SPEAKER_00: 0:04

I was doing SEO, and the way I build backlinks for my clients is by blogging on other people's websites. So I would always so I've always been finding websites and pitching websites and doing cold outreach and trying to build relationships with websites, with bloggers, with editorial sites. And then I just realized, all right, instead of searching for blogs, let me go and search for podcasts. So I would go into the way I'd find blogs is by going into Google and I would just type into Google like SEO blogs or digital marketing blogs or keywords related to what I was doing.

SPEAKER_02: 0:45

Hi friends, this is Read and Write with Natasha Podcast. My name is Natasha Tines and I'm an author and a journalist. In this channel, I talk about the writing life, review books, and interview authors. Hope you enjoy the journey. Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Read and Write with Natasha. I have with me today an SEO expert since 2007. His name is Brandon Libowitz, and he is the author of the book that was just published, was published last week. And Brandon helps brands boost traffic and build authority. Brandon, so nice to meet you. Actually, we met and spent uh good time together last week at Podfest in Florida. So I'm glad to continue the conversation. So, Brandler, I'm I'm really interested in your book, Guest Podcasting. And why do you think I I think the book is written for everyone who wants to boost their brand, but I want to focus on authors. Why do you, since this is like a podcast for authors and you're an author yourself, why do you think authors should go on guest podcasts as opposed to having their own podcasts?

SPEAKER_00: 2:08

Having their own podcast is great. And I think you sh should also have your own podcast if you want to. I'm not opposed to it, but I just found more value being a guest on other people's podcasts because you tap into their audience. And for SEO, one big thing is the more third-party sites that Google sees you on, the more trust Google's gonna give to you, and the higher they rank your website. So you could build some authority and build some trust if you are selling the book, if you have it on your own website and you want it to start ranking higher, or if it's on Amazon or wherever you list it, if you want to boost it up and get it to rank higher, the more websites that these platforms see you on, the more trust they're gonna give to you. But if you're launching a book, just like I did, then you want to be on other people's podcasts to announce it to the world and get some more visibility because if you just announce it on social media and to your email list, that's great. But that only goes so far. If you want to expand to new audiences and hopefully have new people find it, read it, and that's gonna be a great way to tap into the guest podcasting side of things.

SPEAKER_02: 3:17

So why podcasting for SEO? Why, oh you know, I can what if I like want to publish in newspapers or like magazines or you other people, YouTube videos? Why did you actually dedicate a whole book about guest podcasting of all other platforms?

SPEAKER_00: 3:34

Most people don't really talk about guest podcasting that much. So I thought I've been on 300 shows since or in the past like five years as a guest, and I thought most people aren't really talking about guest podcasting as much as they are all a lot of people talk about podcasting, start your own podcast, but they don't look at the guest podcasting side, and that one just helps you really grow your brand, build that trust up by utilizing other people's audiences, because if I'm on someone else's show, then the listeners or the viewers of that show are instantly gonna trust me. I still have to show that I am a subject matter expert, but it's kind of like you're vouching for me saying, Natasha, trust Brandon, so the audience will naturally start to trust me. Of course, if I don't speak properly or say some weird things, that trust just disappears instantly. But as long as you provide a good message and a good story, then people are gonna want to then learn more about who Brandon is. But the biggest part with the SEO benefits are these what are called backlinks, getting other websites to link out to you. So I did the guest podcasting myself before I wrote the book because it it helps my website rank higher on search engines. So SEO is all about trying to rank you higher organically and get you more visibility. And the way the search engines work is keywords are important, but keywords don't rank you because these platforms, even like Amazon, you can put keywords all over your website, they're gonna say, great, but we want to see trust signals from third parties sites, reviews, we want to see people buying your book. But for search engines, they want to see these backlinks, these other websites mentioning my name, my company name. And it's kind of like a vote of confidence. If your website lists me on, if you list me on your website, it's like you're voting for me. And Google sees that as a trust signal. And little by little, they're gonna start to move me up the rankings and bring me more traffic. Plus, I'm gonna get visibility and traffic from your audience. And so there's lots of multiple benefits, also social media content that I can repurpose to clip it and share with my audience, and just you get that kind of never-ending supply of content. I could repurpose that into a blog post for my own website. I could use that to email my newsletter, my subscribers as well, saying, hey, check it out. I was just on Atasha's podcast, and this is what we talked about. And then it's kind of mutually beneficial where I'm helping you out, you're helping me out, and we're both growing our audiences.

SPEAKER_02: 6:09

But many what many like podcasts don't have a website, and they only have like a YouTube channel, or they post their like show notes on Spotify. And how would that would that have any effect on the SEO, or do they have to have the website to actually reap the benefits of guest podcasting?

SPEAKER_00: 6:31

The most benefit comes from another third-party website because Google sees YouTube and social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all these platforms as easy backlinks, and they don't really count for SEO. But with Chat GPT and the LLMs, they are actually looking at that. So for working on the LLMs and the AI tool platforms, they look at social media a lot more than search engines do. Search engines don't really look at it too much. They start, they're starting to a little bit more, but it doesn't have the same impact as a website where you actually post it on someone else's website. So it's kind of like twofold now, where now we got to make Google and search engines happy, and we also have to look at the LLMs, the ChatGBT and Gemini and Perplexity and all these other platforms. So it does have more of an impact than at first did. Like when I first started doing the guest podcasting in 2020, I was like, if you don't have a website, it's not gonna help me out too much. Now I'm like, all right, if you don't have a website, it's not the worst case. I still would prefer it because I want to rank higher on Google as well, but it's not as bad as, or it's not gonna have that. It has some added value.

SPEAKER_02: 7:44

Interesting, because I noticed more people more people are using AI search rather than the Google search. And for example, I last month I signed with a client who found me on Chat GPT. And so I'm kind of this when she told me this, it kind of messed with my head a bit because, like, wait a minute, it's I have to now make sure that I rank high on ChatGPT. And so, do you think now how is that affecting the SEO game now? It's it's completely gonna change, especially with more and more people preferring to use AI to search, and they're actually trusting AI, I feel, more than the search engine. So, how do you how is that kind of messed up with with your SEO knowledge?

SPEAKER_00: 8:37

That one is definitely making a big curveball because I've been doing SEO since 2007, and from 2007 to like 2022, pretty much it was Google, Google, Google. Like there's yeah, being in Yahoo existed. There was DuckDuckGo, but no one really went on those. But once ChatGPT came out in 2021, it's taken a while, but now people have adopted it much, much more, and it's so much easier. You don't have to sort through all these websites, it just gives you the answer right there. So it's good and bad because it's taking traffic away from websites. It's just taking all your information and just giving it to people, and hopefully they then want to learn more about you and search and find your name and search you on Google to find your website. But Chat GPT kind of locks you in there and doesn't give too many links. I mean, they're changing it up all the time, but we're gonna have to see. It's definitely changed how people search. The SEO strategy though hasn't changed too much because it's very similar. Chat GPT is heavily funded by Microsoft, which is Bing. And once Bing put out ChatGPT, they had ChatGPT in Bing in 2021. Google's like, wait, hold on. If AI is already in Bing, we got to release our version, which is BARD, and then they changed it to Gemini because nobody was using this BARD thing, and now Gemini is pretty much what they're looking for is very similar strategies, like keywords, like all the content. It's just changed how people search a little bit with like more questions and answers. But that's been around since mobile came out. People are always doing that voice search and Siri and Alexa, but now even more so, making sure those questions and answers are in there because I use it all the time, and it just makes it so much quicker to find your answer to whatever topic you're looking for.

SPEAKER_02: 10:26

So I noticed now, I mean, I think this started maybe two years ago. Is if I go to Google and I search, the first results are the Gemini results, right? On the top, and it has like the AI thingy, and then you you go to the regular kind of results. And is that the norm now? Like, how is that because and I I stopped even looking at the the links, I just go to the first results of Gemini, which is on which is kind of genius, right? They how they manage how to integrate it. How is that affecting things now where like the AI results appears first?

SPEAKER_00: 11:07

Yep, they started doing those AI overviews. So Google has a lot. They have AI overviews, they have AI mode, and then they have Gemini. They have a lot of different AIs. It's correct. AI overviews always at the top, but it's kind of like what they did in 2013. They started putting this featured snippet at the top, where if you search for like a celebrity's birthday, they would give you that answer right there. The AI overview now is just much more expanded and you could engage with it. That's the biggest thing is now you can start responding back and talking to it. And that's definitely changed a lot. Where now it's even more so important to be in those AI overviews, also trying to get in the AI mode and then also getting in Gemini if people are using Gemini, and it just made things a lot more confusing. I feel like they're gonna consolidate it because there's so many right now that Google has that it just gets a little overwhelming for someone like me to start doing SE on like, all right, now I gotta do SE on Google, AI overviews, Gemini, AI mode, and that's just on Google. And then there's Chat GPT and perplexity, but people want to get those answers right away. They don't want to browse around and click on those links anymore, and they just want that that instant gratification because do you really want to go through a whole Reddit forum thread of hundreds of posts or let the AI read it, summarize it, give you the give it back to you what it thinks this page is or that is about? It's just it's just a big shift in everything.

SPEAKER_02: 12:33

So, how can we rank higher on in AI or Chat GPT or LMs? What shall we do now? Let's say, as if you're an improver brand, if we're authors, what shall I do to make sure Chat GPT mentions me? If somebody looks for like a ghostwriter, a book coach, podcaster, like a book podcaster, I want my name to be on the top. What shall I do?

SPEAKER_00: 13:46

You need to get yourself published on other people's websites because they're looking for the same thing with Google. Google says, all right, you put keywords on your website, but we don't believe those keywords. We want to see that other people are talking about you to vouch for you, to build that trust up. And the best way to do that is by getting published on other third-party sites, whether that's writing articles or getting interviews on other people's websites or doing the guest podcasting. But any way to get your name out on other people's websites, doing press releases, attending trade shows, like I was just at Podfest as a speaker. I always try to make sure that they mention me on their website because then the search engines and the LLMs will see that I'm on another website. And those little trust signals over time build up to getting them to want to trust you more and rank you higher. It is great to have your own website. I always recommend to everybody have your own website because, like when you're publishing a book on Amazon, you're renting space off these platforms or Goodreads. You don't really own it versus your website. You get full control. Then you can start adding more content on your website, adding more blog posts that support all that, which the LLMs will read all those blog posts, but they're not going to rank you without third-party sites. So it's trust signals.

SPEAKER_02: 15:07

So how are people finding you now when you ask them? Like if you ha they hire your company or if they buy when you ask them, they say where? Like, where do they find you?

SPEAKER_00: 15:18

So surprisingly, Google still just dominates. When I look at my own website traffic and my clients' websites, Google just really brings in the majority of the traffic still, but it's shifting. But Google really does bring in so much traffic. When I look at tools like Google Analytics, you could track where your traffic's coming from and you could see like how people are finding you. And you could see that Google just brings in probably like, I mean, it's dropped down a little bit, but it still brings in probably about 20 to 50% of your traffic. Chat GPT doesn't bring too much traffic, but people find you that way. They just don't go to your website. So it's a little bit tougher to track the AI, and everyone's trying to figure that out right now because that's that ambiguity part is like, what are people searching on AI to find me? With Google, they'll show you some of your keywords using tools like Google Search Console, which is another free tool from Google that's for SEO purposes that will show you like what keywords you rank for, what position you're in. But there's nothing like that for AI yet. And hopefully they'll put something out. That way you can start seeing like what are people searching? What words are triggering me to show up in those AI overviews and the AI search results. There are some tools, but they're not really perfected yet. But when I do look at analytics, Google still runs the show, but we'll have to see what happens because it just keeps changing so quickly nowadays that it can flip that switch pretty fast, and all of a sudden Google just could be gone, which I don't think will happen because they have Gemini, but who knows what's gonna happen? It's so dynamic right now. There is no content, it's just constantly evolving.

SPEAKER_02: 16:53

It's a wild, wild west. So how do you keep up with the news? Like how with the with the SEO news in your industry? How like as you said, there's a lot changing, and our brains can take so much information at a day. So, how what is your source, go-to source for all SEO news related and the AI, and how is that affecting?

SPEAKER_00: 17:18

I like to go to forums, but forum like so I'd go to like digital marketing forums, but nowadays Facebook groups are really great and really engaging, and those are great places to ask questions, get feedback, and see what other people are doing.

SPEAKER_02: 17:33

There's tons of good Facebook groups and on SEO or uh Yeah, everyone keeps telling me Facebook groups, Facebook groups, and for everything, there's a face, like private face group. And so you have one people who say, Oh, Facebook is dead, it's for the old people, or it's for the boomers, blah, blah, blah. And then whenever we have a discussion, people always go back to face Facebook groups. Do you think Facebook groups are the ones, the things that are actually saving Facebook from becoming like a boomer place? Or what how do you view that in terms of where we're headed?

SPEAKER_00: 18:11

Yep, Facebook groups are helping Facebook stay live and stay strong because Facebook has Instagram. Everyone is on Instagram nowadays or TikTok.

SPEAKER_01: 18:22

What's that?

SPEAKER_00: 18:22

Not many people are using Facebook, but Facebook, those groups make me keep my account. And like I have some friends that don't use Facebook, but I'm like, you're missing out on these groups because there's so much knowledge that's being poured out there in these groups. But other than that, there's not much value in Facebook anymore. It's kind of like a pay-to-play platform. After they start, after they went public, they had to make money and they just dropped reach. Where in the past, if you have like a hundred people that like your Facebook page, all a hundred people would see that post when you post. But nowadays, I think it's like five percent of your audience will ever see your post without you having to click that little blue button to boost it up. So it's Facebook's more of like a pay-to-play system or platform. But the groups are the only ones that seem to get the most engagement. So I started my own group as well. And that's a good thing to for people to do is create a group around the topic that you're interested in. And then you can start building an audience around that and growing that.

SPEAKER_02: 19:19

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 19:20

That's a great way. Takes time. It's not the quickest thing to build up, but it's another platform that you could utilize to help get your message out there to people and share knowledge with others.

SPEAKER_02: 19:30

And but these Facebook groups are private, so they do not like crank on the SEO game as right. So, but for you, it's they're they're private spaces, they're private communities, correct?

SPEAKER_01: 19:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 19:44

So if they're private, how do you attract people to it? Like, how do people find you if you have a private Facebook group? Like if I want to create now a Facebook group called Read and Write with Natasha, how do what do I put it like in my marketing email or like how how are you growing your Facebook group as opposed to like turning it into a paid community like Circle or others?

SPEAKER_00: 20:09

Yeah, the the growth part is a little tricky with the private group because I thought about make I started my group private and I was like, maybe I should make it public, but once you make it private, you can't change it to public. You're like locked in there. So I'm like, all right, it's stuck at private, which is fine. A lot of these Facebook groups are private, and I just market it to anybody that signs up. I have a bunch of lead magnets. I teach classes for free on my website. So if they sign up for a class or one of my lead magnets, they get sent into my email list. And I think it's like my third email after I say, like, thanks for signing up for the class, here's your class, here's the video, here's whatever they signed up for. Then I have another email that's more value driven, giving them more value. And then I think my third or fourth one, it says, by the way, if you want to join this Facebook group, I made a private Facebook group where we could discuss SEO topics and AI topics. And doing that, I mean it's taken me a while, but I think it's grown to maybe 2,500, almost three times. Oh, wow. But it's slow growth. Because a lot of people because a lot of people are respond back to my emails saying I don't have Facebook, and I'm just like, all right, well, that then I don't know what to do. But there's school communities that I've been looking into, and I have my own meetup that I've done over the years that also has a big audience, but the Facebook group is just so active compared to a lot of these other platforms that it keeps me on Facebook.

SPEAKER_02: 21:37

So you would not go with like a paid community like Circle or School. You would keep it open just so that for promotional purpose, so that you can give value and in return they might hire you for for your services.

SPEAKER_00: 21:51

Nowadays I might say maybe make a school. You could do like a free school community if you wanted to do that, because I made my Facebook group, I think, in like 2020 or 2019 when there wasn't many other options, but school is a really good one that because I have my own meetup group as well, where I teach classes online and in person. And meetup is great, but it kind of doesn't give you that full control. And everyone's been telling me I should take all that meetup audience, it's like 7,000 people I built up and move them over to school. And I've just been so busy with the book the past couple months or years, been working on that book that I just haven't had time. But that is what I'm gonna do now in 2026 is build my school out into a free one and a paid community because a free one to get people interested to show that I am a subject matter expert to build that trust and then move them up to different levels of school communities.

SPEAKER_02: 22:44

Hmm. Interesting. For me, is what I worry is people are already. On Facebook and asking them to create another sign up and it's like, oh, you know, and money, and so I I think that's it adds another level of friction. So, you know, Facebook is kind of like the easiest way, especially for people who is like older generation who actually have the money to pay. You don't want like the Gen Z who would not eventually help your business, you know, if that's the ultimate goal. Okay, I want to switch gear now and I want to talk about go back to podcasting. Do you have your own podcast?

SPEAKER_00: 23:27

I had my own podcast, started my own podcast in 2020 about SEO and digital marketing, and did that for about six months, and then got asked to be a guest on someone else's podcast. And then my SEO side of things started to realize guest podcasting is gonna help build me these backlinks and get me to rank higher on the search engine. So I just kind of shifted gears and went all in on the guest podcasting side. And now I have still have my podcast, but I'm just taking my guest podcast interviews and putting them on my own podcast. So it's not really a podcast, but it kind of is. It's just my interviews, so I'm just keeping it active and updated with fresh content.

SPEAKER_02: 24:09

But and how do you do that? Do you ask the host for the raw file and then you upload it yourself? Or how do you how do you put that on your podcast?

SPEAKER_00: 24:19

Yep, if the host gives me sometimes they don't want me to do that, so I respect their if they don't want me to do it, but a lot of times they'll give me the the video and the audio, and I'm like, all right, maybe I should just throw it up on my own platform. That way they could start tapping into my audience. Just like I'm tapping into their audience. Let me help reciprocate the favor and build that up.

SPEAKER_02: 24:38

I see. Okay, so you mentioned you got on f uh 300 podcasts. That's in the span of what, a year or the span of what? Like how did you manage to be on 300 podcasts? What was the time frame for that?

SPEAKER_00: 24:53

From 2020 to now, but mainly I went all in in like 2021, 2022. I'm in Los Angeles, and during that time we were pretty much locked down. You couldn't go out to eat anywhere. You're just stuck at home. And I had all this extra time because normally I'd be like hanging out with friends or family or traveling or just doing activities. And during that time, I had a lot more free time and was literally sometimes doing two or three podcasts a day. I went a little too deep. My friends were like, What are you doing? Why are you doing so many podcasts? I was like, I'm getting all these backlinks, my traffic is growing, but they're like, How do you even have time? Like, I would just, like we said earlier today, you sometimes stack interviews together. I did the same thing where I would sometimes go back to back to back. And I think the most I did one day was like maybe five or six. It was a lot. Nowadays, I'm nowadays things are back to normal. So I'm doing maybe like one every week, one every two weeks, not as frequently as I did at the past, but now that I did launch my book, I need to start being more proactive and reaching out again and starting to just spread the word about my book because it's a perfect place to let people know about my book. It's just the perfect opportunity.

SPEAKER_02: 26:12

So, how how do you find these podcasts and how do you choose them based on what? So, first, how do you find this? Like, because there's I always get emails from people who like don't know anything that I have a podcast, like they scan me, they say, Do you want to appear on 100 podcasts? We can help you appear on like these are people who like companies that claim that they can put you on all these podcasts and they can book you on these these PR people who like people hire them just to put them on podcasts. So, how did you manage to get 300 podcasts?

SPEAKER_00: 26:44

There's a few different ways I go about it. One, well, I was doing SEO, and the way I build backlinks for my clients is by blogging on other people's websites. Okay. So I would always so I've always been finding websites and pitching websites and doing cold outreach and trying to build relationships with websites, with bloggers, with editorial sites. And then I just realized, all right, instead of searching for blogs, let me go and search for podcasts. So I would go into the way I'd find blogs is by going into Google and I would just type into Google like SEO blogs or digital marketing blogs or keywords related to what I was doing. Now I just change it to podcast blog or podcasts about digital marketing, digital market SEO podcasts, AI podcasts, and I would search in Google using advanced search operators, which sounds a lot more technical than it really is. But basically, I'm just putting into the search, I'm putting in there in URL, and then I put a colon, and then in quotation marks, I'd put the word podcast. After that, you could put whatever keyword you want. And that searches in the URL of a website for the word podcast and then whatever keywords. And that would trigger sites that if I see these sites already ranking on Google, or these podcasts are ranking on Google, I already know that Google trusts that podcast. And that SEO trust is going to be passed on to me if I'm a guest on them. So that's one way that I like to find good quality ones. There's also podcast directories and sites like Podmatch, which is really great and helpful, or listen notes, and there's so many other sites like that that will help you match you with posts that are looking for guests and vice versa. But the way that I got the most SEO value is really by just searching in Google and seeing which podcast already ranked. That way I could get some of that SEO value from it or get more of it.

SPEAKER_02: 28:42

Okay. So I I want to talk a bit about your book. How long did it take you to write it? What was the writing process like? And how did you publish it?

SPEAKER_00: 28:52

It took me a while. It took me about four years of working on the book.

SPEAKER_01: 28:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 28:57

Because I'm not the strongest writer. At least anytime in school when they had us write essays, I was like, I don't want to write an essay. I liked math. I like that a little bit more. But so it was a struggle for me to finish the book. I've been working on it. And because as I guess on all these shows, I was like, maybe I should write a book about this. I've always thought about writing a book. People have told me for years I should write a book, but I was just like, I don't know. Everyone talks about SEO. I was like, what's going to be unique about it? SEO changes so much. But then the guest podcasting came to mind. I was like, maybe this is a little bit more unique and not as many people writing about it or talking about it. And that gave me the idea to go for it. And it was just a lot of late nights writing and just trying to get everything out there and then just editing it, trying to make it organized was always tricky and trying to, yeah, there were so many layers to it, like the formatting, making sure it uploads. I did self-publishing, so making sure it looks good on Amazon KDP and making sure the book cover fits and make sure that there's no extra trim or no bleed and all these new things that I wasn't aware of. And it was definitely a process, but I was speaking at Podfest about the exact topic. I pitched Podfest last year to see if I could speak about guest podcasting and the SEO benefits, and they approved it. And then Podfest was coming up. I was like, I just gotta finish this book. I just gotta grind away. And I pretty much finished it during the winter time, during like Christmas to New Year's, because a lot of my clients kind of slowed down and weren't being as active asking me questions, or I didn't have as many meetings I would normally have. And that gave me a lot of time just to grind away. And pretty much every day I just worked on it probably for 10 hours each day. My fiance, she had time off from work, and I was just like, I want to spend time with you, but I just gotta finish this book, and it was a lot of late nights staying up till 4 a.m.

SPEAKER_01: 30:53

sometimes, just finishing that book.

SPEAKER_00: 30:55

And I was and literally finished it like five days before Podfest and got it on KDP. So I got it approved on KDP and got the book live on KDP like three days before Podfest. So I bought a bunch of copies and mailed them out to the hotel room. I mailed some out to myself, but I was like, I don't know if it's gonna come in time because Oh, that's smart.

SPEAKER_02: 31:20

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 31:21

It was cutting it down to literally the wire, and I barely made it in time, but I'm so glad I got it out there, got it approved, and just also people were telling me, like, I always thought like once you publish a book, you can never change it. It's like permanent.

SPEAKER_02: 31:36

That's not true. That's not true.

SPEAKER_00: 31:44

Correct. I was just cutting the perfect book and I was overthinking it, which I feel like a lot of people might get stuck in their head saying, like, I gotta make this perfect, it's gonna be representative of me, and they want to put their best foot forward. But I realized, like, nope, you just gotta put something out there, and then I could always update it and change it later on. That's what really got me to just finish it and just put something out there, and but it is what I wanted, and it's pretty much exactly how I wanted it. I just have making maybe like little minor changes here or there with the cover, just making sure there's like a little bit extra room on some of the spacing, but other than that, it came out much better than I thought. And sometimes you just get stuck in your head and just gotta Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 32:23

So I I bought the book and I can't wait to get started. The the design is really nice, and it's the whole book looks like really good. And who did that? You did the design, you did everything yourself.

SPEAKER_00: 32:36

Oh, the design I had a graphic designer. That one I am not a designer, and it was so I had a different couple different graphic designers over the years. Like when I first wrote the started writing the book, I had someone make a cover, and then I realized, wait, why am I even having a cover? Like, I have a cover from four years ago, and that cover was completely different. Like the book had a different name and everything. So I realized I kind of went a little too early into the cover. And then after I got the cover made about four months ago. So I realized like once I really know what the book title is gonna be and what the style, then I found a graphic designer and then had a bunch of revisions and making sure it fits in the right trim, and I had different sizes for my book. I was gonna do like six inches by nine inches. I realized maybe I do five and a half by eight and a half. So all these little things change how the cover looks and change the formatting and making sure it doesn't go over the limit, and then like the barcode, making sure that's not covering up stuff because I realized like my name, my author bio was on the back, was being covered up by the butt barcode. So all these little tweaks, CADB doing multiple revisions. Luckily, I found a great designer that was very flexible and happy to work with me because they weren't really a book graphic designer, they were just a really good graphic designer, so they were learning with me about the formatting and the KVP templates and making sure.

SPEAKER_02: 34:01

Okay. So did you hire an editor?

SPEAKER_00: 34:04

Yep, got an editor and had a book formatter because I didn't realize the formatting was so important because I wrote it all in Google Docs, and I was like, wait, nope, this is not gonna look proper. And there were so many little things like drop caps and making sure like I have quotes in there, and I wanted to have like a little gray background in the back and like the bullet points and the spacing, all that stuff was things I never really thought about. And I was formatting it myself one night. I probably spent like two hours trying to format it, and I was like, I just formatted one page and it doesn't look how I want it. I was like, I just need to give it to somebody. So delegating is always helpful, like and same with the editing, because there's only so much I could do in reading it. I'm gonna miss things, and we need to have other sets of eyes on it to help find the little details that you wouldn't be able to notice yourself.

SPEAKER_02: 34:53

And how is it doing now? How is it setting?

SPEAKER_00: 34:56

Uh, at PodFest, it actually became a bestseller in the Amazon category for podcasting and webcasting, and so that was huge and was humbled and surprised to see it get that much traction that fast. Like literally after three days that hit number one on Amazon, and it's been being well received by a lot of people, got shared with my friends and family, and then but Podfest is where I wanted to really share it because those are podcasters and they know podcasting versus my friends and family. It's good, but it's not the same as somebody that really knows the nuances. So I've gotten a few people that read it on at Podfest so far or read a few chapters and have given me a lot of good feedback saying that it's opened up their idea eyes to a whole new way of things. And so that makes me feel good and happy that I was able to get everything out of my head and onto paper so people could understand the SEO benefits of the guest podcast.

SPEAKER_02: 35:52

Oh, well, this is great. So you did the book. Do you have any other books in in mind? Do you have or is this it you're done for a while?

SPEAKER_00: 36:03

I think I might be done for a while. I gotta do the audio portion now because a lot of people are like, Do you have an audio version? Because I love to listen to audio books as well. And I'm like, all right, now I gotta do the audio because I think it's best to have the author speak and do it. So that's my next next goal is get that off the audio probably in the next hopefully month or two, I'll get that done. I was asking like AI, like, how many, how many hours is this gonna be? I think my book is about 47,000 words, and they said it's probably gonna be about six hours of audio. So that's where I gotta commit to that and just get that done. But I just gotta do chapter by chapter.

SPEAKER_02: 36:42

And you're gonna do it at home or are you gonna go to a studio?

SPEAKER_00: 36:45

I'm not too sure. I have my my mic and all that set up, but I might have to go professional, possibly. I think it would be good to do it at home, but it might be better to get the higher quality sound, and that's where I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_02: 36:59

I know a good audio coach who came on my podcast and happy to connect you. He helps people train them to record their audiobook from home. So, like he talks about the equipment and stuff like that. But you know, and that was like one of the most unique people I had on my podcast, which was you're also too, because I never had anyone talk about guest podcasting. So, besides having your website, okay, as an if if I want to talk to author and I want to tell them how to increase their SEO, we know website is number one. What is one thing they say, I don't have time, they already built the website. What is one thing you would tell them to do to improve their SEO so that people can buy their books, maybe book them for speaking events, hire them as consultants, whatever.

SPEAKER_00: 37:46

Yeah, no, building that website is step one. And it's gonna give you all control because even on Amazon, like if someone's looking at your book on Amazon, there's plenty of other books. There's that shopping cart, and people could get lost and just forget about you really quickly. But having your website is where you control it, control the messaging, and make sure that people aren't gonna get lost in there. And what I'm planning to do is maybe give away a free chapter on my website to get people's email addresses because email is one of the most valuable things if you collect emails. Amazon doesn't give you the emails, so you can't really see who bought your book. I put QR codes at the end of every chapter, offering bonuses to try to get people off the book onto my website because that is that's pretty smart.

SPEAKER_02: 38:32

That's pretty smart. Yeah, I've been seeing all the QR code stuff, especially at PodFest. Like you finish your presentation and it's like, Do you want the slides? You use the QR code. I was like, this is genius! Like you get the email addresses of the people who actually attend your event, and now I'm seeing it in books where people put the QR code in books to convert your physical readers into an actual email subscribers immediately. I love that. So so you said the one thing is websites, but what is the second thing if for and let's focus on authors? Let's say what do you think they should do? They built their website. What is the second guest podcasting? Like what is the number two you would say?

SPEAKER_00: 39:17

So once you have a website, a website is only as good as you make it. And for SEO, you gotta make or add more pages to your website. The more pages you have, the more keywords you could target. Because each page on your website loses relevancy after about three to five words. So if you're trying to target multiple keywords, you want to make multiple pages. So that's one of the most important things is making lots of pages that target different keywords and then adding content to that page. Google loves text. They struggle with images and videos. They're getting much better with AI, but they want text on each page. So if I have a book, like my book is about podcasting, guest podcasting, I can make a page on my website for coaches about guest podcasting. And then I can make another page on my website about business owners for guest podcasting, and I can make another page for authors about guest podcasting because an author doesn't necessarily want to see a business coach or vice versa. I mean, they might have some overlap, but making unique pages that speak to that audience is one of the most important things. Like I have over 400 pages on my website for SEO because I'm targeting different audiences. Somebody, I'm in Los Angeles. I want to rank for SEO company in Los Angeles, but I also want to rank for SEO company in Austin or SEO company in Chicago. If I don't have a page about it, I'm not going to be able to rank. If you mention it once or twice on your website, that's okay, but it's not the same as having a dedicated page. That's all about that one keyword. So I make all these different pages about it. I made a page for my book, and then I made a page for like my book bonuses. I made another page about a free chapter download. So my book could essentially have like five different pages where it's different audiences and different segments. But creating multiple pages is one of the most important things. That's why at Podfest I was telling everyone if they have a podcast, take each episode and make it a standalone page on your website. Make it, don't just add it to one page, but make every episode a unique page. Because then if somebody's searching, like for example, somebody might search for SEO for authors, you make a unique blog post on your website about that, that page will start ranking because you have a page that's dedicated to SEO for authors versus just having a player that has all your episodes, it doesn't have that same relevancy to search engines.

SPEAKER_02: 41:43

I see. So what I do is I just link to my uh website, my uh my Buzzsprout website, which is in my butt podcast name, and I like link it to my website instead of going and creating an another page for every single episode. It's a lot of work. It's like 100 over 100 episodes.

SPEAKER_00: 42:06

Yep, it takes time. But I always tell posts, like sometimes they're sitting on all these episodes. I'm like, you have a gold minor content because people don't like blogging, but you have all these episodes that could just be a never-ending supply of blog posts that you just purp repost on your website and it's gonna get you more traffic.

SPEAKER_02: 42:24

So you repurpose, you're saying I should take all the whatever blog or show notes or whatever that I have on Buzz Sprout, my bus website, copy them and put them on my website?

SPEAKER_00: 42:36

No, once it's published, it becomes duplicate content. And that's the one thing the search engines don't like is duplicate content.

SPEAKER_02: 42:42

Exactly. They want original content.

SPEAKER_00: 42:44

That's the only thing that they don't want is once it's been published somewhere, they don't want it to be republished. Or if they don't mind, but whoever publishes it first gets all the credit. Everyone else is not going to be able to rank for it because Google's just saying you're copying it for somebody else, and they want to give credit to the person that published it first.

SPEAKER_02: 43:04

So before we conclude, what is one tool that you recommend to improve your SEO ranking? Like I use Squarespace, for example, on my website, and I have no idea how it ranks. I don't know if yeah, I don't have, you know, what shall what one tool I should use, or does it like use whatever Squarespace provides? So how how do I know even if I'm using the right keywords, all of that?

SPEAKER_00: 43:31

No, my favorite tool for everybody is what you just had keywords, the Google Keyword Planner. It's a free tool from Google that will show you how many people search for your keyword every single month. Because changing one letter could have a huge impact on how many people search for it, like singular to plural and synonyms. One of my clients, their personal injury law firm and personal injury lawyer, singular gets 20,000 searches in Los Angeles, but personal injury lawyers plural gets 200,000 searches. So just by changing one letter. So I always tell people, like especially like in your situation, like when you're posting the titles of your podcast have such a big impact where if you just change it from a singular to a plural or a synonym or some other word, you can significantly increase your traffic.

SPEAKER_02: 44:19

So it's called Google what? Google keyword?

SPEAKER_00: 44:22

Google keyword planner, and it's free to use and it's from Google. There's lots of other tools that will help with keyword research, but the Google Keyword Planner is from Google and it's going to show you the data that Google has.

SPEAKER_02: 44:34

So basically, before posting an episode, put the title of the episode or posting like a blog post or whatever, or even like the hero section of your website. You take it and plug it and see how it ranks, or what does it mean? Do.

SPEAKER_00: 44:48

No, you put in the word like SEO for authors. And then you can see is SEO for authors a good keyword or SEO for author singular or is author SEO better? Because might some people might put author SEO. So it'll tell you which phrase, which ordering of the words is gonna get you the most visibility.

SPEAKER_02: 45:08

Ah, interesting. So this has been great, Brandon. And uh like of course I learned a lot, and I'm sure the audience also learned a lot. How can they reach you? How can I they buy your book, go to your website, hire you for their services? Uh if you can share your uh contact list, or please feel free to tell us how can they reach you.

SPEAKER_00: 45:27

So I actually created a special gift for everybody. If you go to my website at seooptimizers.com forward slash gift, you can find that gift there along with my contact information and classes I've done over the years that show you step by step how to do a lot of the stuff that we talked about. And also, if they want to find my book, it's not on that gift page, but I'm gonna be updating that soon. But if they just search on Amazon guest podcasting or the power of guest podcasting is the name of it, they'll find that book and they'll be able to get it. And I've dropped the price right now for people to try to help out, trying not to make it too expensive because I want to let people be able to learn more about that side of things, the guest podcasting and the SEO.

SPEAKER_02: 46:14

This is great. I mean, this has been amazing, Brandon, and I wish you the best of luck and would definitely stay in touch. And for anyone who's uh listening or watching, thank you for joining us for another episode of Read and Write with Natasha, and until we meet again, ciao. Thank you for tuning in to Read and Write with Natasha. I'm your host, Natasha Times. If today's episode inspired you in any way, please take the time to review the podcast. Remember to subscribe and share this podcast with fellow book lovers. Until next time, happy reading, happy writing!