Digital Social Hour - Mastering SEO and Affiliate Marketing, Importance of Email Lists and AI | Greg Jeffries DSH #326

Episode Date: March 3, 2024

Greg Jeffries comes on the podcast to talk about how he made his money in SEO and affiliate marketing, where he sees email marketing going and how he is using AI. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Digital Social Hour works with participants in sponsored media and stays compliant with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations regarding sponsored media. #ad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

America, we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By honoring your sacred vocation of education, you impact your family, your friends, and your community. At Grand Canyon University, our online bachelor's, master's, and doctoral education degree programs allow you to balance online coursework with observational and hands-on experience in the field. Find your purpose at GCU. Private. Christian. Affordable. Visit gcu.edu. This up-and-coming search engine that no one had ever heard of called Google. You know, I'm going to teach you, I'm going to tell you how our algorithm works and how to game it or whatever. But really, SEO just comes down to three things. Number one, be relevant.

Number two, be popular. And number three, don't be evil. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it. If you follow or subscribe, it helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests and it helps us grow the team truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, we are back on the show, guys, all the way from Austin, Texas. We got Greg Jeffries here today. How's it going, man? Pretty awesome.

How's it going? I'm in Austin, man. I hear good things about it there. It's popping, man. Yeah, it just keeps expanding. Everybody keeps moving there. So a lot of entrepreneurs and authors and yeah so you went there 10 years ago were you doing seo and affiliate marketing at the time or did that come recently

no that was uh well it started shortly after there i moved in 2010 fall of 2010 um just as i'm originally from mississippi so just kind of like the hope of a better life, more opportunities, bigger city. And, um, you know, thinking back, uh, it didn't take very long for me to kind of start going down that rabbit hole of like the make money online, uh, searches and things like that. So I think that started actually probably within a couple of months. Interesting did take probably five or six years to kind of weed through all the, you know, just all the kind of misdirection and BS and stuff that's out there. There's a lot of just... There's a lot of that in the marketing space.

Yeah. So some people it takes a little bit, some people it takes longer. But kind of in the grand scheme of things, it didn't take that long looking back. And once I finally had the pieces of the puzzle that worked for me or made sense for me, it only took about 90 days for me to kind of really change my life, I guess. So 90 days, how much did you make in that period? Well, that's what got me from like $1,000 to $3,000 a month on a good month just because I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. Some things are working, but I don't know why,

to I think I have a direction. So from December of 2016 to April of 2017, that's where I built up from whatever I was doing, maybe a couple thousand bucks randomly each month to five figures a month. And then I've never made less than that since. Wow. Consistent. Yeah. Well, it helped that I was promoting some products and services that paid recurring, which helped considerably. Right.

But yeah, it really – I can talk for hours about this stuff now that I've lived it. But when I first moved out there, I just wanted to make money. But I would see all these quotes of like positive quotes, affirmations, self-help, personal development. And it's like that sounds really good. Give me the money first and then I'll change my mindset. But now all those quotes and affirmations and stuff make a lot more sense because it really is all in your mind and stuff. And once you understand that, the money flows and follows,

which is – it doesn't make sense until it finally does. No, for sure. I know what you mean. You got to build that safety net first and then focus on those things. I neglected my health completely the first few years, which is terrible advice. But I think just getting a safety net. Yeah, and I think the money – I don't think that's a bad thing because once you have the money, you can buy the better food. You can shop at Whole Foods.

You can get a trainer. I remember that change to Whole Foods, man. That was a game changer for me from ShopRite to Whole Foods. Yeah. When I first job, when I moved out there, Whole Foods was new to me. All I knew was Walmart growing up. So we didn't even have that as an option in Mississippi. But one of the girls at my first job I worked at, she was like, she jokingly called it whole paycheck.

That's how the food. You are spending hundreds every time you go there for sure. But it's higher quality. Health is one of those things I just don't cheap out on anymore. I used to try to eat for like super cheap, as cheap as possible. But you just feel terrible. You'll pay for it later. Yeah, you'll definitely pay for it later. But growing up in mississippi what was that like i don't know anyone

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It's a great place. I really like it. It's a good place to come back to. It's much slower than the rest of the country, it seems like, or at least I've been to most of the continental U.S., so it's a much slower pace of life, which isn't a bad thing, but it's almost like it's kind of like a little time bubble. A little bubble.

Which is not bad. Food's amazing. People are good. No entrepreneurship, though. Not a lot. But it exists. They're just not flexing like we see on social media and stuff. And I grew up in the 90s.

So at that time, we didn't really have like the internet as we have now yes it existed but and we didn't have social media so we didn't know what we didn't know so it wasn't that bad you know uh reflecting on that for sure so we just had what they fed us through the radio waves the fm am i guess FM, um, we had cable, um, and then we had magazines and movies and stuff. So, uh, we, that was all we knew. So yeah, if you don't know what's out there, you think you're living a great life, you know? Yeah. That's how I was in Jersey. I caught the tail end of social media. I think Instagram came out when I was in high school. So that Jersey is pretty much all I knew. I didn't even know about LA orA. or anything. Yeah, and I don't know if you've traveled internationally,

but I've started that and like, wow, that really shifts your perspective because you realize, and not to throw America under the bus or anything, but it's like you start to realize, wow, our whole lives, they've kind of fed us these beliefs in school that we're number one and we're the best in the world until you go to other countries and they're like, we don't think that about you all. And they're like, what?

We're the best. We're number one. That's what they tell us. But not in lifestyle. Yeah. Yeah, number one in certain things, but not even anymore, to be honest. I do like the opportunity that we have here. But as far as quality of life and the health care system, the school system, financial system and whatever,

I mean, we have access to ridiculous amounts of credit, which is amazing. The credit's great. Yeah, I just got like 200K and 0% credit like a month ago just having a good credit score. Yeah, which is wild. In other countries, that's not possible. Yeah, which is, again, we're told we have to work for money and trade time for money, but not really true once you discover the truth.

You just go get it. Yeah, which countries really shifted your perspective that you traveled to? Well, my fiance is from Dominican Republic, so that's a whole different world there. And I guess it was a massive culture shock, but in a good way. But it kind of it was uncomfortable because it, I guess, shed some light on the way we do things over here and why we probably are very depressed and kind of frustrated over here which like things they do over there they just sort of make sense which is uh you wonder well

why are people so stressed over here and like um an example would be like you know the health care and stuff uh you can just go pay to go to a doctor today you don't have to like if you've got some thing severely wrong with you you don't have to be on a wait list right like that you just go pay to go to a doctor today. You don't have to, like if you've got something severely wrong with you, you don't have to be on a wait list. You just go pay for that. And if you're sick, instead of having to drive or drag yourself to a pharmacy, you just call the pharmacy and describe to the pharmacist what's wrong with you, and they deliver your medications to you. I'm like, what a genius idea because who feels like going to the CVS when you feel like crap? Yeah, you can order cannabis.

You can order alcohol. You can order everything. Yeah, and then I guess the biggest shift for me is just over here, I feel like we put a lot of emphasis on the outside of things so um like the outside of restaurants the outside of buildings and stuff and what perception and stuff like perceptions reality and what what's on the outside well it must reflect what's on the inside not true and and at least in the dr haven't been to all the other countries, but over here, you know, we've got strip malls where all the stores pretty much look the same.

The logos are just different. Yeah, yeah. Whereas in their country, or in the DR, like you could have a salon next to a radio station, next to a house, next to, yeah, a restaurant,

next to another restaurant, and they're just doors. And you're just like, what's in there? There's no sign or anything? Maybe there's a restaurant, next to another restaurant, and they're just doors. And you're like, what's in there? There's no sign or anything? Maybe there's a sign, but it's like, I would never go in there. But then you go in there, and it's completely transformed on the

inside. So it's beautiful restaurants, amazing service. Your money goes so much farther. And so I was like, how do I process this information? Because everything I've been ever told been told and sold and fed is like flip-flopped right so I'm like so but so I encourage people you know work hard get the what you need to do to get the money or learn how the

money monetary system works and um use it to travel, educate yourself, read books, things like that, learn. I always encourage that, especially traveling. Yeah, because it's going to shift your perspective. It's going to give you a lot. It's going to humble you. For sure. It's going to help you understand other cultures and stuff

because our way is not the only way. Every single country is different. And I know we live in a huge country here in the U.S., so we've got different states. And sure, Jersey is different from Mississippi. It's different from Austin. But not in the same way that the Dominican Republic is different from Mexico. Those are completely different ways of living.

Absolutely. The same things that apply in the U.S., you cannot do in the DR some things and vice versa. So it's like you just have to accept it. You can't really change it. Yeah, there's certain countries i mean you spend five ten bucks on a meal you're eating like a king yeah i remember going to jamaica it was like that thailand it was like that bolivia the dollar goes far in some countries man yeah so it's cool to get out there and experience different cultures and you can live

like a bad out here spending five bucks on a meal you're getting fast food not even like the other week my fiancee she bought a wendy's which i haven't had wendy's in like 20 years and you got a junior bacon cheeseburger another burger uh two fries i think and two cokes and it was like um 30 something dollars i'm like how dang yeah that used to be like seven bucks yeah yeah for for a long time yeah like for decades or whatever like when did it go up to 30 to eat wendy's like for two people i wonder if they uh still have the dollar menu at some of those places that's what i was asking is it now the five dollar i don't know i don't go remember the five dollar footlong at subway yeah those are like 12 bucks now oh really yeah they stopped it they pulled. Yeah. That was one of the best marketing campaigns I've ever seen

because I still get that jingle in my head. Yeah, see? That's how effective it was. Now commercials these days are like just copy-paste. It doesn't have that personality, you know? Yeah, they're all about internal bleeding and pharmaceuticals. Even like those old progressive commercials, State Farm, like those are classics, man.

I actually go on YouTube and watch old commercial compilations. I mean, that sounds pretty weird, but it's just like interesting to see how advertising has changed over the years. Oh, yeah. Like I don't even like Old Spice, but I love their commercials so much that it made me want to buy their product. Yeah. I'm like, these are cool. Yeah, that whistle that whistle yeah geico had some good ones with the gecko

uh doritos had some good ones super bowl yeah yeah i love how they yeah they just they yeah and i just know the 90s and stuff mostly but yeah some of those old classic ones they would just run for years years and stuff like every christmas we had the the m&m and i think the cola coca-cola commercials over there do you remember the one with the little girl around christmas i think it was campbell soup or something oh classic she'd come in she was a snowman or something yeah yeah the boy or the campbell's one where the thing's rolling down the road and goes to the guy's foot. It stays with you for life.

I know, right? These days it's lost its touch, man. How are you advertising these days with the SEO and the affiliate marketing stuff? Well, I'm mostly through the shorts have kind of taken over. Honestly, I've just kind of been taking a step back for the last couple years because there's been so many developments and advancements and stuff with kind of ai slash with short so i'm just now kind of incorporating that stuff into my process which the process hasn't really changed but but the platforms and the methods and the media have a little bit. Yeah, so TikTok wasn't around several years ago.

We got TikToks and Facebook rules, Instagram. YouTube shorts just came out. And so basically, yeah, you just have to kind of adjust and pivot what you're doing, which I don't want to get too nerdy for your audience and stuff, but we just focus on how we're different is creating pieces of content for long-tail searches, so specific keywords that people are searching for. So instead of like weight loss, which is like super generic,

focus on all the – they're called called long tail phrases just like the questions that people are typing in and create a piece of content for each of those so that lends itself really well actually to the youtube shorts and things like that because people have i guess shorter shorter and shorter attention spans apparently now oh yeah but they'll actually watch more more of those shorts so instead of watching a one hour video i think a lot of people not everybody but a lot of people would rather watch like 101 minute shorts just i would personally because i get so bored on the longer videos yeah and i and i do watch those too but i speed them up yeah 2x i used to do one five now i'm at two audiobooks i'm at 2. Audiobooks, I'm at 2x. Dang. People think I'm wild. But yeah, this is like listening to a chipmunk.

No, 2.5 is like a chipmunk. I tried 2.5 and I couldn't even understand the book. I can do 1.5, maybe 1.7. You can slowly work your way up. Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? We'll click the application link below in the description of this video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to you about business and life.

Click the application link below and here's the episode, guys. Go to 175 next, get comfortable there, then go to 2X. It's pretty wild because people that have never done it probably are like, you're crazy. But your mind is so powerful. No, it is. You're like, it can receive information.

Yeah, and it helps me on podcasts because now I'm already a step ahead of the guest and I can get ready for the next question. So it definitely is useful to be able to learn and retain information quickly. I know you're very good at SEO, which is an interesting topic. I know it evolves so rapidly.

But a lot of people suck at SEO. What are some ways to get better there? That's a broad question, but I guess my best advice really would be, I mean, everybody's got a different little process or approach. Just consume three or more people's courses so that you get a pretty broad scope of the landscape because everybody's got a different process. Like, you know, if you bought my course or courses or whatever, I've got a different perspective than someone else. So I would consume, you know, three to six different courses on the topic and then just kind of assimilate all that information together and figure out your own little proprietary process that works for you. Because every SEO that I know has a slightly different philosophy, but the results are consistent.

Yeah, that's what i see with different but i'll sum it up for your audience because i i don't want people to go on these crazy long multi-year tangents and stuff trying to figure out the secret of seo it's really simple it just comes down to content and backlinks and um if if i have a couple minutes i just yeah i'll tell a really quick story so like i you know i just had like an aha moment um about i think 2015 or something on i was chasing all these you know courses and seo plugins and things like that and every single year is the same thing it's like you know google's changed their algorithm and so you got to get this new plugin to save yourself or whatever we just figured out how to crack the code and i was like man it it can't just be a mystery it has to be logical because if if google

is designed by humans the algorithm there has to be some like method to it you know and it's got to be pretty simple and of lo and behold and the last job i was at was a company where we sold um household wares mostly vacuums and stuff and yeah and in my experience you find some of the answers to your questions in the weirdest places and so that at that place they they had an interesting story they had started from selling vacuums um the owner the owners started selling vacuums out of his car made so much money that he um started a a physical store in austin um did direct mail and stuff, made some money that way. Had one of the first websites out there, just a website, back when we just had pages. People would come to the webpage to buy stuff.

And anyway, so the son of the owner, he and I used to have a lot of conversations. And he said, yeah, in the early days, there was hardly anybody that had websites, hardly anybody selling online. And so we would go to these weird little hotel meetings where all the other internet retailers were there, and the search engines would all send people from their company there, basically tell us how to game their algorithms and stuff. Wow.

Yeah, because they work there they got the inside yeah so like this is how our algorithm works and stuff and so one of the last events he said he remember going to you know that the time like at the time like at the yahoo at one point was like king yeah you know and then they were like altavistas and Dog Pals and Lycos and Excite and all those. But there was this up-and-coming search engine that no one had ever heard of called Google. And this was like the last speaker or whatever. And he got up there and he was like, I think he was one of the top, one of the first three founding members or something. Wow.

Not Sergey and the other ones. I don't even know the founders, to be honest. But not one of those, but one of the other guys. And he said, basically, I'm going to teach you, I'm going to tell you how our algorithm works and how to game it or whatever. And everybody was like, what? Who is this guy?

Like, what is Google? And so this guy basically just summed it up. And what my boss, what I'm about to say and what my boss told me, it confirmed the conclusions that I had come to. So I was like, this makes perfect sense and just sums it up so simply. So, you know, you can take all these courses. You can read books. You can buy all these expensive tools and tracking tools and stuff. But really, SEO just comes down to three things, you know, in Google, which is like the behemoth.

Number one, be relevant. Number two, be popular. And number three, don't be evil. So how that translates to me is, number one, be relevant. That's the on-page SEO. If you're trying to target dog training, well, make sure you create content about dog training. Very simple. And dog training types of titles and phrases and searches.

Be popular, also very simple. That just means backlinks. That's the off page. That's links from other websites pointing to your website or your video or your image or whatever you're trying to rank. So backlinks are basically just a vote in the eyes of Google. And you have to think back to like, why would this be evergreen? Why would these things stand the test of time? So when the internet was first created, these were the elements that were

around in the beginning. So social media didn't exist yet. And so all the things that worked back then still work today. And so, and the third element, don't be evil. The way I interpret that is basically don't do the first two in a, not so much a spammy way, but in a unnatural way. Right. Because I think we can all agree, like, you know, Amazon is a huge site. So is it unnatural for them to get a million new links a day? No. No. Because it's huge.

Yeah. But would it be unnatural for, you know, gregjeffries.com to get a million links today and tomorrow? Yeah. And then I say, yeah, who am am i like i don't sell a billion products a second you know so just do things in a natural progressive kind of way yeah and and you're good i've seen people sell those backlinks i'm like that's sketchy dude yeah and a black hat kind of guy gave me this advice years ago he said it doesn't matter if you're buying 100 links a day or 10,000.

Just make sure that if you buy 10,000 today, you keep that up. That's where people mess up. Yeah, because if you do 10,000 and then you never buy a link again, that's weird. What was that? So you're able to use SEO to basically get whatever you want on the first page of Google, right? That's the goal. But I kind of – I shifted my philosophy in that with SEO years ago. So instead of trying to get on page one for like whatever best SEO in Austin, best dentist in Austin, weight loss expert or whatever.

I focus on all the longer tail searches. So I don't care so much that I'm like ranking number one or whatever. I just want, I call it like just saturating that niche or that audience. So like, because I don't really know where all the traffic is because the keyword tools out there that you have, they're just a guesstimate. Right. And they're usually a pretty low guesstimate. And what I've discovered through experience is that a lot of the longer search phrases

that people are typing in, they may have smaller numbers of traffic, but they're more targeted so they're higher quality. So they're going to lead to more conversions yeah so which is that all you're after because who cares if you're ranking number one for weight loss if you've got to educate the crap out of them on your product i'd rather i'd much rather have somebody that's like red nike men's running shoes and like cool we i'm ranking on page one yeah red nike men's running shoes click buy wonderful Wonderful. That's what we're here for. Yeah. To make money.

So you go after the people that are already ready to buy. They're not in the research step. Yeah. Because otherwise you have the long process. Sales funnel.

Educating. Yeah. You know. Make money online for instance. Great. It's great for bragging rights. Yeah. But then you got to

educate these people. That's. Yeah. Oh my people. That's a huge funnel. You've got to take them from learning about a whole industry to buying. So what are the best types of niches or products that you've had success with? I'll give you a couple. And since SEO is kind of a longer game, but six to 12 months isn't super long in the grand scheme of things um i would recommend people go after mostly products that are evergreen although i did catch your uh an interview recent interview that you made a lot of money off um oh the masks the

masks yeah genius but those those are No, there's nothing, yeah. Yeah. So I focus on more things that are evergreen, and specifically products that are either evergreen, recurring, or high ticket. So evergreen would be like a web host. You're always going to need a web host to host your website. Recurring would be something like, I don't you know necessarily butcher box yeah something like that that has an affiliate program click funnels go high level something like that has a recurring uh sasses and stuff that

have uh also have recurring affiliate programs and then high ticket stuff so things that may pay 500 a thousand or more in commission so because that makes it worth it and there's a handful there's only a handful in my experience of products and services uh that are the exception to that um but you would need volume for there to be an exception i think exactly yeah i love high ticket i only do high ticket yeah yeah vip stuff because then it's not like you don't have to focus on customer service and all that. Exactly. Yeah.

Oh, and I'll add this to it too. Pretty much any physical products. So like if you're selling a desk or a chair, you don't have to convince somebody that you're going to scam them. You know, so like if they order a chair yeah it's not gonna uh you're not gonna get a soda can right like you don't have to convince them that it's not this is not a scam or whatever um and then digital products or whatever it puts anything outside of the make money online space because people are so that's such a negative connotation these days yeah which is weird because like i'm in the make money online space.

But that is the hardest thing to sell. It doesn't matter if you're – it would be way easier to sell a $2,000 course on how to bake bread. Because people that are buying that are not like, well, I wonder if bread is a scam. No. They have disposable income. They want to learn how to bake bread. And this just so happens to be a course that's going to teach them how to do that. Wonderful.

I agree. Yeah, the make money online. I think so many people have gotten their hopes up and then they get the course and they don't take action. Exactly. And they're like, you're a scammer. They blame the person with the i'm not gonna jump through the computer and push buttons yeah are you worried ai is going to be able to do what you do better i'm not worried about it i'm excited yeah yeah i know some people in the seo space the copywriting

space uh they're pretty worried i'm not because uh it basically took everything in my process and made it better faster and cheaper nice so i'm not worried at all yeah i think people on salaries from corporations are worried mainly true yeah like i'm i'm a yeah entrepreneur solopreneur whatever self-employed so uh yeah i guess if i was at a job maybe. But then I really don't. I just think things are going to shift. I don't think things are going to go away. It's just that now instead of somebody who is like doing the manual SEO, they now just need to become the person that is in charge of these tools. Yeah, absolutely.

Manage these tools and stuff. So just pivot. Yeah. Greg, it's been insightful. Anything you want to promote or close off with? Uh, I'll just tell people to go to Greg Jeffries.com. That's where I'm going to have all my latest projects and stuff so they can

see all the things I'm involved in doing. Perfect. And they can reach out to you there. Yep. Cool. All right. Well, thanks for coming on,

man. All right. Thanks for watching guys. As always, I'll see you tomorrow.