Transcript
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: I'm joined here by Corey Vandenberg.
Speaker: He's the co-founder of Clixi, which is an online marketing and reputation management agency based out of Salt Lake City.
Speaker: He's an exit member and by his own count, hasn't earned W-2 income since 1998.
Speaker: So we wanted to talk to him about how he got started in his line of work and the prospects for others who might be interested, as well as how he might advise someone who's been doxxed or otherwise dragged through the mud online.
Speaker: So welcome to the show, Corey.
Speaker: Thanks so much.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
Speaker: I got started at digital marketing agency about 10 years ago in college.
Speaker: And at the time it was pretty wild west.
Speaker: Anybody could get into it.
Speaker: Companies would hire people on the basis of just a decent looking website because they had really no idea how to evaluate the service internally.
Speaker: So how has that market matured if it has matured?
Speaker: It's a very low barrier of entry.
Speaker: In fact, I remember how I got into this industry is kind of a weird,
Speaker: left-hand turn of events in my own life i i was um i was buying foreclosures and i was at the very forefront of that industry that that eventually turned uh into kind of a
Speaker: really controversial arena, it was doing foreclosure rescue, right?
Speaker: So in 1997, actually it was 1996, what we were doing at that time was buying defaulted paper.
Speaker: So we would go out and find second mortgages and just anything that was underwater
Speaker: And we would go to the original note holder and offer them a settlement and we would take over that paper and then we would work out arrangements directly with the homeowner.
Speaker: And a lot of times we had some really, really cool outcomes that helped people
Speaker: lower their overall debt exposure, stay in their home, get restructured in their, just everything that was going sideways for them and then eventually refinance and they were much better off.
Speaker: And of course that turned into a whole industry just fraught with scams and problems.
Speaker: But leading into the early 2000s,
Speaker: started to become a very crowded marketplace.
Speaker: And of course, this is also the advent of Google and social media.
Speaker: And at that time, we thought it was novel to start playing around with those avenues for finding leads and deals for ourselves.
Speaker: And so we just started kind of tinkering
Speaker: And I will say just as a side note that, you know, I was talking with TAC, Tactical Minivan, the other day about crypto.
Speaker: And just as a side note, the way I got into SEO is the same advice he gave me about crypto, which is that the best education is getting in there, getting your hands dirty and just kind of doing some of this stuff and messing around with it.
Speaker: And that's precisely how we
Speaker: initially got started.
Speaker: And I had a friend of mine who had a law firm.
Speaker: And because I was so involved with the foreclosure industry, I had a really intimate knowledge of the bankruptcy industry and how bankruptcy works and all the ins and outs of bankruptcy law, federal and state and so on and so forth.
Speaker: And so she contacted me knowing what I had been doing with Google and basically said,
Speaker: I'm moving from San Diego back to Utah.
Speaker: I have nothing.
Speaker: I'm starting over from scratch.
Speaker: Is there any way you can help me with this Google stuff?
Speaker: Help me build my business."
Speaker: And one situation like that became two, became four, became 10 over time.
Speaker: And it just sort of snowballed into this thing organically.
Speaker: And in 2008, when the real estate market crashed,
Speaker: you know i my my business partner and i were over leveraged uh we got just absolutely decimated and we were looking at this thing and saying like okay we got to pivot somehow where could we pivot potentially and we saw this opportunity where we were like gosh this google stuff that we've been doing for ourselves
Speaker: we could potentially actually do that for others on a service basis.
Speaker: And this bankruptcy lawyer that I mentioned, we had taken her from nothing to filing 20 chapter 13s a month, which if you're not familiar with sort of the mechanics and the economics of a law firm, that's a healthy, healthy practice for one attorney.
Speaker: Right, because they not only do they get paid on the front end, but they get a residual off of that case as the plaintiff makes payments every month.
Speaker: So, you know, within six months, she had both a healthy incoming practice as well as a nice pipeline of income.
Speaker: And we saw that as an opportunity to scale.
Speaker: And so we started doing that and became known for growing law firms.
Speaker: And so that's the first piece of advice I would give somebody.
Speaker: Sorry, it's actually the second because I said, get in and tinker, right?
Speaker: So that would be my first advice.
Speaker: But my second is to specialize in a particular area of knowledge or emphasis, something either that you know a lot about or that you have a proximity to, right?
Speaker: Because the reality is that online marketing and SEO is pretty agnostic
Speaker: to the application.
Speaker: It doesn't matter if I'm doing this for a lawyer or a plumber or an e-commerce website.
Speaker: Now there are small differences and distinctions that somebody who knows this stuff could argue with me and say, well, what about this aspect or that aspect?
Speaker: But by and large, they're broadly applicable principles.
Speaker: And so the advantage of knowing something about a niche
Speaker: is more in your ability to attract new clientele because their presumption is going to be, this guy's the expert about my thing.
Speaker: So therefore, I'm going to go with him over some generalist.
Speaker: So it's more of a branding thing rather than it being sort of like you actually know something in particular.
Speaker: Yeah, because I was going to ask, you explained how you got in, but I was wondering why you stayed in that lane.
Speaker: And that's why, because we got a reputation.
Speaker: Yeah, it's branding.
Speaker: And so, you know, there's been a lot of growth in our company just simply by being known as, you know, I'm using air quotes, but like lawyer guys, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I'm not going to pretend that there aren't some benefits to using a specialist, right?
Speaker: Because I do speak their language.
Speaker: I know the ins and outs of growing a law practice.
Speaker: So I can speak to a lot of the problems that they experience.
Speaker: But again, I think by and large, that just furthers my point that
Speaker: that they love to know that you know their business as opposed to somebody who they're going to have to teach nuance to, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I imagine that in terms of your ad buy, having some grip on the psychology of why somebody looks for that particular product has got to help.
Speaker: And I wanted to ask you also, when I started in that business,
Speaker: it was still kind of adversarial with the search engine.
Speaker: It was, it was very much like trying to do things outside of their, their ecosystem to game the results.
Speaker: And, and in the course of my time there, it evolved to where like, basically people were saying the algorithms are too good.
Speaker: We need to just focus on like working within their system, doing the ad by learning to use kind of their proprietary
Speaker: like marketing and analytics tools.
Speaker: And, and I wonder, is that your experience or is there still a lot that you can do kind of external to like AdWords and.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I'll, so I'll approach this from a couple of different angles.
Speaker: First, I'll tell you what I tell clients.
Speaker: Um, and I, I like to answer the question about, um,
Speaker: What you brought up is oftentimes referred to as like white hat tactics versus black hat tactics.
Speaker: And then there's gray areas in between, right?
Speaker: What I often tell clients is that, especially in a really competitive market like personal injury, we need every advantage we can gain.
Speaker: And so I share with them my personal ethics in how I approach those types of tactics.
Speaker: And what I tell them is that I'm much like a doctor in the sense that my ethic is to first do no harm to the client.
Speaker: I don't care whatsoever about Google so long as I can maintain my own.
Speaker: that premise.
Speaker: So will I explore black hat and gray hat tactics?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Any SEO worth his weight should.
Speaker: But I typically do it in a very controlled environment.
Speaker: so that I can explore, see why it's working, find out if there's some mechanism that is less of an exploit that could potentially be done in a white hat or a gray hat manner, and then apply it in the real world once I know that I can maintain my ethic.
Speaker: Yeah, so I mean, and this type of stuff that I was doing was very much like...
Speaker: I was writing a lot of blog posts with embedded links, just link building.
Speaker: And that started to become...
Speaker: Meaning like guest posts?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So is that the kind of thing that you're referring to as black hat or is that just sort of standard procedure?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: That's on the very mild end of what somebody might consider black hat.
Speaker: I've got some great stories.
Speaker: You know, people...
Speaker: Obviously, there's a lot of discussion around Black Hat.
Speaker: It's controversial.
Speaker: But I remember one of my really close friends was telling me about a conference that he attended.
Speaker: This was like 2006 or 2007.
Speaker: It was right around the same time that Google released the Google Maps product.
Speaker: And it used to be called Google Places back then.
Speaker: And he was in this conference and the guys from Google at that time were there and they were telling these stories about how they actually had like a war room
Speaker: with monitors set up, big televisions set up so that they could monitor live real-time changes that were occurring on certain websites that they had sort of identified as having a proclivity towards black hat tactics.
Speaker: And they were like, in real time, just, they talked about loving the ingenuity of these guys and they would sit and watch them and use them as like a,
Speaker: almost like a QC that's like they would get ideas and be like, oh my gosh, that's smart.
Speaker: And so they put up one example and they talked about how this guy, they're like, this guy is super clever.
Speaker: It was one of the first instances of them referring to white text on a white background.
Speaker: And it was my buddy who's sitting there in the audience and they have his site up there as an example.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: We've experimented with everything from that to mobile phones hooked up to servers that basically emulate human behavior.
Speaker: right so like we've we've tried all kinds of things just to see what they do and to what extent they can be utilized to get a better result um so yeah i i think that what i would i would suggest most people probably just don't ever go near that stuff because that takes
Speaker: not only years of experience, but also just sort of like being in the right time in the right place and having the right relationships to otherwise, I think that you're much better off focusing.
Speaker: If I was going to get into marketing today, the first thing I would encourage someone to do is focus on what I call evergreen marketing skills, right?
Speaker: So things like understanding persuasion, copywriting,
Speaker: Those are never going to go out of style, no matter what the algorithms do, right?
Speaker: Those are always going to be of use and of value.
Speaker: So from a persuasion perspective, I know there's a lot of technical books that people could read about how to use AdWords, how to do SEO, but for these evergreen like principles and the art of persuasion and marketing, are there like, is there like a favorite book list that you have that you recommend to people?
Speaker: Yeah, one of my all-time favorites, and this is a big classic that a lot of people will reference, is called Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz.
Speaker: And in it, he talks about a principle called the stages of awareness.
Speaker: And it's one of my favorite things because it's so broadly applicable.
Speaker: When you understand the stages somebody goes through from being completely unaware of a particular problem to being problem aware,
Speaker: And then solution aware.
Speaker: And then ultimately they get to the greatest stage where, you know, you might say like, oh, I'm, I need a Tesla or I need blue blockers or, you know, you get to, you can move them through that stage using the principles that he teaches in that book.
Speaker: there's another one that I mistakenly referred to as being Eugene Schwartz, but it's actually called Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins.
Speaker: Both of these gentlemen are the early pioneers of advertising.
Speaker: If you ever watched the show Mad Men, these guys are the mad men.
Speaker: They're the real guys who wrote advertising.
Speaker: In the days when it was far more difficult because there was no checking out online, it was like,
Speaker: mail in like they had to convince somebody to put money in the mail and then wait days or weeks before they got the thing they were ordering so you can imagine the level of ability they had had to be just absolutely top tier compared to um you know amazon with its one click checkout right which makes impulse buying much easier right
Speaker: So those are two that are great.
Speaker: On the concept of persuasion, I really like a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini.
Speaker: He's a professor out of Arizona, and he takes and kind of highlights some different aspects of why humans are influenced.
Speaker: And he talks about several different things, such as...
Speaker: urgency, scarcity.
Speaker: He talks about liking, right?
Speaker: So making yourself likable and having them like you.
Speaker: He talks about having a reason why.
Speaker: It was in each of the different chapters, he cites studies that were done so that there's actual evidence and data behind some of the claims that he's making.
Speaker: You know, he shows an example of students in a cafeteria where there was a line for a
Speaker: a copy machine and they tested out going up and asking if you could step in line because and giving no reason at all and when you had a reason and even if it was a stupid reason like because I'm late for my appointment there was a significantly higher amount of people who were willing to let you cut in line
Speaker: rather than the people who didn't have a reason, right?
Speaker: So that's just one example.
Speaker: Urgency, scarcity, and there's several others.
Speaker: I can't, off the top of my head, I don't recall them, but Influence by Robert Cialdini is a great book on the topic.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: And then if you're in sales, if you're looking at sales and marketing yourself, I think that Chet Holmes' book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, is another one that,
Speaker: that I think is a, is an absolute classic and a must read.
Speaker: Um, and then, sorry, I'm, I've got like a whole wall of these books, so I could probably go on for, I could probably go on for too long about it, but I, I'm going to add in, um, two more that I think are just criminally underrated.
Speaker: One is you can't teach it.
Speaker: You can't teach a kid to ride a bike, uh, at a seminar.
Speaker: And that sounds like a really weird title, but it is one of the best books on sales and marketing I've ever read.
Speaker: And the other is called Straight Line Persuasion.
Speaker: I think that both of those just haven't really caught on in the mainstream.
Speaker: They don't have the notoriety of a seven habits, but man, those are great.
Speaker: Well, I've just gone from being a corporate drone where I was miles away from any kind of customer to being in direct contact with people who I would like to participate in my group.
Speaker: So I'm going to go take that reading list home for myself.
Speaker: So thanks very much.
Speaker: Yeah, you're welcome.
Speaker: So if you were trying to get in the game today,
Speaker: without sort of the advantages of maybe the first mover stuff going on in the early days of online marketing?
Speaker: Like if you had to jump in now, what would be like step one?
Speaker: So I think one of the big areas, this is one of those hard learned lessons, is that early on, we tried to be everything to everybody and take on just
Speaker: massive, massive projects that were very, very complex.
Speaker: And I think, you know, to an extent, we can do complex stuff because we did complex stuff.
Speaker: So we've learned how to systematize around some of those things.
Speaker: But if I had to start over today, I would prefer to not have to walk through that minefield and figure all that stuff out.
Speaker: And instead, I would look to build
Speaker: around what I call scalable services.
Speaker: So an example of a scalable service might be something like birthday
Speaker: birthday text message lists for restaurants where you have a very repeatable deliverable that you are great at delivering and it might be smaller ticket.
Speaker: You know, that's the downside, I suppose.
Speaker: Somebody might say, well, I can only charge $1.99 a month for that.
Speaker: And that's true that they are smaller ticket items.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: you can deliver many more of them with much less overhead.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So then once you've got your process figured out, you can focus far more on just marketing yourself, building a pipeline and getting more and more volume in to scale.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Once you've got that stream, it's, it's effectively fire and forget.
Speaker: Like it's just, uh, you just sort of cash the checks at that point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's been a lot of change in the, we'll call it the digital agency space.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And where I think the trend right now is headed is around what some people are kind of referring to as SaaS based agencies or SaaS meaning software as a surface.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And what these, and so I would say probably at the, at the forefront of that is a platform called high level.
Speaker: And I don't have my affiliate link or anything like that.
Speaker: Although they do have a really robust affiliate program.
Speaker: So that's another way that somebody could do really well.
Speaker: They give you half of the revenue from the signup for life.
Speaker: So it's a pretty killer deal.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But High Level, I think their web address is gohighlevel.com.
Speaker: And what it is, is it's a marketing automation platform.
Speaker: And it's not quite as sophisticated as something like Keep, formerly known as Infusionsoft.
Speaker: But I think that it's close.
Speaker: And I think that it's good enough that it can be utilized by a lot of businesses from very small to medium sized.
Speaker: Maybe it's not the best fit for enterprise, but I think somebody who just starting out, you're most likely going to be selling to small and medium-sized enterprises anyways.
Speaker: And what I would do is I would sell packaged, scalable services based on high level, if it were me, starting over.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So you sort of work within that platform to deliver the services?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yep, that's right.
Speaker: And you have unlimited sub-accounts that you can set up.
Speaker: So once you've signed up for yours, you could have an unlimited number of clients with their own accounts signed up underneath you.
Speaker: And it doesn't necessarily cost you any more.
Speaker: So the only thing that they would have to pay for is usage.
Speaker: So every time you set up an account, you have to tie into other platforms,
Speaker: to be able to send out emails and texts.
Speaker: So you're signing up for a service called Twilio and you're signing up for something like say Mailgun to be able to whitelist and send out emails, but they pay for their own usage and you don't have any additional overhead for putting them on the high level platform.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: And so then what I would, if it were me building one of those types of agencies around something like high level,
Speaker: What I would do is I would find a particular niche that I had a lot of knowledge about.
Speaker: So for me, let's say bankruptcy law, right?
Speaker: Because I really understand that world.
Speaker: And what I would do is I would create a bunch of templated emails, text messages, ringless voicemail, and I would set up automated sequences based on the
Speaker: a life cycle of client, right?
Speaker: So I would have like an onboarding campaign and I would have a campaign for somebody who's already an existing client.
Speaker: And I would have one for somebody whose bankruptcy is, and I would think about the different stages that somebody goes through being a bankruptcy client.
Speaker: And I would design automated communications for those different stages.
Speaker: And then I would sell that to bankruptcy lawyers as a sort of a done for you or a done with you type of a product.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, so I was thinking about how the market has matured and I was definitely framing that as a negative because it might be harder to break in, but it almost sounds like they've given you some, they've given a novice digital marketer
Speaker: some training wheels or like a powered exoskeleton so they can deliver a lot more value than maybe someone just starting from nothing could have delivered 10 years ago.
Speaker: That's pretty cool.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: And I think too, it would help to make the distinction between activities and results, right?
Speaker: So lower tiered products, things that are more scalable and repeatable to a certain degree, what you're doing is you're fulfilling activity.
Speaker: So there are certain things that you can just sort of set an expectation that these are just things that need to occur.
Speaker: You need to have a Facebook page so that people can see that you're reachable, that you're a real company, that you have legitimate...
Speaker: credentials and so on and so forth.
Speaker: But that doesn't put on your shoulders, especially at some low tier product price like 200 bucks a month, that doesn't put on your shoulders the responsibility to grow the business.
Speaker: you're just simply fulfilling a need.
Speaker: Whereas some of the types of clients that we take on, like for example, Polkadot, the cryptocurrency, which is actually, that's not the name of the company, it's actually Parity Technologies.
Speaker: um, you know, they expect certain specific results and that's why they pay bigger tier prices, right?
Speaker: They expect to see actual growth because of what we're doing.
Speaker: And I think starting out, the last thing you want to try to do is be the guy who can say, yeah, we're going to deliver a certain amount of growth to your business.
Speaker: That's a, yeah, that's a tall order.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That,
Speaker: I hadn't thought of that.
Speaker: There's, there's definitely different ways to quantify your offering.
Speaker: And it's much easier to say, I will do these specific things agnostic of how it cashes out for the client.
Speaker: Um, just because I know you need them versus yeah.
Speaker: Uh, this, this almost, um, predictive, like I, you know,
Speaker: I'm gonna make it rain for you kind of approach.
Speaker: Which you can do if you're a pro, but it's harder.
Speaker: Yeah, like if you go sign up for CallRail, right, which is a call tracking company, CallRail says, I'm gonna give you call tracking phone numbers so that you can track your ROI, but they don't say, I'm gonna give you ROI.
Speaker: They just say, we'll help you uncover it if it's there, right?
Speaker: Or see to what extent it's not there.
Speaker: Um, because they're just simply fulfilling a specific need that you have.
Speaker: And I think that a beginning, uh, agency or a marketer or somebody who's looking to fulfill those things should take a page out of that book and understand that, that you're probably not at a, at a point and may not be for a year or two to where you could, um, in good faith, tell somebody that you can deliver financial growth.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I, uh,
Speaker: I think that's going to be interesting.
Speaker: We have a handful of guys who are in this space and I think they're going to find that approach really, really useful and interesting.
Speaker: So as far as beyond gohighlevel.com, are there any other major overheads in terms of software subscriptions that make this hard to scale?
Speaker: Or is it something where you can just sort of learn some relevant skills to provide the services and then pick up a client and get going?
Speaker: You know, there's a lot of tools out there and I suppose it's all going to be circumstantial based on how much you need them or to what extent there's free or low cost options.
Speaker: You know, we have a pretty significant overhead with software, but that comes with having a lot of clientele and the need for more enterprise type solutions.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: You know, we're using tools like, and people who are in the industry are going to be familiar with some of these, but like there's one called SEMrush, SEMrush is how other people refer to it.
Speaker: But we utilize that for doing a lot of SEO tracking and research.
Speaker: We use another one called Ahrefs, which is sort of a reference to like backlinks and nomenclature involved in building backlinks and such.
Speaker: But I guess I don't know quite how to answer the question of what tools you would need because it would depend a little bit on the direction you chose.
Speaker: So, you know, if somebody wanted to get into, say, for example, doing more like social media stuff, there's probably a lot lower overhead needed there because you can do a lot of that just merely by helping people create content.
Speaker: So you might need...
Speaker: You might need something like Canva, which I think Canva has like a free, a free, uh, initial subscription.
Speaker: So yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, I think most of marketing is going to come down to, um, understanding a lot of that persuasion and the ability to communicate.
Speaker: And ultimately that's what it is.
Speaker: It's a form of communication.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: The strategy side of things, I think, is one of those areas that's going to take a lot longer to acquire the skills.
Speaker: But the ability to just fulfill on certain areas, I suppose, yeah, there are ways you could get into it with low overhead.
Speaker: Account creation, account publishing content.
Speaker: Well, I wanted to ask you, I think maybe people who are my age and younger
Speaker: may think of like account creation as something that everybody knows how to do.
Speaker: And so it may not occur to them that that's a service that they could provide.
Speaker: Is that your experience where people are willing to pay someone to just set up their different social media accounts?
Speaker: Dude, if you were to go, so here's a way you could get started with relatively low overhead.
Speaker: And this answers your question too, is you can go to sites like fiverr.com
Speaker: and upwork.com and just get a taste of what's out there.
Speaker: Look at what others are offering.
Speaker: There's hundreds of thousands of those types of gigs, right?
Speaker: Where that's what people are offering.
Speaker: And the crazy thing is even outside of marketing, I had my brother-in-law who's in HR and he was asking me, he was like, holy cow, have you heard of this site called Upwork?
Speaker: And I'm like, yes, I've been hiring people off Upwork for a decade now, back when it was called Odesk.
Speaker: So yeah, I'm very familiar with it.
Speaker: And he was like, dude, I've been getting gigs where people just want me to do HR stuff.
Speaker: And it's not even marketing things.
Speaker: There's all kinds of one-off type of opportunities that you can sort of dabble until you get your footing and figure out a direction.
Speaker: But yeah, account creation is definitely a thing people hire for because it's tedious and monotonous and frustrating.
Speaker: So you could easily design like a Google form that asks the questions that you need in order to be able to create a profile or some kind of an account for somebody.
Speaker: And yeah, I mean, I will say that that might be...
Speaker: a tough one to do profitably just because I know there's a lot of that type of gig work that's being done by overseas workers.
Speaker: And so it's done at a very low, a little low cost, but it's, it does exist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I I'd like to, I'd like to move into the reputation management space.
Speaker: Um, it sounds like,
Speaker: Well, a lot of the job, it sounds like, is technical from an analytics perspective and SEO.
Speaker: There's a lot of nuts and bolts there.
Speaker: But with reputation management for celebrities, you really can't shout down bad news.
Speaker: So it's got to be much more about, I imagine, about message crafting and more like art than science.
Speaker: So tell me about how you approach that.
Speaker: Yeah, it's definitely a mixture of art and science.
Speaker: What we've found is in the celebrity and executive space, dealing with famous executives and really well-known business people, you're right.
Speaker: It's not like lesser known individuals like us where we can sort of publish our way out of the problem.
Speaker: If we simply know
Speaker: the right aspects of technical SEO and we crank out enough content most of the time with just a little bit of knowledge and know how you can kind of just overcome that stuff with volume.
Speaker: And that's a lot harder to do when the problem that you're trying to overcome is on the front page of the New York Times or the New York Post or the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker: So at that point, it does become
Speaker: a bit of there's almost like a confluence of the world of pr and seo where you have to you have to be able to get the narrative you want pushed out there and then do all that other stuff and sometimes you have to get really creative um you know we've done things like um we've created
Speaker: blogs that look like they're some fan, some really passionate fan and create just written some content that makes it look like they're just really, really obsessed with this person.
Speaker: And because a lot of times what comes with that territory is they want the problem gone, but they don't want it to look like they want the problem gone.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So you have to be sometimes very discreet in how you're handling those types of things.
Speaker: So, you know, a typical rep management campaign is going to start out looking like doing sort of an assessment of the landscape.
Speaker: So you want to pull down a spreadsheet of what are my antagonistic URLs?
Speaker: What am I up against?
Speaker: So you would put those into a spreadsheet so that you can look at them.
Speaker: And some of the things, these are a little bit technical stuff from an SEO standpoint, but you're gonna wanna look at like the strength of the domains that you're up against.
Speaker: You wanna know what does the backlink profile look like?
Speaker: So you wanna know how many other sites are out there linking to this thing and how authoritative are they?
Speaker: Then you put together a plan to say, okay,
Speaker: what can I do to make both short, medium, and long-term gains?
Speaker: So short-term gains for anybody, this is famous or otherwise, short-term gains are always going to, or typically are going to come from profiles that, because those are gonna carry the most relevance to you as an individual, right?
Speaker: So something like a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn profile,
Speaker: Those are very, very high authority domains that are going to carry extremely high relevance to you and your name.
Speaker: And so the way this typically works is almost like a triage.
Speaker: Nobody knows what the end result's going to look like, but we're going to start with the lowest hanging fruit first, see how the landscape shakes out, move to the next tier of complexity until we've exhausted all of the easy opportunities.
Speaker: If they're not the ones showing up on the first page, then we're going to move to some of the more complex stuff like inventing fan blogs and crazy stuff like that.
Speaker: So
Speaker: know uh and then of course if it's a if it's somebody who's genuinely famous they're going to have pr people they're going to have contacts with um publishers and so then what you start doing is you start collaborating with their pr company and sculpting a narrative figuring out is this something we need to spin or is this something we need to ignore and how do we want to how do we want to approach that and then
Speaker: Once you've got kind of all those pieces working in harmony, you've optimized all of your available profiles and sites that you have access to.
Speaker: You've got publishing going on.
Speaker: Then it really comes down to the age-old SEO stuff where you're obtaining high-authority backlinks and to the extent that you can control it, trying to get...
Speaker: names utilized in the right way.
Speaker: So you want names in the URL, names in the titles of the page.
Speaker: We refer to them as H1s, H2s, which is just a type of formatting on a page.
Speaker: The headings.
Speaker: The headings, yes, right.
Speaker: So if you can get the name that you're trying to optimize for in the URL and in the headings, you're going to h ave a better chance.
Speaker: And then as you're acquiring backlinks, the same thing's going to apply there.
Speaker: anchor text and name relevance from the page that you're sending the link from.
Speaker: You know, and over time it just becomes sort of a war of attrition.
Speaker: You're doing all these things while at the same time hoping that the intensity dies down around this topic, hoping that it becomes less relevant over time for you and your name.
Speaker: hoping that the page in question loses backlinks.
Speaker: That's another thing that we can do is when it's somebody who can afford having a team like us behind them, we'll do work behind the scenes to try to get links taken down to the pages in question.
Speaker: So we'll try to play offense and defense at the same time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was going to ask you if there were tools to actually expunge or remove unfavorable content or if it was just about flooding the zone.
Speaker: There are, and they don't always work because sometimes Google isn't just going to take something down just because.
Speaker: So sometimes you have to find specific cause and argue your case to them.
Speaker: Maybe it's they've broken some law.
Speaker: In that case, yes.
Speaker: If they've broken some law, then you can definitely appeal to Google to try to get something removed.
Speaker: In the EU, there are what's called right to be forgotten laws.
Speaker: And so there are certain things that fall under like privacy statutes that allow you to potentially get something removed if it's in the EU.
Speaker: That doesn't work here in the US, of course.
Speaker: So I guess to be more specific and applicable to somebody who isn't a celebrity with just endless resources to throw at a problem like this, if you've been doxxed or somehow the canceled crowd's coming after you, I would say that you want to do two things after you've assessed the landscape like I described.
Speaker: And that is you want to try to...
Speaker: optimize as many of the low-hanging fruit that I described like your Facebook your Twitter so on and so forth to get those things to rank for your name and then I would I would consider and it's going to be somewhat circumstantial so this won't apply to everybody but like if it were me what I would probably do is I would start looking at ways in which I could potentially establish myself as an authority in something
Speaker: ideally something that I'm actually an authority in.
Speaker: But the reason that I would want to be doing that is because it gives me a reason to talk on those different platforms.
Speaker: And it gives me the ability to influence a particular aspect of Google that isn't always available.
Speaker: It's not that it's not available, but it's not always active for those of us who aren't celebrities and really well-known individuals.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: What I'm talking about is what are called search result features or search engine features.
Speaker: So things like the carousel that has images or the carousel that has social media posts or videos.
Speaker: And then there's another one that oftentimes, if you look up a celebrity's name, you'll oftentimes see a little box to the right-hand side
Speaker: of the search results and that's referred to as the knowledge graph, Google knowledge graph.
Speaker: And that's sort of like a secondary layer of information that Google is building about you or about whatever thing that you happen to be searching.
Speaker: And so building out your knowledge graph and getting that little box to trigger on the right hand side
Speaker: starts to build an insulation around your image and your reputation that allows you to have a bit more control and ability.
Speaker: Whereas when you lack a knowledge graph, you're a bit more susceptible because what it means in SEO parlance is that Google doesn't recognize you as a specific entity inside of its database.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it knows it knows who Elon Musk is.
Speaker: It knows who.
Speaker: And I don't mean to refer to it like with.
Speaker: As a person, but the AI
Speaker: understands this entity called Elon Musk.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's not just a collection of keywords.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: There's very specific context to it.
Speaker: And so it'll link up all those things.
Speaker: It'll link to his Twitter account and to Tesla as a company.
Speaker: And all of those things will be referenced in that little box on the right hand side of the search engine.
Speaker: you can eventually get one of those as well, but it requires sort of acting like a unique entity.
Speaker: So, you know, maybe you publish an ebook, put it on Kindle, you know, maybe building out a YouTube channel and just starting to build out an expertise in a particular area will allow you to optimize for Google's knowledge graph,
Speaker: and eventually gain some more control over your search results for your own name.
Speaker: So the hardest case that I'm aware of personally was a friend of mine who was a state prosecutor with a pretty distinctive name, first and last.
Speaker: And you can go to like page 10 of Google, and it's still news articles about his doxing.
Speaker: Is it possible to clean something like that up?
Speaker: Or are you just better off kind of looking for a boss who's cool with your history?
Speaker: That's a good question.
Speaker: I hate to say it depends because that's always the standard answer that a lot of people say, but you know, it kind of comes back to that assessment that I talked about earlier.
Speaker: Like it's hard to know how,
Speaker: how much you could remedy a situation without understanding the various sites that are ranking for their name.
Speaker: So you'd have to almost approach it on a case-by-case basis.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's virtually all news sites.
Speaker: It's like the Salt Lake Tribune, the Guardian, the Montana, whatever.
Speaker: So it's like that tier of content.
Speaker: Like, is it possible to...
Speaker: bump those out of the way or are those pretty hard to crack?
Speaker: Anything's possible.
Speaker: It's, it's, it's the, the constraints are time and resource, right?
Speaker: So you can always, there's nothing, there's nothing that's immovable.
Speaker: Um, you know, one of the most creative situations that I saw, um, in, in one of these circumstances was, was somebody who was not super famous and they had an issue.
Speaker: you know what they did is they started to go out and re I'm going to say brand, but brands, maybe not quite the right word, but they used, they went out and changed everything to use a slightly different formulation of their name.
Speaker: So they changed it to like, to have junior and, you know, some other prefixes and suffixes and things like that.
Speaker: And they, they made sure to use that almost like a,
Speaker: you know, like Thomas S. Monson type of a thing, right?
Speaker: They went from being called Tom Monson.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: And so by mixing that up and sort of using it throughout all your own media and sort of reinforcing it over time, that's what more and more people searched for.
Speaker: So they avoided the problem rather than fixed the problem.
Speaker: And that was, I think, a pretty clever solution.
Speaker: That is cool.
Speaker: So this generation has their whole life archived online.
Speaker: Basically anybody younger than me.
Speaker: I was just young enough that I mostly dodged that bullet.
Speaker: A high school friend reached out to me recently and sent me a link to my old live journal from high school, which I thought was dead and buried.
Speaker: And it was, it was almost as bad as getting doxxed in terms of like my visceral, like physical response to that information.
Speaker: And I, I frantically, I go to, um, I go to their website and I realized that it's, it's attached to an email that no longer exists.
Speaker: And so there's no way for me to get it taken down.
Speaker: I'm like, oh my gosh, it's nothing, nothing horrible, but just sort of like awkward, embarrassing teenager blog.
Speaker: Um, so what do you tell?
Speaker: What would you tell your kids about how to handle their online presence right now?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, with my own kids, we've definitely restricted their access to a lot of social media because I've just seen it be so difficult and problematic for so many people.
Speaker: um you know we've also to the extent we've given them some access you know we've always given them the customary uh precautions of of don't don't speak to or connect with people you don't know don't be don't be giving out a lot of the personal identical identifying information um we we have really really candid conversations with them but
Speaker: With the younger generation, I me an, a lot of, I don't know that there's technical answers as much as, as much as behavioral answers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, I hope, I don't really know what this looks like necessarily, but I do hope that there's advances and changes coming with a lot of the
Speaker: the movement that we have, that we're seeing right now around crypto and privacy and I'm hoping that some of these issues are going to resolve themselves.
Speaker: It seems like that oftentimes happens with a lot of technology where the thing that we're all having high, high anxiety over sort of innovates its way out.
Speaker: And I'm hoping that occurs, but I don't know.
Speaker: I don't have a, I don't have a great answer for it.
Speaker: It's so challenging because like a lot of it is just like, you know, you can tell your kids to be smart, but like kids just aren't smart and you know, like they're like, they're just, they're not going to make like the best decisions at that age with this, with this like really permanent.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: Technology that's, that's, that's a huge challenge.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, the thing I've always said is that you can't childproof the world.
Speaker: And so the best thing you can do is worldproof your child.
Speaker: Like you've got to be having frank conversations.
Speaker: And in order to do that, you've got to be maintaining a relationship that allows for those frank conversations to be had in the right spirit and to be received well.
Speaker: There's no shortcuts in parenting.
Speaker: It takes real effort.
Speaker: You mentioned about innovation.
Speaker: Do you think also that there's a point where... I talked to Tom Woods.
Speaker: It was on his podcast, as you know.
Speaker: One of the things that we discussed was his generation of being a conservative commentator online
Speaker: I was thinking about Carrie Prejohn, who was kind of thrown into the meat grinder around the same time, early 2000s, where there was a lot more sort of institutional trust in the media.
Speaker: And so like, if you were getting kicked around by those people, a lot of people assume that you kind of deserved it.
Speaker: You deserved it, yeah.
Speaker: And now it's much more like...
Speaker: yeah, they lie all the time about everything.
Speaker: I'm sorry that happened to you.
Speaker: Like that was like 90, 95% of the time.
Speaker: That's been the response when I tell people what happened to me, there's no like, Oh, you must've really done something.
Speaker: Cause it's like, no, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a jungle and it's, it's crazy out there.
Speaker: Do you think that there's a point at which enough, obviously ordinary, decent people get run through this machine that people sort of stop caring?
Speaker: I think that has to be, and that may be the way we innovate our way out of it, is that we just, over time, erode public trust in these institutions.
Speaker: I can't remember where I heard it recently.
Speaker: Maybe it was Jordan Peterson or
Speaker: That guy that's James something he's been going around talking about his book about like CRT in classrooms.
Speaker: But one of them talked about how the best thing you can do with these people is let them talk and let them be heard.
Speaker: Because what ends up happening is that those of us that are sane hear it and go,
Speaker: They're insane.
Speaker: And the more we allow their insane ideas to get exposure, I think the better off we'll all be.
Speaker: Twitter has been incredible in that respect because it has given us all an unfiltered look at the people who deliver the news, the people who invest in quote unquote investigate journalism and the people who run all these institutions that are supposed to be so authoritative and so smart.
Speaker: And like, you know, goofballs like me and guys with anime avatars can just destroy those people on Twitter and make them look absolutely ridiculous because they are ridiculous because they're buffoons.
Speaker: And it's, you know, I think that's creative destruction.
Speaker: It's a healthy process that needs to unfold.
Speaker: Well, and I think those of us who are in a position to do so, I think we need to not be quiet and we need to actually take action on our ideas.
Speaker: You know, I loved, even though I don't necessarily agree with everything he has to say, I loved that Ben Shapiro gave...
Speaker: I can't remember his name, but yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Gave her another opportunity and stepped up and said, you know, we're going to make sure you're not entirely canceled.
Speaker: I think to the extent we're able to, we should all sort of follow that example, right?
Speaker: So if there's an opportunity to hire somebody who has gone through this, we should do it as an employer.
Speaker: um or if there's somebody who has to venture into entrepreneurship we should support them and that's that's i think probably the best way that we can uh that we can help change this tide is putting action and money and intent behind our words
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, that was the genesis of this group, was to get resources together and minds together to make that kind of thing happen.
Speaker: I was just going to suggest that there could be a potential way that we could harness the power of the exit group to help each other or help out those who have been damaged in their online reputation.
Speaker: Yeah, lay it on me.
Speaker: Because one of the missing elements when you're publishing stuff, and this is why I told you that we've experimented with like, I've got a whole wall in our warehouse of mobile phones that are all hooked up to a server and every single one of them is rotating IPs and emulating human behavior.
Speaker: and all with a with a each one of them has a specific purpose right well one of those reasons is because Google pays quite a bit of attention to what we call user signals and so there's a lot I could imagine us doing as a group to help each other out in those situations you know if for example
Speaker: If we have websites, we could potentially say, hey, here's opportunities where I'm willing to give you a backlink to a particular piece of content.
Speaker: We could take published content that's going to help and we could help to proliferate it.
Speaker: We could help share, like, comment and get it out there.
Speaker: So, you know, having even just a small network can make a really big difference.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I just wanted to throw out there that that could potentially be another benefit of the group and a way in which we could all help lift one another up.
Speaker: Yeah, so Robert B is an exit member, and he's been a very strong booster of that idea.
Speaker: He's very good about sharing the guy's content and getting things out there, and it's something that we've kicked around quite a bit, and that's one of the reasons why we have the content creation space is so that we can shill each other's stuff.
Speaker: And I have been thinking of that more in terms of like,
Speaker: someone wants to get their sub stack out there or whatever, but I hadn't thought of it from like a real name reputation management perspective.
Speaker: So that's a really good note.
Speaker: And I think we're going to do something like that.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, and I could even probably scrounge up a, one of those spreadsheets that somebody could use to do the assessment so they could figure out like, what are my antagonistic links?
Speaker: What am I up against?
Speaker: And then once that's built, then we could kind of figure out a plan for them as far as profile creation and publishing, and then the group could help to promote those things.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: We could probably put something like that on the wiki.
Speaker: So I'm going to be announcing the release of the wiki tonight.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we can talk about it.
Speaker: So it'll always be accessible.
Speaker: On the group chat, things kind of flow down river and you lose them.
Speaker: Right, right, right.
Speaker: But, um, but yeah, that's, that's an awesome idea, man.
Speaker: Thanks a lot.
Speaker: You bet.
Speaker: Sounds good.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, that's all I have.
Speaker: I will splice that in.
Speaker: Um, cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So great information, uh, both from, from the entrepreneurship side.
Speaker: I think people are going to find that really interesting.
Speaker: And yeah, you know, there's at least, there's at least, uh, half a dozen to a dozen of us that, um,
Speaker: could really use that reputation management information.
Speaker: So, so that's, that's awesome.
Speaker: Really, really appreciate you taking the time and for, and for joining up, man.
Speaker: It's great to have you in the gang.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: I appreciate the chance to be on the podcast.
Speaker: And with that, Corey, it's been, it's been a great time talking to you.
Speaker: And if, if anyone is interested in learning more about reputation management or
Speaker: or if by chance you're a personal injury attorney and you wanna get your SEO dialed in, you can find Corey at clicksy.com, C-L-I-X-S-Y.com.
Speaker: If you wanna be one of the heroes that makes sure that Dr. Bennett's not completely canceled, come check us out at exitgroup, exitgroup.us.
Speaker: You can follow us on Twitter at exit underscore org, and you can subscribe to the newsletter there.
Speaker: Thanks so much, Corey.
Speaker: This was a great time.
Speaker: Great talking to you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I really appreciate the opportunity.
