The Best PR Strategy for Agencies That Gets Clients | Episode 194

If I were to start over, what would I do to get clients? And my first thing would be, if nobody knew who I was, I would make sure they knew who I was. Don't worry about building content on your own page. Write content for other publications and use their audience to then build your audience. I would find organizations that already had my target audience. And then I would be basically a parasite. And I would go into there and then I would say, how can you get my message in front of your audience? [MUSIC PLAYING] You know what the crazy thing is? My brain froze for a second. I'm like, I need to pay you 250. I feel crazy even asking this question. And she goes, oh, no, we'd pay you $250 to write this for us. Like, we have such a hard time finding expert advice. What world am I in? Like, this is backwards. Like, I should be paying you to publish this. [MUSIC PLAYING] I need to figure out as an SEO, what are the things to get recommended by Chad GPT? OK, well, as I put myself in the shoes of a prospect, and I was looking for a marketing company, what would I type in? It always showed tons of competitors of ours. It referenced us in a couple of those screenshots. It didn't decide to like spit us out. And if you don't show up in the majority of those queries, it's not going to recommend you in the end. This is herfool. You go to Google and you type in a long-term marketing company, and we're number one. We're not even being a reference with some of these basic keywords. Some of our competitors that were like, five positions below us are now right below us. And it's scaring me a little bit. We need to secure that first position. The majority of the industry doesn't even know who we are. I think you fundamentally misunderstand how many of these niche businesses exist. We got a message in our form. I've been in this industry for 28 years and read many publications. This is hands down the best article ever printed. Like Little Jake alone in his apartment. Yeah. I didn't ask that. We didn't have any clients. I think we had one. And we got tons of response from it, too. We got leads like left and right. So-- If it works, we wrap it up, slap a label on it, and call it up. $10,000 a month for it. Because this is not easy to do. [MUSIC PLAYING] So in like a week and a half, I am going to-- Wait, is it OK? A week and a half? I'm going to California to try out for a pro team. Yeah. Oh, one week. Not even a week and a half, one week. And I have been meaning to hit the gym lately, and I've been doing more running. But it's like two times a week, maybe. I'll do like a long run. Because I've been prioritizing work lately. And I haven't done strength training in a long time, like months, I don't know, like four or five months. Like I want to get back into it. But I'm at this point now where I'm like, do I even do it before I leave for California to try out? Is it even worth it? Is the DOM's going to be worth it? Right. The DOM's. Yeah. What if I accidentally injured myself because I've been out of it for so long? And then like-- so I'm like, I'm trying to cope with like, finding like a reason to not do it, not go and lift out, or if like-- or if I'm actually being rational about this thought process. I think you can just do it if it's fun. Because one week isn't going to, you know, it's not going to make that big of a difference anyway. So if you just, you know, have this sparks joy. Yeah. Maybe I'll just do cardio this entire week. Because it's always safe, right? Just to encourage you on. Yeah. I'd never-- I do is-- everybody who-- I don't know. I think people are lying. Or they just have a grasp on their life that I do not. And that's totally possible, too. But I think generally people go through phases, especially if they're agency owners, where they will. They'll hit the gym hard, or they'll have like life balance, where they go regularly. And they have it in the schedule. And then you'll go through waves where you're just working really hard, and you're neglecting parts of your health. And, you know. But I've found, if I'm being honest with myself, that what I'm doing, the balanced thing, and I'm making time to work out, that work actually goes better, too, because my head's clear. And I could think, you know, like, if I just sit and I try to think-- or not, I think. But if I try to work for, I don't know, 18 hours, consecutive, and just crank it out, I know I'm not doing maximum efficiency, or really anything optimal at all. And if I just took the break and did some self-care things like that, it would probably go better. Do you get distracted when you work? You're saying efficiency, or are you, like, do you feel like you start working on the wrong things? I get mental fatigue if it's creative stuff, for sure. But if you work out, you don't get as fatigued? Yeah, because it's a break. Like, I can do that, and then I can come back and keep going. Oh, so you're talking about your midday workout, though. Not necessarily. I mean, it could be any time. When I still have the day job, I would do the whole second morning concept, right? So you, like, you come home, you shower, you start over, and that would work. It's just a shakeup that-- Dude, if your morning routine was working out, and you did the second morning thing, and you worked out twice, two times a day to start over, you'd be yoked. You have a huge business, and it would be super jacked. Yeah, huge business and huge biceps. All right, jump into it. Business. Business. So this question never leaves our lives, and it's, how do I get clients? What? Oh, my god. So-- Can we get a call at the theme of this episode? How do I get clients? Yeah. I don't know what to call this, because this is how I would do it. And there's two ways how I would get clients. I guess, technically, three ways. And let me start this off by saying, this isn't just a generic how to get clients episode, but this is actually how to use PR to build brand authority and what I do, and this actually does bring us a ton of clients. So this is also relevant to bigger agencies, too. I want to say I have nothing taking tribute to this. I'll be then played devil's advocate, or challenge some of your things here, because I'm reading them and I'm going, yeah, I get that, but I know what people are going to say back. But I also know you're the wizard at this. So I just want to fight for some of them and say, but some people are going to say-- Sure. --so I can get your thoughts on the-- Well, yeah. And also, if somebody's notes in here, you're like, you're probably like, why is that written down? There's no context. And it's like, well, I'll get to it. And maybe I don't know. Maybe you won't have anything to say after that. No, I get it. That's what my brain works, too. We got the brain waves, though. It's fine. So there's three ways that I would go to get clients when I first start. I'll just go answer them real quick. Number one is being an SEO. It's really easy for me to find a really bad SEO website on the third page of Google, figure out what's wrong with it, cold call that person, or that business, and just tell them what's wrong with their website, and then just give that advice for free. That's a whole episode on its own. I did this with Marcus. Marcus called seven people and got three appointments to four people who actually wanted to buy his services. So if you do that from an SEO perspective, that can work out really well. That's actually something that Chris Walker in his episode talked about what he did when he first started Superstar SEO. If you were like, whoa, that's crazy. What is that? Just go listen to that episode. It's like a small segment in there, but I'm not going to cover it in this one. The second thing is I would actually network with other landscaping and long-term businesses, and you could do that via Facebook groups, or-- You're just talking about whatever niche that you've chosen. Yeah, super. Sorry, yeah, yeah. Whatever niche you've chosen, sorry. I'm hopped upon so many drugs right now. I am-- Totally legal and good. No, they are. Over the counter, yeah. I had a migraine this morning. So I've been like, I'm on so much acetametaphine and said, I be profan and anti-histamine, basically Benadryl. And when you combine those, they can all be taken together. But when you combine those-- It actually works. It will-- it helps my migraines, but I feel a little disoriented. And that's kind of how I am now. So whatever niche you're in, go network with those people in that niche, like where your clients are, and that could be done through Facebook groups, be done on LinkedIn. It could be done on actual niche events. So maybe if you're in the roofing industry, there's a roofing conference or something. Go there and do those things. The third thing is my favorite. And it's the most applicable, no matter what service you offer. So with my first point with the SEO thing, that's the number one thing I would probably do if I needed a client like tomorrow. I was like, find those people who have bad websites, given free advice, things like that. But I reckon they're gonna take about that. - There's like, what's great. Great. That's all. Well, the critique is that not everybody does SEO. And in fact, I'm starting to see fewer and fewer agencies offer SEO. Like the more agencies that come into the Discord or in Reddit don't even know SEO. There are like a paid media space or even an automation space or something like that. And like that's not a skills that they have nor do they offer it. So even if they did say here, I can improve your website or you can improve your website by doing these few things. Like, great, what value are you giving if that's not even a service that you offer anyways. So I failed as the devil's advocate because I didn't think about that at all. So zero thoughts. I just assumed that everybody was doing SEO stuff. Sorry. No, it's it's it's a forgotten art. One, well, I also, I still recommend everybody learn SEO. So some kind of fundamental level. But I've been asked like if I would start over like what would I do to get clients and my first thing would be I would build authority like if nobody knew who I was, I would make sure they knew who I was. And there are when I first started, I don't know if it's better to like give like a quick history of starting ever grow and building that authority. It was a speed running real quick. Yeah. So the first thing I did was like I networked. I did I joined the Facebook groups. I would like help people with the marketing questions. I want to solicit. I would just get in there and I would do those things that advice has never changed. The next thing I would do would I would I would find like people or publications or organizations that already had my target audience. And then I would be basically a parasite and I would go into there and then I would say how can you get my message in front of your audience. And all the time I see new agencies enter the space and the first thing they try to do is build an audience. I think that's totally backwards. I think when you first get into the space, you should leverage other people's audiences that are in the same space as you. And I don't mean other agencies. I mean like publications that are focused on your niche. So if you're like if you work with electricians, there's probably electrician magazines. I bet I could Google right now electrician magazine. Look at this electrical contractor magazine. EEC mag.com. Easy. Like publication for literally everything. Like get known in that industry and siphon their audience. Okay, but why? Because I'm thinking here I'm flipping this. I'm going. So you can build authority kind of in one of two ways. You own the playground in the audience or you go and borrow it from somebody else and you could make your own blog where you're talking about these things or you can go and find the people who already have the publications and try to get in with them. But are they going to let you in if you don't have something to show for it too? That's a great question. Cody, thank you for asking. So we'll let you in. Sometimes maybe it depends on the content. You got to do a little bit of research and I'll get into it a little bit. Here was so many of the discord you were exchanging with today and they were talking about planning their content because they're launched on their website. They're trying to plan their content out to launch a blog with their website that was full of content versus just kind of like slowly adding new content to it because they didn't want to like an empty blog. They thought I didn't look professional. And I kind of gave the advice of what I just gave now, which is don't worry about building content on your own page, write content for other publications and use their audience to then build your audience and then start writing your own blogs. You don't need to just like go to market with a ton of content. If your content should be purposeful and driven for sales, which is what, which is the argument you made. Like you shouldn't just be writing content on your site just for the sake of getting traffic. Like it should be meaningful and impactful for people to want to work with you. The problem is if nobody is seeing that content and that content is useless. So if you can write that for a publication and have that publication distributed for you, two, you're your same audience. That's a win-win. Okay. So then going under the topic of why would they want to publish you or were they even? We had two episodes on this 150 episodes ago. That's crazy. It's like three years ago. So number 35, we published how to get published in niche magazines. And then episode number 39, we wrote, or we talked about what to write for those magazines. Because there's like a delineation between like what you should publish on your website. And then what you should write inside of those niche magazines or what you should pitch them. You don't necessarily want to give them the best stuff, but you also don't want to give them the worst stuff. You should be hyper tailored to content that they either have gaps in and are kind of actionable and get people more interested in what you do. But to answer your exact question, which was why would they want to feature you? Well, there's two ways why they would want to. One is you can pay them to do it and they will do it because money talks. And you can usually pay them for like a press release, which is what I think a lot of people in the SEO industry are familiar with. Or you could just pitch them really good content that they can't say no to that they want in their publication because it is valuable to their readers. And like that's like the number one lesson there is what is valuable to their actual readers. What can you provide that other people either aren't or can't? And I was just explaining this actually in the most please go lay down. I was sorry, my dog. I was just explaining this to a guy in the discord because actually multiple people in the discord I talked to this about. But they're like, well, I don't have like the industry benchmarks and knowledge that you have because if you go to our website, what I do and what we have done is every year we aggregate all of our Google ads data, we extract meaningful information from it and we publish this industry report. And then we can go to other publications and we can say, Hey, we publish this report. Like it's got a lot of cool and interesting data into it. But when you're new, you don't really have that. That's not something that like you can just go in with. So how do you write something that's compelling for publication? So I pulled up some examples and in the first two publications we got into in our industry were turf magazine and green industry pros magazine. And actually, if you go to our website, evergomarketing.com and you scroll down the homepage to the section that says you might have heard about us. There are three magazines. Those are actually like the face of the print magazine that we are published in. We were in actually in the print magazine and we were in the digital version. And then the first two for turf magazine and green industry pros, I believe. Oh no, just green industry pros and green industry pros. My article is actually on the front cover. And in green industry pros, the article title, this was February 13, 2019. It's how to find a quality lawn care customers. If you read that article, you realize there's actually no data in there at all. It's all just like subjective. It's like what I would do if I was a lawn care company knowing the marketing that I know. And like in there, I pick up, broke it out into like five, yeah, technically 5.5 headlines. So know your audience, know how to target, tailor your message, establish your value off or pick your routes and know your worth. The only thing in there that's like that has like information specifically about that, about this industry is the pick your routes thing because route density in the lawn care landscaping industry is a term to describe like having a bunch of customers in like a really narrow route. So you can optimize service delivery for efficiency and maximum profitability. And I only knew that because I hung out with like all the lawn care company people inside of like the lawn care groups on Facebook and you just kind of picked up on some of these things. So that when you write these articles, you can kind of speak to their language, even if you don't have the data or anything to back things up. And then you can write some of this subjective stuff. And then in Turf Magazine, this was March 19, 2019. So they published this a month later. I wrote fly by night guys aren't taking your business. And fly by night is one of those kind of industry terminology or industry terms also known as Chuck's in a truck. But this article is the same thing as how to find quality lawn care clients. They're just different titles. So the fly by night guys aren't taking your business and then how to find quality lawn care customers. The fly by night one, my message in there was basically like, if you were worried about these like, guys with a mower charging $25 to mose someone's lawn, if you worry about them taking your business, you're not fishing in the right pond. Like your target customer is incorrect because no homeowner that's willing to pay somebody that is, whatever, sorry, let me rephrase it, no homeowner that's willing to pay your prices would ever hire somebody for only $25 an hour because they know what the implications of that means. And so that's what that article was about. And that got my foot into the door, into the publications. I wrote these pieces before I pitched them. And then I found the editors in charge or that would publish these. And I said, hey, I wrote this for your magazine. Do you want to take a look at it? Is this valuable to your audience? And then will you publish it? Does that answer your question? Yeah. It sounds like you're taking knowledge that you gathered other places professionally already and then skinning it for a particular niche or industry in a way that makes it readable for them and seem applicable. But really, we've got 80% that's kind of just universal business advice that you've gathered from years of experience. And then 20% that's customized to actually apply to them. Yeah. And that 20% like really that 20% is probably 80% of the impact. It's like if you just modify it to speak directly to that industry, not only will the editors recognize that, but also the readers will recognize that too. And we got tons of response from it too. Because when those actually went out in the magazines, I remember we got leads like left and right. And so when we first went to market with like good getting in these publications, it wasn't about like SEO, common SEO metrics are like domain authority or domain rank, which are metrics you could find with like, Moz and atrefs. It wasn't about getting in those like high authority publications. It was about getting in the publications most relevant to our industry. And had the highest number of readers because we wanted to leverage their audience. Nothing to do with their authority from a domain perspective. It was do they have the audience that we can pick you back off of. Do you think you still need something though to give credibility to yourself? I mean, if you're just going to these places and you have nothing really to show for yourself. Because I think about, you know, we did at least have a blog with some stuff. It wasn't as good as it is now. We've got way better stuff now. But I feel like sometimes people underestimate just how niche that they can go with some things because they think there's no volume for it. And that's how they, well, that's their analysis too, is they go down these rabbit holes and they don't go deep enough because they're like, well, the keyword player says there's nothing for it. So I'm not going to write anything. I'm going to write something like that. Well, if you just wrote a, you probably find out a little bit and then maybe you could just solve some credibility. So two things. First one is we actually had a listener write into our email. I've been going back and forth with him on his at pool. He does pool builders, pool contractor marketer. And I was teaching him a little bit about SEO on like how to structure his website to attract pool builders looking for marketing companies specific to that industry. And he was using Google keyword plan and he's like, there really isn't a lot of volume for it. He's like, there's only like a hundred searches a month. And I'm like, my man, that's 1200 companies a year looking for a marketing company. Imagine you only had 2% of that. And then I was like, that's 24 clients. That's as many clients as we have on marketing right in the in the slow season. So like, yeah, volume's low, but it's like, it's if you can optimize for it's super high intent. The other thing was you're like, do you have to have some kind of like reason or authority of why they would like take you seriously? That's why my advice is to write the piece first, write the piece first and then pitch the pitch them it because at that point, they should be judging you off of the quality of the written content versus taking a word for it and then being like, well, I hope you write it decently. Just or she just write it first and then say this is exclusively for your publication. And then make sure it's like good or valuable. And I think that's like the hard thing that people struggle with is like, what is good or valuable? And it's like, well, if you didn't know what you knew and you read this, would you be able to walk away with some value in it or is this just a sales pitch to your agency, which is the one thing it should never be. You should never, ever, ever, ever pitch your agency or your services in a post that you are providing to a publication. So what's what's the benefit or in what way is this funneling back to actually get to you then when you're talking about these things as this, I'm going to give this useful thing, the buy line is going to be enough for people to actually follow through and contact me. Or is it purely I'm doing this for the backlinks and I don't really care about any human response? These are all really good questions, Cody. I'm proud of you. Um, yeah, so two things, it depends on where you're at with your business. So at first, I just want to mention, I don't even care about the back link. And even from a non-SEO perspective, now that we're in 2026, the last time we talked about this was 2022, actually, I think it was 23. LLMs are not big like AI recommendations, and they will recommend you base off of branded mentions, not even links. Which is what every SEO wanted for the longest time. I remember, I can remember ran talking about this in the video and being like the co-sitation is the future, right? And then it wasn't. Yeah. So maybe it was, maybe it was right. Maybe I just proved myself wrong by saying that he was wrong and then it just didn't happen in an SEO, it just happened in GEO. There you go. Don't stop it. Stop it. Yeah. So now it's like, I just wanted the brand mention. I didn't even like, I didn't even want like a link at that point, but like they, they will do it. So when you write for a publication, your primary link or like a link that you should expect, probably seven out of 10 times would be actually in your author by line. So at the end of the article, it'll say, this is written, you know, submitted or published by Jake Huntly, they'll give you like an author profile and then they'll have like, you'll write like a brief description of it and they'll ask for this when you submit the piece or when they accept your piece. And then like I link the name evergreen marketing to our website. And then they like, again, seven out of 10 times, I'll do this. Sometimes they won't. And if they don't, don't ask for it because it's just, it's not, you know, their protocol to do it. But again, like, at the beginning of the business, I didn't care about the authority of their link. I wanted the traffic. And as long as the traffic knew who wrote the article, the high quality clients or prospects will come and find you because they liked what they wrote. I remember this was years ago now. We were planning and exploring some stuff about backwakes in the different locations that we can do them. And you have a PR hit list at the moment for some, uh, person outreach, internal outreach. I just told you to I'd kind of, in some downtime, I've been playing around with a similar one specifically for, uh, a makeshift peanut butter network. I don't want to say that actual word. It's the, the first letters all the non SEOs are like, what are you talking about? Peanut butter network. You know what I mean? The first, the first three letters of those words. Um, yeah, because at the time, some of that stuff that we had done, you know, people were pushing these things. They're pushing the hype and then we tested it and we're like, it's just not true. We've done that with a lot of things, right? A lot of what you said with PR. Um, yeah. Yeah. What's some links that we had kind of tried out to see if it would give us the juice that we thought. Like newspaper type stuff. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And I think when you talk to at the time, this was years ago now, when you talk to people seriously directly, personally, and ask them about the impacts of those things, they would say, yeah, well, honestly, the impact is in that big. It's more about it to live for a little for the client. So that they saw or they see a thing that you did and you can prove that it happened and that sort of thing. And I wonder, I want to go back down this route more recently and explored again specifically how it relates to, I mean, you're doing it for us, but I also wonder on a half of clients too. If, like, this is kind of a beta in a way where we can see what kind of impact it has for us to and that if it works it can be worth it. replicable for clients too. If we determine that, you know, there's a corresponding uplift, but I think the biggest thing is doing it in a fiscally viable way. And that's what some people don't want to do or don't want to think about. They're like, yeah, pay us this retainer and we'll get you links. But you don't measure the corresponding lift. You don't actually see if there's a proportional increase in revenue for the company and they leave after two to three months when they realize that you're full of crap. I think the other thing too is like, people get so obsessed with domain authority and domain rank. They're just like, yeah, I want a Forbes link, but it's like, okay, but topically, that's irrelevant to you or your clients. Like the websites that you're guest posting on and like you're getting these links from or you're getting these mentions from, they should be like hyper relevant to your industry, your niche because a topical authority is, I think, more important than general authority, like way more important. I would rather have, I gave for the SEOs, I'd rather have a domain authority of 10, but all of my links be from topically authoritative industry publications than a domain authority of 40 and I have none of that. So I wanted to cut back just a quick because I was while you were talking, I was looking up this, this form fill. And I think I mentioned this in one of the previous episodes. But after that, how I had to go into HubSpot and look up all of our form fills since 2019, but after that, how to find quality lawn care customers article was published. We got a message in our form that said, I just wanted to commend you on the article title, how to find quality lawn care customers in the January, February, green industry, pros magazine. I've been into this industry for 28 years and read many publications. This exact information has kept my business successful and profitable from day one. It's tough lesson to learn, but it sure works. That was like mind blowing to read that because again, this is beginning of 2019. It's like little Jake alone in his apartment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We had, I think we had one at this, at this time. So it's like, we weren't even like, like, there's no data to go off of this. It's just like basic information that I picked up just in business in general. And then I tailored like 20% of it to the industry. And then this guy was never became a client or anything like that. But this let me know people are reading this, especially if they reached out to me about it. And so that could be you. Actually, use my one piece of advice to is be that person. I've got nothing else to say, but I do that when something that I read is a banger, I reach out to the author and I say nothing other than that was a total banger and you should feel really cool about yourself. I've done that. I do it all the time. And then they remember it. And then if you do want to talk to them later, it's not hard to get a hold of them again. Yeah. Which is another good point that I'll talk about too with some of those publication stuff. Okay. There was a second part to your like when you asked me how do you like decide which publications to get into. And I said, well, it depends on like what stage of the business you're in. So when you're at when you're first starting out, I really cared only about traffic and audience size. Right now we we can just do nothing and we would get leads on leads on leads right now because of the old stuff that we did do that has helped our SEO for years and years and years. Just getting that getting those links and everything. And so like we don't even have to get to publish into publications to get clients coming in via our own SEO. But when you're when in later in business, what you do or what I'm doing now is now I'm going after high authority websites within the industries. So I don't actually don't care about traffic. I don't care about that audience size. Now I just want the authoritative brand mentions and links. And that's it. And this is more of an SEO perspective than it is like a market driven PR perspective. But I'm still calling it PR because it's the same strategies of getting in these magazines. But I wanted to talk about why I created this media hit list that Cody briefly mentioned. And it was because in the last episode, I was just talking about how I was how a client or a prospect found us through an LLM. I don't know which one actually he responded to me. I asked him what he typed in in the LLM because you know, you never know unless someone tells you. So he said, I use I use GROC to find you guys. But I think chat GPT service the website to at one point. It's definitely going to be an interesting marketing channel go forward, especially for y'all's I have business in my opinion. I'm not sure if you saw, but there was some news chat GPT was going to put ads in the results. Okay, he didn't actually tell me. I don't know what he's searched to find this. But man, I started to do some searches. I'm like, okay, well, if I would I put myself in the shoes of a prospect and I was looking for a marketing company for my lawn care business, what would I type in? And so I try like all these different combinations of like, like, like who are the best lawn care marketing companies or like who are the most affordable lawn care marketing companies? And I'm just trying to like change some of these keywords around to get it to prompt us. And it never did. It always showed like tons of competitors of ours. It showed us like in when you see like show thinking and like it shows you the thinking. It referenced us in a couple of those screenshots where it's like now comparing ever grow with this one and this one. And then it didn't decide to like spit us out. It's like, I know. I was like, what the hell, man? Like you go to Google and you type in lawn care marketing company and we're number one. So it's like, if we're number one in search engines, but we're not number like we're not even being a reference with some of these basic keywords and their hipsters. They're like not our two mainstream. We got to get something else out here. So this is what all the geo fanboys Russians. You see, I told you so it's totally different. For what it's worth, I still don't think it's different. I just think it's a different type of search engine and the factors it's using are different. So we don't rank number one in being for lawn care marketing company like we do in Google. It's just a different search engine. They use different things. So now I need to figure out as an SEO, what are the things that get recommended by Chad GPT? And it basically comes down to content. So the way that LLM's work is they do a thing called the query fan out. So when you would you type in a question, it'll basically, it'll understand that question and a bunch of different semantics and it'll search the web. It'll typically use a combination of being in Google to find answers to the questions it's asking itself to answer your question. So when you say best, best is very subjective. So it's going to look up lawn care companies of the most review lawn care marketing companies with the most reviews lawn care marketing companies with case studies lawn care marketing companies mentioned wherever and it's going to like that's like that's fanning out the queries. And if you don't show up in the majority of those queries, it's not going to recommend you in the end or at least it has a less likelihood of doing so. So that has kind of kickstarted my conquest to do this whole PR media hit list thing. And then if it works, we wrap it up, slap a label on it and call it up. $10,000 a month for it because it's not easy to do. So in this situation, I've also noticed too that like landscaping marketing company has a keyword and lawn care marketing company, we have like some of our competitors that were like five positions below us are now right below us. I think we like rested on our laurels for too long. And we're like, we we did this. And now we can just, you know, be search for this and always be number one. When I see these competitors start to catch up, I think I need to go on that offense a bit more now. And we need to, we need to like secure that first position. So the problem was, what's the moral when you rest in there? I don't know. I just know the phrase saying rest on my like, like, like our legs. Okay. Be so satisfied with what one has already achieved that one makes no further effort. How do you spell it? Like Lauren, but within L. What is a laurel? What is a laurel? A shrub or a tree? Oh, aromatic leathery leaves. Is this like a thing where it's like kings like lay on that or something? Sitting on it, resting on our laurel. Okay. So you're just hanging out in the bush. Is that what? I guess. Anyways, we got too comfy for too long. And now I feel like we need to go on to the offense. And this is no longer a traffic situation. Like I don't care about traffic. I just want to go up to the high domain authority, high domain rank websites, which aren't like Google metrics. The third party metrics domain rank is a metric that H refs uses to kind of calculate the popularity or authority of a website and then Maws and other SEO tool uses doing authority to do the exact same thing. There isn't like Google doesn't say they have like a specific like domain authority or domain rank. Tymetric, but they do in a certain other ways. They might not like put a new miracle value on it, but they can assess the authority of a site, especially topically. And so these are more just kind of like our guiding north stars for like the authoritative publications we want to be in. So I went out and I looked for all the publications within our industry and our sub industries. So our industry is landscaping in lawn care that can be bundled up into the green industry or outdoor living. And the sub industries are like pest control irrigation tree services like all of those have their own kind of sub industry magazines. And then I put them into basically a table in Google Sheets with the publication name, the domain, the industry that they serve or the sub industry, the sub domain, oh sorry, the submission link where you where I would need to go to submit a pitch or I have an email in there instead of waiting to email. Then I have the domain rank, doing authority, I have the article that was published if we have had an article published in there. And the date pitched, the pitch, what I pitched them. And then the last one is a drop down of was do we get published in it or not? So when you when you pitch now, are you like, hey baby, I'm Jake Emily, I'm wicked cool. Look at all these things I've been published in before. You'd be stupid not to publish me not to. Like this is the strategy different as it changed now that you have some clout compared to those initial ones and should people stack that somehow? You should be careful. I think you should be careful. This is a little subjective, but like I'm not going to go to turf magazine and say, hey look at this article, I published some green industry pros because that's a direct competitor of theirs. So it's like, it's kind of like, I don't know, show boating in front of them a little bit. Like I just I get very careful of just not doing that with competitors. Now with like TCI mag, which is tree care industry magazine, we published our aggregate results for Google ads this weekend, this last weekend. And in there, we have like average Google ads metrics for tree services. I went to them and I pitched them and I'm like, hey, we did our industry benchmarks that we do annually. And we have some information on tree services specifically that I think would be really good to kind of expand on in your magazine for your audience. And I'm like, here's we did something similar with this in green industry pros mag or in a yeah, it was green industry pros magazine last year with our benchmark support. They're not competing magazines. Green industry pros are just landscaping lawn care. TCI is a tree service magazine. And so I was able to do that so they can get a feel for like how I actually write and they can feel confident in that because in this situation, I didn't actually write the article first. I just pitched it. But like if you don't have any credibility, like, yeah, like write the thing first and then give it to them. So yeah, I would just be careful, I think, like you don't want to, I'm not going to go to search engine general and be like, I published this in search engine land last year. Like that's just, yeah, I just, I probably will do that actually. I feel like I built up an author profile strong enough to just be like, what about it? So, so I went out and I pitched this this week and I pitched one, two, three, four, five magazines out of this list of 20 that I have. And three are two thing up back to me and I'll cool with a submission. One of them, the senior editor accepted my LinkedIn connection request. So this is like, and this is actually a new strategy that I wasn't doing before because before I didn't have the tools. But the hardest part of like finding out who to pitch to is knowing who to pitch to. Like, usually when you go to publication, you'll say like about or you'll see like an editor's page, you'll see a list of editors ones like the senior editor ones like the the managing editor and it's like, who do I actually send this to? And I used to go in and I used to kind of start in the middle. So I went to the senior, but I want to go to like the associate editor. I'd go to like the managing editor or like whoever is in between. And I talked to them because they have enough poll to push something through, but they also are still in like the prove yourself stage. So they're still looking at finding good content. If that didn't work, I would go one lower to the associate editor and I'd work it up the flagpole that way. It's now it's different. Now I find a magazine. I opened up Chad GBT or Gemini and I'm just like, hey, I want to publish in this magazine. I wrote this piece or this is what my my pitch is going to be. What are the best avenues to pitch this to the to the most relevant person? And then it would spit back a list of names. Then I would just have it like, hey, what are their emails? Like, like, how do I get their emails? Or it would also work. Yes, it does work. Absolutely. So I don't know where they're sourcing it from. I mean, if I imagine a through editors from the magazine, they're probably listed somewhere and it's finding it somewhere. Something. Yeah. But connecting with them on LinkedIn is always a great shot too. So usually what I'll do is I'll go and I'll just connect with everyone of these people on LinkedIn. You connect or you just click in. I don't even send a message. I just connect. For real? For real. For real. I ignore. At this point, I like nearly every single connection request that I get that doesn't have any sort of note or anything with it. I'm just like, I don't want to talk to you. Yeah. That's it. It works for me. Impressive. Sometimes I send like, and it could just be like, they could just be going to my profile and just being like, who like, what kind of stuff do they post? Like, do they seem like they're going to sell me something or whatever? And my profile doesn't look like that. So maybe they accept it. But I don't have like advice on whether you should or shouldn't add a message or a note or something. Just figure out what the best way you think is to connect with all of these editors. Don't say anything to them. Just to connect with them. So when you do want to say something to them or you do want to pitch them, it's just as easy as sending them a message. So I'll do that. But then I'll also look at who Gemini had suggested that I reach out to with the pitch. And it'll even help you craft like the pitch email. But the thing that I'm super conscious about is I don't want it to, I don't want it to read like AI. I don't even want to be detectable by AI. So I'll use like, if I'm like, man, the thing that Gemini wrote for like a pitch email is really good. And I want to use basically that structure. I'll throw it into originality AI. And I was like, does this sound like AI? And it'll say, yeah, we're 100% confident this is AI. Then I just rewrite it in the box at originality. And then I'll like scan it. And then it'll say, okay, we're 99% sure this is original. So I just, I'm nervous that when you pitch an editor, the first thing I'm going to do is did you even use AI, did you use AI to craft this email? And like, it's not a good look if you clearly did. And you're trying to pitch them an article to put on their website. So I'm just very conscious of that. So yeah, I sent some of these had like very like very simple submissions, submission like processes. So I just like submitted those. But then I also connected with the editors too. Because if I submitted this via like, they're like, article submission contact form and no one ever reached out to me, you probably got stone walled by some intern. So like, I'll go and I'll find the editors on LinkedIn. If I don't get a response, I'll message them on LinkedIn. But I only target like one publication at a time for a specific angle or article. And if I don't hear back from them, then I'll take that article somewhere else. So you're not shopping the same article to multiple publications at the same time. Yeah, because what happens if multiple publications get back to you at the same time and say, yeah, we want this. And they publish and then like on one hand, you're like, yeah, I got two people to publish the same exact article. But now good luck getting the next article submitted when they find out that you did that. Yeah, you're shooting yourself on the foot. Yeah. So I created this article hit list. Now what I will say though is this is also a new tactic that I've tacked that I've started doing for this like mad PR campaign is finding industry podcasts. So there's an industry podcast for almost everything. There's actually fewer podcasts in their R magazines and media companies, which is a little shocking. I found irrigation podcasts, lawn care podcasts, land skating podcasts, pest control podcasts. And then what you do is like get something published in one of those magazines. And then once that gets published, find those podcasts, pitch them and say, hey, I just had this published in this magazine. I think it'd be a good topic to cover on your podcast. Because what you're doing two things here, I guess technically, yeah, two things. You're establishing authority through social proof. This this publication was willing to stick their neck out for me and publish my article. And two, you're giving them a topic that's worth publishing in a different format. So that's exactly what I'm going to do with, I found like three pest control podcasts. Once and if I get my pest control article published in one of the main pest control publications, I'm then going to take it to this podcast and say, hey, I think this would be really good for your audience. And usually what might happen to, is this actually just happened with the tree service one. I submitted the article and I was like, hey, we just did our annual benchmarks for Google ads and there's some really interesting insights related to tree services. I think it would be really good for your publication. They wrote back and counterpitched me and they said, I think that's two in the weeds for audience. They need like more simple and basic marketing help, which is always a great thing to hear when you're when you have to write something, because you're like, ah, okay, I can this can be really easy to write. Especially if you're new, right? Yeah. Because we have all we have absolutely. So like, it's okay, right? Also, also this magazine is like, they're like the second most authoritative site on my list of 20. Like it's massive and they want something super basic. Something I could have wrote in 2018, 2019. That means you, the listener, could also do the same thing. Just pitch something super basic. It feels like it feels weird. It feels impostery. But like, the fact that you know how to run Facebook ads using Facebook ads manager versus the ads center from the page is already like light years ahead of what the readers can do. But the, the, yeah, so they counterpitched me and they're like actually we have a recruitment issue coming out where we're talking about hiring. So if you can talk, if you can speak to something about like how to use marketing to attract talent to hire for tree services, then yeah, we'll actually publish this. You know what the crazy thing is? This is a Twilight Zone thing, man. So usually when like the other option of getting into publication is just paying them, just being like, okay, well, like, okay, well, it's going to cost you like 200 bucks to submit an article. And like, that's just like, okay, like how bad do you want to link or how bad do you want this? Do you want this? And we've never paid to be in a magazine. No one has even told us that it costed to be in the magazine and then had us and then we were like nah, no thanks. Like we've always submitted article and pit articles and pitches that have gotten us in for free or just ignored. This one was like, yeah, I, you know, I know it's not, they're like, it's not much, but we pay $250 to put an article in the department categories or I don't know how ever she ordered it. My like brain froze for a second. I'm like, what are you talking about? And so I, I emailed her back. I had to clarify and I was like, what do you mean you pay? I was like, you, I need to pay you 250 to get the article or you're going to pay me 250. And I was like, I feel crazy even asking this question. Like she's like, we have such a hard time finding expert advice to write expert columns that we pay you like we're nonprofits. So it's not a lot and she's like trying to like sell it. And I was like, what a world am I in? Like this is backwards. Like I should be paying you to publish this. And so I just emailed her back and I was like, I don't want the money. Like I like the mention, the backlink, the PR, like that's, that's all I want. You know there's going to be other niches like this too, right? Especially the deeper you go. And I think you should go deeper. I think, I think people are afraid of going too deep with a niche. And I think it's not a bad idea to go that deep because then once you're there, they have something that's peripheral, right? It's not the same, but it's right next to it. And then you can just hop over. You have to do the same thing again. Sure. But okay, it's not hard. You already did it once. Well, Peskin's show was when was that niche for us? It was like, it's not like in the green industry because it's like, it's tangential. Like you're like a common pest that like that intersects is like moles, like moles in the yards. Some of our green industry clients like will handle that. But then other pest control people who deal with like bedbugs and termites and cockroaches will also do moles stuff. So like that's how we kind of transition into a side industry. And we learned a lot from a couple pest control clients that we got enough information to put them into this like aggregate data benchmark thing that we did. And then take that to a pest control magazine and say, I would like talk more about this so we can get in front of your pest control audience. Um, and you come to ask, he mentions podcasts when you're talking about publications. Are we talking about YouTube too? And then if we are, is there like a minimum viable setup you need before you're pitching or talking to these people because if they're like, yeah, sure, come on. And then you've got your Chromebook. Is that okay? Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point to bring up. Um, in most cases, I don't think any of these industry podcasts, unless you're in like, like SaaS or like a tech focused in like industry. I don't think they're really going to care about sound quality that much. Um, the first podcast I was on was lawn care leaders. And it was like his, I think his 11th episode maybe like 10th or 11th episode. We, he said an iPhone down between us and I went to his office and we recorded that way. And that was it. He just happened to be located near me. But um, if you play on going on podcasts, my advice is to get a decent microphone. And the camera doesn't have to be decent. Like if it's, especially if it's a YouTube, if it's YouTube or like a video podcast, have a camera, but the audio is the most important thing. So like get a Yeti mic or get one of those mice to get at best by, you know, something decent. It doesn't have to be, you know, $100, $200. It could be $50. But, um, but yeah, now with, with podcasts and YouTube channels. So I have three of them on here and on my hit list because I've learned that, um, when you look at podcasts, their content is like, just stays up forever. But you have to look when they last published because podcasts come and go all the time. And you could be like researching a dead podcast. So I found three past control podcasts. And I like, kind of like sort of them by, okay, once I get published in one of these past control magazines, which podcast would I prefer to go on first to target or to talk about what I published in that magazine. And I found one here and I put it into the different categories. So, um, there's, there's four. Actually, there's a, there's like seven things, six things. How many YouTube subscribers do they have? What are their Spotify rating is count? What are their Apple rating is count? What's their listen notes score? So listen notes is something that I know because of our podcast. But listen notes, if you're to listen notes.com, uh, you can type in any podcast and find it and pull it up and it'll give you kind of a score and rank those podcasts globally around audiences. Um, so I think if you look at ours, like we're 30, we're in like the top five percent of all podcasts. Um, the B this one, uh, like these three that I found I found a 41, a 39 and a 33. So initially, is that all podcasts like every? Yeah, it's everything. Yeah. So, um, so 41, 39, 33 for the listen notes on these three podcasts, you would think I'd go for the 41 because according to listen notes, they have a bigger audience. And in fact, um, I'm going to look at the first one and the second one for right now. But like the first one, um, they have a 4.9 rating on Spotify with 92 reviews on Apple. They have a 4.9 or 123. They have the highest listen notes that tells them they have the biggest podcast audience. Um, so if I was going for traffic, I would want to be on that one. If I would, but I'm not going to traffic. This is not the point of my PR campaign. Mine is for authority. Um, they're the one with the biggest amount of traffic. They have a domain rank of 4 from a Trefs and Maz says they have a domain authority of seven, which is extremely low. I could get on the worst magazine for better domain ranking domain authority. Um, so one thing about podcasts is if they have a, if they have a website, they will likely link to you as, as the guest. And so just being on the audio platforms is getting in front of an audience and and using what what I'm going to talk about in a second, which is parasite SEO. But like being mentioned on that other platform is good too. But if they also a website, you're probably going to get a link from their website. It's topically relevant over to your website as well, which is the reason why I want to go with podcast number two. So podcast number two had a 39 listener score. They only have 22 ratings on Spotify with a 4.6 average. So versus the 92 on the other one. And then Apple is 95 4.6 versus a 123. at four point on the previous one. Listen up score again, 39 to point slower, but here's the gigger. They're domain rank from age reps is 26, that domain authority is 20 on their actual website. So if my push here is authority, that's the one that I'm going to go after. I want our link on their website. If you're brand new, Gios go for the biggest. Is it like the bully at school? You go and punch the biggest guy, so people know not to mess with you. Like you're starting out with someone. You feel like you can actually get through too. How's that? Great question. So when I first heard I went after this smallest person because it was the easiest to get on there. And I built myself up. I climbed the ladder. Now I don't. So now I just I beat up the biggest, the biggest, baddest person in the prison. Nice. And then yeah, so I just do that now. So you're right, I'd probably go after somebody else, but I would still probably go after like this middle one here because the one below that is a guy named Jonas Olsen and he's more known for having a YouTube channel and pest control personality. He has the lowest list and score rate or rank of 33. He's got a zero demand rank and a four demand authority. But he has about 3000 YouTube subscribers. So he's got in theory the biggest audience out of those three. So I don't need like this is like a weird list for these three that I have that I don't even know honestly who I would go after first if I was going after the smallest person. So, but yeah, um, Parasite SEO. I mentioned this. Parasite SEO is when you use the authority of another website or platform to push your brand. So a big Parasite SEO tactic right now is Reddit. You know, your brand gets mentioned on Reddit for like what's the best roof someone asks what's the best roofing marketing company. And if you click on that and then you see someone recommend your own company or like maybe you recommended your own company. I don't know. That's technically that's technically considered Parasite SEO. This is real too, right? Like newer semantics because you used to be that Parasite SEO was black hat hacking injection. Yeah, this is a good. So like yeah, back in the olden days, Parasite SEO used to be people injecting malicious code or getting into your site and then promoting scam stuff through indexed pages and search results that you would never find unless you were specifically looking for in search results. That was the old Parasite SEO. The new Parasite SEO the way I understand it is just using the authority and leveraging that platform. So when somebody searches for a question that you want to target or searches for something that you want to target, you're still in the results when that link is clicked. So we had this for a while when we first started. There was a question it was like, or there was the very first article I ever published was in Turf Magazine and it was called like nine things to do in the winter for marketing to prepare for spring. And it ranked for lawn care marketing forever. Like that key and it was like number one. And so like if we were on the second, if our website was on the second page at Google, but that Turf Magazine article that was ranking for lawn care marketing and the first position was in number one, I don't even care. Because if somebody clicks on that link the first thing they're going to see is published by Jake Helene Everga Marketing. That's Parasite SEO. So that's not just like when you're right for these publications, it's not just leveraging the publications' authority and their audience, it's also leveraging their position and search results already. Cool. But see if it still ranks lawn care marketing. Oh, we showed up number one. And then and then read it was underneath us. I'm excited to see how this impacts the LLMs. Like I, there's so much that, I don't know, I want to make time to do. We have some things that we put on the list recently. But why just email one? Very coincidentally, somebody reached out from an ad platform that I wanted to have us check out. That was fun. We were able to get back to them. There's a lot of just one off platforms that you I want to check out the viability or they're not platforms, but just segments. LLMs being one of them, right? I'm I don't buy any of the LLMs hype yet because it's only like 5% of the search market. But like actually Mike King, he was on a, he was on Rand Fishkin's podcast on, on, on, is he? Is that I pull rank? Is that yes? Yeah, cool dude to listen to. He just had something on his podcast talking about the overlap between search results and LLMs. and there's only a 19% overlap between the results they pull. And he was saying like how, like they really, actually, I don't know why I brought up Mike King. It was a good episode. Maybe if I remember I'll link it in the show notes. But something in there too is like, LLMs really care about lists, like best landscaping company. It's like they're going to look for articles. I say best landscaping company. They're going to pull from that. And a lot of our competitors, I think three of them now have created these lists where they put themselves number one and then like all their, all their competitors, like below them. And like it's such an easy thing to do to create and put it on your website and get index and have LLMs read it and recommend yourself. But like I'm just not willing to do that. It gives you an echo a little bit. It gives me, yeah, absolutely. It gives me the echo. Like if you want to do that, go for it. But yeah, I just, I want it. Dude, there's a, I just like the long, somebody that has a little domain, lawncaremarketing.com. That's great. It doesn't look like a very good website. It's pretty bad. I wonder how they, I have a bias against, I think once you go into three letters, I have no, there's no logic behind this at all. This is just a personal feeling. But I think once you get into the three letter category for domains, you've, there's like a, it's an ik too by itself. Like it's just counted a little bit in my brain. Because it gets too long. Any three words? Yeah, what did I say? Letters. Man, words are hard. Yeah, well, there's long sections. A lot of care. They're short enough too. I think it's okay. I don't know. I think a lot of any logic to this at all. Actually, the first podcast that was on lawncare leaders, it actually annoyed me a lot because Britt, the owner of the podcast, he, he combined lawn care into one word and lawn care is not one word. Well, I'm like, you're literally a lawn care professional. Like, you should know, you should know this. Yeah. That's how some nieces work. I want to learn more about other people's, they won't tell us, you know, because everybody wants to be super secretive about it, but they shouldn't be. They get it be cool to learn more about when people find. We hear all the time about local legion ones, you know, but not the, I don't know, the really obscure ones, the ones that, but I think the category is, if they can cross multiple Geos and by Geos, I mean, like the equivalents of states, right? If it's that big enough that your service area gets that big, or it's necessitated to be that big, because what you're doing is so specific, I think those are really cool. Yeah. Like well digging. Right. That's super cool. Right away maintenance. That's one that we've like run into, right? That one's really cool. We do oddly like decent for that. Because we think we did it twice. So right away maintenance for anybody in non-nomance, he'd be industry is like, um, if you ever drive to the Midwest and you see like those giant power grids that like go across like fields and like you drive like under it basically, and it's just like going forever. Right of way, that's a right of way. And so like those power grids have right of way, which means there should be no debris or trees or anything in the way. So as things grow, they start to like affect power lines or things like that and right away maintenance. Is like that service. It's commercially oriented. And there aren't a lot of people that do them, but when they do get a contract, it's massive. So your cost per lead could be like $500 to $1,000 and still make it profitable for them. Yeah, it's like in the category of, I don't know, uh, corporate SaaS contracts, right? Like you, you need three leads a year to prove yourself. Something that was kind of funny was Brandon, who listens to the podcast and is in the discord a lot. He uh, he said that he, he struggles to know like why anybody would have to go with him because he's in the landscape and lawn care industry too. he's like, wow, would anybody go with me when you guys exist? Like they would just want to work with that regret. I'm like, I agree. It's a hard concept to grasp, I think, when it's like the majority of the industry doesn't even know who we are. They don't even know that we exist. Like I think you, I think you fundamentally misunderstand like how many of these niche businesses exist. And just because we've been in these publications, doesn't mean we've been seen by everybody. There's like, these publications only, they capture, they have a large audience, but they capture a fraction of where the audience actually is. And additionally, every business model is different. Some people might not want to work with us because they see how low cost our prices are and go, I don't want to work with them because I'm going to get a lower quality product. They'd be wrong, but that's their perception. They also might not want to work with us because we only add account. I don't like that. They feel like that's gaming. Okay, that's fine. No amount of convincing for me is going to change your mind on that. A recent one is that somebody didn't want to work with us because we didn't do contracts, which is weird. And like, they're like, well, that makes me feel like you could just, you know, basically rug pull me and leave and say, sorry, we're a month to month. I'm like, yeah, but like, what kind of business model would that be? Yeah. And so there's all sorts of reasons like people wouldn't want to want to want to work with us and would want to work with another business with a different business model. And, you know, when I think about it, when I think about the the 15% of ladies listening right now, and I think of how much of an advantage that actually is because you have, you know, your nation and niche, think of the entire service industry that exists to focus on women that everybody else is googling things, these things, and like in this category, are not, it's never consciously spoken or consciously said, right? But there's a bias to everything that's done in here when we're talking about it because when we default, we go to proofing doctors, dentists, lawyers, blah, blah, blah, right? And you have an entire segment that is not that. And then it's also more niche because at least when it comes to our listener base, right? We know that they're not thinking about the entire, you know, the gender display too. So there's got to be a whole stuff in there. Are actually, I'm looking at our demographics right now. Okay, all time, the female demographic is 13.6%. All right. Last 90 days, 16.2%. Move it up. Last 30 days, 21.3%. What did we do? What are we, what are we doing? There's actually more women. It's just the brand. It's still rolling out. It is actually. And then like last seven days is 20% female. There's actually a decent amount of women in the discord and that are highly engaged too. So I think that is probably one of the main, I feel like 20% is actually more representative of the actual like agency population. I never thought about that. It definitely is a continued rollout of the brand change. We're still going to be feeling that for a while. I imagine. Yeah. That's cool. So if you made it this far, guys, please leave us a review. I keep meaning to talk about this in the very beginning, man. I was forget. Yeah, do that. Please. But otherwise, that's all I got. Anything else? No. All right. Well, everybody. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. See you.