Lawrence Tam’s Blogging System: Meaty Content, Keyword Bait, and the 80/20 Promotion Rule

You spend real time writing a blog post, syndicate it to a handful of people, and watch it land with a shrug. Will describes doing exactly that: he sent his post out to five people, three of them clicked through out of politeness, and their own posts ran a couple hundred words with a single image, optimized and forgotten. Then he opened one of Lawrence Tam’s posts and found infographics, video, dozens of pages of text, and a comment section that wouldn’t stop. That contrast is the entire interview in miniature, and Lawrence spends the rest of it explaining exactly why one kind of post survives and the other one doesn’t.

Lawrence Tam keeps insisting he isn’t the best blogger in the company, then proceeds to lay out a system detailed enough to make that claim hard to believe. He’s one of the top earners in the room, and blogging is the strategy he credits most of it to.

Why does a stack of short blog posts disappear while one long one keeps ranking for years?

Google used to reward almost anything you put up. Lawrence remembers a window, roughly 2000 to 2008, when a few hundred words on the right keyword would get found without much of a fight. That window closed. Now the posts that actually hold their position are the ones built like reference material instead of a quick update, and Lawrence still has posts from 2009 ranking at the top of the results for their exact phrase, years after he stopped thinking about them.

The mechanics matter here, and Lawrence lists them like a checklist: your keyword phrase belongs in the title, in the URL, in the first paragraph and the last, and worked naturally into at least one subheading. Bold it once, italicize it once, underline it once. Name the image file after the keyword before you upload it and fill in the alt text. None of that replaces substance, though. It needs to be meaty. It needs to be like an authority, the kind of post someone bookmarks and comes back to instead of skimming and forgetting.

What should you actually be searching for when you pick a keyword?

Lawrence’s advice here cuts against the instinct to aim broad. Chasing a single popular word puts you up against enormous, well-funded competition that you simply will not beat. The move is a specific phrase, several words long, aimed at exactly the person searching it.

The keyword is like the bait. And if you set up the bait properly, my kids, they love chips, they love popcorn. If I put popcorn here, they’ll come to it.

A broad, generic topic is the vegetable nobody reaches for. A precise phrase, the kind with real but manageable search volume every month, is the popcorn. Lawrence even points to seasonal and trending phrases as a longer play: he built a post around a video game and a shopping weekend months before either one was relevant, so that by the time people actually started searching, his post and its backlinks were already sitting there waiting.

Why should promoting a post take four times longer than writing it?

Here’s the part most new bloggers get backward. Lawrence is direct about the ratio: writing the post is a small fraction of the job, and the bulk of your time belongs to getting it in front of people afterward, through guest posts on other blogs, syndication, and links from sites that already have an audience. Write something once a week or even once a month if that’s realistic, then spend the rest of your time making sure it gets read, because a great post sitting untouched on your own site is doing nothing for you.

That’s also the challenge to the excuse that a long, meaty post is out of reach if you only have thirty minutes a day. Lawrence’s fix is simple. Take a topic with several distinct steps and write one step per session. By the time you’ve covered all of them, you’ve built the long, authoritative post without ever needing a marathon writing day.

The reward for doing it this way shows up later, not immediately. Lawrence still closes sales today from posts a reader found years earlier, people who came in warm, already familiar with his voice, because they read their way in instead of clicking a cold ad. That’s the quiet advantage behind every hour spent building this instead of only running paid traffic. The traffic keeps arriving long after you’ve stopped thinking about the post that brought it.

The full session goes further than what’s above, including Lawrence’s approach to off-page backlinks and warming Facebook traffic through content before selling to it. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Hey guys, welcome. I'm here with the amazing Lawrence Tam. Lawrence is one of the all-time top earners in Empower Network. Also, when we were in the closed leadership chat and we were talking about who should we bring on to teach blogging, Lawrence is super interesting.

Lawrence is like, well, I'm not the best blogger, but then he goes on and he gives the most amazing advice I've ever seen. I'm like, Lawrence, you humble guy. This guy's made more money than almost anybody in the company or maybe than anybody in the company. He clearly has a strategy.

We want to pick his brain. This isn't going to be a formal modeling interview, but we want to take the best of what Lawrence teaches for blogging and just make sure that you have it so that if blogging is one of your strategies, you know where to go with it. Lawrence, with that, for this interview, you said that you wanted to make some basic assumptions. You wanted to assume that somebody has already figured out how to type.

They've already figured out how to type. They've already figured out how to type. They've already figured out how to you're not how to blog they've probably written their first handful of blog posts and that's where they are so yeah yeah so the those assumptions are correct because if they can't log in you don't know what a blog is or why they even use it or even how to you know uh where do i publish that's not really blogging blogging is more like let's drive a car let's not figure out how to change your oil change your oil that's like a maintenance thing that's okay let's figure out how do we drive our car properly um and shift the gears and check our mirrors so with blogging i did want to say i'm not probably the best blogger in empower network um but i have done a lot of good things with blogging and blogging has evolved over time right back in i would say 2000 to 2008 you could basically blog about anything on a specific keyword put it up into the google atmosphere ecosphere and it would be found but now i don't know i don't have the statistics with me but every like minute there's thousands of new blog posts and blogs being uploaded into these different sites and now google's getting you know like who do we show because you have to have the frame in mind the reason we blog are twofold this is our house our property and we want it to be found organically for free normally we were only targeting google maybe a little bit of yahoo and bing but normally google right now now that all the animals came out with google the penguins the hummingbirds the pandas what that basically means is you can't just write 300 words put it onto a blog throw it into the internet and be found right you might get lucky but that's probably not going to work these days and i wouldn't recommend it and it's a really long and hard way to do it so we had discussed okay well if someone wants to blog and it's part of their core commitments i would suggest if you're doing your eight core commitments one of them is blogging and the reason why is because you can do paid traffic to it you can do organic traffic to it you can integrate text photos and images so it's like the all-encompassing thing it's like your plate on a when you're having dinner your plate it holds everything you kind of need that right now of course some of you like myself sometimes eat a pizza with their hand or have a couple potato chips to stick in your hand that's fine on the go but if you're really wanting to build a long-term business it's got to go through a blog and a lot of it especially if you want to do it long term where you don't have to do paid traffic every day so if you're a paid traffic person maybe blogging isn't that important but you still kind of use it for for upsell conversions for engagement but the majority of us are hybrids we do some paid we turn it on we stop paying we look at our analytics we wait a week or two and turn more traffic on or maybe you want to do it for a long-term business but if you're a paid traffic you only do traffic twice a month well if your traffic is only hitting a little bit a couple times of the month where is your traffic the rest of the time it's got to be coming through your blogs and social media the cool thing with blogs is it integrates with all of that so i wanted to kind of give a simple process of what this looks like um i would highly recommend you learn how to type faster and so if we had a target i would say 40 words per minute is 40 words per minute is that you have a type 40 words per minute no i think that's real reasonable i think it's reasonable and i remember taking typing class when we had an actual typewriter in high school i would peck everything you can definitely peck your way to you know a couple thousand dollars a month in empower network but i suggest you learn the home row learn that use a little you know the tabs on j and f learn how to type because some of you are probably spending way too much time in typing when actually you should be writing okay so i would highly recommend you learn how to type 40 words per minute okay so that other way typing is good now we want to have some simple blog stuff because number one before you actually do anything what is the purpose of your blog post like what is the exact purpose of it and when i say this because the blog in your post can do a lot of different things the majority of us write a blog post to attract new visitors it's cool with you know being ranked or maybe we share with social media but if it's for a guest a prospect the language is to someone who doesn't know really who you are or maybe they're not a customer yet so you can't really talk to them like they know what you're saying an example don't use words like commission the average person you know commission is good but most people are on salary or there are hourly wage earners so don't use commissions use earnings you know use maybe talk about salary you need to have that conversation where is this someone who's brand new or if it's someone actually in your team because you'll be writing blog posts specifically for your team and you're going to be writing blog posts for your customers because you can segment those and it's okay to release those to the public so they can kind of see what you're doing but the intention of the blog post is important now i'm only going to focus on the types of blog posts i use to bring in new people and especially through organic search engine optimization methods like seo and also through social media i i believe if you're really going to grow a business it's going to come not so much from seo though now some of these groups might not want that but i i want to say that's kind of like the the uh the dessert it comes at the end right don't primarily do search and search engine optimization because number one google changes a lot in three months i mean they could change an algorithm and you'll be slapped off i've had that happen but here's a cool thing i have blog posts that i wrote back in 2009 that still rank number one for very specific keywords which leads me you've got to write on a keyword keyword.

Now, what is a keyword? A keyword is a very specific phrase. It's a phrase, not a word, but a phrase. And these phrases are being searched a bajillion times, a variety of them on Google.

So an example would be, don't search the word dog, right? Or don't target the word dog. That's the topic. That's fine.

But the keyword shouldn't be dog. It should be like the best dog leash for my shih tzu. Very specific. What is it for?

It's a leash for my shih tzu dog. And it's a phrase. You want to do a keyword phrase. Now, why is that?

Competition is way easier. I mean, the thing is if you look at the word keyword dogs, that word is used in so many different ways. It's used in what's up dog. It's like a saying.

It's part of a company named Sure Dog. It's a martial arts company. It's part of a company named Sure Dog. It's part of a company named Sure Dog.

It's part of a music. It's part of a music title. It's used for dogs. And major large corporations like PetSmart and all these other pet companies are targeting the word dog.

You're not going to win there. But what you can win is a very specific phrase. What is the best dog leash for a 20-pound dog or under? Now, how do you know what actually is being searched on the internet?

This keyword data is actually freely available on Google. You can actually find out how many people are searching for a phrase every single month on something called the keyword planner provided by Google. Keyword planner is completely free. Now, this is only one of the tools you'll be using.

But I would say as a beginner, we're talking for someone who's brand new, write down keyword planner. It's basically the tool that Google will share with you on what their projections are of how many searches a month will be displayed for the specific phrase, the specific phrase. Now, I'm not going to go into actual the specifics of what happens if the words rearrange or whatnot. Just focus on the phrase.

And when you're writing now, there's only a couple of things. Once you have the keyword, you then want to go into two parts, which is on-page SEO and off-page. Now, I said SEO is not the primary focus. But if you're going to write the blog post anyways, let's go ahead and do that.

So, let's go ahead and do that. Let's go ahead and optimize for SEO just in case it does take off. And then in the future, you can always edit it and change it. It's just much harder to change certain things after the fact.

If you just go and think forward of in the future, this is what I want. If this article or keyword makes me a lot of money or is a good source of traffic, then I'll optimize it more for more stuff. So, once we have a purpose, we have a keyword, what I normally do is I search in keywords. And you can probably spend $5, $20 and go to Fiverr.

And there's a ton of people on Fiverr who have keyword research tools. So, you can go to them and ask them, say, hey, look, I'm looking at this keyword, say, how do I sell to people in Baltimore? Or say, how do I find customers in Baltimore? The only person who would write that is probably a business in Baltimore looking for more customers, right?

But let's say you have a package or you have a process to communicate with business owners in Baltimore, you know who that is because the keyword dictates who the person is searching for. A person who wants to find the next dog treat is not specifically probably at that moment going to search, how do I find more customers in Baltimore? The keyword is like the bait. And if you set up the bait properly, my kids, they love chips, they love popcorn.

If I put popcorn here, they'll come to it. But if I have this big piece of, I want to say bok choy, but I don't know if that's an actual popular American vegetable, broccoli. I have a big can of broccoli, come and get it. They're like, you know what?

Maybe I'll pass on that, right? Not to say that my kids don't eat broccoli, they do. But if you're talking about the two things, I mean, they'd rather eat junk food, but we can't do that. But when it comes out, they eat it.

So, when the bait comes out, they're targeting what you're writing about and the keyword will attract the readership that you're looking for, right? So, with that in mind, we have this keyword. Now, let's go into something called on-page SEO. Now, before we go into on-page SEO, is there any questions before understanding keywords, the purpose of the blog post before I move on to on-page SEO?

Just the size, I mean, the average volume that you're targeting for like a long tail keyword. I would say get over 300, 300 to 500. The best case is over 1,000. But a lot of times when you do long tail, here's what happens.

Short tail, broad keywords like dog, boat, car, internet, business, there's millions and millions, billions of keyword searches for this word, but the competition is ridiculous. But once you get, once you add words onto a phrase, the volume starts to shrink as you start to narrow down your targeting. So, I would say anywhere from 500 to 1,000 unique search engine searches per month is a great, is a great way to do it. Now, I do want to throw out an asterisk on this.

You are not, you can't bet on this 100% because some words are seasonal. Right. For example, Halloween candy. Like, well, I mean, if you're not, you know, anywhere near Halloween, that, that keyword is like nowhere to be found.

An example of the power of this is if you think the future of seasonal keywords, right? People doing research today will say, oh, there's nothing to search on that. But once the trend or the season kicks in, you can really monetize it. So, example, I sold a lot of video games on Black Friday.

And all I did was I had labeled the keyword of the video game plus Black Friday review or Black Friday sale. Or Black Friday deal. So, that was like this long keyword, product review, product review date, like 2014 or whatever. So, I had this one long review.

Now, the time I was writing it, no one was searching for this because the game wasn't out. There was no deals yet. And it wasn't even Black Friday at that time. But I was building momentum.

So, when the day did come, people started to search it. I had all these backlinks. I'm going to talk about this in off page. I already had all this stuff set up.

So, I was already ranked. And this is how I was making organic sales. So, that's a different strategy. So, I'm going to give you the ideas that if you're looking for a keyword, make sure it's more evergreen.

Because let's say right now we're in the spring and you're talking about, say, Easter. And you're thinking, oh, this is a great keyword. But by the time you rank for it, it's long gone. So, there's a couple approaches to it.

I just want you to focus on, number one, the keyword itself, it's a loose ranking factor of how much traffic it gets. And I would say over 500. So, let's go. There's two major parts to SEO, right?

Something called on-page SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization. And the other part is off-page SEO. There's two parts, on and off.

Easiest way to remember it is on is what you could physically do on your article, on your website. You have physical control, right? Off is generally things that are coming from outside your website and coming in. Backlinks, referrals, Facebook.

Right? Facebook shares, someone linking to you. That's off. So, first thing you can do is always optimize to the best of your ability on-page SEO.

All right? So, on-page. The most important things that I would say for on-page SEO is have the keyword in your article. So, if your article is about how to find customers in Baltimore and you never actually have that exact phrase in your article anywhere, how is Google supposed to?

How is Google supposed to interpret what your article is about? Google is a robot, right? Think of the robot in Terminator. It's very yes and no.

There's no real maybe. So, if you're trying to tell Google your article is about getting customers in Baltimore, it needs to be in a couple places. So, let's go ahead and get your piece of paper. I'm going to drink water.

Yep. Keyword in its entirety should be placed in the title of your blog post. Number one. Number two, it should be in the permalink of your URL.

That's number two. So, when someone types in, you know, www.yourdomain.com slash, it should say your actual keyword. And sometimes there'll be dashes in between. That's fine for separating words.

So, we have number one, title. Number two, the URL. URL. Number three, I would have it in the first paragraph of your article.

Okay? And then I would have it at least once more in the ending of your paragraph. Right? End of the blog or end of the first paragraph?

End of the blog. Now, it doesn't have to be last sentence. I know some people say it needs to be last sentence. I haven't been able to determine if that's really that big of a deal.

But I would definitely say in the beginning paragraph, last paragraph. And then I would make sure you have at least one H2 and one H3. So, in your editor for any word processor or blog editor like through Kulatu, you could actually change the font size. Right?

Or the font type. But there's actually something called the actual style. Right? It's an H1, H2, H3.

You want to have an H2 and H3. At least a couple of them. I would say H2 you can keep with. What this is is, see, in HTML write-up, I don't know if you've ever seen HTML.

Some of you guys will eventually start seeing this stuff. The way the internet sees text is not how we see it. It's actually coding. And when you have an article, and let's say it's how to find the best clients in Baltimore, they actually put this tag before it tags it as H3 and after it closes it as H3.

And then when you turn on to the public view, we see it as humans. We see, oh, the font's bigger. Now, it might only be a little bit bigger. But there's an emphasis.

And what these are are like header breakouts. These are like chapter names. Now, why is this important? If you're reading the Bible and you're reading Psalms, what book are you in?

You're in the book of Psalms. Right? It's like, oh, we're in Psalms. Right?

So, same thing for your article. If you're saying, here are three methods of finding your best customer in Baltimore, number one, finding your best customer, you want to find them using the phone. But in that tag, you want to have that tag. You want to have your keywords.

So, it can be step number one, how to find your best customer in Baltimore, use the phone and have that as your H2 tag. And then have, you know, whatever data that supports that. And then you break into your other section, have another H2 and say, how do you find your best customer in Baltimore? You can say, well, you can use the Internet or use social media.

Now, sometimes this looks weird. So, you might only have to do it once for an H2. Because what happens is Google will send this thing called a spider robot. It's a spider.

It's a thing that crawls the Internet. It's a little thing that goes through all the Internet to index and find out what your blog is about. It's looking for what is being emphasized on your blog. And the only way it knows, it looks at these HTML tags.

Right? And the HTML tags will tell the spider, it's probably about this. Right? And so, if you have like a really big blog post, you have the ability to mix in H2s and H3s more with your keyword.

Now, I do want to emphasize, it needs to look natural. Right. And if there was to weigh the differences, SEO is long term. Right?

Human readership is now. So, don't force it to make it look robotic where you know you're trying to stuff it in there. Don't do that. So, once will be fine.

If it's a very natural keyword for a headline, go ahead and keep doing it. So, that's H2, H3. And then in your body, I would have it bolded one time, italicized one time, and underlined one time. Just somewhere in it.

Just somewhere in it. Right? Where doesn't really matter. I would have three different cases.

And what this really actually does, right, if you can do this, that means you have at least five. You actually probably have six keywords being listed in your article. First paragraph, last paragraph, bold, underlined, italicized, H2. That's six different places right now you have a keyword.

So, if you're talking about keyword density, how many times this keyword actually shows up in your article, you're already forcing like six different times it's in your article. So, when Google sends a little spider, they're like, man, this one phrase is being emphasized. It's being bolded. It's being H2.

It's front and back. I guess it's probably about this keyword, which will probably then give you a, it's a grade a little higher SEO score to be later on for your SEO to bump up. Now, on SEO, just a quick primer, being number 11 is the same as being not listed at all. Okay?

So, being 11 is like being not listed at all. Now, if you want to actually get free organic traffic, absolutely. Ideally, you're above the fold. What that means is if you were to search how to find the best Baltimore customer, you hit search, your screen, however big it is, will only list maybe three to five listings.

Right? Now, the first page of Google is 10, and it has ads. So, depending if the search has ads or how big your screen is, you might only get maybe three to five in the top before you have to search. Before you have to scroll down to see the rest of the page one.

You will dramatically decrease your traffic if you're found on the bottom half of the first page versus the top half of the first page. So, I would say target top five. Top three is the best. Number one is ideal.

But remember, there's only one number one, one number two, one number three. So, you're going to do your best. Right? We can work with this.

Because the thing is, if you automatically are like on page two, you didn't do any kind of off-page SEO. It's only on page because there's no competition. Well, you know, now you work to off-page. Damn, you're getting that juice to really bump you up.

But let's focus on on-page. So, one of the probably the last two things I would do, the second to last one would be you should always include an image. Right? Always include an image.

Now, this is not the all-encompassing SEO. SEO is a science that's being taught for, you know, a long time. And there's a lot of books on that. There's a lot of books on this.

This is a primer. But if you do those things, plus add an image. Right? Two things I want you to do.

Before you upload the image, I want you to name the image your keyword. Name it. So, normally, if you took a photo, it will be like DCNX55 or image6003.jpg. Before you upload it into your WordPress, actually rename the file whatever your keyword is.

And then go ahead and upload it. Right? Now, why is that? It's a file with your keyword sitting on your server being indexed by a robot that goes, damn, I think this article really is about this keyword.

The second thing you want to do on that image, there's something called the alt text. Right? Alternative text. You also want to put the keyword in there too.

So, what happens is if you were to hover a mouse over an image, the keyword should pop up. Right? So, you just hover and you should be able to see it. If you don't see it, go ahead and go to your editor and kind of look.

It will say alt text. Put the keyword in there. This also allows Google to really see what is this image about? Because Google doesn't have yet the ability to see the difference between what a flower looks like or a person's face.

Sometimes it kind of knows. Like Facebook, you got to get that. But the idea is you just, instead of having them kind of guess what an image is, this is what the image is. It's this.

So, label as a keyword. Go and label it. So, the last thing you can do, actually two more things, two more things. The last two things.

So, that's image. One more would be you want to write in a way so that when people who were to search, right, who were to search and when they come into your blog, it needs to be congruent. Because if someone comes in and immediately bounces off and goes, I was looking for pizza. I came to your website.

It's about hot dogs. I'm done. I'm out. Right?

That's not good because Google is actually taking track. They're actually keeping a score. And they're like, wait a minute. People are bouncing off really quickly.

You're probably not serving our Google customers. We're going to go ahead and remove you from the first page. So, having a congruent article that solves the keyword. Because you can write about a keyword all day long.

But if you're actually not serving the keyword, not serving the searcher, the person searching for that keyword, and they bounce out in less than like ten seconds, five seconds, Google knows, wow, I want to keep sending you people. I'm going to bounce you off and get someone else on there. I would say the last thing, before I overwhelm you guys, the last thing you want to do, you need meaty content. So, if you guys are vegetarians, you need a giant salad bowl with fake bacon.

Right? It needs to be big. It needs to be meaty. It needs to be like an authority.

Like I taught this in one of our events. I think it was Nashville. I call it a pillar post. Other websites call it an authority post.

It's an article that you would reference over time. And you would probably update over and over again because it's so good. For example, if you came to a website that says, you know, how to get rich and slim three easy ways. And it's 300 words with one image and it's optimized.

Or you came to another website, same keyword, and it's 4,000 words, got a PDF, a slideshow, a video, and an infograph. And it's got testimonials. It's just full of information. If those are the two same keywords, two different styles of blogs, which one would serve the customer more?

When I say customer, I'm talking about Google being the customer. But this also applies for Facebook because Facebook sees this too. If Facebook is sending traffic from Facebook to your articles, and they hit it and they come right off, they're like, why am I going to let you take our Facebook audience and send them to your thin content on your blog? How do you do that?

Make it meaty. And I would say statistically what they're saying is to rank in the top three, the average article has over 2,000 words. Average article has over 2,000 words. Now, don't be scared about that though.

Don't feel like that's not attainable. If you're typing 40 words a minute and you're blogging every day, if you just blog 30 minutes a day, write a certain topic, one topic, say you have 17 different ways to change your oil and save you money. 17 things you need to remember, tools, processes, and safety measures, 17 things. And so every day, you just did step one.

Next day, you did step two. Next day, you did step three. Now, if you focused and all you spent was your time on that one topic, instead of it just being like two sentences, you might have this like 30-minute really in-depth, the reason why you don't use this motor oil versus this one, choosing the right motor oil. Now, in the big article, it's only one section.

But if you were to blog and you were to build your blog, build this thing out, by the time you're done, it's this huge article piece. And by the time you send it out and syndicate it, people are like, this is ridiculous. I love it. I'm going to share it.

And those are the things we'll be going on to off-page SEO. So in terms of on-page, that's the rough estimate of what you need to be doing. We can go to off-page. Do you have any questions on this, Will?

No, no. This is brilliant. So on-page. We're thinking about the reader because we're wanting to think like Google and Facebook.

Google and Facebook want people to be served. That means it's content-rich. It's well thought out. It's well organized.

It's got pictures. It's got graphics. Maybe it's got a video in there. And then we do the things to hit the keywords.

We want a keyword that has about 500 to 1,000. Ideally, maybe 300 to 500 if we're looking for something a little slimmer. Dude, I think this is like super clear. Let's hit off-page.

Off-page SEO. This is brilliant. Two more things. Keyword, you probably, and then phrase, start with at least three words.

Three words? Three to five. Yeah. Because if you just did two, it's still kind of a broad keyword.

So I would start with three. And then the second thing is if you have a really long blog post, your time, the person stays on there. When an article is 300 words versus 3,000 words, the chances of someone staying much longer on a 3,000 words is much longer. SEO purposes for Google.

I think even Facebook looked at this. How long someone stays, the on-page factor is huge. Right. If someone goes to a website and they're there for like 30 minutes versus three seconds, you're going to get that boost in your ranking.

So that's why you want to build like a really meaty thing. Okay. So let's go to off-page. So off-page are things you can't really edit, change, change the header and the bold and italicize and whatnot.

But actually you kind of can. Right. Now I'm not going to go too much into link building, but I do want to just emphasize the main things about off-page SEO that will take anyone who's brand new to get you to understand what this means. So, um, during, uh, let's say, let's say you have six food trucks and out of six food trucks, one serves pizza, hot dogs, turkey legs, uh, quesadillas.

And mystery, you have 10 bucks and you only have 10 bucks to go to one food cart. When you actually go and buy food from that one food cart is your vote of confidence that I trust that I'm going to give my money to this food cart in exchange for goods. Right. I think about that.

It's called a vote of confidence in backlinking. What this is, is. Another website has a physical link that if someone were on the website, they could click it. It has to be clickable.

They can click it and then it lands on one of your blog posts recommended, not your top level blog, not your main domain, but a very specific blog. So if someone were to click how to recruit on the internet and on their blog, it says how to recruit on the internet. And a visitor were to click it and then they'd get then be transported into your blog post that says 37 ways on how to recruit on the internet. Google's like they're sending their spiders through these, these linked backlinks.

That's an actual link, like a chain link. So the spider will land at one page, then go to your page and go, Hey, it's, it's actually about what they're saying. I'm going to give you a vote of confidence. And I'm going to give you something called, well, depending on how the link structure is, I'm not going to go into that, but it's a solid backlink.

Let me, let me ask a clarifying question about this because there are backlinks now that can get you in trouble too. So when you're, when you're out shopping for them, what are you looking for? I never buy backlinks. Okay.

You never buy them. Just don't even buy it. Just don't even buy it. You'll get penalized.

You could probably buy them. But I think for, for novice intermediate experts. Yeah. For novice intermediate SEO marketers, I wouldn't buy them at this point right now.

Now you can test it if you want, you can test it. And if you want to test them, I would say, think of things called link pyramids. I'm not going to go too deep into that, but basically you can just give the topic and the, like a, like an overview and people can go research it if they want. Yeah.

Just look up link pyramids. If there was something you want to look at and to don't spend a lot of money on this stuff. And, and, and buying a high PR links, high page rank links, but really there's other ways to drive traffic besides actually trying to rank because rankings are a long term strategy that you're probably not even going to touch at this point unless you're actually experienced. And once you're experienced, you're probably reading every single form and everything you can digest about SEO.

But, but just know, just don't buy links. I think that's probably the easiest. Save your money and hire a good ghostwriter. Someone who writes in your name.

Someone who does the hard data, right? Someone who does the actual research, right? Actually pay that writer. That's way more beneficial than getting backlinks.

So back to the criteria of backlinks. So it's a vote of confidence that someone on their website that you don't own is actually using something called an anchor text, like an anchor where you drop an anchor on a boat and anchor text. It's the actual clickable keywords. Clickable keywords that are now going to your website.

Now, let's say you have nbc.com or cnn.com or Huffington post on their main website. And it said, it said how to build a business. It's clickable and it goes to your website. That backlink would be a monstrous backlink.

It's coming from a huge website with a lot of authority. Plus there's probably a lot of people going through it. That backlink would be a hundred times more important than small backlinks from unknown websites from small forums. So then the question is, okay, if I'm going to be building backlinks, I want the good backlinks from big websites.

You can't buy those. And the ones you want to buy by the time, you know, maybe you have to pay every month. It's just gets, it gets messy, right? You can do it.

I'd recommend it only as a last case. Like if you're like number five and you've tried everything. To get that one last bump to number four, number three, you can play with it. But for right now, don't mess with that.

Just know you need to be building backlinks. All right. You need to be building backlinks. Now, here are some really interesting ways to manufacture your backlinks.

I don't go too deep into this, but it'll get your brain moving. Anything or any, uh, profile, sub-site, social media sites. Web 2.0 site that you currently have access to that has the ability to have a link. I would link it to the things you care about.

So an example, and the reason about this is like, um, let's say your Twitter account in your Twitter account, you have a profile section. It's like, you know, 50 words max. And then you have a website there. That link right there is high visibility.

It is being indexed by Google and their spiders. So if you're trying to rank something, maybe your main domain, maybe your capture page or sales page, you can have that clickable. Now having an anchor text, an actual word is better than just like a raw click here or a raw URL. But you know what?

A backlink is a backlink. You want as many as you can. So you could be sending backlinks from your Pinterest account, all the images. You could be sending stuff from your Twitter account, Facebook.

You can send it through your other blog posts. Think about that. If you have 50 blog posts and 49 of them are talking about how to exercise and lose weight without actually exercising and losing weight, like what the heck? But they all go to this one blog post, which is like your ultimate 57 step guide to losing weight.

You are building is, is, is an internal backlink interlinking into something inside your website. It's not as strong because it's not. It's inside your website, but it's an actual link. Now think about that.

If you take that same idea and go out, you're getting these backlinks. Now I want to emphasize, and we'll, we'll probably end it on this offer off page. The best way to get quality backlinks is to actually work with other webmasters, authors, writers, and bloggers. That is the best way.

But you know what? There is no way someone is going to backlink to you. If your article, why would they do it? Why would they go into their article?

Click edit, type in your anchor text and link to you and spend that time. Why? It makes no sense. So it only makes sense if your content is like the Mac daddy of them all.

And they're like, I want to share this. Because it's so great that their audience would love it, dig it, and would appreciate that reference. Right? Because once you start being referenced, that's the key.

The backlink has been a reference. Then you start getting some really big backlinks. An example, let's say you have the definitive guide to X, Y, Z. Well, Wikipedia has references.

And if Wikipedia is on the topic of X, Y, Z, and you are the man or woman that talks about this product or topic on X, Y, Z, they will link to you as reference material. You are the reference material. In terms of Google, they're like, dang, everyone's referencing your material. Those are the best backlinks to build.

They're sticky. Why? Because they want to do it. They want to do it.

And I would say the last tip, last tip that's been working extraordinarily well for me and has worked for a good two years. Two years is you backlink to someone else. You might be thinking, but Lawrence, that's opposite. Right?

Think about this. If you reference to some other person, now you go to them on Twitter, Facebook, email, web form on their website, and you go, Manuel, I really loved your article about being able to break through. I have an audience that really loves motivational information and getting breakthroughs in their lives. And I referenced one of your articles here.

I loved it. And I referenced it in my article about the 37 different ways on how to make more money and live a free life on my article here. Now, if you believe my article brings value to your audience and blog readers, I would love for you to share it and comment on it. Either way, I appreciate your time.

Thanks. I appreciate it, Dave. Thanks for taking the time to be here. I appreciate it.

Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thanks, Gabe. Thank you both. Joe, thanks for the wonderful handshake.

You went through three quite a few conversations. Just were too Elizabeth, I was surprised by that. Rob Concord, which is like super crate. Just like Shangri-La.

Where did you start, Jordan? Shut up, YouTube. Yes, one of the first five concerts Fool Change of Man เห diagrams thatally happened. I 그렇تles you apparently, but basically, not because you wrote the article.

I just felt like I FEEL FOR YOU. I REGRET THE TABLEadd somthing happened, while everyone had an fourth and they sent everyone a flyer. percent of the people to respond to you but if your whole point of writing a blog post is to be informational and serve your audience referencing key industry leaders people who know what they're doing and good content and reference material it only makes sense to reference other people and then tell them about it don't just be like i referenced you you will eventually find out that i did reference you no you physically have this content schedule where you were like i wrote my article it's time to build backlinks because when i tell people when you're blogging right 80 your time is off page so you have to think about this if it took you a week to write an article why would you just like put it on the shelf and let it collect dust that makes no sense this is kind of like your little manuscript right it is time to shout it out so you're then to i'm like translating for like a new guy so like 80 of your time is on blog syndication distribution 20 of your time is writing it yeah yeah yeah so that's why it's opposite so like the average person who comes in who like i want to blog they submit a blog they blog every day but they spend zero time in promotion and they're like well how come i'm not getting traction how come people aren't leaving comments how come people aren't engaging and come into my website it's because the only way you're going to get traffic is if someone stumbled upon you i've actually tripped and fell into your website which doesn't happen which doesn't happen not anymore not these days unless you're really influential right so what you do instead is you spend your time on writing good content once a week once a month right primarily once a week if you can do it once a month is okay too because the thing is you can always update the blog update it for 2016 and then you're getting all your time in writing blogs uh writing content to come back so what so so then the question is like okay launch i just spent 10 hours writing this blog i'm not going to do it for you blog post.

It took me about two weeks. How can I spend another 10, 20, 30, 40 hours on promoting it? I've already put it on my social media sites. I've already syndicated it.

That's like, that took an hour. Here's how you do it. You write guest posts. What the heck is a guest post?

You go to places like Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Inc. You go to all these other websites, like blogs, like all, like there's thousands of these blogs in your niche and you talk to their headmaster. Hi, my name is Lawrence Sam. I have this really cool article.

I'm a blogger, but what I would like to do is write for your blog. And this is the style of how I write. If your article is like 6,000 words, right? And is like the awesomeness of the internet and the webmaster or editor sees this, they're like, dude, I want you to write for my blog.

So you write on their blog, and all you ask is, I would like the ability to have at least two backlinks, one in the actual article and one in my signature. And if I can do that, I would love to write you some content. Some of these blogs only require like 500 words, maybe a thousand max. So now when you're blogging, you're not exactly blogging on your own blog.

You're blogging on other people's platforms. Why? They have traffic, right? They are going to send their stuff, which is actually you.

And if your content's good, you have two types of backlinks, one in the body, which is different than one in the signature, because you can use an anchor text, right? And then you send those people to your blog. So now if you're spending your time actually being a guest blogger, shooting videos, writing content, doing Instagram stuff, going to forums, marketing forums, and you have this link in your signature, build as much as you can by yourself until the point you're like, no, I think I've done everything I can. Maybe it's time to hire someone to do off page SEO.

You know, at that point, if you did it right and your article is awesome, people are going to share it. People are going to find it. And then I would say the next step would then be drive paid traffic to it. Actually drive Facebook people that are interested.

So if your article is about 67 ways to eat clean and still stay in budget, it's just this great article. You go to Facebook, you target people in the health niches, and then you send those people into that blog post. Those people are then like, this is awesome. They'll share it on Facebook.

So now you're getting them to syndicate you, right? With their audience. And then maybe an editor picks you up. It's like, Hey, we would love to republish yours in one of our journals or whatever.

That's the way to do it. It all starts with great content. If it's not, I have a, I have a quick, I have a quick question. So, um, I mean, and this is just something that, that seems obvious to me, but maybe it's not obvious to somebody out there, but if somebody has the standard EN blog and they've done like zero customization on it and they go and they do a Facebook ad with it, what's the likelihood that they're going to get their ad accounts slapped?

How good, how good is that article? Well, let's say it's even a good article, but it's got the standard blog theme with the, all the make money stuff around it. Yeah. The make money stuff is kind of tricky.

You probably want to strip most of that stuff off. Um, when I say strip, I mean, instead of sending it to straight to a funnel where you make money, send it to, Hey, I got a really cool blog post that teaches you three things on how to do yoga. You know what I mean? It's a little longer process, but in terms of every ad platform in terms of paid, this is a whole new subset of marketing, but it's paid advertising.

So you're not going to have success if you're not going to comply with their ad platform. You're not going to have success if you're not going to comply with their ad platform. So you're not going to have success if you're not going to comply with their ad platform. And Facebook in particular does not like make money.

They don't like Forex. They don't like dating. They don't like gambling. They don't like, I mean, not to say it's illegal.

I mean, obviously it's illegal in many places, right? But on Facebook, they don't like it. Drinking, alcohol, smoking. So if you remove all that stuff and just make it kosher, have it sent to valuable things that you've built, lead maggots that you've done, webinar invites that you have, whatever that is, um, connecting with you back on Facebook.

Once you have all that, and then you have, I think Facebook, you need to have like a, um, a policy. You have like a couple of footers, income disclaimer, contact me page in a privacy policy, right? You're basically telling the users, this is what our site's about. This is what we do with your information.

Um, as long as you have most of that stuff, Facebook actually favors blogs, but I would probably, and here's, here's, here's one thing I should probably put out there. If you are using the get money blog, you probably want to turn off that pop-up most. And I don't know if you can, so you might have to use a different theme. So that's just something to maybe, uh, hit up support with or test it out.

Cause not everyone's going to do paid traffic to their blog, right? This is more of an advanced tactic. But if you're, if you're thinking about doing this, you want to stop pop-ups because one of the things that Facebook dislikes is pop unders pop-ups and exit pops. So they don't like exit pops either.

No, I wouldn't do it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you look at like a, yeah, I just, I, I wouldn't risk it.

Right. So, but they love blogs because it's content rich. And I mean, if you think about it, if Facebook were you, if you were to send them to a capture page versus a good blog post, that person stays on a long blog post a lot longer than a capture page. So Facebook knows this, right?

So, okay. So, um, so that means, okay, Facebook, Facebook marketing. And I would say the next phase would be to drop a Facebook pixel on your content. Cause let's say you're spending, 50 bucks a month, right.

On, on promoting your blog posts, 50 bucks a month, and you're sending people to your blog, right? And what happens is with Facebook, you can build this audience of every single person who actually engaged with it, right? Every single person and right. Every person who's engaging with it, that didn't come through your page channels.

Maybe they shared it. Maybe they emailed their email database or maybe Google sent people there. This pixel is now kind of like, I don't know if those, those little things were like, if you roll it on grass, there's that little like spiky ball that gets stuck on your shirt. It's kind of like that.

You don't really notice it. It won't hurt. This one doesn't hurt, right? Now, sometimes you get stuck.

It might hurt. It doesn't hurt. Yeah. It's like, it's stuck on you.

It's like a little sticker, right? Stuck it to you. And they don't have to come from Facebook. They could have came from YouTube.

They could come from Instagram, Pinterest, Google. But when that person logs into Facebook, you have an audience. Right. And you can just send them a different ad, maybe a different lead magnet, maybe a different blog post.

That's very similar in that niche, or maybe just to drive them into your Facebook page so that you can show them the video marketing and what you do. That's more of an advanced strategy. But the idea of why a blog is done that way, people, it's hard for people to buy on the first take. It's like dating.

Most people have to go for a couple of dates, right? One date. That's very like non salesy. Yeah.

And the other thing that's really crazy is to send them to a blog post versus like a capture sales, especially through paid ads, especially through Facebook. You want to warm them up, grab their email, send them some cool emails, send them to a couple more blog posts and videos, then sell them through email, right? Or send them through a different type of funnel that they've already seen you a couple times. That's probably the best way to build it on any platform.

So you're warming them up first. In fact, I think it was last year at the Traffic and Conversion Summit, the digital marketing summit. Yeah. That was the first thing that a marketing marketer puts on.

They were talking about this very strategy. They had tested sending people right to a capture page versus sending them to a blog post, pixeling them, and then retargeting them with the same or with a related lead magnet. And while their cost per opt-in stayed about the same, their cost per sale conversion dropped by like 50% or something. Yeah.

Because you're actually building a brand that you are the authority and you gave all this great content away. Yeah. And by the time you give something else, something small like a lead magnet or maybe you are selling to them, it's way better. It just makes sense for them to want to buy from you because you've given away so much of it for free.

It's a longer process, but it does play into the game of what Facebook wants. Well, it plays in the game of building an audience. I mean, I think that Ryan Dice was saying that, in his opinion, the new measurement was cost per pixel was the standard, the new measurement was the cost per pixel. Yeah.

And the new measurement was the cost per pixel. kind of the standard the standard i think that's really right in line with what you're saying yeah he wants to drop pixels and and that's his thing he wants to follow you around the internet yeah yeah yeah right it's like yeah friendly friendly facebook friendly facebook stalking or friendly adderall stock it is it is awesome well good stuff man i i think that uh i think that we we wanted to keep this concise i think for those that are interested in blogging um there's just a this was a gold mine i mean i i don't know about you but you know as you're listening to this but i mean i took you know eight pages of notes four pages front and back i've got some actionable strategies and it all starts with writing good content and targeting keywords and so lawrence man is there anything you want to say in closing or um yeah um i think in closing blogging has been the most profitable marketing strategy i have ever ran since 2009 which is basically before empower and i've done a lot of different things that's made money but in terms of blogging i'll make sales from people four years ago who read a blog post and eventually got back into the industry and that's kind of like i read your blog post a long time ago and you'll make these sales organically as you get better these blogs the type of customer who comes through those is much warmer they they've they've been indoctrinated through your process of how you write who you are your personality um the value of that customer will always be higher than someone through cold traffic right yeah yeah beautiful well i love it man i just wanted to say thank you i got a ton out of this i'm gonna need to retool some things with the way i'm blogging um i'm already one that wants to provide a lot of value when i blog but now i've got some more tactics i think that are that are actionable so i just wanted to say for me thank you and from everyone who's watching this like especially if you're in the i mean if you're watching this you're in the next you're in the next level breakthrough coaching right now um go in and check out his uh blogs that are posted in the blog syndication thread read them from top to bottom look at them with the strategy cap based on the notes that you just took comment on his blog give him some love share his post but look at what he's doing because um i mean when i went and i was like okay i'm posting my blog up there i'm going i'm syndicating five people you know the first three bought blog and i'm not talking bad about anybody you know good blog posts but people got like 300 words 200 words 100 words yes 700 words and then i go to lawrence's post and i'm like holy shazam you know this is like you know infographics videos you know 40 pages of text you know and like you know then a bunch of comments and stuff and i'm like i'm like whoa i mean there was one on instagram and i was like i know nothing about instagram right and i read this and i'm like i could probably go to instagram marketing yeah the really solid stuff so i just wanted to say thank you for sharing your expertise and i know you say that you're not the best blogger in the company but and for not being the best blogger so love you appreciate it and um we'll see you uh we'll see you here in a couple hours yeah thank you very much okay