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About Our Free Email eBook, Twitter Power Video and a Ton of Other Stuff! All this and more…

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Show length 21:33

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01:20 Using Project Gutenberg for SEO, and the Public Domain

04:57 Josh asks: Do you guys recommend any suppliers for populating local search pages? Yes, up to 60k uploads on Google Local

05:32 DoubleClick Small Business Version

06:31 We are the Hottest Men in Social Media and you should vote for us

08:18 RoninMarketeer down for 4 days – Update: my backups were not destroyed. Use an Accident Hash promotion code at GoDaddy.com

11:11 Open Site Explorer – Fix your incoming links to the best ability that you can

13:07 The eMail ebook is live!

14:28 Chris’ Twitter Power Video

17:31 Upocoming Event Watch: Profs Boston in May, Free 15 day virtual PBX trial at Toll Free Freedom. Chris at Social Fresh, Optimization Summit in Dallas and other Blue Sky Factory Events.

18:00 No Question of the Week this week – Just sponsor John in his fund raising efforts for the Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital Home Base Program. Get early access to the new twitter power guide by donating $100 or more. If we raise $5,000 everyone gets the eBook.

Check us out on LinkedIn: John and Chris

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Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters in the Music Alley from Mevio.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall 0:19
Marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall. I’m Christopher Penn. Today’s marketing over coffee brought to you by sponsors blue sky factory and communication freedom. We’ll talk about more of those guys a little bit later. Back at the donut shop. Back to the donut Yes, here at the dunks. That’s right, that’s right back from your voyage down to Philly Snowmageddon, which, you know, where it’s normally getting to right now, which is nothing but rain for us. But it isn’t it you know, I’ve heard a couple people kicking around these theories now of how, because of the web, like what used to just be on the local news and for people watched is now like, as soon as the storms coming, like within a day, it’s fever pitch and everybody is out buying plywood. You know, batteries and lanterns and all that and you know, meanwhile it’s just yet you know, again, there’s a 70% chance of Do anything, right? But it continues to spin up as

Christopher Penn 1:02
a marketing idea for Home Depot. Let’s get on Twitter and it says

John Wall 1:07
24 inches of snow expected in the next half hour. A blanket hits. Alright, so getting on to more qualified material. So the one that got my attention that you had mentioned was using Project Gutenberg for SEO. I want to hear about that.

Christopher Penn 1:23
Yeah, this is something that I just did not too long ago for the Boston Martial Arts Center. If you’ve never heard of Project Gutenberg, before, it is a repository of all the public domain books that have been scanned in or edited in and stuff like that out there. It’s a great resource. If other if you’ve got like a Kindle or any ebook reader, something like that. You want a library of like decent quality stuff. They have 30,000 books in their library, on just about every topic as long as it’s in the public domain, which means there’s no copyright on it. Typically, in the United States, that’s any work published before 1923. So what this what I did with this is I took an old, very, very old Sun Tzu’s Art of War, the Lionel Giles translation 1910 version, completely public domain, pulled it out of there, because it’s public domain. Under the law, you are allowed to do whatever you want with it. There’s no attribution. There’s no preservation of copyright, because there is none. And put it into, you know, my my publishing program pages, tidy it up, you know, they tidy up the text, cut out stuff I don’t want to have in the ebook, this, again, you can do that you can do whatever you want on this thing. But a new cover on and stuff like that, since it’s sponsored by, you know, Boston martial arts, I don’t have the links on it, that’s slapped up on the website is a free ebook, you know, a very minimal amount of actual work because the work was done by someone else a long, long, long time ago. And in this case, because it’s something that’s it’s topical related, and it’s still relevant. It’s a great value add for the website. Because it’s a PDF. It gets scanned as part of the website when Google stops by to say hello. And it’s a great free gift to give to people. right up front, it costs nothing to do this, but you’re right up front, you can say, Hey, you know, while you’re checking out the school’s website, why don’t you please take a copy of our free ebook, you know, The Art of War by Sun Tzu with limited commentary or whatever. And it’s, you know, you can’t get much easier than that when there’s all sorts of stuff in there to this. Dale Carnegie, Dale Carnegie’s book on public speaking, is in there. There’s a book, I was thinking, actually, for our website on the history, the annotated history of coffee. So this is a ton of stuff in there. And the other thing you can grab from them as they have both text and HTML version. So if you actually want to have on page content, you’ll be formatting for a while. Right? But you know, you can get literally just start adding three or 400 pages at a time to your website have good quality material, not just the cheap tricks, but actually the stuff that people would want to read.

John Wall 3:54
Right, right. And that’s so that’s it, you get, you know, you’re cutting the copywriter out of the loop, you don’t have to go through all that process of right fresh stuff. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. The other

Christopher Penn 4:02
thing you should check out is Wikipedia has a good article on public domain what is considered public domain because for a lot of folks, if you’re if you’re any kind of business that deals with information, for example, any and all of the data that is published by the United States government is public domain, any it all works published by the US government with the exception of agency logos, and classified papers as public domain. So, like the CIA World Factbook, is public domain. The CIA publishes it, but they do not have the right to restrict it. Any work. You’re the only thing that’s exempt that I can remember off the top of my head is work done by a contractor of the United States government. But if if the government has it as a work for hire, it’s yours. I mean, you could do with it wherever you want. So if you’ve got data from you know, the Federal Reserve or something like that, there, it’s yours do with it, as you will

John Wall 4:52
write your census data to a lot of the economic data solid stuff. All right. We had a question from Joshua email, then who is asking about suppliers, repopulating local search pages. You know, it’s easy and free to do this stuff. But he has a client who’s doing where they have 3000 stores, they want to try and update them all in one shot. Is there any way to do that?

Christopher Penn 5:10
Yes, Google Local will let you upload an Excel spreadsheet up to 60,000 different locations. And you got to go through and put them in. Right, right. But yeah, it’s it’s a one batch upload. And it’s actually fairly fast.

John Wall 5:24
Yeah, well, that saves you a ton of a ton of pain there. All right, let’s see what else

Christopher Penn 5:31
we got a DSP. Oh, yeah, big news this week, double click the the ad network kinda like AdSense. But you know, a little bit older and has different advertisers just created their small business version, which again, is very similar to AdSense. So now as a content creator or publisher, you have the ability to choose, you know which of the programs you want to participate in since Google bought them a while ago, but they’ve supposedly made you know, take any of the restrictions off of it that used to be in the in the big premium version, and now it’s out there for anyone to get give a try. So, if you got a popular blog, it may as well give it a shot, see if, if it pays out at all? Let us know actually, you can try it and it starts making some money, let us know.

John Wall 6:10
Right And well, and then the big thing with them, right is the granularity. Like you should be able to pick some, some channels that are very closely related to whatever, you know, if you’re a camera blog, you can probably find, you know, b&h photo or you know, wherever that kind of stuff, it’s really tight. It’s not like just the AdSense, where you’re throwing it out there to the world and who knows what’s gonna, you know, come back and show up. Yeah. Alright, so newsflash, we have been rated the hottest men on social media just need to know that there’s been a campaign we’ll have a link in the show notes. There’s an agency that set up a squidoo page they’ve and I’m surprised we made the list those The one thing that you know, I mean, we make fun of these contests all the time on the show, because they’re for suckers. But, you know, we have totally placed I with a great bunch of guys like big names who are, you know, movers and shakers. So, you know, before we rip into it, So we are honored that you know, this is a, it’s definitely got a laugh out of it, and hopefully it’ll generate some traffic for you. But I just, you know, dude, Hottest Women. That’s it. That’s where the clicks go. How does man and that’s so much

Christopher Penn 7:13
Yeah, I don’t know though I know that you you’re starting to see a lot more folks in marketing getting the technology and stuff so you look at the you have a social media site, you know they’re like Mashable or whatever you look at the demographics and stuff. It’s pretty even now so

John Wall 7:27
yeah, that is true hair game. You know, maybe you don’t want hot men being the inbound links that you get for your website or your business. That’s, you know, not the mean may or may not be qualified traffic. That’s why they hosted on squidoo. That’s what I was thinking to because at first I was like, why would they host on squidoo because it’s, you know, if you want to prove you can handle a campaign like this, but then that is, you know, they don’t have to worry about it running afoul they can jettison the page at any time, which is good. So, so yeah, people you should definitely vote for us so that we win the contest. I will have links In the shownotes but so that was a, you know, again, we got to try. It was interesting too. We were the only do Oh, yeah, there you go. I was kind of a, again, angling for the traffic was exactly, exactly. Alright, so I do have to talk about a PR disaster to hit or so my blog has been down for like four days now, five days. So who’s the hosted with West Coast is the former House well they’re throwing me a free year so I may take advantage but I mean it’s amazing story is like classic, you know, site went down after a day it was just like, Oh, it’s down we’ll pry it up. And then about a day and a half into it like the real story came out where they had gone in on Saturday and the fire inspector was inspecting the fire system which then discharged into the server room Wow. And basically blew out the whole server room. And you know, it’s been higher so it was, you know, a ton of servers down. Now there’s a bunch of them back up. But you know, a day or two later You get the the email that says okay, by the way now so there were a lot of servers actually were pretty much destroyed. And so we’re restoring those for backup, we can only restore three at a time and it takes 24 hours and there’s a dozen down. So you know, you may be dead until Friday. Wow. And now yesterday I got the email saying, okay, we’re down to like the last six servers, of course, you’re still on one of those six. And some of the backups may have been destroyed too. You might be able to so they did they threw me a bone though they’re like look, we can upgrade to to our new server rack, and hopefully with an umbrella switch now. And you just have to re upload your site but so it was, you know, I guess the only you know, the big lesson of it, it’s just like put the story out there from day one, you know, because it’s gonna get out there and the longer it takes to get out the worse it gets. And

Christopher Penn 9:47
so that’s the the other lesson is there’s a plugin for WordPress that will email you backups of itself, you know, so you know, install that so that you know the whole thing doesn’t go south on Yeah, you can you have your own backup. You’re like whatever I can just move Do another host like that day.

John Wall 10:01
Right, exactly. That’s the way and then another thing too, though, now a mistake that I’ve made with this too is having your domain name and the hosting at the same vendor. Hmm. So you know, yeah, you know, because it’s even if it goes down now, it’s still I’m gonna have to fight through the support line to get them to point that domain name somewhere else, and they’re obviously busy with, you know, they’re mopping up the floor.

Christopher Penn 10:24
Yeah, I mean, I use GoDaddy for all my domain name stuff on things. So actually, a friend of the show cc Chapman has discount codes, we’ll throw him some love there. If you use one of his discount codes, I think over an accident hash.com you can get, you know, the 10% off or something. But um, yeah, I mean, I hate GoDaddy for everything else. Like, I think there are other services, not my favorite, but for domain names and stuff. You know, keep it there and you can redirect it whenever their domain manager interface to my knowledge has never been down. So if you’re completely screwed, and you’re just reporting right away and you’re up and running in an hour,

John Wall 10:58
right, just point someplace else. Ready to go? So, yeah. So yeah, more as that unfolds. So that was an interesting tale of technology going awry backing stuff up folks, locally all about backups. How about open Site Explorer.

Christopher Penn 11:13
So here’s the fun, fun thing to do. A lot of folks have been saying, and this is there’s some truth to this, that a lot of the search engine data that you get on backlinks is getting worse and worse and worse in terms of quality and stuff. So the folks over at SEO Moz have put out their version of the Yahoo Site Explorer called Open Site Explorer. You gotta pay for, you know, beyond the first five results, but what’s nice about it is and those are the ones in the, in the show notes or something, but it will tell you, among other things, what link text people are using to get back to your site. So one of the things that you can do for SEO and one of the most important things for SEO is not like getting inbound links but getting inbound links for the right keywords. And this will let you go through and look at it and go Okay, you know, there’s a whole bunch of people who have linked to our site, but there’s no link text, you know, they just linked up an image or a banner that we gave them, and it’s not doing crap for us. Other people, you know, this is something we’re dealing with at work is people link up to the company name, but nobody searches for the company name. And the company name is not one of those countersuit marketing things and stuff. So it’s a challenge to go through that and say, okay, you know, can you at least throw you know the answer, just blue sky factory can stone blue sky factory email marketing, you know, or email marketing with blue sky factory as the link text that we at least get that in there. No thanks. But open Site Explorer, it’s, it’s terrific. If you have the paid subscription, it’s even better. There’s another one majestic SEO that does a not bad job. And you could still get by with stuff like Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools but compared to what the paid tools are coming out with, those are getting really kind of kind of clunky. This is one of those instances where I would recommend paying the money if you’re if you’re like dead serious about SEO and you and you really want to get cranking. One of my favorite systems is the SEO Moz system. I think You know, they give you your money’s worth, it will take some time to get up and running with it. But, you know, it’s not easy, but it will give you your money’s worth. The ebook, the email marketing guide that we’ve been tooling on for what, five months now? Yeah,

John Wall 13:12
I think October was that it’s it. It’s just like a movie. You know, it’s like going through production and this and that and the rights. But yeah, it is. It’s alive. It looks a lot like Duke Nukem Forever. Right? Exactly. It could have never seen the light of day, but now it’s seen that seen the light of the sun shine upon it now. Yeah, I have the link in the show notes. You can go grab it, it goes over to blue sky. They’re using it for full disclosure, they paid for it. So exactly paid content. But yeah, if you’re looking for a good overview of email strategy, everything from getting started right up to multivariate testing, this will give you a good

Christopher Penn 13:45
section was really good. I mean, really, really good.

John Wall 13:47
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we tried to, you know, cover all the bases give a good intro to that and I and of course, why blue sky factory loves it is it is it pushes the very frontier of, you know, if you’re just using Joe’s email service, you’re not gonna be to do some of the stuff Yeah, it kind of explains why you want to upgrade to a power tool. Because, you know, if you’re doing a lot of mail, it will save you some time make more money for you. Yeah.

Christopher Penn 14:10
Doesn’t make more money for you the multivariate testing.

John Wall 14:12
That’s Yeah, you know, I mean, you know, because it’s just, it’s just a numbers game, you know, I mean, if you’re sending hundreds of thousands, and you can eke out another 2%, you know, we tie all the time, that’s, that’s your jet payment right there. I’d say you know, especially if you’re selling a big ticket b2b item, it just makes a huge difference,

Christopher Penn 14:28
the Twitter power video to plug that in. So we’ve been playing around a lot with a few different Twitter tools lately. And what what’s kind of funny about Twitter is that the ecosystem and Twitter has a lot of really, it’s like Unix, it’s got a lot of really good one purpose tools out there. And very few that the ones that try and do it all do it really poorly. So you end up having to glue a lot of things together. So put together this video, just for fun over the weekend. And I just did the audio last night of taking three tools triangulate the good text, data. You’re in the middle, and then tweet them out to really change how you follow people. That’s why it’s kind of neat. So what you do is you, I hate the name of service. Elmer Fudd naming exactly, you put three people in there who I say people who have talked about you personally. And then you say, Okay, show me the carbon followers among all three of these people, you know, so I can say like, you know, show me cc Chapman, Chris Brogan and John Wall. And it’ll give you a list of all the people who follow all three. So I mean, if they’ve all been tweeting about, you know, me or something I’ve said, chances are the people who follow them have heard of me, I’ll take that data out of there, you know, through the text editor cleaned it up, and then look at a tweet, which is basically a batch a batch follower, right, and load it up. So you know, I can pull 234 hundred people who are all following all three of these guys who have mentioned me a lot loaded in there. And when I go and follow these folks, you know, the follow back ratio goes from you know, half to 95%. Right? You know, likewise, if you’re looking for Really interesting stuff that you might not find otherwise, pick again those same three people and say, okay, who did these three guys all follow? You know, who you know who’s on their shortlist of works really well, especially with folks who, who don’t follow back everyone like, you know, for example, Chris Brogan is a terrible example because he falls back everyone, right? You can’t really get much out of that because it’s, you know, 100,000 some odd people, but someone like Chris Anderson from Ted follows like 50 or 100 he’s got 10s of thousands of people following him but

John Wall 16:30
he’s got a shortlist. Yeah,

Christopher Penn 16:32
you know, so you look at the folks who have the shortlist combine them up and see who’s who are they keeping their eyes on? One competitive use that is kind of fun if you if you are interested in a little Open Source Intelligence is for any vertical you’re in figure out who your three competitors are, and then go in you’ll do the do the who’s following all three of these at the same time because they have their you know, industry trade breasts or their you know, Compared to their competitors, and maybe there’s a black horse in there You Didn’t Know About or alternately, it’s someone who’s doing the homework on buying right? Yeah, it was it was getting away particularly b2b if they’re getting, you know, following up all three counts or however many is like okay, I need to start getting on the radar these folks too, because they may be they may be thinking about buying.

John Wall 17:18
That’s great. Yeah, that’s a great tag there. Maybe even find a prospect and find some gold in the pile. Fantastic. All right, let’s see what else we’ve got. upcoming event watch. Still, we’re pushing props coming up in May 15 day virtual PBX trial from toll free freedom part of our sponsor, and event I have to plug to I’m gonna be doing a road race in May. Oh, nice raising funds for veterans who’ve had Post Traumatic Stress Stress Syndrome all the time. And so that’ll be down in Boston. I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. I have to raise like a grand so I’ll be hitting everybody up for that. Okay, but finish line is right through Fenway Park. So

Christopher Penn 17:57
nice. Let’s see. I’ve got a new version of this Twitter ebook that I did a while back the Twitter power guide, I’ve got a new version that I’m updating and stuff. Did you have like a pledge page? Yeah. Okay, here’s the thing I will send out, you know, email marketing over coffee@gmail.com if you are, you know, gonna pledge like more than 100 bucks, or whatever. And, uh, when the new Twitter power guide is ready, I’ll give it to you guys first, if you know if john breaks $5,000 we’ll, we’ll we’ll push it out to the whole world. So let’s see five K, for john wall’s road race. And we’ll push out this new Twitter guide with stuff that I guarantee you’ve never seen before. Unless you are really really good at Unix.

John Wall 18:40
All right, this is cool. Sounds good. So we’ve got raising the bar here. We’ll see if I can blow the lid off the exact the fundraising line. So that’ll be excellent. Exactly.

Christopher Penn 18:49
How about travel for yourself? Wow, got a ton coming up. I just found out that our Director of Community TJ Waldo is an expecting father any any day now. So it could graduations to him but that means that his his dog and pony show is for him so I’ll be at social fresh I think Portland I’m pretty sure I’m going to be at St. Louis. I may be coming up also at I’m going to be at the optimization summit in Dallas Texas. Presenting there I’m pretty much you know, it just go to the blue sky factory events page and Greg tangelos his name was not on the event. It’s probably

John Wall 19:28
Alright, so we’re doing the traveling show. We’ve got the whole circus coming together.

Christopher Penn 19:33
Exactly. Yeah. And you know, if you’re adding these events, you know, stop by Say hello. You know, whatever, but don’t follow me to my hotel room or I’ll stab you.

John Wall 19:43
Just because he’s not at his home doesn’t mean there’s not weapons everywhere. Remember that?

Christopher Penn 19:46
That’s the TSA loves me.

John Wall 19:52
We don’t want to make the no fly list. So we’ll leave it at that.

Christopher Penn 19:55
You know, I was thinking about this. I have like some of the most popular speakers have those presto well the speakers gets to the performance kits where they say of the venue here’s all the things I can only green colored m&ms or whatever and things like that. I shouldn’t have one says you know, these the following weapons must be provided on site

John Wall 20:14
must be blade within 25 feet at all times.

Christopher Penn 20:19
Be Awesome.

John Wall 20:21
I could see them with the list that just like what the hell is this? Exactly. Alright, it’s Chris is self defense back part of the mix.

Christopher Penn 20:29
Yeah, you can send me whatever bottle water you want as long as his sword

John Wall 20:34
is short grass. I have a question of the week. What do you want to throw out to the

Christopher Penn 20:38
world Question of the week. Now, let’s can that those we can just put up the pledge page and see just you have sheet we can generate on that road race for you right away right off the bat.

John Wall 20:48
All right, that sounds good. So we’re gonna plug that hard. We appreciate your donations and you have the full stories up there. You can read everything. There’s a video you can watch the whole deal. So Alright, well, that’ll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee. Enjoy the coffee.

Unknown Speaker 21:01
You’ve been listening to a marketing over coffee. You can hear Mr. Penn daily at the financial aid podcast and read more at Christopher S. pen.com. Mr. Wolf blogs daily at Ronan marketeer.com and podcast theme show every Monday.

John Wall 21:20
The marketing over coffee theme song is called mellow g by funk masters. And you can find it at the pod safe music network pod safe music network.com or follow the link in our show notes.