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Podcast

Episode #155 – Link-Building Tactics For Real Estate Investors with Tessah Aihara


The real estate investing industry is stuck in the past. And relying on old-school marketing strategies that used to work is a recipe for failure today.

This includes SEO and content marketing. Realtors and agents have left real estate investors in the dust when it comes to SEO marketing. And this could doom the real estate investing industry in the near future.

But how do you create content and focus on SEO when you have a million other things to do and aren’t a great writer?

In this episode, Tessah Aihara, SEO expert and owner of The SEO Mama, joins me to reveal simple SEO strategies that helps your content close more deals.

Listen to the episode now before the entire real estate investing industry gets left behind. This is the future of online marketing!

Show highlights include:

  • The “Hone Everyday” filter for selecting an SEO agency that delivers the results you promise ([5:24])
  • How to create massive PR campaigns (even if you can’t get into major media publications) ([5:57])
  • The cold, hard truth about why link-building isn’t as effective for SEO as it once was (and the “outcome” mindset that helps you build links that drive sales) ([10:02])
  • The insidious “Illusion of Activity” trick SEO agencies use to steal your money in plain sight ([13:28])
  • Why designing your content strategy like a restaurant menu gives you a positive ROI from SEO ([16:50])
  • How ranking for niche searches with a fraction of the traffic volume drives better SEO results for real estate investors than targeting “we buy homes” ([20:49])
  • The “Content Cluster” SEO strategy that makes Google want to rank you higher than your competitors ([23:57])
  • Why it takes at least 8 months for Google to notice your articles (and how to use this to build a profitable SEO strategy) ([30:39])
  • How to compete with other real estate investors pumping out 100 articles a months (without writing nearly as many posts) ([31:21])
  • Why thinking about your content like products in a store makes it profitable instead of a massive waste of time and money ([33:18])

Need help with your SEO and content marketing strategy? You can book a free strategy call and discover your top 10 SEO opportunities for you at https://theseomama.com/.

Need help with your online marketing? Jump on a FREE strategy session with our team. We’ll dive deep into your market and help you build a custom strategy for finding motivated seller leads online. Schedule for free here: https://adwordsnerds.com/strategy

To get the latest updates directly from Dan and discuss business with other real estate investors, join the REI marketing nerds Facebook group here: https://adwordsnerds.com/group.

Want to find motivated seller leads online but don’t know where to start? Download the free Motivated Seller Keyword Report today at https://adwordsnerds.com/keywords.

For more actionable advice like this episode, check out the REI Nerds YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/adwordsnerds.

Read Full Transcript

You're listening to the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high-tech digital agency, focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition, and live a freer, more awesome life. And, now, your host, Dan Barrett.

Dan: All right. I'm here with Tessa Aihara. Tessa, how are you?

Tessa: I'm good, so happy to be here.

Dan: See, I wasn't kidding about a fast start. I just get right into it. I ask the tough questions right off the bat. Super excited to have you on the show. We've been trying to get this set up for a while and I am super, super excited to talk to you and learn a little bit about what you do. [01:02.8]

Let's start at the beginning. For people who don't know you, describe what you do. You have this business—which, by the way, if you are listening to this right now, you should definitely go and check out Tessa’s website. I'll talk about why in a little bit, but that is at TheSEOMama.com. Tessa, who is the SEO Mama and what does she do?

Tessa: I’m the SEO Mama.

Dan: Okay, all right, good. We got that one right off the bat. That's good.

Tessa: Yeah, I want to clear that up. Anyway, we are an SEO agency. We primarily help our clients to do their content strategy, meaning, we help the clients with what to put on their blog, so then it would be beneficial to their audience. That is our expertise, and also we've been having good results for our clients in the digital PR world, meaning, we help our clients after they have this good content on their blog. Then we help them to amplify those content and reach their target audience by getting them in big media publications in the high-authority sites. [02:15.5]

Dan: I'm super excited to talk about this and just to kind of back up to give people a little bit of context, in general, on the REI Marketing Nerds podcast, what I'm doing is bringing to the real estate investing community stuff that we are experimenting with, stuff that we are excited about—and, just to be clear, I am working with Tessa on AdWordsNerds.com, so she's helping me with my own stuff, which is why I wanted to bring her in and share her with the audience here.

I wanted to touch a little bit, you mentioned content, right? You mentioned content strategy. It's got SEO in the name, so clearly we're talking about organic marketing. But I wanted to zero in for just a minute on digital PR, which is what you just called it. [03:04.0]

Can you explain to people, what is digital PR? How is it different from kind of traditional SEO? And why did you plant your flag in that space, as opposed to just saying, Hey, I'm an SEO agency, or something like that?

Tessa: Part of it is, one, I struggled to find a decent service when it comes to promoting and amplifying your brand, and in the agency, we have our own sites, meaning, we have our in-house projects where we build, rank and flip websites, because that is the original business that I had before. We still have those, so we have our own sites, so we test. We build them from scratch, and after we have those decent content using our own strategies, we have our blogs and whatnot.

Then the next step is to promote your brand or your blogs or your sites out there, and what we have seen is that there are a lot of services out there where they do guest posting, they do all sorts of [strategies]. They call it link-building. It's just that you build links and you go out there and you just want to have some exposure. [04:11.5]

But what I’ve seen is all of these strategies out there are not something that I want quality-wise, and, of course, the cost is there. I just said, why not build something that I could use long term? And if it's good enough, I could offer it to the clients.

Dan: Yeah. One of my favorite things about you, not to cut you off, sorry, but one of my favorite things about your service is my friend, Nick, always says this, right, that you want a service where they eat their own dog food, which is basically like they use the thing that they do. You had this whole business, flipping websites and doing SEO and making money from SEO just for yourself, and you are bringing that service to the market, which is super awesome. [05:01.0]

Tessa: Yes. Just to kind of add a bit on that, I always say to my clients that I'm not going to do something on your site that I'm not going to be happy to do on my own sites, meaning, what I'm going to do is something that would work and something that I’ve tested in the sites that I’ve worked with.

I also partner with really good niche site builders and we have flipped sides in the past, so I learn and always hone my craft. I mean, ranking your sites, all of the SEO specialists out there would agree that that is the best way to test your skills, to hone your skills and to learn the strategies that work. I mean, SEO and digital marketing, they change too fast that you need to hone your skills every day. Building your sites keeps you grounded and keeps you with all these new strategies and Google rules and updates and algo updates and whatnot.

Going back to your question, what is digital PR? It's public relations, right? There is traditional PR where you get your brands and magazines, and you know the traditional magazines and where you also get your brand on TV or on radio stations. [06:14.0]

But, nowadays, because we have the internet, it's so common for a brand to reach out to influencers, to famous people on Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube, so there are these influencers and marketing, and also reaching to blogs that have traction in their niche. That is what we do with digital PR. We really kind of target your niche, see what your competition is doing that you could leverage, and then you could do better, because that describes the competition.

I mean, if your competition is doing this, promoting their brand on these sites and they have this target audience, then we would kind of check, okay, so this is your competition. We don't just analyze the competition. We see what the advantage is that we could get from it or we could give. What is our advantage over the competition? And if we have this advantage, let's focus on that. Let's promote on that. Let's target that. We heed that angle. That's what we do with the digital PR thing. [07:15.3]

Dan: Yeah. You're hitting on two really critical things and I want to tease that out a little bit because there are two really important reasons that I wanted to have you on specifically to talk to real estate investors, right? And if you're a real estate investor and you're listening to this—I hope you are. Otherwise, I don't know why you're listening to this podcast. So, you're a real estate investor and you're listening to this—there are two things I really want to underline that Tessa is getting at.

One is there's a shift in the larger industry. I've talked about this on this podcast multiple times. You can go back and find several different episodes where I mentioned this, movement from a market that is purely problem-aware, meaning, our market as investors doing marketing, our market is sellers, and a problem-aware market for sellers is “I have a house and I want to sell it” and that's all they know about, right? [08:06.5]

When you have a problem-aware market, all you have to do is approach them with a novel solution. For decades, real estate investors have marketed in that way. You send a seller a postcard that says, I'm an investor, I will buy your house for cash. That's all you needed to do, just say what you did out loud.

That market is very much shifted now to a solution-aware market where they know investors exist. Everybody knows what investors are. Investors are on HGTV nearly 24 hours a day flipping houses. People get it. Everyone has got the postcards. Everyone sees the bandit signs. Everybody sees the billboards. They see the radio ads. Everybody knows investors are a thing.

Now what matters is your brand in particular. You have to answer the question, why you versus the nine other investors that contacted me this week, and for that kind of market brand-awareness is critical. It is critical to understand that shift from just doing marketing to doing brand marketing and building equity in a community over time. [09:11.5]

The other thing that you just hit on, Tessa, that I think is really fascinating is this shift in link-building, the specific technical aspect of SEO that we're talking about, where you are building high quality content and links back to your website. The standard for that is just way different.

Let me give you a question here. Many investors that are going to listen to this, they know that for SEO, they need to build links, right? Everybody says you need to build links for SEO and they're generally going to go out and pay somebody 500 bucks and that person is going to build them 40 links a month, I don't know, commenting on some log from 1997 or I don't know what they're going to do. Right? They're going to do some kind of weird shady thing. [10:01.5]

If someone came to you and they said, Hey, I'm a real estate investor. I've been building links this way. Why should I change my approach? Why should I build links your way versus the old way? What would you tell that person?

Tessa: I mean, just a disclaimer, I used to do those kinds of things, so I know.

Dan: Yeah, we all did. I did, too. Both of us.

Tessa: Right. That was it, right?

Dan: Because it used to work, right?

Tessa: Right.

Dan: I mean, that's the whole point. It used to work.

Tessa: At one point, it used to work. Yeah, that's the exact word actually. It “used to work.” I mean, everything changes. Everything evolves. To be honest, what we're trying to do right now is I’ve learned that we marketers, we need to shift our mindset from output versus outcome. I think I’ve told you this, Dan, before that.

Now, as an agency, we don't just think about output. We also think about outcome. Link building or building links is like that. I mean, it's a vanity. At the end of the day, how many links do you build? What are the metrics of those sites? [11:02.7]

At the end of the day, it's a vanity, unless it does something to your business, meaning, the output are the links that you build, but what is the outcome in your business perspective, business-perspective-wise?

My thing is we are kind of offering you a link-building or a campaign, a digital PR campaign, that has measurable results, meaning, Hey, Tessa, I want links. I want to be promoted. I want my brand to be amplified out there. Then my first question would be, Why? because if you just want links, then you have other vendors there that you can ask for, because, definitely, I'm going to onboard you if you know what your “why” is, because I don't know that, for sure, so I need to know, what's your why?

Then we could tell you, Okay, do you want extra signups or do you want additional signups on your emails, or do you want a service that you want to promote or do you want engagement? Do you want brand awareness? Because that's why we build links. [12:04.8]

We don't just build links just for the sake of it, just to say to people, Hey, I have 20 or 80 links by the way. Oh, hey, I think my competitors have 70 onwards links, so I’ve got to have them. No. The mindset we have is, okay, I want this exposure because I want these results and these results could be measured by these X KPIs.

That's the reason they're going to hire. Actually, all of the clients that we have onboarded are happy that, finally, there is a link-building service that they could hire and they could expect results outside of the metrics that other vendors have been offering.

For example, at the end of the day, you're not going to get an Excel spreadsheet that contains the DRs of the domains that we've placed here and the link to the actual post. Now you're going to get the content asset, how many engagement it drove, how many sign ups you've had, or how many conversions we had for that if those are your target KPIs. Again, it's always depending on your target. Did I answer your question? [13:15.0]

Dan: Right. Yeah, it depends on the client. No, that's perfect and I love it. I actually wrote it down and I started, right, this idea of moving from output to outcome, and I think for SEO and, look, I did SEO for six years before I moved into PPP. We still do SEO at AdWords Nerds today.

The thing that I have noticed over and over again is the vast majority of work that SEO agencies do is designed to produce the I don't want to say illusion, but to produce the appearance of activity, because when you are paying an SEO agency, you want stuff to be happening for that money. The worst feeling is I paid this person $2,000 and they didn't do anything, right? [14:07.6]

And so SEO agencies tend to have all this work that they do because, like you said, I can put it in a spreadsheet and say six rows were added to the spreadsheet this month but ultimately very few of those things actually produce revenue in the case of a real estate investor. Right? Very few of the things that you are doing on your website are actually producing motivated-seller leads and deals and in the end, that is all that actually matters.

I think one of the things that's so cool about the work that you do is that you are very, I think, observant in your understanding that people are only going to hire agencies moving forward that actually produce an outcome that is needed. Ultimately, nobody needs a hundred citations just because that's a thing that SEO agencies can do, right? You want clients, you want deals, you want leads, whatever it is. [15:08.6]

Talk to me a little bit about content strategy. You mentioned that early, and a big part of what you do is, just like you said, getting people onto the websites that really matter for driving the ultimate outcome, right? I could link to you all day from a Russian CD-sharing website, but if that's not what you do, it doesn't really matter.

A big part of that is having the content that people actually want to link to that you can actually get published. How do you think about content strategy? Or let's frame it this way. If you were going to sit down with a real estate investor today and talk about really changing their content strategy to improve their marketing, what would be some of the questions you would ask them and how would you get them started on that process? [15:56.8]

Tessa: First, I'm going to ask maybe, what does their audience persona look like? How does it look? Because, at the end of the day, those people are their target audience, so they really need to know what the pain points are of these people, what makes them stop and read what they're reading on the blog. I mean, what would make them click or look back and feel, Oh, I need that content, I'm going to save that content, I'm going to bookmark that one because I really want to consume that content?

Now Google is so smart that, if you're just going to put random content in your blog and people are not staying, people are bouncing, Google would sense, Oh, this site is not useful, I'm not going to rack it. I'm going to burn it. I'm going to burn it in the top 20 results.

Dan: Right. [16:51.3]

Tessa: Meaning, first, it's snubbing your audience. It's a cliché that you need to know your audience. Then it's just kind of like reverse-engineering. Okay, my target audience is people who want to sell their houses fast. Okay, so who are these people? Are they college graduates or do they love games? Are they housewives or are they singles, or what is the demographic? Then what do they like to read? What do they like to consume? Where do they hang out? Because, once we have that information, then we know what to write, what to serve on them.

It's kind of like opening a restaurant, right? If you're a Filipino restaurant, if you're a Japanese restaurant, obviously your target people or target customers are Japanese. You're not going to cook Thai food in a Japanese restaurant.

Dan: Hot dogs and cheeseburgers.

Tessa: Right, hotdogs and whatnot, because people would leave. Exactly, oh my god, this is a very good example, so random. But, I mean, people would just leave. Oh my god, I thought this was a Japanese restaurant, but all they have is Thai food. Let's go out. It’s kind of like that in your sites. You’ve got to have that good content, or else, people would just leave and would just bounce off, and then Google would penalize your site, meaning, it would index your site and would not find your site. [18:07.7]

That is where we start, and then, after that we know your audience. Then you know what to serve them. Then my next step is this. Okay, you know your audience. The next step is let's do some competitive analysis, because I believe SEO is not a rocket science. No one needs to invent new things. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You don't need to waste your time thinking of those unique ideas, because we are on the internet. All things are out there.

You’ve just got to reverse-engineer. You’ve just got to learn from others, collaborate with people, collaborate with your competition, understand everything, and then see what your advantage over them is. Okay, they're doing this. I'm going to reverse-engineer that I'm going to see where I could come in using my own branding, using my own perspective, and then I'm going to make their content way better, so then people would start also considering my website or my content. [19:07.0]

Then that’s when Google would notice you. Oh, people are clicking on that site, and when the people click on that side, they stay. I need to make sure that that side shows off more often when someone searches for invest or real estate investor-related terms.

Dan: Yeah.

Tessa: It's how I think it works.

Want to find motivated-seller leads online, but don’t know where to start? Download our free Motivated Seller Keyword Report today. AdWords Nerds have spent over $5,000,000 this year researching the most profitable keywords for finding motivated-seller leads, and you can grab these exact keywords when you download our report at www.AdWordsNerds.com/keywords.

Dan: When you are looking at competitors, you are looking at other people ranking in a space. It sounds like, I mean, I'm sure you look at, for example, the domain, the DR of their links or whatever. [20:13.3]

Tessa: Yeah.

Dan: But it sounds like you're also doing more kind of general sort of qualitative research. You're thinking about the types of content that they're doing. When you do competitor research, what are two or three things that you tend to look for or care about that you think other real estate investors could look at their competitors and sort of think about it as well.

Tessa: First, of course, it's easy to just check their metrics because, I mean, all things equal, higher DA or DR means a stronger, a strong brand or a strong site. If a site is really, really strong, I'm going to skip it, because then I'm just going to see very high-level kinds of terms, which I will not be able to compete with. [21:00.0]

Dan: Right.

Tessa: I mean, we want to make sure that we work art as well. When we do SEO campaigning content strategy, we want to have short-term wins and long-term wins, meaning, you don't want to waste your time or bore the clients kind of like, Okay, we've been working for one year, I haven't seen any rankings or I haven't seen my content out there. It's just because you targeted very competitive keywords or topics.

Dan: Yeah.

Tessa: So, let's focus on the small wins first, so then you would have more motivation, so then you would have more budget to target those very, very competitive terms. By the way, once you target first the short-term wins or the easy wins, you build up your relevancy, topical relevance, so it would be easier for you to tackle those competitive keywords.

Let's say, for example, I could not think of any real estate investor keywords, so let's say, for example, I'm a website owner who is talking about sewing machines. That’s always an example, always. [22:10.5]

Dan: Huge, super-hot EO market right now, so, yeah, super-hot.

Tessa: Just because I had a sewing machine site before that got really successful. We all know sewing machines they buy randomly from strangers on Google. Pretty much there would be big makers out there like Janome, Brother, and Singer would pop up on Google, no doubt on that, so meaning, it's not smart and unwise for me to target that keyword.

Why not let's go five steps back, maybe to the best sewing machines for children. That is too targeted. I mean, too targeted out there, too niche, but that said, there is volume out there, children. We all know that parents love to please their children. Children. There are a lot of children in the world, and so a lot of people would be interested to know what the best sewing machines are for children. True enough, this is my number one keyword on that site, and that site, I sold it for six figures, by the way, so that's kind of ... [23:13.5]

Dan: Wow. Seriously, wow. Okay, listen, folks, if you're listening and you're wondering if Tessa knows what she's talking about, she knows what she’s talking about, all right? She’s flipping sewing machine websites for more than real estate deals go for.

Tessa: So funny.

Dan: Yeah, I don’t know, maybe listen up. Maybe listen up to her advice. Okay, so you were saying, all right, we're going after kind of the longer tail, what we call the “longer tail”.

Tessa: Yes.

Dan: The sort of more niche sort of opportunities for keywords that builds our topical relevancy and that's what helps us kind of get into those more competitive keywords, the stuff that is like everybody is going for them right off the bat. Is that what you're saying?

Tessa: Yes, yes, because it's all about topic-clustering right now. I mean, if Google sees that you are ranking on the lower-tier content, then obviously you also build your relevance. [24:09.8]

For example, if you're discussing the best sewing machines for children, obviously you're going to discuss also best sewing machines for crafters. Then as you build this lower-tier content, you are building a kind of cluster, a topic cluster about solving machines, so your site is the meta when it comes to sewing machines, once you have completed all of these clusters.

Yeah, that's one thing that I want to also point out that we do topic-clustering. That's part of the content strategy that’s very, very important. It's not about just keywords, but because of the development in Google LSI and NLP, it's important that you tackle topics.

That starts from knowing your audience, because when you know your audience, you know all the topics that might interest them and their pain points and whatnot. Then you have those topics in your mind, and I'm pretty sure every marketer who is working with their market, with their niche or with their audience knows all of these pain points. [25:08.0]

I want to go back to your question about what metrics I consider. First, the site metric. If it's competitive, I don't include it in my research. I want to target the low competitive domains, because I know if I find—what do you call it?—a weak site, meaning, DA 20 or DR 20 below that are ranking, meaning, it's doable. If that site is ranking, I'm going to rank as well.

Dan: Right, okay, so to back up, just in case people don't know some of the terminology, basically what you're saying is so DA, domain authority, DR, domain ranking, basically the same thing. They're kind of these calculated metrics you get from different tools that judge essentially how strong a domain is in the SEO world.

What you are doing is you look out at the competitive landscape and, look, if you're an investor and you look out and you see the Zillow, for example, is ranking for “sell my house fast”, you can just go ahead and leave that one off because you're not ready to compete with Zillow yet. Someday, but not right now. [26:10.7]

Instead, what you're looking for, what you are saying is, weaker sites that are sort of more in your peer group that you can start thinking about competing with because that's where you're going to make early progress. Is that about right?

Tessa: Exactly, and also I want to point out that make sure that that outside you're considering is also the peg that you want to follow. I mean, for example, if you saw IKEA, just a random example, let's say IKEA is a low-DR site, it’s a weak site. IKEA is an e-comm site, so you don't want to put IKEA in your research because, one, you're not an e-comm site. Unless you're an e-comm site, [then] that is a good site to consider. You want to make sure.

Dan: You’ve got to be real competitors, right? They’ve got to be people doing the kind of thing that you want to do.

Tessa: Exactly.

Dan: Okay, got it. [26:59.6]

Tessa: You want to make sure that it's right in the niche and also the DR is there, weak site. Then the next thing is, are they putting up content out there? Because you want to study blogs or sites that would primarily use content marketing as a strategy to drive organic traffic.

Dan: Got it.

Tessa: Also, one thing, I also want to make sure that the site is not an aged domain or that it's not old. I want to make sure about the age. I see the age. I check the age as well because that is a factor. For example, the site is weak. It's a DR 0, less than DR 20.

But down the road, you’ll notice that I’ve been working, trying to kind of beat this site, but I haven't had a chance to outrank this site. Why? Because a lot of sites right now in the search are aged domains, meaning, they've been used before, but they've been dropped and they've been re-registered again. Is that a word, “re-registering”? [28:00.6]

Dan: Okay.

Tessa: That’s a factor.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, so you're talking about a domain that has been around for a long time, and then that company maybe goes out of business or whatever. They don't renew the domain.

Tessa: Yes.

Dan: Someone kind of scooped that up. They'll register that domain name. They'll put a different site there, but because the domain was there in Google for a long time, maybe it still has links.

I'll give you an example. I have a client, because they didn't do this on purpose, but they registered a domain name for their business name, and it just so happened that their business name was also the name of a band that was active in 2000 to 2005 and then isn't a band anymore. They have all these links still to their domain from CD-review sites from 2005. If they had done that deliberately, that might be a strategy of kind of having an older domain that's a little bit stronger. What you say is to just look out for that, essentially? [29:01.8]

Tessa: Exactly, look out for that. Then, not to just kind of like give up, but at least you have your expectations. For example, I have five aged domains in the search, so you know already that these domains have an extra boost or have been amplified in the past, meaning, you want to make sure that you’re also ready to invest in your promotion or in digital PR.

Also, one thing is I forgot the content velocity because this is important. If your competition is pumping content like a machine, I mean, 50 posts per month or maybe 100 posts per day, because what I’ve seen in my niche or in my industry right now where we build run and flip sites—that is an industry, niche site building—a lot of people are targeting publishing 1,000 posts in a year. That's so crazy.

Dan: A thousand blog posts in a year. [30:01.2]

Tessa: Yes.

Dan: Really?

Tessa: It used to be that the old goal was to just post 100, your first 100 posts in the next three months or six months. That was the goal. But now, no, it's kind of 100 posts per month, if you could do it.

Dan: Wow.

Tessa: That content velocity is one thing that’s very important, because if your competition is pumping out content maybe 50 to 100 posts per month and you are just making five posts per month, imagine how long you would need to catch up with that competition, so it aligns you that way.

Dan: Right, or you would never catch up or it must get stopped.

Tessa: Right, I mean, you would never catch up because the content needs, on average, eight to 10 months to age in the search and also rank for Google to notice it. Imagine if you're just publishing five posts versus the 100 posts that this competition is doing. It's so important for you to learn that, so then you know what you're against is up to. Just aligning your expectations also help you strategize. [31:00.0]

Dan: Let me ask. I would say it's common in this space for people to use blog services, right? There are a couple different services that will provide pretty similar blog posts to a pretty large amount of people -

Tessa: Yes.

Dan: - at a sort of set rate. Let's say, for most investors, I would say, they don't really want to be in the blogging business, right? They want to use blogs, they want to use content to grow the site, but they're not full-time content creators. If you have a competitor, let's say, that's putting out a fairly high number or a high rate of relative low-quality posts, is it a viable strategy to then say, I'm not going to try to match their rate, but what I'm going to do is produce much longer pieces or deeper pieces. Is that a viable strategy to compete with someone who's doing a ton of lower-quality posts? [32:03.7]

Tessa: Absolutely. I mean, yes. You could always outrank the sites that are putting garbage out there, versus your making sure that you pop out content that is of high quality. That said—that said—the next question is, it's just a matter of time until when, because once another competitor notices that, Hey, this site is ranking with just 10 pieces of content, I'm going to make high-quality, better-quality 20 posts.

Because now that everyone is online, everyone is on the internet, everyone is wanting to build a site, want to earn money blogging, people know this trick already that they need content. There's one agency that I really, really like that really focuses with content-velocity building and they only onboard clients that are ready to really pop up content, and they don't do digital PR. They just focus on content, which I really, really like, and validates what we know that—and I’ve heard this quote since 2009, since I learned SEO—content is king. [33:09.8]

You’ve got to have the mindset that your content marketing, your SEO, is a journey, meaning, if it's a journey, you need to do this consistently. You need to put the consistency factor in it. For example, I'm just going to beat that site with high-quality content, but I'm just in for 20 posts a month.

Dan: Two posts a year.

Tessa: Two posts a year. But then you are not really a business owner, because if you're a business owner, imagine your content is products. Who would just restock their stock two pieces per year, right? Because your content is your product. Your content is your offering primarily if you are a contenting agency or a site, if you are driving organic traffic, driving people to your site via content. That is your asset, and if you're not restocking on that, if you're not continuously providing value to your people, I don't think that is a business, yes. [34:17.5]

Dan: Yeah, I think you are hitting on something that's really important. Look, if you're, if you're listening to this as a real estate investor, maybe SEO is important to you, maybe it isn't, right? Maybe this isn’t a part of your strategy, but I personally think it should be, but for some people, they disagree.

But I think the thing you can't lose sight of, which is exactly what Tessa is talking about here, is this is no longer a business where you can simply show up and say, I buy houses, and have people knock on your door to sell you their property. It is just not that type of business anymore. [34:58.0]

You have to be investing in putting roots in your community, building value and trust with people before they need you, building relationships. This is where every other business has been for over a decade. It's just that investing is late to this party. If you look at real estate agents, realtors, they all do this already and it's time for us to catch up or we're going to be left behind.

I think what Tessa is saying here, the whole thing about being a business owner, if you don't want to do this, don't do it. I don't want to do it either. I hire people to help me, right?

Tessa: Exactly.

Dan: I hired Tessa to help me. I work with a full-time content writer on the AdWords Nerds blog. I give them ideas. I come up with the sort of techniques and strategies I want them to talk about and they flesh out those posts. There are ways to do this where you don't have to be in the trenches every single day.

Tessa, if someone is listening to this and they are looking to get started, what's the best way for them to either learn more about what you do to reach out to you, give this audience some ways that they can maybe get started with this process. [36:16.5]

Tessa: They could always go to our website and book a free strategy call. We do that to everybody. When we have that free strategy call booked, we offer the top 10 opportunities for all of the people we talk to, regardless if we end up working with them or not, meaning, we offer value right off the bat. We’re going to tell you, Hey, these are the things that you need to be or you should be doing to ensure your success. You could bring this to someone that you want to help you or we could help you execute these opportunities that we think you need to jump right into.

By the way, just to add something to what you've said, what you just said, I build flip sites to five to six figures amounts, but I haven't read any single word that I’ve built. [37:07.8]

Dan: I literally can't write.

Tessa: I can’t write.

Dan: I don’t know how to write.

Tessa: So, I outsource. That's what VAs are. I mean, that's how internet support is right now. You just need to leverage something. I mean, it's money versus time.

Dan: Yeah, and it has never been easier to hire a high-quality person. I mean, I'm recommending Tessa and, look, I’m not getting any money for that or whatever. I just like her service. But even if you didn't want to work with Tessa, if you did, for example, jump on a strategy call with her and have her team build out those kind of top 10 opportunities—which I did and I got a lot of value out of, and I think investors will get value out of as well—it has never been easier to hire a great writer, right? It's never been easier. [37:57.5]

I do think this is one of those things where, and I always say that my dad always used to say, the two best times to plant a tree. The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago and the second best time to plant a tree is today, right? It's not too late to get into this game and really put down a foundation and really start generating serious revenue. This is where the revenue is going to be online. I really, really believe that.

For people that want to follow up, I highly suggest you go check Tessa out. The website is “The SEO Mama”, M-A-M-A, TheSEOMama.com. Go check her out, get a strategy session. You will not regret it.

Tessa, thank you so much. This was great and I really, really appreciate you being on here.

Tessa: I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

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