhere.

I have also recently seen that if the site you’re optimizing does not have some decent social signals, you can build some beautiful relevant backlinks and they won’t do squat.  We have tested it and found that with relatively new websites, if we do some social sharing and build a couple; like 2 or 3 relevant backlinks, the site does much better than a higher authority site with more backlinks.  I think Google has finally come to the conclusion: “how can a site be getting a lot of backlinks while not getting talked about on social media?”  If that is the case, it certainly makes sense and the tests we have run seem to prove it out.

Holler if you think we drank the Kool Aid over here, but I know what is happening with the majority of our clients and would love to know if anyone else is getting these kinds of results this easily lately.  Or maybe, give it a try and get back to me on what you’re seeing.

Google Launches New Mobile Web Design Update. 

April 21st, Google throws the switch and starts ranking all websites based on this simple little test:  Click here.  Your website needs to be mobile friendly or officially called RWD (responsive web design) or the penalty will be significant.  Now, we hear this kind of SEO Armageddon banter all the time but I’m afraid this one is for real.  As a matter of fact, Google has stated that this will be the most significant algorithm update that they have ever launched.  You must remember that most of their updates affect 2% to 5% of the websites at a time.  This will affect them all!  Every website will be judged and reranked by the 28th of April at the latest according to Google’s announcements; which they don’t make too many of anymore.

Search Engine Land wrote on March 12th that an average site that does not comply to the “mobile friendly” edict will lose anywhere between 19% and 27% of their traffic.  Most of us has known for a couple years now that mobile was growing and that it now represents an average of 30% of all traffic to your site.  The nice thing for some of our clients is that they will probably get a bump in traffic while the webmasters who have procrastinated will suffer until they get their act together.

Google’s New Mobile Search Engine

The next bit of news is that Google is also going to launch a “Mobile Search Engine”.  I don’t think we have heard whether you would have to select it when on your mobile device and I kind of doubt it.  I also have not heard a date, but if anyone thinks this will be the last mobile update, you are sadly mistaken. Just about everyone in the know thinks that this is the first step and they will follow with other updates as Google sees how users behave on certain web designs.

We are busy finishing up all of our larger clients with dozens to hundreds of websites to make sure all are compliant.  Our folks at 1st-page;  our SEO company are buried right now and working long shifts in order to get every site finished by by the 21st of next month. Stay tuned for the next post.  I will be describing reputation marketing and sharing several of our articles on the reputation marketing blog.

Lastly, I have found this amazing website with incredible free graphics that anyone can use as they wish.  So, I think I’m going to be using their graphics from time to time even though they may not be relevant to the subject matter that I’m writing about.  That’s why you see the palm trees right in the middle of the article.  Why not have a little distraction while talking about Google’s new dictums? Enjoy!

Well the last three years have been eventful, but in a good way.  We have hired more veterans and seen several move on to new careers and we are tickled to report that all have gone on to better places and grown immensely.  The soldier that started all this; Charles Weaver is now a Monroe County Deputy Veterans Service Officer!  I spoke to him a couple months ago and he said that it’s the greatest job he has ever had.  “He gets to help veterans get all their benefits every day”.  We’re so proud to know him and call Charles and his wife; Dawn our friends.

We have expanded our business reach and are now doing a lot of business growth consulting and helping businesses all over the country.  The advanced methods in marketing have afforded us the ability to target the exact type of person who is most apt to be looking for our clients’ services and at the time that they are searching.   I guess it’s time to build out the site and officially start growing the consulting arm.  It’s a service that comes with all the benefits of 45 years being self employed and I can do it from anywhere in the world as Sue and I start to do a little more traveling in the winter as Chicago gets a little tougher on us.  We are now looking for a new office in Florida for January through the first of April.  We are also actively searching for a couple young people who can take over a lot of the work in the next several years. We may have found one this past week!

Approachment is a service we’ve been providing for more than 10 years now.  It’s where we monitor clients’ websites 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and chat with their web visitors on their terms and when they want collecting as much information as they want to share.  We generate quality leads for clients and this simple software (that we invented back 18 years ago) provides a place for people who are just too scared to pick up the phone and call an attorney or doctor sometimes.  Some of the best cases are gotten through this type of service.  We facilitate your prospective client to speak to you in a non-threatening way and the other advantage is that we are there at all hours so that a prospect can always find someone to chat with when they find the need.  I’ve really never marketed this service and have gotten all of our clients through referral, but we will grow this company as we move on to a new stage in our careers.

I will expand on our newest companies and their services as the days go by and I begin writing again.  It’s something that I miss sharing with you folks.  Thanks for the time and don’t hesitate to write or comment as this grows.

Sue and I spent Monday, May 7th aboard the Intrepid in New York City.  It was a life changing event in that we learned so many things that we could never imagine about the problems veterans face upon returning from war.

The guest speakers were like a who’s who of New York’s elite.  Tom Brokaw chaired the first panel of the day and the Mayor kicked it off.  Justin Balding helped us get to New York and Robin Hood could not have been more gracious with our travel arrangements and our entire day of meetings.

If you’d like to read more about the Summit, please head over to their website:  http://www.robinhood.org/rhvets#section-1

The day was surreal for Sue and me as people we had never met came and thanked us for what we were doing.  The best part of the day though was a man whose name I never got who came in from Atlanta to thank us and told us that he owned a company and because of the Dateline piece, he was now actively seeking to hire veterans.  I told Justin about it and wrote him about how noble his profession can be.  He started all this.  Producers pitch the idea and if it gets approved, it takes on a life if its own.

We just returned from 7 days in the Keys with family interrupted by 15 hours in Washington D.C. The trip up from Key West to the Joining Forces Anniversary Celebration was eventful but it all worked out in the end. Sue and I arrived at the White House as instructed at 9:30AM and then went through 4 security checkpoints in order to get to the White House. The scene on the front lawn was magnificent. It’s hard to describe and even if you’ve done the “tour”, this was different. Dignitaries abounded. You knew they were important because they had their names on the chairs.

The entire Joint Chiefs of Staff were there sitting right in front of us and I was most impressed by General Odierno. He had all the time in the world for the veterans who wanted pictures with him or just to shake his hand. Someone was apologizing to him, but he couldn’t have been nicer when he said: “No, I am happy to do it“. He genuinely cared for these soldiers. There was no mistaking that fact and as a civilian it was heartwarming to see.

The ceremony lasted about an hour. Tom Brokaw came out with General Dempsey, the first lady, Jill Biden and a young lady who was a second year Airman at the Air Force Academy. The words were eloquent and the cold seemed to not matter much as the first lady spoke about all the good works that a lot of private citizens were doing and that there had been more than 20 million hours pledged so far to help these returning warriors.

There were times that were pretty emotional as we saw a lot of titanium limbs and seeing eye dogs, but these soldiers stood tall never minding the inconvenience. They were soldiers and proud to be who they were and we were honored to be in their presence. It‘s hard to know what they went through, but I‘m certain that there will be a lifetime of challenges as they live with the damages that come from our wars. Sue and I have decided that we are going to spend the rest of our useful years left trying to help these kids find meaningful jobs as best we can.

We will build Hire One Veteran to facilitate matching veterans to jobs. We have built  our corporate site here: www.hireoneveteran.org  We’ll need all the help we can get, but after meeting more of these fine young men and women, it’s the least we can do for those who have given us so much. Please holler if you want to help.

It’s 6AM in Washington, DC and we’re both awake.  We got in after 1AM this morning to find that they didn’t have the room we reserved.  Thank goodness they had a “sister property” 5 minutes away, but when we got there we walked in to 1965.  This looks like a set from an Annette Funicello – Frankie Avalon movie.  I think I’m in a time warp. The dining room table is leather!  Need I say more?

Anyway, we’re here and getting ready to have some breakfast and head over to the White House. (It’s really surreal to even write that: “Head over to the White House?”)  Our partner; Peter said that yesterday and he’s right.

It should be fun.  I’ll write about it from Atlanta tonight.

I spoke to a lovely dedicated lady yesterday whose husband has a severe brain injury and she has been working for this organization for a couple years now: https://www.wishuponaherofoundation.org/  These folks have a great concept and one that we can all learn from.  Take a look, as they raise money in their community for their community and all the while hiring a veteran to do the fund raising that supports him or her.    Thanks Christina!

We’re heading out of town today and will be talking to some veterans in South Florida this week while also trying to do a little fishing with our grandson and shopping with our granddaughter.  Lord help me be able to afford that adventure as we will be bringing along a couple professionals; my wife and daughter!