Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband. I've got some SEO advice for you, but I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use all right, we're gonna talk about healthy SEO habits. This is SEO heavy. Number five. This is our fifth habit. This is the sixth part in a seven part series seven. Oh, yeah. Wow, this is the last. This is the last habit. So this is about link building. I'm talking about building a healthy habit around link building. Now, I'm gonna assume that you've already handled your local link building. Okay, local link building. If you haven't done that every local business owner needs to do this. I talked about that in episodes 50 and 62 different methods, Episode 50, about how to use YT spark episode 60. About how to do it yourself without Whitesburg. I'm gonna assume you're doing those. If you haven't done those, you gotta do those before you try to worry about this stuff.

Meredith: 1:45

That's right. So just stop, go back and listen to them. Yeah, you can

Meredith's Husband: 1:48

listen to this one first. And that's okay. Because I can if you want, I'm also going to assume that you're creating content that is resourceful because that stuff will naturally attract links. If you haven't done that, you can listen to the last episode we did. Yes. Or any other episode that mentions blogging. Okay. But now we're gonna talk about how do you build links on an ongoing basis? And the problem with this, the challenge with this actually, there's two, there's two problems with this. Yes, number one, it sucks on work. So nobody likes this work. I don't like it. Just one person who loves it. There are some people but in my industry that like people make a profession out of link building. Outreach, like it's it's that there's there's no crossover between, or there's minimal crossover between other types of SEO and link building. Like there are people who are skilled at it, I guess they like it, because they do it as if there's, as a local business owner, you're not gonna be able to hire those people. Trust me, they're really expensive. Okay.

Meredith: 2:51

I believe it.

Meredith's Husband: 2:52

The other problem is that they do the job of like plumbers, kind of like plumbers, actually, yes. To che mercy. The other problem is that it doesn't have a high success rate. So you are an actor? Yes. Yes. How many auditions? Did you go on? For every role that you actually got? What was the ratio? One to two? One to two? So was it what so you went on? Say, let's say did you go on, for every role that you go to you go on 10. So that's a 10% success rate. I think that's going to be similar to link building, like most of the time, you won't end up getting a link from for a job. And you certainly won't be cast in a play or TV show. But I'm going to tell you how to hopefully improve that. Okay. Rate and and make it you know, as easy as possible. Oh,

Meredith: 3:55

that's always the best. That's why we love you.

Meredith's Husband: 3:58

So what, what people do often is they just that and this is, this is a bad approach. Don't do this. They just send out emails and they ask people for links. Have you gotten emails like that? No, no, never. You've never gotten an email from somebody just randomly saying, Hey, can you link to my site? It's would be great for your readers or something? Well, I get those a lot. Okay. Listening to you, if you have received emails like that, that this is what those people are doing. They're trying to get links for SEO.

Meredith: 4:29

Should you link with them? If they asked for one?

Meredith's Husband: 4:32

No, no, no, no, no, it's a bad practice when I get those emails. I either delete the email or mark the email as spam and or block the person from ever emailing me again. I don't want those emails. Okay don't like them if you can't tell good

Meredith: 4:48

to

Meredith's Husband: 4:50

what you need to do instead is you need to give something first you need to give before you can ask or get Yeah, good. I like that more. Give before you get

Meredith: 5:00

Yeah, that's normal. You know, what is it Prosecco restaurants? Whatever. recept reciprocal, reciprocal reciprocal when you give to somebody they often feel the

Meredith's Husband: 5:17

that's actually a good point. Reciprocal there is a there's an entire method of link building.

Meredith: 5:21

Yeah, I love her. Whenever I say something valuable. You go. You know what, that's that's the point. That's actually right.

Meredith's Husband: 5:31

No comment. So so what do I, so I want to explain a little bit about what the difference is between this asking and then giving before you get. So let's say, I'm going to give you two examples. Okay? Like, let's say, two examples. Yeah. Pretty funny. So let's say you get an email from somebody, you're going to get an email you let's say you receive these two emails. Let you tell me which one you would be more apt to respond to. Okay, ready? Let me email number one. Okay, Meredith, we just worked together on this such an such thing. I thought your photos were great. Would you link to my site? Okay, that's one email. Basically, I'm paraphrasing.

Meredith: 6:14

Is this somebody that I actually have worked with? Yeah, yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 6:18

I mean, if it's totally random, then that's even worse. But the the, the, the examples I'm going to give you are how to approach people that you have worked with, he has a much better chance of getting those links. So that's one email. Hey, Meredith, you're great. Would you link to my site? Here's the other email. Hey, Meredith. This is so and so remember that thing we just worked on? I really liked your, you know, XYZ. In fact, I did. I wrote a little piece about it. And I featured it on my blog. Here's the link. You want to check it out? Yeah, you'd probably check. Yeah. Check it out. Okay. Now that's

Meredith: 6:50

curious to people. We always like when other people think of us in a nice,

Meredith's Husband: 6:55

or Oh, yeah. Okay. Yes. And that's the difference between just asking and giving before you ask. So if that second email, then that, then you will probably open some sort of dialogue, hopefully, ideally, you'd be like, hey, so and so who just wrote to me and posted this thing. Thanks so much. That's great. Then that person can say like, I'm glad you like it. Would you mind sharing it? Or would you want to share it with your blog followers or your social media? Or you could or they might say something? Hey, could I create something like this for your blog to share? Oh, now as it now the this is great, because as a photographer, you are able to take some nice photos, right? Probably. Yeah. If you were to work with somebody, and you'd take photos of their I don't know what this works really well, by the way for wedding photographers. Gets a little more news. Yeah, with venues with caterers with flour, florists, with DJs with can also

Meredith: 7:58

work with family photographers, because there's this great dog photographer here in Park Slope. And she does like things in Dumbo and will do Dumbo.

Meredith's Husband: 8:07

Yeah, and we'll talk that's a good point. We'll talk about that in a second. But this method works I think especially well for wedding people, because every time you have a project, there's a whole bunch of other partners other vendors that you can that you can you know you hate. Did you like the the placemats? Mats? What are the place settings? If you like the flowers? Did you like the decorations? Did you like the cake? Did you like the, you know, you got to find something you'd like and then and then use that and then feature that. So you give before you get you create something, you create something and I like to think of two ways how you can help people, you either do something, make them look good, or you make their lives easier. Yeah, you do one of those two things? Yes. A student of mine just did a she has done a wonderful job doing this. She creates a she does. She's actually not a photographer. But yes, she takes really wonderful product photos.

Meredith: 9:03

Really,

Meredith's Husband: 9:04

that's a photographer. Well, that's not that's not what she does as a profession. But she has she does take really nice photos. And she did something like that. And she reached out to a, you know, a co I'll say a co vendor, somebody, another vendor who worked on a site on the same project with her. And she reached out and she said, Hey, I really liked this stuff. Here's some photos I took of it. And the person loved it. She said, Would you like me to write a guest post on your blog featuring your work? And I remember I said the success rate of doing this is pretty low. Yeah, she's got like, close to 100%. She hasn't done a lot. But she's done it. She's built like a handful of these. And every single person is doing it, which is amazing for her. Yeah. Super.

Meredith: 9:44

Thank you. Thank you for listening.

Meredith's Husband: 9:46

That would that was actually not listener that was a that was a student, somebody who was in they could be

Meredith: 9:51

a listener. They might also be a listener. They were in one of the courses.

Meredith's Husband: 9:55

Yes, they were in my my group coaching class. Wait, wait, what course I have a class. I have a group class that it's like zoom. It's like it's a class via zoom, basically, lessons and homework and q&a sessions and things like that. Really, it's all about SEO. It's about SEO for most for most, if not all, but mostly for photographers. It's right now it's just word of mouth. However, it's it because I launched it a while ago and I didn't you know, I wasn't really comfortable just charging a lot of money for a course when I've never taught a course before. That's a good idea. So I reached out to a few people that I knew Pretty well said, Would you like to take this course on a very reduced price? Keeping in mind, I've never taught a course before. And then it's expanded by word of mouth a little bit. It's starting to develop a bit of a waiting list.

Meredith: 10:47

So how wait is of course,

Meredith's Husband: 10:50

there is a waiting list is starting to develop. But I actually would like to offer the waiting list spots to to listeners of the podcast rather than the word of mouth since I love my listeners. This is my favorite people, if you Oh, so how do you do that? You could go to maris husband.com, just go to the contact page and just send me a note. I'd love to be on the waiting list. When the next course is launched. It just means I will send you an email and I'll give you the details. And I'll ask if you want to be here. There's no you don't need to sign up. But any personal obligation anyway, that student has done a wonderful job in doing this. So nice. Now what you are, may be thinking right now is wow, why are they talking about this? You may be thinking this sounds like a lot of work like she did all that work just to get a couple links. And often the success rate is not even that great. That sounds like a ton of work. Yeah. And you would be right. I already told you this sucks. Nobody likes it. Nobody likes to do this.

Meredith: 11:53

No, because you have to ask somebody for something. And that makes us all feel vulnerable.

Meredith's Husband: 11:57

And it's yeah.

Meredith: 12:00

It's not inside.

Meredith's Husband: 12:01

It's not fun. But these feelings are so so powerful. Links are so powerful. Do you remember search engines in like the 90s? Ask Google Jeeves asked Jeeves and excite.com and early Yahoo. And yeah. What do you what do you remember about those search engines? What do you remember about the results that those search engines are terrible? Exactly. They're terrible. So when when Google came along the difference between Google and those other search engines when Larry and I'm sure I've told this story before, I'll tell Larry and Sergey? Yeah, I have told it before. When they started, when they were starting Google, it wasn't called Google. It was called. It was called backrub. Actually, because it was yes, it was not good. Absolutely was guarantee you, I promise you, I promise, it was called backrub. I can even find the logo. Okay. It's called backrub. Because it was all built on backlinks. All they were doing was just collecting the ways that websites linked to each other. That's it. They didn't even know what they were going to do with it. And they have said that in interviews since then, like we didn't, we had no idea what we're going to do with it. We just knew it was going to be really cool. Lo and behold, one day they realized the hold, they realized one day, oh, you know, all else being equal. If two websites are exactly equal, if you can say a one of them has 100 links pointing to it, and the other one has no links pointing to it. The one with 100 links is probably going to be better quality. Right. All right. And so they launched a search engine and the results were good.

Meredith: 13:36

That's how they got good. Google, because it was good. And they went good. Google Now.

Meredith's Husband: 13:44

Okay, so let's get back to how we build links. What is the habit? What is the habit that you need to develop? So that you can see you can do this? So like I said, this works really well for wedding photographers. Yeah. Every project you have every wedding you shoot, pick something do you did you like the DJ? Did you like the cake? Did you like the catering? Did you like the invitations? Did you like the venue and you want to keep it positive? Oh, 1,000,000% of 1,000,000% it had and it has to be genuine. If you really want to pick something that you genuinely, genuinely like, because you're gonna want to promote this on your blog, you're gonna want to share this on your blog. So don't don't pick something just to flatter somebody pick something you really like. That will also go a long ways in when you approach them and the things you say. It's gonna go over a lot better if you're honest about it. True, true. True. If you're not a wedding photographer, if you're a children's photographer or a family, pet photographer, your shoots are not there's not going to be caterers and event planners. And

Meredith: 14:51

but but maybe there's like, Oh, I loved this couch from Crate and Barrel. No,

Meredith's Husband: 14:57

no, but you I mean, like you've you've done this with toy shops and the neighbor. Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe you shoot outdoors and you are shooting at a at a at a park. Maybe you're shooting a birthday party, you can reach out to the venue and hey, hey, guys, your venue was awesome. I just shot a party here. Here's some photos that I posted from give before you get give before you get. Yeah, that's nice. And remember the two rules how can you make people look better or make their lives easier? Yeah, I love it because I think that's just live your life too. Yeah, yeah. And there's other you know, there other things like how can I make people more money or make them healthier? We're just talking about links here. So we're not going out of time. We're not. We're not doing any miracles. We're just addressing one thing. But as a photographer, I bet there's something you can do for somebody that's going to make them look good. Hope so probably something that would make their life a little easier to yah. Yah, yah, yah. And my final advice. Yes. When you after you give. Now it's time to get when you are asking, somehow for that link to your website. Don't ever say, will you link to my website? Don't ever use that phrase, don't say can you please link to my website? Okay, what else are bad words? Oh, say can you share? Hey, can you share this? Can I create something? A guest blog posts for your followers? Can I sharing is a much better term sharing implies some sort of benefit for their followers? People reading their blog for the people following them on social media. Okay, asking somebody for a link to your website is as 100% benefit for you and nothing for them. Right? You're saying hey, can you do this thing? For me? That's been a benefit to me. It doesn't do anything for you. Asking to share can Hey, would you share this with your readers? Would you share this? There's some benefit there for your readers? Are you would you mind sharing it with them?

Meredith: 16:49

Right? And then that's somebody who has provided you a pre written blog post.

Meredith's Husband: 16:57

Yeah. Yes. blog post? Because yes to do Yes. Nobody wants to live, I should say very few people want to create their own blog posts. Everybody's looking for content. If you can create something for somebody and do it in such a way it makes them look good. Wow. Like, yeah, that's the what my student did. And she did it really well. And it worked really well. The podcast is over. You know, walking past people you hear though one sentence. The one sentence we heard was dad like, because I'm the parent. If you're finding these episodes helpful, I created something that I think you're going to find even more helpful. It explains the SEO process similar to these episodes in a way that I hope is new for you, but it also puts them in order so that you know what to do first and second and third through the entire SEO process. And I hope saves you a lot of time by giving you an actionable step by step plan. It's called the SEO roadmap, and you can find it at Meritus husband.com/roadmap.