Flip The Switch Episode 67: Best of 2018 Marketing

00:48 AUSTIN: Welcome to Flip the Switch, presented by Power digital marketing. This is episode number 67.

00:54 JOE: The last, last, final last episode of 2018.

00:58 AUSTIN: We’re calling this the Kobe Bryant part 2 episode, because he hit both 4, 8 and 24 and is the greatest of all time, and that’s what these interviews are. Does that make sense, folks?

01:09 JOE: The greatest of all time in 2018.

01:11 AUSTIN: In 2018. I know that was a lot to handle, but I hope you’re ready, because we have the best of marketing interviews coming up to you right now. Let me give you a breakdown of who we’ll be hearing from: Nicole Pereira, Summer Felix, Charlie Ninager, David Brickley and Devin Kostrzewski. We’re gonna be talking about CRMs, so funnel marketing. We’re going to be talking about content marketing. We’re gonna be talking about digital strategies for online retailers as well as social media for sports and entertainment. Finishing off with link building and SEO. All of these interviews are also available in their full length already out, so you can, if you really like them, go backwards. Go listen to the whole thing. They’re all super good but we’re bringing to you now the best of… About 9 to 10 minutes of each interview, right now, so that you can get them all packaged up into one. So please enjoy.

02:03 NICOLE: So we just walked away, even from all awareness marketing, in its entirety, even organic, even anything that usually is considered in the role of inbound marketing. And we looked at it saying, what do we really do well? When we look at our value to the world, what is it? And it was always building funnels. It was always once that awareness issue was solved, which is a long road… It’s when you get that name in that database what do you do with it?

02:27 PAT: Right so taking a step backwards to just to get a little bit more general with it. In your terms, what is funnel marketing? To somebody… Because if you’re outside the marketing world, you hear that term thrown around all the time. You see the charts. There’s real nice graphics about you have your awareness, consideration, purchase. What does that all mean though? What is it actually?

02:50 NICOLE: Yeah, it’s curating a pathway for someone, based on what you know the most common group or persona is looking for. You’re actually not trying to trick anybody. You’re literally trying to give them exactly what they tell you they want. And you’re continuing to optimize that and make sure you’re continuing to give them exactly what they want.

03:08 AUSTIN: Wow, yeah that. And then to draw the comparisons and the parallels right now with what may be a typical SEO job would be and what you do is… I want to get traffic based on keywords that are relevant, but it’s more of a visibility play. So I want to come up with new ways and new keywords and maybe new ideas so that I can attract a new audience coming to the website on a pretty consistent basis. What you do and it’s a very skilled skill set that is very special, is you take customers and give them exactly what they want that are already there. So you make them… You get a higher quality conversion. You get a higher quality customer. You basically create that based on your skill set and marketing technology.

03:47 NICOLE: Yeah. And so when my paid counterpart and my SEO organic counterpart and my social counterpart all do their job really well, hopefully they’re attracting the right personas. And then I hope I’m delivering to them the right message on the website, giving them the right hooks and the right weight to give me their email address, or to continue the conversation with us. Because we’re all aligned and I’m taking 80% of that because we’re giving them exactly what they need. There’s always the anomalies but we’re seeking for the majority of the people and the majority conversation we want to have with a particular persona.

04:22 PAT: Okay. And I think that this is a question a lot of people have too is, can you create a funnel for any business type? B2b, b2c, are there differences between the two nuances that people need to be aware of?

04:36 NICOLE: There are but different industries have different types of funnels. Your b2c e-commerce low price-point funnel is usually short and squat. But then you’re remarketing a lot so it’s short and squat over and over and over again, right?

04:51PAT: Right, getting those repeat purchases, and sharing a little bit more of that lifetime value.

04:55 NICOLE: But when you have a hundred thousand dollar b2b tech products, it could take a year of nurturing and education in tandem with possible outreach. So then it’s just, it’s different. It could have four different funnels that feed into each other and somebody jettisons out of one part into another and when something changes or parameter changes you have free trial funnels that then lead into a proof-of-concept funnel that then leads into a sales funnel. And then even in marketing, you can have a whole funnel that is just the top of the buyer’s journey.

05:32 PAT: Right, just to even get that cold traffic to them.

05:35 NICOLE: Yes, yeah and so the more complex the product, the more complex the conversation. Honestly they’re sales funnels, they’re not marketing funnels. We’re trying to take a person further along in the conversation. And the salesperson at that point should only be customer service. Like they’re like, may I take your order? So they’re just trying to out… Answer those questions that linger, validate and then just finish the process.

06:00 AUSTIN: And nurture is the word that I picked out of that whole conversation right there, that you are really focusing on is nurturing a lead. What specifically do you do to nurture a lead? What really helps you to have a lead go from that middle to closer to the bottom of the funnel?

06:15 NICOLE: So email is usually the crux of it. But honestly a really great nurture strategy brings in your paid, your organic, your social counterparts to remarket to people who get lost. So a good funnel, as you’re going down the funnel, is someone is at the top, for example they download something, they either got a coupon in the b2c world or they downloaded an informational guide in the b2b world, or they watched a video that had a turnstile on it…

06:40 PAT: Some kind of lead magnet.

06:41 NICOLE: Lead magnet, yep. And so then they get lost. They were progressively led to another landing page which uses the talents of our friendly web developers and designers. And so they’re on the next landing page and they get lost. They got the email from us, but they didn’t really read it and they forgot about it. Now you have your paid guys going in there who are remarketing off that list going, hey by the way…

07:03 PAT: Remember us?

07:04 NICOLE: Don’t forget this item. You were here in this phase. It’s like when you go look for some shoes. You’re on Nike and like a week later there’s the shoe, and it’s magically there’s a coupon with the shoe I was just looking at. Right? But I would like… Looking at toilets and the shoes like on the toilet website. It’s just magic. But so it’s bringing in paid counterparts to mirror the journey so that they’re actually no longer awareness only. That they’re actually a part of progressing somebody back into the funnel. SEO helps people get back into the funnel too. When you go we know that this particular set of people when they actually come to our website or become aware of our brand, they’ve actually already done this portion of their journey. So we’re gonna bring them in here. And then social right? Trying to do paid social, getting people back on track, or particular groups of individuals putting them into the funnel at the right stage that they need to be in. So a very well thought out funnel strategy actually incorporates all of us back together again. But as a specialist we have our place, and so you always need a unifying strategist that goes, here’s the master strategy.

08:10 PAT: Right. Here’s the vision from what the end goal of all this is.

08:13 NICOLE: And here’s how we all come together. And so sometimes I tend to play that role, just because we do have other agencies that we play really nice with who come in and fill our gaps and we co-work with them. But those people are few and far between. And I think I would love to see more people invest in looking at the whole picture and unifying us all again. Because we’ve gone so far down a path where we’re all specialists, which is great and that’s why I’m on this podcast is because I am a specialist on one area. But that being said we’re actually a whole lot stronger when we bring it all together.

08:46 PAT: And you touched on something really early on that I wanted to go back to. You talked about how you’re a HubSpot premium partner, is that correct?

08:53 NICOLE: Yes we’re a platinum partner.

08:54 Platinum partner. So what role does the CRM play into this, the whole thing, because I’m hearing a lot of the different channels playing together, potentially an ESP coming into play, your email provider but how important is leveraging that CRM data and what’s a good way for a business owner to go about doing that?

09:12 NICOLE: What’s really nice about HubSpot, not just because I’m a partner, because I’m actually their fiercest like, critic. I have advised people away from HubSpot time and time again because I’ve heard the needs and I say you don’t need that. Like for example ecommerce and HubSpot, though they’re trying to bring that world together. They don’t play nice. B2b marketers think, talk, speak, use different words. B2c marketers think, talk, use different words. B2c marketers are dealing with huge databases that are worth very little per name in the database. So low value high volume. But your b2b marketer is low volume high value and so a system like HubSpot is for low volume high value based on how they price the system. Plus stage naturally out of the box don’t have the reporting and the tools you need to attribute revenue to an email that systems like Matrillo, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, Klaviyo, those systems will give you an attribution to the emails worth. When this email was sent. What did it play it in the total revenue?

10:18 PAT: Right and in a low, low volume, high-value account or strategy where you’re trying to drive a high price point purchase for that business, you need that attribution. You need to be able to understand to the dollar and cent what channels are helping the best in order to be able to optimize off of that more effectively. And it’s definitely something that we see here all the time. We need to… Every channel wants to take as much credit as possible. Does HubSpot, in your opinion, help people make those educated decisions on how to better optimize the channels that are in the funnel? Or is it more give that final picture of, alright, this ended up happening after these touch points, and attributing it that way?

10:59 NICOLE: It should, if you have a unifier, right? It’s hard because everyone wants to do their own thing and be uninhibited by someone else’s opinion who’s not a practitioner in their field. But if you can bring all those people together, a system like HubSpot actually can do that for you. They can attribute, did somebody come from a Facebook ad? What ad do they click on, and how much did it cost to acquire that lead when you finally take it through to a sale. That being said, we’re not talking about a whole team of people. Our friendly salesmen, right? That marketing gets along with so well. So they’re at the end of the attribution like chain, right? So we need to see it through all the way if we can… HubSpot is a system that can bring us all into one place, and then give us that full picture at the end of it. But it just requires us all to be on the same page with that strategy. But you can attribute all those pieces all along the way. They have all that in there.

11:55 AUSTIN: It sounds like a very complex piece of technology for a lot of people. And of course there’s all these different channels interacting. What’s a big mistake you see people make with HubSpot? Or what’s it typically something that you glean from this technology that maybe someone would miss?

12:11 NICOLE: Buying the platform and not having someone being able to run it.

12:15 PAT: Really.

12:16 AUSTIN: As simple as that.

12:17 NICOLE: Yeah. So we… Go ahead.

12:19 PAT: No, all I was gonna say was… So how… I just want you to speak a little bit too, how important is the practitioner in that scenario?

12:25 NICOLE: Yeah. So I’ve been in the SEO world… I think it’s a wonderful specialty but there is a baseline of SEO that anyone can do, because they’re so… It’s such an old craft that there’s so much documentation, if you just follow the baselines you’re doing something productive in SEO. Is it the best? Maybe not, but something good could come of it. The same could be said for paid and social. That being said, I think marketing technology like HubSpot it’s… There’s no like easy entry into knowing how to take all this information, analyze it, and send out the best email.

13:04 SUMMER: Everything that you’re doing every day is some type of creation. Whether its business, it might not necessarily be artwork that you’re drawing, but anything that you are doing is creating. And creating is also bringing it to… Bringing it to reality. So it’s having an idea and the creation process is bringing it to fruition. And so for me it’s really… A lot of it is reverse engineering. So you have an idea and then you go okay, what does the end product look like if this is a success? What does that look like? And then the creation starts to come when you go, okay, what are the pieces that I need to make that happen? And then now who are the people that I need to help me get there? Because most likely, it’s not going to be just you that helps you get it to fruition.

13:51 PAT: Right, that makes a lot of sense too and it’s kind of interesting that methodology. Because I’d always… And I’m not necessarily… Like I don’t consider myself necessarily a creative, like, being. There are people that are extremely good at artwork and design. That’s guys like John and JOE: I’m a little bit more the analytical guy. And I’ve always kind of thought that if you have this end goal in mind you still need to first kind of achieve each of the individual milestones to get there. And I think that can be why people get so comfortable at times, because they’re just focused… And the journey is valuable but they’re just very in their comfort zone and they’re doing their thing, and they sometimes lose sight of that end goal, and what that’s supposed to be. And I think that it’s being a creative person and being able to think outside the box and have that bigger vision is crucial, and anything that you’re doing in life for that reason.

14:38 SUMMER: Oh, for sure. Absolutely. Otherwise sometimes you’re just kind of… What’s the word? Aimlessly wandering. And it’s just like okay, whatever happens, happens, but sometimes things do go in a different direction, but you wouldn’t have gotten there without knowing what is it that you’re trying to work towards.

14:56 PAT: Yeah, and with things go in a different direction, you need to be creative enough to know how to pivot and address that, right?

15:01 AUSTIN: I think creativity is totally a perspective on yourself as well. Like we as a society really think of creativity as the drawing side of it, which the web design that these guys do, but there’s totally that side of it too of being creative in certain things like maybe finding a new major that didn’t exist before, right? Or shifting your whole entire life because you have these skills but maybe they’re not translatable long term. That’s creativity in its own way. You didn’t draw something, but you became aware of a new situation by coming up with it in your head, and then acting on it. So that too is… Don’t discount yourself simply because you’re not drawing a picture. You can be creative in a lot of ways. It’s just simply the act of imagining something, and then turning it into reality.

15:39 SUMMER: Totally.

15:39 PAT: On that note, actually, I have a couple questions around some of the other companies that you have founded and been involved with. Can you kind of walk us…? So you graduated from Pepperdine after essentially creating your own major. And then what were the next steps after that? You gave us a little bit of background on that first company that you started. Was that the first one or was…

15:55 SUMMER: That was the first one. And so under that company that I had with my ex-husband which was called brevity, we had a bunch of other little companies that we would build and sell. And that was at the peak of internet selling information. So that’s what we were doing. We were building sites selling information. And so we would build those sites up with so big lists and really great revenue and then we would sell them, and then we create another one. Then we started teaching people how to do that themselves. So that just taught me a ton. But I would say it wasn’t something that I was… Any of the stuff that we were doing wasn’t really my passion. It was fun. We were making a lot of money. It was great. But when I… When we sold that business, it was like, okay, now I have to really think about what do I want to do? And so I then got into ghost writing. So I was writing for crazy authors that I could only hope that I would ever meet. So it was like that. I have to pinch myself. What?

17:00 AUSTIN: That is incredible. I always think ghost writing to it immediately popped in my head like little Wayne or…

17:05 PAT: Drake has ghostwriters.

17:07 AUSTIN: Anyways but yeah. Authors, famous authors, right? They take on ghost writers because they probably don’t have the time or the energy to write on. So you…

17:13 SUMMER: And that’s exactly it. I mean, it has nothing to do with they can’t write. Most of these people did write their first book, but they’re so busy they’re now going on their ninth New York Times bestselling book and they need help. And they have all of it in their head they just need somebody to write it for them. But it started with, I was working as a… I was doing copy where I was writing the CTA’s, call to actions for infomercials. And so that then turned into, hey can you write this copy? Can you write her email sequences? Can you do this? Like so many questions and I always just said yes, yes, yes. Yeah I can do that, I can do that, and I did that before. But then I started, can you direct the infomercials because so-and-so isn’t able to be here. And then all the sudden I’m like wow, I’m actually directing an infomercial this is pretty crazy.

17:58 PAT: Again, stepping outside of your comfort zone a little bit, right?

18:00 SUMMER: Totally stepping out. Because I wasn’t like this super outspoken, like I have to tell this like kind of celebrity who’s filming their product right now like that you’re not doing a good job. I need you to be a little bit more… Yeah, it was weird. But then what happened is one time on set they were advertising with your package, you’re gonna get this free book that’s gonna tell you all of these amazing things. And then at the end of filming they said hey so-and-so it doesn’t actually have a book. That’s just the cover of the book that we designed. Can you write…? Can you write the book?

18:36 PAT: Can you write a book?

18:37 SUMMER: Yeah, and of course me… Totally! I can totally write the book. Cause in my mind I’m like, I could, if I could do this and I could do that I can totally write the book. And I did it. And then the next thing, it was, oh wow that was great. We’re gonna refer you to this person who needs a book. And now this person needs one, and then all of a sudden it just got crazy. And the thing with ghost writing and writing books is I was writing four at a time.

19:01 AUSTIN: Wow

19:01 SUMMER: And it’s not… You can’t scale that.

19:04 AUSTIN: So is there a level of efficiency you have to have? Did you have like, shortcuts to writing the books? How does that look when you’re…?

19:09 SUMMER: I developed them along the way. So it’s kind of like I definitely was going through my own learning curve in terms of the process and what I needed to know from people and it’s… Some of that stuff, I mean, I brought into the draw shop, in terms of creative briefs. Here’s what I need to know from you in order to get people to take action. And essentially that’s what the book was. It was like a really, really long sales letter. What do we need them to do at the end? So, I mean, I really loved it in the beginning. I loved… I was traveling with really cool people. I was just getting to like pick the brain of people that actually helped me in the personal development world and business and just so many, so many cool things. But I started to burn out. And I had like two young kids and I was like, okay, I could take this in the direction of which I did for a short period of time where I have my own business and I’ve got copywriters underneath me and I’ve got writers and that. But most people were like, but we know you. We want to work with you. So eventually, I met my business partner Erik and we had a client that we were working with together. He was at a phase where he wanted to transition out of what he was doing. He was vice president of a company. And he was like genius in marketing and building sales funnels and all kinds of awesome things. And I knew copywriting. I knew how to do that. And so he sent me this video that was done by Dan Pink, and it was actually Dan Pink’s TED talk that was turned into a whiteboard video.

20:49 AUSTIN: I watched that in Business School. A couple professors showed it. It was amazing.

20:49 SUMMER: Yeah it was amazing. And we saw like the how many views that video got. How many views the talking head version got. Just the filmed version, and it was crazy. But he sent me just the video. That was it he didn’t say anything. And I was like oh we have to do this.

21:09 CHARLIE: What I would say is what we really did a couple years ago is pivot and again we took a global perspective on what we wanted to do. We understood the growth that could come from ecommerce and digital. There’s a lot I want to say about why it’s unique when you’re an eyewear brand to focus there, because we have a unit, a product that people really like to try on and feel before they buy. It’s a little bit different when you know you’re a size 10 shoe and if you see a 10 online, you like the looks, probably gonna fit. You don’t know that with eyewear. People really like to try it on in the physical space. But regardless of that, we started with just really focusing on the customer. We did a massive research project to understand who our customer was, who they weren’t, why people chose us, why they didn’t. What choices impacted their decision along the funnel of going from, I’m thinking about sunglasses to I bought a pair. And then we just applied those learnings to both digital and physical retail. And we really tried to be consistent in our presentation so yes, we brought in experts. My VP of wholesale, VP of e-commerce or digital revenue, John Gilson, he built out a team we re-platformed. We moved on to… Why am I fumbling…? With demand ware and brought in a lot of other experts in their space to help support that business. And really at the end of the day…. And then we aligned our strategies, right? There are a lot of companies in our space, where they’ve got an e-commerce initiative and then another. It’s called wholesale initiative. And they conflict a lot. And the best thing about being at spy is me and John got together with the CEO, and just said like, we want to do this right, and we want to do it the right way across all channels. And we’ve been in very much lockstep the whole way. So it really was understanding the customer, aligning… Allocating the resources, and then aligning the strategies. And the benefit is, we have an amazing website. There’s so many people who go to our website, look at a product, they’re right there but they want to try it on. And they’re gonna go to physical retail to buy it. And that happens every day. It happens to the vast majority of people who even go to our website. But… So it’s servicing… The work we did there is servicing a lot of channels, and really our whole business. And honestly at the end of the day, we would love you to get into a spy. We’d love to help you find a way to get into spy. We don’t really care where you get into it. So we’re just gonna try and be the best we can in every segment.

23:18 AUSTIN: Yeah and talking a little bit about that, so I would consider from this conversation that your website is the middle of the funnel, so to speak. So most individuals are not going to buy there. That’s kind of that nurturing of the lead, right? What is something that the website does that can get those person to go in store or help them get there?

23:36 CHARLIE: I’m glad you asked. We have some answers. So I’ll give you some numbers. So I don’t know the exact number, I’d have to check with JOHN: But the very vast majority of people who go to our website filter down to a product, the color they want, they’re looking at it, don’t buy it. They bounce. And we have three options there when you’re looking at that we call product detail page: buy now, and if you’re comfortable you’re buying now. And who’s that? That customer probably has already worn that frame, knows it fits, is trying to replace it. Maybe isn’t in a rush. But here’s another thing with our category. It’s a product that people intrinsically need. So if I take your sunglasses today, stomp them out on the ground, you’re probably gonna have to go buy another pair in the next 24 to 48 hours, because you wear sunglasses. So you don’t always wait. So again, somebody buying on our website is… You’re right. It may be middle, like low funnel, like they’re in. The next step is if you need an Rx we can take care of that. But the third one is a partnership we have with a company called Locally and they’re built out in the outdoor space, a little bit less kind of our lifestyle space, but they’re coming. And what this does is traditionally a brand like us would present you a dealer locator. Hey you live in Claremont, Mesa, here’s five accounts of spies that are in your area. They might have the thing you want, good luck. So it’s hard, right? You’re sending somebody into the physical world, they don’t know if they’re gonna find what they’re looking for. But Locally gets in between the brands and the retailers, takes their POS feed and can kind of say, hey you live in Claremont, Mesa, here’s five accounts of spies in your area. Ones two miles away, ones three miles away, but the one that’s six miles away has this product right now. Click here to reserve it or call them and go pick it up. So that’s something we just added and we’re seeing slow adoption from our retailers of it. But it’s really important. It’s one of the few ways that we can really push feet into their retail stores. And that’s for them, that’s great.

25:20AUSTIN: That’s a really great idea. I think that that’s probably one of the biggest things as we transition out of more brick-and-mortar to e-commerce and there’s just a lot of influx and situations where brands don’t know what to do. And then also the big part of it is attribution. Is how can you tell which marketing efforts are impacting sales? And then for you guys, it seems like Locally is probably a great option for that. Are you able to attribute the online visit to that offline sale? Or is it kind of, you’re looking for upticks in brick-and-mortar… What does that look like?

25:50 CHARLIE: Yeah, so it’s a little bit of a new initiative, and most of our retail base is pretty new to this, this thing we’re talking about, but it exists other places. So a little hard to tell, it’s not perfect. But my perspective is… And taking a step back. If you had a pie chart, you said how do people shop. You can imagine there’s quadrants, and they’re not equal quadrants. The biggest one says I shop in brick-and-mortar, and I buy in brick-and-mortar. The smallest one says shop online and buy online. And we have to be bulletproof in those areas. But the most fun and interesting ones are the other two, which says I shop online and then I go buy in-store, or I shop in store and then I buy online. And we’re looking… I think forever people in our position and at brands like ours spend a lot of time focusing on the first two, and not the other, the latter two, which are more interesting, more dynamic, so Locally is an answer. It’s not perfect because we can’t always know when that person walks in that store, says hey I reserved it online. Eventually we’ll be able to track it though. So, yeah not perfect but again like we’re just trying to push the frontier of what we can do there, because that’s… To me honestly, it’s just that’s the most exciting spot. If you’re gonna go to my website and buy, you’re a big fan, you’ve already been a big fan. If you’re gonna go into a store and buy, great, but I want to play around at the margins there.

27:07 AUSTIN: Yeah, and the website is such an important part of just the brand look and feel, just trying to capture what you already do, what people associate those feelings with, when they wear your sunglasses… You want to see that on the website too. These guys do design and web development, so they’re much more well-versed in that subject matter, but that’s kind of a…

27:23 CHARLIE: Oh good. We’ll need a full review of our site with notes, because it’s pretty new to us and we really like, look at it from… Again we did this massive research project. We had a great partner called instant laboratory who… They’re like, they’re basically like anthropologists, right? They study how we evolved as human beings and respond to stimuli. But they apply it to the retail world. So they have this massive bank of understanding. They’ve done a million projects. They’ve got all this consumer insight, and then they did a research project with us and said how do people shop sunglasses. When and why do they choose to buy them? Why are they choosing spy or not? And we filtered that all into this… Through a funnel of like, let’s present them what they want to know. So on our website… What everybody wants when they buy sunglasses they want to know am I getting the style that I like and does it fit? And the really hard part is to talk about fit. Because I could do a lot. I could digitally show you the sunglass laid over your face and say this is the right size for you, but you still don’t know if it feels good on your face. So we focus on the website of making sure the product looks great, making sure they understand where they can get it, and making sure that they understand as much as they can about fit and style, so that they can make that decision.

28:27 AUSTIN: Slight tangent. Well it’s something that I saw. I think someone sent this to me. But Facebook starting to put augmented reality platform into their ad space, so let’s say that someone is looking at a pair of sunglasses. They’re gonna have the ability to see them on their face on their screen. Kind of crazy. So you might eventually have a solution to that, if that becomes integrated into everyday marketing, digital marketing that is. But I definitely can see how that would be an issue, and why people are going in store. So my… I think the way it works for us would… Cause it’s interesting. Again, if you haven’t been to spy and I have that technology and you see it overlay it on your face and go this looks pretty cool. You’ll feel better about trying it, but you still don’t know how it fits. But what I was imagining is in the future is, if you’re a loyal customer and you’ve logged… You’ve taken a picture of yourself and spy has it, and we know what frames you like, so we kind of know your fit from the other side, what actually feels good. We could send you, hey here’s a new release and here’s what it looks like on your face, because we just overlaid it. Like that’s kind of cool, right? Like that might help. I don’t know. I have a lot of ideas where it’s going, but for our category, it’s very unique in that it’s that fit thing, it’s really hard to get around in the digital environment, and we’re working on it but it is what it is.

29:36 JOHN: How are you guys approaching that with the new website? I see you have the… Like the measurements on each…

29:41 CHARLIE: You got the measurements, which mostly nobody knows what those means. But smart… Some people who get really in the weeds know like the millimeter measurement of the width of their face… That I have a long from the front of my face to my ears long, so I know what measurement I need there, but 99% of the world doesn’t. So then we also try and present as much as we can some UGC so people can see what the product looks on other people, how people are wearing it in the environment, who’s wearing it. That seems pretty impactful. We’ve got a lot of work coming. We’re doing some SEO stuff to try and say hey you might be looking at these two glasses and trying to decide which is which so let’s tell you what’s the difference. And you can imagine every level the funnel, we’ve got to add really good quality content. And that’s stuff we’re just kind of diving into. We spent the last year and a half rebuilding the website. And it’s never done. It’s so much a work in progress. So, yeah, I think those are kind of some of the ways we’re trying to help address those questions. And again like I said, that it’s crazy the amount of people who wear spy that aren’t on our website and don’t follow us on Instagram. And it’s got to be the high 90s that are finding out a physical retail, so we’re just trying to be the best we can in both places.

30:45 JOHN: How is the response been to the new website?

30:47 CHARLIE: That’s been good. I mean, sales are up. I think if you’re a brand like us, sales better be up digitally. Conversions and sales are up. We’re a/b testing a million things at all times and making it, honing it and making it better. But I think we’ve provided a better experience. I think we’re helping people make their decisions a little quicker which is really important. And I think it’s probably having a pretty profound impact in the physical world at our wholesale that we can’t attribute and get the measurements for. But things are pretty good at spy and there’s not a lot of brands in our space like… Well there’s not many like us anyway. But the few that are like… I think it’s pretty challenging to be an eyewear retailer like us, and an eyewear manufacturer. And I think we’re doing pretty good.

31:31 DAVID: Before then, I really wasn’t thinking about running my own business and having employees or anything like that. But once that started to gain steam and I understood that could be like some of that could monetize, it started to get my mind thinking in a different way. So as I saw YouTube blowing up and I’m like, nobody has taken advantage of Twitter. All these sports teams at the time too… The reason why the Laker nation at the time was successful and I think why my YouTube sound was successful, nobody was talking about the stuff fans wanted to hear. They want to see if Kevin Garnett’s gonna come to the Lakers. They want to see if the Lakers will ever trade Kobe, if there was a right fit type deal. And that was the stuff we talked about and the fans really just ate it up and got a really good community going. So that was the key for me, as I looked at all these sports teams out there and said they’re not talking to their fan base. They’re not being genuine to the lexicon of what people like you and I are talking about, the watercooler about the Lakers and what they should do, should they bring LeBron and Paul George over, should they not do LeBron because he’s gonna ruin the team and ruin the dynamic. So those are the things that we tried to talk about and be genuine.

32:30 JOE: And just because you kind of were doing this on your own, outside of your nine-to-five, you didn’t have any of the red tape that a lot of the bigger networks like Fox Sports, or even Sports Center… They kind of refused to talk about. And even kind of transitioning now, the way sports media is today, it’s more along those lines where a lot of people are kind of steering away from the suit-and-tie and the very formal stuff and wanting to get…

32:53 DAVID: We talked about barstool sports before…

32:55 JOE: Yeah exactly and so people are getting more drawn into, because it’s like those conversations that we all have together. And then if we have someone on a national platform speaking about it, talking about it, I’m gonna sit down and I’m gonna listen to that every day. Versus the cue cards of sports and I wish… I won’t lie, I still watch Sports Center every single day, but like…

33:12 AUSTIN: And even Sports Center has reinvented themselves to a degree. Their most famous anchor now is Scott Van Pelt, who… The show that they do is so different than it was even five years ago.

33:21 DAVID: Vine ruined Sports Center. Vine was something like that, you can follow a couple feeds and see Russell Westbrook dunk on somebody. You can see LeBron swat a ball into the stands. And it… Because I was a guy that had ESPN news on constantly in high school, constantly in college. I wanted to be up to speed. But once vine came out, I think that was that shift. You had some guys, I think Vinny Viner was one of the guys that he would post every single relevant highlight, much like house of highlights is doing now on Instagram. And if you followed that feed and you scrolled a couple times a day, you were up to speed on everything. All the big moments and you felt like you can talk about every dunk, every crossover, whatever it may be. So that was a shift and Sports Center had to shift because of it.

34:02 AUSTIN: Some sports they choose to allow their clips to be on social media. How does that work? Do you know how a league would choose to say, hey we can’t show the clips. I know, I think it’s not the major leagues but I think the NFL doesn’t allow twitter clips.

34:15 DAVID: Yes. So the NFL has restrictions. MLB has major resources with BAM, which is like their internal media rights agency. I think they’re doing a huge disservice. The fact that the MLB, they have some charismatic guys that I think could be the LeBron’s and the Westbrooks and the Hardens of their league, but nobody knows about them because they’ve refused to be a part of this whole thing. Adam Silver and what the NBA has done is I think the exactly what needs to be done in all sports. And that’s why it’s become global, because somebody can start to see like, who’s this Russell Westbrook guy? Like, oh my god. He attacks a rim with frosted. He slams it really hard. I really like this guy. Then they start to say, let me check out a OKC game. So even Adam Silver, he had a really good article recently where he was interviewed. He’s all, we’re gonna throw those snacks out there and our whole goal is hopefully it’ll lead to people wanting to have some meals, which would be the full three hour game, or maybe coming down the stadium and checking out the game. So I think the NBA is what everybody should be doing. And what’s happening right now, I think it’s with rights and this is funny too. Even something like Monday Night Football or Sunday Night Football, they don’t own their own rights. So although Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth is being paid by NBC and they have… They don’t have the digital rights. So that’s sold to like Verizon or what-have-you. So even NBC can’t post their own highlights on NBC channels. It does sound… It’s crazy, because they’re trying to find a way and bam is looking at like, well we’re not gonna let some random David Brinkley guy post a highlight. We want to monetize that. But in reality, you guys know being in marketing, it’s a long-term game, rather than the micro game. And they’re focusing way too much on, we need to monetize this, rather than building the sport.

35:55 AUSTIN: The fan should have the longest lifetime value of any customer, right? Because it’s a passion inside the individual that drives them to use your product and engage with your product in the first place. And so it should be pretty easy to utilize that. The NBA crew incredibly caught on to that, figured it out, and grown it globally. The MLB, it’s confusing that they haven’t. Because they are international to a degree, and especially in the Asian market. And then they just haven’t been able to create these characters that you’re saying. So, what does it take…? What would someone do to take someone like a James Harden and a Russell Westbrook and blow them up, make them this household name. What does that entail?

36:31 DAVID: Well, I think the issue with the NFL is they wear helmets, and that’s a big deal. You don’t see a lot of their facial expressions, the only guys that really make it to the red carpets are the quarterbacks, like the Tom Brady’s, because you see them on camera most the time when you’re watching a game, and the close-ups and everything like that. I think that what the NBA has been able to do, especially when you’re at a game, you can be courtside and literally feet away from a Lebron James. And they’ve allowed their players to talk. You see what’s happening right now with the anthem protest and everything in the NFL. The NBA is not having that problem, because they nipped it in the bud immediately. And they let their players speak. I mean Lebron, Chris Paul, I forgot everybody that went, Dwayne Wade, I think was at the Espys and they had a big talk about police brutality and the NBA allows their players to have a voice. And I think they respect the league office because of that. So they have like a healthy conversation. The other leagues wants to, like the NFL, they want to control the message. They don’t want to have guaranteed contracts they don’t want to really give back. And like any organization if you’re not listening to your employees, you’re not listening to the people that put the butts in the seats. I think it causes tension.

37:31 JOHN: I mean if you watch a postgame press conference of NBA players, versus MLB or even NFL players, you could tell the NFL players are trained and scripted, and they have all these responses, it was about the team, it was about this, it was about this… But everybody in the NBA, they all have personalities. They have the whole thing when they’re walking up all their style, and all these things. Like they have individual styles or individual personalities in the grand scheme of things, it definitely plays. And you’re talking about the NBA year-round. Like it never ever stops. And so they really do a good job of that as well.

38:05 DAVID: Yeah. We work with Twitter and they’re huge on #nbatwitter. To your point, it’s a year-long thing. The players are on Twitter, they’re talking with fans, they’re talking shit to each other on Twitter, which is funny as well. So to your point, yeah, it’s a 24/7 thing and you can reach out and touch these athletes where I don’t know necessarily if you can reach out and touch a stand from the Yankees type deal. It just doesn’t feel that same possibility.

38:29 JOHN: Well, even kind of going back to you being at Fox Sports Net, and then running your podcast and your YouTube channel. So Kobe was your first athlete that you were able to get a hold of and produce content for. So you started out…

38:44 DAVID: And listen I was a die-hard Kobe Bryant fan. I grew up an hour east of LA. Yeah, so I mean that was amazing. And on my first ever interview was Kobe as well, so it’s just crazy and so I owe a lot to him.

38:59 AUSTIN: What an intimidating moment. I mean, talk about one of the most ferocious individuals to ever walk the face of the earth. How was that interaction for you? Were you scared and nervous?

39:08 DAVID: So it’s funny. So when I was at KCR radio, we were talking about earlier, at San Diego State, I’m just trying to beat my craft. I’m trying to get better at what I do. I had no connections. It’s 07, 08, so what I’ll do on my weekly radio show is I would hit my friends up and they would be the baseball guru or the NBA gurus. I’m talking to Ryan Fontes, one of my buddies. He’s gonna talk about the NBA. Now I interview him as if he was Steven Naismith or Chris Boussard, right? That allowed me to get reps though, even though it’s kind of funny and kind of silly because they weren’t really experts, it got me reps, got me reps. I didn’t really like skateboarding, but there’s this thing coming up called the Maloof money Cup in Orange County, and we got a press release, because they don’t have any media coverage and they hit us up, like would you ever come out to our event? And I’m like, I mean, I don’t really want to, but this could be another opportunity for me to get better at my craft, and get reps. So I can interview the skateboarders and I can get more for my demo reel for a future job. So I show up to this thing and I hear this… This is 09. This is when the Lakers won the championship versus the Orlando Magic. I hear this huge roar and I turn around and Kobe’s in the building. He came to watch the skateboarding competition. So that was a moment where it’s like, everything’s led up to this. I want to be in sports broadcasting. I’ve been watching this dude since he was a rookie, every single game. This moment, I have to do something. So I had a camera guy, I’m like, let’s go do it. So I walk up to him, I say, hey man can I get a couple minutes for an interview. And he’s with his wife. I was like can I get a couple minutes with the interview. He’s like, nah man. And I was like… And then just your heart sunk. And then he’s like, I’m just kidding man, let’s do it. And then sat there for like five minutes and I just went into, I just went into it, right? And that was what my friends are like, are you kidding me? You didn’t stutter. You didn’t freak out? Kind of like you said. And I didn’t because I just went into reporter mode based on all that history of interviewing my friends, or interviewing a skateboarder, interviewing a softball player at San Diego State. I just went to the moment which was cool to kind of see how that come to fruition. So that was awesome.

40:57 JOHN: So you kind of… Where you saw it early on at a time where the digital space kind of wasn’t taking off just yet. We were still kind of on the cusp of that. And you capitalized on that opportunity, which kind of then started shifting your focus away from I could make this full-time job, I don’t need this nine-to-five in this network, I can start what became STN digital. So could you kind of tell us about that transition and kind of where you started and where you wanted to take it?

41:23 DAVID: Yeah, so when we started, this was about a year after bleacher report got bought by Turner for a hundred eighty million dollars based on their blog network. They were creating a lot of blogs, like the top ten Kobe dunks of all time or the five places Lebron James may go in the offseason. That was a Content like we’re talking about. The fans wanted to read. So they were very… They had volunteer writers for every single team across the nation, across the world, and they built this piece of collateral that was valuable. So Turner buys them. So the idea at that point was the only way these teams were making money was to monetize on their website. So everything had to be pushed to their website. So the original business model was, we’re gonna create these bleacher report type blogs for your website. We can put together a contributor network. We can hire writers. All this different things. So we talked about Houston Rockets. We talked to all these different teams and the market punched back immediately, like ehh we’re good. But do you guys do social graphics? We’re like infographics? And we’re like sure. So me and my business partners at the time, were literally in Photoshop creating infographics. And in the early stages kind of grinding. Whatever the client said they kind of needed, we would figure out. So originally, it was blogs, it went to social graphics, and obviously since then it’s blossomed to… A year later was on-site activations at award shows. And then now we’re doing influencer campaigns and branding entire digital feeds and running marketing campaigns for the World Cup and Olympics and some crazy things. So, it started off just with like, let’s make some blogs and help you guys out on the website. But now social is such a monetizable thing that obviously the dot-com isn’t where they make their money anymore.

42:59 AUSTIN: Yeah, incredible growth in just a couple of years, which is… 2013, right? Is when you first started.

43:03 DAVID: Yes, we just had our five year anniversary, but it’s been… And it’s great. It keeps it fun, but it’s also frustrating, right? You have to… And much like power digital, you have to constantly reinvent yourself. There’s new platforms coming up all the time. Right when you think you got that revenue stream going, vine goes away or Instagram comes out with stories or snapchat starts to take a dive, and you constantly have to kind of figure out. But if you’re willing to roll your sleeves up and stay kind of ahead of class, you become very valuable. Because you can be that partner that they trust and know they’re gonna keep you ahead of the game.

43:32 AUSTIN: And how do you manage and grow these partnerships with these big teams and leagues? What does that entail and how do you approach them saying I want to do this for you, I want to do that? Is it a long-term contract? Is it a one-time project?

43:44 DAVID: Yeah, it’s mostly project-based at this time. I think sports teams will have like season long retainers and things like that. But especially with projects, what we’re finding is a lot of these large, or even like a Fox, they won’t even know their budget for something until like 2 or 3 months out. So they can’t just say like, hey we’re gonna give you this guaranteed X amount of money. So I’ve seen in the sports entertainment space… I know brands are still kinda on the retainer model, maybe one, two, three year deals. In the sports entertainment space, the word retainer is a bad word. They don’t like giving it. I think it’s because our market and agencies as a whole have… They haven’t held their end of the bargain up. I think what makes us different in my opinion, is we essentially say what we’re gonna do and do it really well and provide world-class customer service. And there’s a lot of agencies out there that just BS, and they say they’re gonna do all these amazing things, and they’re gonna make all this happen and they never do. So I think that’s kind of ruined the retainer word, because you get in this retainer and then everybody just kind of relaxes. And the brand or whatever is not happy with the results.

44:45AUSTIN: That is the unfortunate part about being in digital marketing. We run into that a lot here, the same thing where we get clients that have been burned really bad. I run into that a lot in SEO specifically, because it’s very easy to sell the idea to someone and say I’m gonna allow you to show up on Google for free, right? That quick retainer and then you’re gonna get all this traffic. And people get burned in our space because it is still so new.

45:05 DAVID: And you get black hat SEO and you have all these things that really screw it up.

45:08 AUSTIN: Sure. It’s the similarities there with sports. But I imagine these brands also are looking to you for what to do, right? I can’t imagine that they know how they want to interact with their fans and shape that. So from an experience standpoint, do you apply a lot of what you use with other teams, to those teams or how does that work?

45:25 DAVID: Yeah, I think we have a unique advantage that we’re able to be in so many spaces, whether it be the SAG Awards, the Olympics, to the Green Bay Packers. It’s a lot of different fan bases. And you’re able to see what works and kind of a b test a lot of different things. So I think our advantage with working with us is we’re able to take all that knowledge and see what’s working and what’s trending across the entire space. And then hopefully apply that to your brand. So we’ve really stepped that game up in the last year or so. I will not do a Content package or do anything, unless there’s strategy and consulting involved. Because I want partners. If I don’t want to be the executor. I don’t want to just be the guy like, hey can you make us this and make us that? Unless we have like partnerships where we’re constantly kind of beating the brand up and see what we can do and evolving and shifting, it just… It doesn’t… It’s not impactful for me personally. But also my employees I think seeing that happen to seeing that growth is so rewarding that I don’t want to just be the graphic dude or the video guy.

46:21 DEVIN: So the evolution of the algorithm is obviously quality over quantity. And I learned a lot about that in my early years, because we had a lot of clients needing a bigger footprint but needing all original articles. A huge part of the link building business is content creation. Because if you place a hundred backlinks a month, you need a hundred original ideas, original publishers that you haven’t used before. They have to hold their own weight as far as quality is concerned. So now getting a link from abx.org which is a website nobody knows, reads, or has ever heard of. It’s maybe not indexed. That used to have value and now it doesn’t. So it’s a trend towards quality, but a lot of quality. And because links are so important it’ll kind of… It’ll like never die which is a crazy part about it. There’s a lot of SEO stuff that’s… Well we can’t use this strategy anymore, and we don’t do this anymore. Backlinking, you need different strategies within backlinking. But you can never not do it. It’s like never going away.

47:28 AUSTIN: I’ve always been, I guess surprised that Google hasn’t come up with a better way to… At least a different number one ranking factor. Well, we talk a lot about user experience and how that’s become a really big ranking factor for google and they want people to have a great experience on a website, seems pretty obvious. But they’ve been able to develop their algorithm to understand that more in terms of UI UX and how long people stay on a site, what they do on that site. But it still is, is that backlinks hold that value so high because Google needs something else in these signals from all over the internet to tell them what’s good or not. And they really value that, and there’s still… You still have the ability, and I think a lot of people associate that with manipulation. But there’s really two ways to do that. There’s kind of this black hat SEO, which is very bad and can be something that violates Google guidelines. But there’s also the white hat SEO and that’s kind of more of the realm. But I’m curious could you explain kind of the difference between maybe a black hat and a white hat SEO link?

48:24 DEVIN: For sure, for sure. Every time there’s a big penalty or Google update or people are getting in trouble for black hat practices, that’s good for me and my business because we don’t really dabble in that. And now there’s people who are like, I have to spend double on link building now because I have to make up for all of these marginal outreach tactics that my website has. It’s like why we got penalized. Examples could be forum links or byline links, where you’re hiring someone for a few dollars an hour to just write comments on thousands of articles to link to some page. That’s not really an issue anymore because they’ve gotten around that. Using low quality website is another part of it. If you’re just spamming crummy blogs and putting up articles, you could have… So you could build a ton of links to best digital marketing agency in the world to powerdigitalmarketing.com and eventually that’ll catch up with you. That’s very unnatural. There isn’t hundreds of thousands of bloggers in the wild who are gonna write articles about digital marketing and happen to pick you and pick this keyword in this exact match phrase. So you can’t incur a penalty by being too aggressive. You need to get on good websites. If you’re on Forbes or TechCrunch com, that’s amazing. Those are websites that kind of run the internet. So those links are really important and lower ones are not. And that description of quality is kind of abstract, but there are so many third-party SEO tools that do the work for you. So my main use cases are with moz.com. They have a great like API and service, semrush.com, they do a lot with organic rankings and keyword tracking. And then majestic com where we can evaluate the links that the publishers are getting. So now like, you look at TechCrunch, who’s linking to them? And the answer for TechCrunch is everybody. But there’s these lower sites that maybe only have a few hundred visitors a month. If their backlink profile is garbage then why do you want to link from them? And so it’s such an evaluation, and that’s in the end, sort of the service that I’m providing, is the evaluation of the blogosphere, the world of content.

50:41 PAT: That’s a good word.

50:41 DEVIN: Yeah it’s a tough one. But anyone can spend or hire someone to email tons of editors and blog guys and try and get back link opportunities. I’ve already done that. I have the network. And we can evaluate these blogs based on what SEO practices are most important to you. So if I work with a few agencies, they all have different QA processes, Quality Assurance. Maybe an agency like Power Digital is more focused on the traffic trends in SEMrush. And maybe another agency is, we just need domain Authority 40 and above and I don’t care about anything else. Just do it.

51:17 PAT: Yeah, it just depends on what your goals are, right? As the company that’s soliciting those sizes. So in the realm of SEO, what level of importance do backlinks have then? Because we hear about a lot of different things that you do for SEO. You have on page, you have like content optimizations, you have like keyword mapping. You have a lot of… You have like technical SEO, like changing the architecture of the website to make sure it adheres to SEO best practices. Like if that’s one piece… If that’s like the pie, how big of a role I guess do backlinks play?

51:47 DEVIN: Super good question. My analogy when I speak with people is the SEO puzzle has so many pieces, but one of the central, most important ones is the link building. And it makes… And if you… When you talk about on-site stuff, meta descriptions, coding, like all that jazz, it can really confuse people or just seem really complicated, which it definitely is. But the simple link building is kind of like word-of-mouth. It’s like who… What coffee shop did Austin recommend? And which brand of sneakers is referred to you. And so link building is kind of like that. It’s how can you have people talking about you. At the end of the day Google’s still a popularity contest. The best websites that have the most traffic, that have the best experience are the ones that they want to rank highly.

52:34 PAT: It’s the best reflection of them as a search engine.

52:36 DEVIN: And then a great example of you, like Austin said, you… They want you to design a great website. And if you do that people will link to you. And so I am sort of a horsepower product where the flame is burning. Your fire, your website is great and then how can we put the lighter fluid on top of it. Have it burn brighter, seen by more people, more traffic, leads, conversions. Money.

53:00 AUSTIN: Make more money. Yeah, and I mean just thinking about what an internal link is and/or a link, excuse me, and what anchor text is, you’re reading an article and then you see it’s blue highlighted and maybe you’re hovering over it and it’s shiny and you click on it and it goes to another page. That’s a backlink. Whether that’s to a page inside your website or to someone else’s website. It is a backlink that’s linking to another resource that’s providing more information about whatever you’re reading. So think about that from Google’s perspective, where their algorithm, the whole purpose of it is to align searchers with most the information on the subject as possible. So something like a backlink is considered to be extremely valuable because the user, me and you who search, is now getting more information on the subject that they searched because of this backlink. So that’s why it’s really so valuable from an SEO perspective. Because Google knows if Google’s algorithm wants to know, I should say, who’s the most authoritative on a subject and a backlink can be a big signal for that.

53:58 DEVIN: Exactly. If you go to sports like ESPN is gonna rank, Sports Illustrated is gonna rank. There are a lot of great sports bloggers that don’t have that power, but if they give a backlink, it’s a real website, it’s a real blog that someone is running and like putting their life into. And then who they decide to use as references and resources… It’s really important to them and then when they’re creating this great content, it’s important to Google too.

54:23 AUSTIN: Yeah, and I think that your analogy about throwing lighter fluid on the fire is really important too. If you’re listening to this and being like, well I just need to get as many backlinks as possible. This is great. I’ll just start getting backlinks. Seriously not how it works. Google is too smart at this point, and that may be even more around 2011 2013 where you could just do that, right? And you’d start just firing up and you’d be amazing. But like we just talked about ESPN, Sports Illustrated, these other websites so much authority because of time and actual content and actual interaction with the website which has allowed them to have a baseline ranking. And then backlinks is helping them achieve a higher ranking, right? So it’s more so reaching that premium position and not just trying to be visible. You need to create visibility through having an awesome website and getting traffic to your site and providing a great service. These things that are very normal, right, for a business, a good business to do. Backlinks just get you to another level. So just to clarify there and make sure you’re not just saying I need to start getting as many backlinks as possible. It’s more so that you can get to a point where backlinks can really help your business. Think of it as an investment in your business to help you grow.

55:27 PAT: I think it’s interesting too, because it goes along with a couple other trends that we’ve seen in digital marketing where like the… It’s almost like a testimonial of sorts, right? It’s almost like another website saying, hey I trust X website, right? By deciding to link to them. You see that all across the web. Like some of the best performing ads that we can use for like nurturing and things on like even like paid social or Google, are like testimonial based. Because it’s more important that other people are talking about how good your business, is as opposed to you trying to promote how good your business is. So it’s like if that resonates with consumers at like the ad level, and Google is trying to make the best consumer experience possible, of course they’re going to replicate that on the technical side, because that’s how people are predisposed to trusting businesses and trusting companies. It’s really interesting to kind of hear how that all sort of plays together. One question that I do have for you. So you talked about it a little bit. Out of like all of the companies that you’ve worked with, what typically are the KPIs that they care about the most when they’re measuring the success or the effectiveness of their SEO and link building?

56:27 DEVIN: For sure. Super good question and leads me to a point I wanted to make. So link building as a product is very tangible as far as internet marketing services go. There are many people out there who can sell digital marketing services, whether it’s a coder or an SEO guy or whatever. And they sign you up on a retainer and six months later don’t have much to show for it, and can just say, we tried our best, and if you didn’t like what we did, go somewhere else. We have all your money and we didn’t really do anything, but like we swear that we tried. So it’s really easy to kind of be a shyster in digital marketing. But for link building if an agency is like I have three clients, I need three links. They need to be on websites of this authority. It’s very defined in black and white. And so execution is like the number one thing, is getting things done. And then when I can report something, it would be like saying click on this blog post on espn.com. Scroll to the third paragraph and click on the word athletic shoes, and it goes to Nike com. Nike that’s a backlink that I earned you etc. etc. So it’s very physical for being just kind of like some online thing. So people care about execution because you need to have backlinks coming in at all times.

[Music]

57:53 AUSTIN: Once again thank you so much to these wonderful people for coming on this show this year. Astounding, astounding interviews. Every one is very interesting and taught me a lot about marketing.

58:03 JOE: Yeah, me as well. And I think that just about does it for the flip to switch team for this year.

58:09 AUSTIN: It’s crazy. I literally cannot believe how much content we put out this year.

58:14 JOE: Yeah it’s gonna be better in 2019.

58:16 AUSTIN: Oh we’ve got some incredible things coming. Might be some really tall people coming in here… I don’t know yet, just saying, hopefully. Joe’s smiling at me because we don’t know for sure yet, but you’re gonna have to listen next year to see if that comes true and we’re about to sign off, so I’m gonna say thank you so much for listening this year. We really appreciate you coming every day, or once a week. I don’t know. Maybe you listen to us every day. But regardless thank you so much for listening to the show. Please have a safe and happy holidays. We’ll see you in 2019.