927 – Do this the RIGHT way: Tom talks Wasting Time and Money on SEO

Summary by ChatGPT

In this episode, Tom Antion argues that focusing too much on search engine optimization (SEO) can be a waste of time and money for most businesses. He shares his experience as a former top expert in SEO who ultimately decided to stop prioritizing it because of the growing competition, frequent algorithm changes by Google, and the unpredictable results.

Key Points:

Challenges of SEO: Tom explains that SEO has become highly competitive and unreliable due to the vast number of people attempting to rank for limited keywords. Moreover, Google's frequent algorithm changes can erase months of effort and investment, making it hard to achieve sustainable results.

Basic SEO is Still Useful: While Tom advises against heavily investing in SEO, he emphasizes the importance of understanding basic SEO principles to avoid making mistakes on your website. He suggests listening to episode 469 of his podcast for foundational SEO knowledge and episode 466 for insights on backlinks, which remain a crucial element of SEO.

Shift to Paid Advertising: Tom recommends focusing on paid advertising rather than SEO. Paid ads, when done correctly, provide quicker and more predictable results. He suggests using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for targeted advertising.

YouTube In-Stream Ads as the Best Value: Tom highlights YouTube in-stream ads as the best value for online advertising. These ads are cost-effective because you only pay if viewers watch the ad for 30 seconds or more. This method allows advertisers to test and refine their ads without significant financial risk.

Tips for Effective Paid Advertising: Tom advises starting with one advertising platform, becoming proficient in it, and setting a clear budget. He warns against rapidly increasing the advertising budget, which could signal to platforms that you are inexperienced, leading them to show your ads to less relevant audiences. He also stresses the importance of closely monitoring ad performance to prevent overspending.

Upcoming Content: Tom mentions that the next episode will cover "done for you" services, often referred to as "done TO you" due to potential scams. He encourages listeners to tune in to learn more about avoiding these pitfalls.

Overall, Tom's message is to avoid over-relying on SEO and to invest time and resources into learning and implementing effective paid advertising strategies for more reliable business growth.

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Episode 927 – Wasting Time and Money on SEO
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 927 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to try to encourage you to quit wasting your time on search engine optimization, because it could cost you a lot of money and waste you a lot of time where you get nowhere. Now, don't think I'm not in favor of certain parts of SEO, but let me tell you about it in this episode. Hope you didn't miss the the series I just did on the three prong attack to a seven figure income. This is something I developed at around 1996 to Simplify things for people that are trying to make their online part of their business go, but they get confused. There's so many things going on, so this breaks it down for you. Episode 924. 925 and 926 was the three prong attack. And let's see, make sure you get a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Now, I mentioned several episode numbers. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. Three prong attack starts at 924.

[00:01:35] All right, now let's talk about this search engine optimization. Now, I quit a long time ago, and this is after I was taught by one of the best of the best ever, a guy named Michael Campbell. I was considered one of the best of the best for 12, 13, 14 years, But I quit because here's the thing I got to teach a lot of you folks how to do this stuff, and I don't want to waste time myself.

[00:02:10] So there's so much competition now. There's so many scam SEO people out there telling you you're going to get a high ranking in Google. Well, here's the hard core reality of it. You could spend 6 to 8 months or more to try to doing what they tell you, spending a lot of money to have them do it for you, maybe get some response out of Google, but maybe not. It's a big coin toss. It's really difficult to get a top ranking in Google on any keyword that's worth anything. And then let's say you did pretty well. 6 to 8 months. You spend thousands of dollars and you haven't sold anything because you're working on all this SEO stuff right? And then Google goes up to their dials on the wall and they turn the dial a little bit, and then you disappear off the face of the earth. That's the reality of this situation. So you spent all this money. Let's think about it logically. You spend six months or more of hard work and money and trying to learn this stuff and getting people to do it for you and all the stuff that needs done.

[00:03:28] And then, as I said, you might get a little traction, but you might not. In fact, you probably won't. Okay. Why do you think I quit when I was considered one of the best of the best and had the best training, and was in the top of the search engines for 12, 13, 14 years. Why do you think I quit? It was just too much flood of people out there, and there's only so many keywords that apply to me, and just floods of floods and floods of people coming in, and so it just was not worth the time and effort anymore. Now, I do want you to learn the basics so that you don't shoot yourself in the foot and do stupid things when you're developing your website. And I've got two episodes, just like I did as a resource on the three prong attack, there's two specific episodes I want you to go back and listen to. Episode 469 was on basic SEO. This is the simple stuff that you should always do. That's always going to work and makes Google when they do bother to stop by your site that they think, oh, this person knows what they're doing. They're not trying to cheat us and they're not tricking us. And, you know, so we're going to look at them favorably, even though they're only on page 92 now. Okay. So that's episode 469. Screwthecommute.com/469. Then if you were going to spend time on anything, this would be it. And that is called backlinks. And that's episode 466. Screwthecommute.com/466. This and this has changed significantly from the early days when just the more links you had, the more Google thought and the search engine back. Even before Google thought you were a great site. Now it's very specific on the links that you want to get coming into your site and how to do it. And that's on episode 466. All right. So I'm painting a pretty sad picture here, like, oh man, it's going to be months or years before I can get any traffic to my website. No, that's not the case. So what is the case? And and thinking about it logically, remember I just outlined a picture that you spent enormous amounts of time and money hoping to get some traffic to your website for free from Google, but it wasn't for free. Because if you even if you got a little success, which I doubt if you will, you spend a lot of money and you went months and months and months without selling anything. All right. So this is ridiculous. So what's the solution? The solution is for you to take the time and put aside a budget to learn paid advertising. There's all kinds of places you can advertise now.

[00:06:27] Now I'm going to tell you a little later the best bargain. I think it's a little bit harder to do because you got to shoot video, but it's the best bargain out there. But you have every place. You got Facebook, you got Twitter, you got TikTok. I mean, X, you got Instagram, you know, you got WhatsApp. There's a whole bunch of places and you got these broadband places that can get you on, like, uh, with Taboola, I think, is it was called. They might have sold out to this other company. But anyway, you can be on, you know, if you have a big general product, you can be in Wall Street Journal and AOL's homepage, you know, all kinds of places. Okay, so the one thing I got to tell you about is a lot of these advertising places are self-serve and you really need to go, you know, get training either from me or, you know, YouTube or wherever you're going to try to get training and make sure it's credible to learn how to use them, because you can blow a lot of money. So here's my rule for you. If you're going to do any advertising online, and usually it's pay per click kind of advertising or pay per impression is different. So you have to learn those differences. But my big role in all caps and underlined outlined in blood or lipstick or whatever is you must obsess on the ads when you put them in.

[00:07:55] What does that mean? I mean, you're checking them every 15 minutes. Every half hour. And why do I say this? Well, in the early days, I put an ad in on a Friday and got too busy to check on it. And by Monday, I owed Google $8,000. Okay. No sales from that ad. I should have turned that ad off within a half an hour. It wasn't doing any good. So you must obsess on it. And then here's another thing I'm going to try to make you understand, even if you've never advertised before. These are the three parts to advertising. The highest level thing is a campaign that's like, I'm going to advertise my Screw the Commute podcast. That's my campaign. And then under the campaign level are called AD groups. So I might have one set of ads for people that want to be entrepreneurs. I might have another set of ads that I'm going to write a completely different ad for those people that are want to be entrepreneurs. I'm going to do another one that are already business owners. I wouldn't say the same thing like, hey, do you want to start your own business? If you're already in a business, that's stupid, right? So I have ad groups for different groups of people that I want to advertise to under the campaign for Screw the Commute podcast.

[00:09:26] So I got ad groups, and then each ad groups has its own bunch of ads. You know, as I said, under the ad group for entrepreneurs, I'm going to do all kinds of stuff that says, hey, you want to start your own business, you want to do this, you want to do that. And the ones that are in business, my ads are not going to say that. They're going to say like, hey, you know, it's hard to be in business and, you know, insurance is too expensive and you know, this and that because they're already in business. So my ads are going to be different. So that's the hierarchy. Your big campaign of what you're advertising. And then ad groups are who you're going to target. And then the specific ads are to target those people in that ad group. So that's the three levels that you're going to run through in almost all advertising platforms. All right. So make sure you obsess though. Now if you just took and I don't suggest you try to go to multiple platforms right off the bat, if you just took one platform where you kind of know your clients are, spend weeks and weeks and weeks getting really good at that. Put your budget into that. Don't try to spread it out over five different things.

[00:10:37] You'll never figure anything out. All the ads will be losers and you'll get screwed. You know you'll lose all your money. So pick one and you'd be further ahead in the long run to do it that way than try to target, you know, just go to all these different platforms. Also, before I tell you the best bargain, I want to tell you some of the scams that the advertising platforms do to you now, are they going to admit it? Hell no. But guys like me that are in the mix of this know that these things happen. So here's a typical scenario. So let's say you put an ad in or any of the platforms and you set your budget at $5 a day. That's perfectly reasonable. Lots of us professionals do that. We start low and start testing the ads and see which ones are working and which aren't and all that. So you are a new advertiser, and you set your budget at $5 a day and you start getting some good results. You're starting to get traffic and people converting and buying your stuff, and you're thinking, oh my God, I just hit the lottery. Well, maybe you did, maybe you didn't. And here's why. Because when you're a new advertiser, these companies give you the best possible people that buy a lot of stuff and put you in front of them to hook you, to get you addicted to this.

[00:12:01] And then you say, oh my God, I'm going to raise my budget to 20. You know, I was making $3 for every dollar you were spending, let's say. And so you say, I'm going to raise my, my thing to $40 a day. Guess what? You're going to lose your shirt, right? Because no professional makes that big of a jump from 5 to $40. Ever. Because that's sending a message that you don't know what you're doing. The they know how professionals do things and so they see you again. Are they ever going to admit to any of this stuff? Hell no. But this stuff happens every day because that's how they get to be billionaires and, uh, rich. So as soon as you raise it to $40 a day, they start throwing your ads on every crap place they can find and showing it to every idiot on earth that's never going to spend any money. They're going to take all your money and then screw you. If you're dumb enough to keep going. They'll keep taking your money. If you quit, they don't care. There's a thousand of you, or a million of you lined up behind them, that they're going to take their money. Okay, so so don't be jumping all over the place because you get a little bit of success.

[00:13:15] All right. Now, what's the best bargain? In my not so humble opinion, the best bargain is YouTube in-stream ads. Now, you do have to do video for this, but these are the ads that you know you can click the skip button. Well, guess what? If somebody clicks the skip button before 30s, you don't pay anything, so there's really no incentive for you to make ads less than 30s if they watch the whole 30s, well, they're probably a pretty good prospect and you have to pay for the ad. So don't make a ten second ad, because as soon as also if the 10s is up to the end of your ad, you have to pay. So don't make the little short ads. Make them at least 30s or go as long as you want, you know, because once you pay for it, you could have a 20 minute ad. Okay, this doesn't make any difference if they're watching it that long, they must be a darn good prospect. See? So you don't pay anything, though if they skip. In fact, we use that in the ads a lot of times to disqualify people. So I'll say, hey, if this isn't for you, just click that skip button now and get back to the video you wanted to watch. But if you're wanting to this, that and the other, stick around and I'll show you how to do it, you know.

[00:14:29] So I want them to to click the skip button if they're really not important to if what I'm talking about is not important to them or they're, you know, they're not interested, they they want to get to the video they wanted to watch. I don't want to pay for somebody that's not really interested in what I'm offering say. So that's one of the best bargains out there. Youtube in-stream ads. So anyway, forget SEO we quit a long time ago. Learn to drive traffic. And then also, of course, you know, I got a million, you know, things on email marketing because I want to get him off of there, even if they don't buy onto an email list. So that's part of the whole whole thing of the ads, even if they don't buy now, if they're kind of interested, you get them on an email list. You can follow up, follow up, follow up for free and sell them something later. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check. Remember to check out that three prong attack on a seven figure income. Episodes 924 through 926. And this was 927. Quit wasting your time on SEO. And next episode is 928. It's called done for you, which should be called done TO you. Lot of it is scams, so make sure you don't miss the next episode. 928. I'll catch you there.