The Digital Side of Business
Marine Corps veteran Patrick Burt has spent years working on optimizing websites for businesses big and small. As an expert in SEO and the digital space, Patrick helps us navigate the online space. Lets face it, learning about SEO and how to do it is something many of us are a little nervous about doing. While doing something is better than nothing, sometimes doing the wrong things to your website can drastically impact your goals in a negative way.
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Transcript from Episode 36 with Patrick Burt:
Keith McKeever 0:03
Buddy with McKeever, welcome back to another episode of the battle buddy podcast, I have the one and only the man the myth, the legend, Patrick Byrne here today and we're gonna talk a little bit about some social media websites, stuff, SEO things like that he's the annual talk about all of it anyway, we're gonna talk about all of it, there's no way we go. You're like, the man in the in the digital space, that's for sure. So I'm really excited to try and get you on here for a while. So I'm excited to have you here. And and break down some of this stuff. Because I think a lot of there's a lot people have websites and it's not just business owners. Alright, there's people have hobby websites and stuff like that. And there is a struggle to SEO and all that stuff. It's like, like, you'll fairy tales, right? There are scary woods, you know, the Prince Charming has to go in and rescue the princess from, like, we all looked at it like this, this weird world we're not used to unless you're kind of in it every day, right? It's like, oh, how do I bite this off? How do I do that, but you got some, you got some stuff we're gonna talk about that might kind of be a torch to carry through the woods, for lack of a better term. So without Without further ado, Patrick, tell us a little bit about your your story. You know, your Marine? What? What got you into the Marine Corps? What you do in the Marine Corps? What got you to where you are?
Patrick Burt 1:22
So let's see. Yeah, um, I would say I decided to be a Marine. I think I was a, I think I was about eight, about seven or eight. And I saw my dad's, uh, his blues cover. And I was like, What is this? I don't know what this is. This is a funny looking hat. But, and then that's, that's when I I was old enough to understand, like, what the Marines were. And I realized that my dad did. My dad did I think eight years and then my grandfather did, I think like 20 years in Vietnam. So I mean, I always knew, you know, out of high school, like ngon college now. So I enlisted 18 That was 2012. I didn't do anything super crazy. While I was in I mean, I was a turbo Pogue. I worked on radios and calibrations and all types of stuff like that. But you gotta go. Yeah. Went to went to Japan, Mississippi, Barstow, California. And it was in Japan that I had an old buddy that actually reached out to me, he's like, Hey, what are you doing? And I'm like, I don't know, drinking in the barracks. What else is there to do? He's like,
Keith McKeever 2:38
what else?
Patrick Burt 2:39
Do I play video games? And, and he's like, you want to? You want to learn something? And I'm like, Sure. So that's when I was first introduced into digital marketing. And that was like, this was like, 2015, when things were super, super early on, or, yeah. And I mean, I was talking with people about getting them Instagram followers. And like, that was my first start of digital marketing. Now, of course, that was a while ago, since then, I mean, I've worked with like, 1700 different businesses in various industries, tackling anything from just a web designed SEO, mainly SEO. That's, that's my jam. But I've got a full team behind me. So we do. I mean, you pay us we'll do it.
Keith McKeever 3:32
Absolutely, yeah. That's why I was excited to have you on here. Because we've talked so many times, I knew SEO is your thing. But you do a lot of Facebook Lives and a lot of posts on social media about all these different things. So I know people are gonna are gonna recognize your name and recognize your face. And you know, from the content you're putting out there in intrapreneur tribe and in other places. So I want to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit on this, like I said, this, this SEO thing is, it's kind of scary. And it is, in some ways, you don't really know exactly what it is, right? It's all about being optimized so that search engines can pick it up for it so that you rank higher, because if you're a business owner, I get these text messages or emails all the time, if you're not ranking high enough, like every single day. And unfortunately, there's some people that don't know enough about it, and they're just gonna click on it and they're gonna pay these companies huge amounts of money to do nothing, right, literally nothing. Or, I mean, they're probably not even gonna communicate back. They're just probably gonna take your money, right? There's a good chance or scam most Well, yes. But, uh, you know, it's the thing that's, it's been around for a long time. We've had websites for a long time, but a lot of people don't know what it is. And, you know, there's, we're gonna see the other day. Something like this. This was this is interesting, and I'm probably gonna get the numbers wrong, but websites in like the year 2000 There is only like 200 million websites 1.9 billion websites right now?
Patrick Burt 5:09
Oh, I'd say there's more than that. I mean, that
Keith McKeever 5:12
article, but that's not what I saw the other day. And I was like, wow, yeah, that really doesn't surprise me. Like, I mean, it is so easy to create a website.
Patrick Burt 5:19
Yeah, that sounds like that could be right. Because like I was, I've always been big into computers. And so like, the internet's always been something that interested me in the Google project. What Google was originally founded on was to index the internet. But of course, whenever, you know, Google got started. The internet was like, oh, yeah, let's just, you know, get a few million websites. And we have the internet now. And now it's now there's, there's gigabytes, and then, you know, terabytes and then like petabytes, and then more, but there's like, an fathomable amount of information out there. Like there's a it's getting close to, like, celestial numbers, like whenever you're like, counting stars and stuff, it's getting to like, oh, yeah, that's, that's the amount of bytes of information out there. Um, it's really dumb.
Keith McKeever 6:13
That doesn't surprise me. Because I can I can, I can picture like this. When I'll join the military. And I went on my first deployment, I went to the to the base exchange, I was in Japan too. So I went to the exchange, and I bought a hard drive. Now this frickin hard drive was, you know, 12 inches long, it was a triangle thing had a push button to start it had a charger. It was, it was not as long as good as you might be thinking. And it had 128 gigabytes. And it was the biggest and nicest, portable, semi portable hard drive there was at the exchange. A point did I fill that thing up? Now? I've got a terabyte is my desk. 500 gigabytes on my laptop. I've got a five terabyte hard drive plugged into my computer right now. And I think I spent, I think 150 160 bucks on that original hard drive. 75 I was like, I wanna say was like, 75 200 bucks or something. Yes. five terabyte? Like, it's just unbelievable. How much more storage you get for the money? Oh, yes, Joseph. Storage,
Patrick Burt 7:25
rounds it. Um, and I can't remember the the guy. But it's like a mathematical law. And it's like, I think it's every three years. The the technology is it improves by a magnitude of like 10 or something or three. I can't remember. But pretty much it's like every three years the form factor in which our like chips are decreases by like a nanometre. And I know that's like, oh, well, that's nothing but that, that makes jumps from 100 gigabytes to Oh, yeah. Now we can have a hard drive with a terabyte, you know, um,
Keith McKeever 8:01
yeah, I've got a little like, waterproof, cheap GoPro camera thing I hear that I bought her vacation last year. And I mean, it's, I mean, this is unbelievable to 512 gigabyte microSD card. Yeah, I'm old enough, and yet young enough to remember floppy disks.
Patrick Burt 8:22
I remember floppy disk. I never used them. But I remember floppy disks. I remember building my version Peter. And we were like, this thing's got a 50 gigabyte hard drive. Hale. Yeah, let's play some Call of Duty one. Like,
Keith McKeever 8:38
man, I was, I was already like, probably out of high school by that point in time. Yeah, I remember. I was like, literally, like 25 kilobytes, or whatever. You know,
Patrick Burt 8:49
I mean, damn. Phones have like, five. But, but yeah, man. I mean, it's interesting how the internet's grown. Um, and I think, just sum up what SEO is, like I said, it's originally started because Google wanted to index the internet. But the internet got so big that Google actually had to really create this algorithm that can identify and sort through all this information. So SEO is the art. I like to call it an art instead of the science of basically showing, yeah, showing up to those people whenever they search for something. So um, you know, search engines have a process and you have kind of mainly three parts. So you have that first step, which is the indexing or crawling, where Google has these bots, which go out to all ends of the internet and just crawl pages and be like, hey, here is here is a website here the page, not 100% sure on what it is. But let's essentially bookmark this and have somebody else come out here and do deep digging later. So it's crawling So a lot of SEO is going to be optimizing so that you can be found and be crawled. And then the next step is going to be indexing. This is typically what people think of whenever they talk about SEO. So indexing is whenever the your site gets, like, looked at, and I might be messing this up, I might have the order backwards, waiting for this caffeine to hit. But the point still stands. So Google, go, yeah, for Google, we'll go through the website in depth and look at just like you said, you have your your keywords, your metadata, the code PageSpeed, there's about 200 different factors that actually go into what Google looks at to determine if a website is good or not.
Keith McKeever 10:51
That's That's what more than I even expected. Oh, yeah,
Patrick Burt 10:55
it's Wow. It's pretty dumb. As long as
Keith McKeever 10:59
that's everything on your website, basically. Oh, yeah,
Patrick Burt 11:02
look at it, if I'm mistaken, I believe that number is just the like, hey, here are the meaningful ones. But then there's actually a lot more that are like, these aren't meaningful, but this is something technically on the list. Um, but you can go so SEO isn't some mystical thing that only matrix hackers can learn about, right? Anybody can go to Google. So Google actually has their own website, which like is centered around education of all this, how it works, how you can do it. And there's there's different levels to this. So they have like a baby, that beginner one, all the way up to like the, I can't remember the name of the paper, but it's like that STL Bible and it says, Hey, here's what we look for in raw text. And it is like a 90 page document of I mean, you're like reading a congress letter. Like, it's, it's like, oh, my god, yeah.
Keith McKeever 12:08
I'm more of a YouTube video kind of guy. Yeah. Give me the nuts and bolts.
Patrick Burt 12:13
Yeah. So you have you have all that. And that's what people typically think of when they think of SEO is to have somebody come in and clean that up. And then the third step is going to be serving. So this is where Google has already crawled. It's already indexed you. And this is where you type something and you type in a query to Google and then Google runs through based on what has been indexed and what has been crawled, it will give a specific result that fits the the situational variables such as, you know, your search history, where are you located? What do you probably looking for? What do you mean, the AI goes really in depth. And it's, it was something like, there's like 3 million searches every month or something. Actually, it's probably a lot more than that. But there's a lot of searches that happen very frequently that Google had never received before. And so the AI will learn. And its whole purpose of Google is to guess what you're actually looking for, like, you ever look up one of those songs that you can't remember, and you're like, a song that goes like that? And like, yeah,
Keith McKeever 13:27
research, like, you know, all of a sudden, it just gives you restaurant choices like in your area, and it's, you know, and he never stopped to think of, how are they doing that? You know, yeah, it's this merging of the physical world and the digital world is quite frightening sometimes.
Patrick Burt 13:47
So that's kind of a top down view of how SEO works and what it is, um, in order to let let's get into some actionable things for SEO and as to what you could do, um, again, Seo really isn't super complicated. If you're just like, hey, I'm just trying to pop up in my local area. You know, if you're trying to compete against Walmart, then best of luck for one yeah,
Keith McKeever 14:11
you're not going to I'm in real estate, right and, and I'm just I'll just say like, my personal website is never gonna compete with Zillow, Trulia. realtor.com homes.com, ReMax Keller Williams like, yeah, it's just that, like, you just don't have the budget. You don't have the skill. You don't have the staff. It's never gonna happen. But we had that next year.
Patrick Burt 14:32
Yeah, I mean, we had a company that we worked with, which was about 150 locations around the country, and they did COVID tests. And, I mean, we got them from like, 3 million a month to 15 million a month in under four months. But we're competing with like, Walgreens and CVS. Like it was absurd. We couldn't tackle them. But obviously we can compete with them. Um, but yeah, I mean, It's possible, but like the actionable things that you can do there, it's not so much like, Oh, you just need to have your website look pretty. You need to create content. And that's one thing that people typically forget about. Whenever they think about SEO, they think of, I need code to be good not I need to write blogs. And so that's where I break things up into ultimately, three parts for SEO. So one, you have your off site, SEO, these are going to be typically for local things. But you can do things like getting on Google My Business getting on Yelp, getting on Manta, Bing, Yahoo, you know, all that fun stuff, don't have to pay a dime to any of these companies. But having your business on these profiles and linking it to your website, having your social media linked up there, putting in your picture filling out, you know, filling it out. Very, very important. I
Keith McKeever 15:53
can tell you in my industry, I see that a lot that is not done. Oh yeah. Unbelievably how many realtors and we're local, right? It's a local business, you want to be found and discovered locally. And you want. I can't really imagine too many businesses where you don't want to be discovered anywhere. Yeah, like, like you said, Those are, those are good platforms. I mean, everybody has their opinions on Yelp, and some of those things, but you, they're free, go set up the platform, set yourself reminder to go review it once a month, once a year. I'm not a big fan, either. But set up the profile, put the picture on there, make the links, go review it once a year, just wants to make sure everything's accurate. And that's all you got to do. Like, it's it's not that hard to upload a picture and links and websites,
Patrick Burt 16:39
it's, it's, it's so important to a business that my entry into SEO was doing just that. And it was such a, it was so important, and people needed it so much that I mean, we just by doing that alone, at a 250 price point, we got a I mean, we had like 250 people that were taken care of at one point in time, they needed it, it helps tremendously. And it's something that people just completely forget about, they'll handle Google and Facebook, that's it, you know, but that's, that's the majority of the actionable off site, things that you can do some other simple things, you know, pop up on podcasts, get interviewed, you know, do stuff like that, and just, you know, Link websites and stuff like that. Um, now for on site. This is this is where we get into technical SEO. So big things for on site SEO, you'll want to do making sure one you have your content on your website. So throwing in keywords in your descriptions during keywords in your your texts, very important. There's a there's a an aspect called keyword density. So you don't want to go ham and just like to hammer down this keyword because Google will pick that up and be like, Yeah, you're this doesn't sound good for a human to read. And it was
Keith McKeever 18:13
called keyword stuffing or something like that. Putting too much stuff in there and it's just it doesn't doesn't flow doesn't sound natural, right, because websites will just pick up like what the content they'll read the content on the page, and they'll create those descriptions and stuff for you based off that
Patrick Burt 18:28
pretty much pretty much um, so that's something you want to watch out for. That used to be smart now it's not now it will get you blacklisted. Um, another thing about that which I technically is off site, but I'm gonna bring this up here, never pay for backlinks, um, the only backlinks you should ever pay for are going to be like one off, hey, I'm getting you in a news article. You know, do not pay for bundles of you know, 500 backlinks do not pay for bond, you do not buy backlinks off fiber. Like don't don't do stuff like that, that will that will tank your ranking faster than anything you can pay to get it up. Yeah,
Keith McKeever 19:10
I've got a perspective on that. And that's a business is relational. And if you want backlinks, someone like Yelp, right, you just put it on there. But if you're going to link to another business owners website, build that relationship. Yeah, find that collaborative effort, talk to them and figure out hey, let's let's help each other out here. We're like, right, you know, business affiliates or whatever, I build that relationship. And then it's real, it's genuine, everybody knows it. And, and you can actually grow even more outside of the digital realm. So that's my take on that.
Patrick Burt 19:46
Um, but yeah, I mean, that's super important. But yeah, diving into the website, you don't need to do anything crazy. There's some keywords in there. Make sure whenever you're going through your website, you know you have things filled out Personally, build your websites on WordPress. That's the best. But if you have like Wix or Weebly, if you have Weebly I'm sorry. But if you have a Wix or Squarespace, you know, you can go into the backend of these sites now, I will be upfront with you, these sites aren't built with freedom in mind, they're built as a software as a service, you pay for the platform, and you get everything bundled together, and it's very convenient. However, you go into the back end, you're going really quick that you can't really touch a lot of things. So SEO on these, you can't do a lot, you're not going to get great results. But at a bare minimum, go through, you know, check the button, pop in some things here and there, there'll be some boxes, you can fill it, make sure you do that. And even with WordPress go in, you know, whenever you put in your pictures, make sure that they're not 10 gigabytes big, you know, make sure that they're small, make sure that they have descriptions, make sure that they have metadata behind it, you know, whenever you go through. And, you know, build out the website, make sure you don't have broken links everywhere, no, four fours, you know, stuff like that. I mean, it's it's, if you keep SEO in mind, when you're building a website, it's really not anything wild. SEO gets very hard whenever people don't build websites with it in mind. And then we get into the website, and we're like, we got to rebuild all this, you know, there's
Keith McKeever 21:31
no link, there's no information, like nothing. It's just
Patrick Burt 21:37
links. And yeah, I mean, their pages go into the duplicate content. And one thing that people don't realize, if you have an E commerce business, and you have duplicate content, it's very easy to do that. Because if computers don't necessarily know to not do it, if let's say this is another customer in a in a unique cart ID and now you have, before you know it, you have 5000 pages of the same product with different URLs, and just different like, IDs, like you go to face art, let's say you click on a link from Facebook, and you know, it has like the, you know, stream yard.com, forward slash FBI DEA and like a stupid amount of numbers and letters, those links and pages can get out of control. If you don't have the settings done the right way. And all of them will be saved. So like I had a conversation with a dude. And he's like, What are you guys been doing for the last four months? And I'm like, well, we've been working on your images. And he's like, What do you mean, I only have like, 15 products on my site? And like, Well, yeah, but you have about 10,000 images that you had to redo and delete and go and update. Like, what? And like, yeah, here's the links to them all? Well, it's like, Oh, my God, and like, yeah, it, there's a lot that goes behind the scenes. But if you build a website with SEO in mind, and all you got to do is just not build it broken. Um, and, and you'll typically be fun, and then just add things on top of itself. SEO isn't supposed to be a, Hey, I'm gonna pay for this once and I'm gonna get the results. It's supposed to be a, okay, I'm gonna constantly work on this over and over and over. Because more than anything, consistency is what's actually going to bring results in SEO.
Keith McKeever 23:25
I mean, I'm sure you can find a website from 1995, they could still be ranking high, and it's still kicking butt out there. Because they've update well, and they haven't updated it. But they maybe add content, they've done the right things.
Patrick Burt 23:37
I mean, like, content, bringing it to the third part is huge. Because you can have a number one website, like you can have absolute 100% SEO score on your website. But if you don't put out something new Google essentially scans the website again, it says, Well, nothing's changed. So I guess these guys don't do anything, you know, but putting out irrelevant content consistently. It didn't even have to be good. I mean, like, whenever we write our blog, we write them for Google. And a lot of businesses are worried about like, oh, I need to write to the customers. And I'm like, Look, I'll be level with you. You're starting out. Nobody's gonna read your blog. Just be honest. Focus on getting it for Google
Keith McKeever 24:24
first. Yeah, I mean, I've taken all my podcast episodes, I've transcribed them, blog posts off of them. I've dropped the video in there as a link to and an audio file. So you can watch it, you could listen to it, or you can read it. And, you know, I've seen I've seen some impact. I mean, I just log in sometimes, like wow, like, I don't know what happened. Like, yeah, I just got 3030 listens, extra listens in one day that, you know, just like all of a sudden you just see these, you see incremental rises and all of a sudden you jump in you're like, oh, yeah, what happens? It doesn't Oh, you know, I did not like a month ago. You know? Notice these changes periodically. And I'm like, this is weird.
Patrick Burt 25:03
There's there's a guy that I know. And you probably know him as well, everybody knows him in the tribe that has a podcast that all he does is follow me. He followed my advice, not even my, we never had consultation calls. And never dieted dived in anything. But he just followed my posts, and he's now in like, the top 10 in the world for veteran podcasts. And I mean, they're gonna be up there too. Like, it's, it's not hard to do, but consistency. Now, he has been following me and doing what I've been telling him to do for the last like two years. Um, but honestly, I mean, man, this this is outside of business or anything is just life in general. If you can get out of instant gratification, and you can you can really lean into, let me invest in the future, let me just do something consistently for two years, three years, you will be ahead of like, 80% of your peers. If not more than that, I mean, I'm, yeah, I'm 27. And I ain't smart. I, you know, rich or fancy or Blessed are You know, I kind of had a average fucking life, right. But I stuck to the same thing. And I dedicated to learning a skill for years. And now I am beyond just about everybody else that I graduated with.
Keith McKeever 26:31
Yeah, I'm reading and studying and being consistent. That helps. And that leads right to a question I was gonna ask you later, kind of about mindset and staying positive on these things. Because this is a long game, this isn't. You make some changes in next week, you start getting more visitors to your website, or you start getting more leads or, you know, you've noticed big changes it's consistency. You know, you gotta you got to stay consistent contact. Gotcha. Do you know, like, when terms?
Patrick Burt 27:00
Was it trust the process? Trust process. That's, that's it, I have been, I've been in some very dark situations that I had no idea. And I actually just talked to, to an old friend today about this too. And I was in and she was like, I feel so lost. And I don't understand, and I don't like feeling uncertain. And I'm like, Hey, can I give you a pro life tip? And she's like, laid on me, what do you got, and I'm like, You will never not feel uncertain. That that is part of life. And embracing that uncertainty is actually going to make it more enjoyable, because you have to learn to let go and just trust the process trust, if I go to the gym, and I do my eating, right? For six months, I will see improvement, you know, you have to trust it. And disconnect from that, what if it doesn't happen, that anxiety, and if you could do that, um, I mean, not only will you be tremendously happier, but you will get where you're trying to go there, it's impossible to do the right actions and not get the result. You know, you need to be patient with the action or no patient with the result impatient with the action.
Keith McKeever 28:21
That's just gonna set I mean, a road is not straight, either. Yep. Right. I mean, you need to be consistent. But as you navigate through things, you're gonna, you're gonna zig and you're gonna zag and you're gonna have hills to climb. And in other times, you're gonna speed up, or slow, like, it's, it's the journey.
Patrick Burt 28:39
Um, one thing that I was, I was told by somebody that is much more successful than I am, is to find the path Reese taken, um, and to take the hard path, because people in society inherently does not like to do anything difficult. I mean, obviously, everybody loves comfort. So
Keith McKeever 29:02
that is Americans. Yeah.
Patrick Burt 29:04
Taking the, the uneasy path or the path of least taking it. Let's put this into perspective for business. Everybody's trying to start up a T Shirt Company, everybody's trying to start up these little bitty things, right? But everybody's trying to do these in order to get quick money. They're like, well, I want to get out of my nine to five so let me make a t shirt business and what everybody else is doing strike good. But the people that are successful are like, Hey, I understand right off the bat that I am not going to make money from this for like two years. So if I go in with that mentality, and I just invest and I do things right, and I make sure that I spend the money where I need to and I, you know, I don't even take up a penny from this company and just put it straight back into it. That's how people get to the point to where they have a successful Hey, they're pocketing 1020 grand from an E commerce business without having to, you know, be a millionaire right off the bat, you know, it just takes time, but do what people aren't willing to do. And there will always be value, any business, you do the marketing, you do the hard work, people don't want to do posting SEO, shaking hands. You know, it's so easy to get ahead these days, because every business owner just wants to have leads handed to them. And all you got to do is just work. And you'll you'll surpass everybody,
Keith McKeever 30:32
you know, and you get some great points there. You know, like T shirts. Coffee is another one of our friends that in the coffee business? This is a holy, right, yeah, you have to solve a problem. If you don't, if you're not solving a problem, you don't have a business. And that's where I'll pick on Jose, their day coffees to gain past guests great guy. He does something unique, right? It's not necessarily solving a problem, but it's unique. He's got mesquites roasted coffee, it's a flavor you're not going to get anywhere else. So it's, it's it's either solving a problem or creating a unique, you know, something that sets you apart. But there's so many people that like you say, get into those business, right? It could be T shirts, could be all these other things, and they don't have anything that sets them apart. You're doing one, I'm going to pick on the T shirts for a second, because so many veterano t shirt companies, they all have a flag on this on the sleeve, right identifies it. And, you know, they're they're all set, sir, as a color. I'll tell you, they're the same, you know, and it's like, where are you different shirts.
Patrick Burt 31:43
I got briefed on that. Whenever I was yessing. And my CEO is like, Hey, you're not going to get out and do some fucking t shirt business. Right? And I'm like, no, like, a how, how a lot of these companies are doing. And this is something else that I was told, if, if there are courses on how to build it, you're too late. It's already you're you've missed the boat, it's you're having an uphill battle, if there is a course on how to build an E commerce business to sell T shirts. Don't sell T shirts, because you I can guarantee you there's already you know 50 Swinging NICs in your vicinity doing the same thing you know,
Keith McKeever 32:26
so I throw a stone in my in my daiquiri town here and hit somebody who makes T shirts.
Patrick Burt 32:31
Exactly. Business. It's like you need to have unique value propositions and T shirts can be good. And every single person that I talk to, it's the exact same thing. I'm like, hey, you know, apparel, good. It is a good brand. I've seen brands go from nothing to to solid. But how they do it is all in how they present themselves. Nobody. And I did a post on that. I don't know if you saw this post, but nobody, even your friends are going to buy a t shirt from you. Just because you have a fuck t shirt. There has to be some reasoning behind it. If you are trying to sell designs, then you need a story behind the designs. Why? And if you're in the veteran space, it can't just be Hey, I'm a veteran buy it because you support that, of course, are 22 or whatever the usual ends are you have to have something unique. Um, I found a there's a designer apparel company now they've done all types of stuff, but it was called Black. Um, it was B L V c k k.com. And they're on a Paris and they started as some I mean, it was probably just a dude, making that making you know, a thing. And it was t shirts and stuff and everything was just black. It was you know, it was like the A was it like off white. But it was just everything was black. And it was just like, you know, that type of luxury appeal. But they were successful because they had a market they had a niche. They're like, Hey, we're not just t shirts, everything is black. Everything is like high end. And they were able to leverage that to build for veterans, you can do the same thing. And you were not just another 22 You know, with like, T shirts with skulls that are ungodly.
Keith McKeever 34:23
Yeah, there's no mission behind that's why I mentioned Jose because because his coffee is religious based. It's exactly it's different is unique. Like I said, You're not gonna flavor anywhere else. And he's not paying me for promotion, by the way. But I do have his coffee upstairs. But like it's unique right? And then he his mission is tied to his faith in God. Right and, and then portions of his proceeds go to help the actual farms where he gets his coffee in Honduras. Like there's that mission and it's, it's awesome and how can you not want to support a guy like that? Exactly. But other people just go start a coffee company. They go get a roaster, they buy some coffee, they roast it say hey, buy for me. It's like It's like why yours isn't a brown bag like everybody else's, it's like everybody else's Look, you've got all the flavors that everybody else's, you know, there's some other people I know that have coffee, and they've got some unique additives in it that, you know, CBD and some stuff like that, you know, that's, that's another interesting take, it's offering something a little a little different. You know, and it doesn't have to be too much unique
Patrick Burt 35:23
value proposition is very, very important. And a lot of people forget about that and assume they think if I build it, they will come. And it's true to a certain extent. Um, but there needs to be a reason behind it. Just like I said, I made a post the other day, and it was like, it was, I snagged it from some dude, that was like really complaining. But he was whining about like, you open up a business and sell water for $1. And your friend is going to go and buy it somewhere else for $3. And it's like, well, you can whine and complain about that. But actually, that's your fault as a business owner, because you assume that just because your friend is your friend that he's gonna buy from you, but people, no matter who were what people there needs to be value. And this is even with family, I mean, you you have a business that sells food, your family isn't going to buy from you just because you sell it. But you have to talk to them and get them to convince them to buy it because they like it. You know, it doesn't matter who it is doesn't matter what it is. There has to be some sort of value needs base, you know, something?
Keith McKeever 36:46
Yeah, because the family is not always gonna support you. Yeah, you know, I've made that's a whole nother conversation. I have had families clients, I've also had family not call me for different things. And you know, and I know other people that have I've had conversations with and they're like, you know, you know, so and so in my family, they didn't use me, they were with my competitor, or they just never come in, they never get a service or products from me. And it's like, well, you know, I mean, maybe your product everybody else they're not interested in maybe it's not a need of theirs. But you know, who knows, but family? You would? It's weird, you get into business, you think, Well, my family is going to support me. But I'm just telling anybody who's listening. You don't have to look very far for plenty of examples of people that will pound the table like we are right now. The family is not going to support you to the level you think they are.
Patrick Burt 37:36
Yeah, just just not gonna happen. I mean, it's really funny, because I've seen more friends and family. Not my business, because obviously, but like in other people's businesses, I've seen more of their friends and family not buy for them, not because they didn't want to support them. But just because they didn't know or it wasn't top of mind. And that leads to marketing. Um, nobody is above marketing. I mean, you gotta, you have to market. It doesn't matter if who it is, if you're not top of mind, in a world where attention is the ultimate currency, secondary to time. Technically, they're kind of the same thing. But I mean, if you're not on top of somebody's mind, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how good the product is, doesn't matter how much of a relationship I've lost deals that with other Marines that we've had our long conversations, and they're just like, oh, shit, man, I forgot. You know, like, I forgot you did that. And I'm like, That's my bad
Keith McKeever 38:46
piece of business advice. Because my goal is to have you know, actionable stuff. If you're in business, and you're listening to this, even if you're not even just just a regular person, you should start, make a list of of all those people you use, right? You go to the same doctor, you probably go to the same dentist, use the same real estate agent use that same insurance company, I mean, maybe every now and you should look to change, but the same lender, the same bank, right? Just kind of build this list of people and organizations that you want to support. And that's your go to list first. Right? If if somebody needs SEO and and they call Patrick, and maybe it's just something that's just not in your wheelhouse or your company's wheelhouse for some reason. Maybe you can refer him to somebody else, or at least they went to you first. You know, it's, you know, I'm actually in the process of doing that for my business and looking at all the people. I'll keep a real estate, all the service providers that are out there, there's some newer companies, some inspectors have gotten out of the business, I got to find some new inspectors, and I got to build my list of preferred vendors. You know, I kind of need to reassess that after so many years. You know, that way when I refer people to people, I've got this go to people, you know
Patrick Burt 39:59
that to competition isn't always bad. Um, a lot of people, a lot of Pete like I did this post the other day, and it was talking about competition. And there are a few people that were like, oh competition, I don't have competition. And I'm like, Hey, do and competition is really good because competition is it gives you an opportunity to look at things from a different perspective. Like, I'll be the first to say that I check up my competitors every now and then just to see what they're doing. And I'll typically see that they thought of something that I didn't think of, and then I'll be like, I'm going to take that, make it better, and make it my own. Make it more valuable than what they did. And then release it. And then essentially, we play that game back and forth. I'm
Keith McKeever 40:47
iron sharpens iron. Right. Exactly. You know, sometimes you look at your competitors, or you find something you start looking around like, Okay, I can't believe nobody else is doing this. Oh, exactly. Then, you know, you got something. You got something? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's competition is good. And you should have more than one name on some of this. Maybe you only need one doctor, one dentist, but Oh, yeah. You know, identify, I don't know, a couple of plumbers in your local area, you never know, when you need a plumber or an electrician, right? You know, get those names, get the information, put it down in one place. And if you know, I read one of your dad's manual, we'll find your house. How about that? I got, I got two people in the Houston area, we'll get we'll get you hooked up. But yeah, you just got to have that that network of people. You know, if if I was going to write a book, I know two or three people that are that are authors, right? Like those are my go to people in the back of my mind. If I've got questions about writing, or organization or editing or any of that stuff, you know, if I ever went down that path, like, you just you get to know people and you shouldn't live in your mind other than to go down that path. You should at least in your mind, like know who your people are in your little tribe to go to.
Patrick Burt 42:01
So yeah. Oh, yeah, is, uh, I mean, you do that, um, another little thing, another super simple thing, which I'm starting to do this year, which I did a little bit every now and then. But just shout out other people. Because it will, it will show that you're grateful for what you have, it will show that you're not an arrogant sob. It'll show that you're a helpful, friendly person. But also you shout out your friend. You know, let's say you have a plumber, you're like, Hey, guys, I just wanted to drop this guy over here. Does great stuff, he fix my whatever. Um, check them out, you know, and then you'll be surprised that just because you did that that plumber that you just named dropped is probably gonna be like, that was he's a good guy. And now you're gonna be on top of his mind whenever somebody asks him, hey, where can I get a realtor? You know, and it takes it takes 30 seconds. And it is so powerful. Because especially nowadays, everybody's very, very selfish. So I've closed more deals just by showing people like, hey, look, I just want to help you out. And people are like, well, you're honest, and you genuinely just want to help me out. Not take my money. Dude, let's get started. You know? Um, and it's the same thing for everything else. Again, like, name drops and friends that have businesses shout them out. Um, people love that. And they'll love that and then you're not a dick.
Keith McKeever 43:44
Business Owner really loves it. I mean, I have to say I'd love it. If a lot of local people were given a shout out to my business. You know, it's because it is this digital world with, you know, one 1.9 billion websites that are out there. It's it's cloudy, right? Our attention when we don't watch commercials anymore, you know, if I'm watching TV, I'm watching it on a streaming device. I'm watching something that Eric wonders ago. And if a commercial comes on my phone is next to me. And I'm on Facebook for the two or three minutes that same thing during sports games, they go to commercial I don't I didn't. No idea what's on the commercial.
Patrick Burt 44:21
Well, let me change to that other
Keith McKeever 44:25
night our attention is always on the digital space. So it's hard to cut through that clutter. You know, I that's one of the SEO right and getting your website getting your presence out there. It goes so much farther. I mean, there's a lot of things you could do for your for your social media stuff, too. But you know, bringing it back to that SEO, I'll ask you this question What is like maybe one thing somebody could do today this week, to really improve their situation when it comes to SEO.
Patrick Burt 44:54
So when it comes to SEO, first things first, like I said, You're off site. So going through, do all those that is free, it's just gonna take time, it's gonna suck, but do that. Um, so that's, that's like a quick, easy step. Number two, on Google My Business, make sure focus on getting reviews. And here's something that not a lot of people know, the reviews and the review responses also get scanned and indexed by Google. So if, let's say you're out there working for reviews be like, Hey, I'd really appreciate if you can either use a template, or like, say b by name, or see what we did. And then whenever you respond, you go through the same thing. My template was like, Hey, John, I appreciate you using ABC Company here in XYZ city, anytime you need ABC service, be sure to hit us up, and I'll be happy to help you out. And that hits all of your keywords, and a cool thing, you can go back to old responses and edit them. And you can do that. So you can make them all do that. So that's a really good actual thing. Going through your website, and just making sure that all of your pictures are not massive. Um, that's a, that's a very easy one to do.
Keith McKeever 46:16
Because it helps to use something like Canva and kind of created an image template and put everything on that one standard size. So where's that?
Patrick Burt 46:26
I mean, it's not necessarily going to be size in terms of how big I mean, that will play a part for your Yeah, design. Yeah. Right. It's more so going to be in terms of size of file, file size. So there's a lot of compressors that you can do, which will put a photo through and it will make it a quarter the size. But still make it pretty. Do that. Because that will make your overall website load faster, which can help people from bouncing off people, you can help conversions. It can help with SEO, it can help with a lot of stuff.
Keith McKeever 46:59
Yeah, there's, there's a lot of those out there. I actually use this for my real estate business. On some reports. Some websites only take like 25 megabytes or less. And yeah, your smartphones these days, they take higher quality photos. Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah. So I've had to go do that before and sometimes by mean, like, 20 photos one at a time to to make them smaller. But yeah, that's, that's a good idea. You know, and it doesn't change the pixels or anything, it just kind of shrinks shrinks the size. So take a look at I'm probably guilty of that on all my websites to vulnerability.
Patrick Burt 47:34
Yes, that's a very common one. I wouldn't do that.
Keith McKeever 47:37
My weekend busy. Review all this, but it's no easy fix. I think
Patrick Burt 47:44
it's, it's yeah, it's super, super easy. A lot of SEO is gonna be very easy. Like, you're not doing more than like going in and adding a link or going in and like uploading something or changing a word to another word, if you really look at it. It's just you're doing a lot of it. And so it just takes a lot of time. But it's not. It's not complicated. Um, you don't need to be a, you know, we're not doing like rocket surgery or anything. Anything crazy.
Keith McKeever 48:17
I'm a big time management guys. And so my advice to people would be to time block, right? Yeah, maybe take your website. And I don't know what the average number of pages is on a website. Let's say you got 50 pages, you know, just wait a minute today. Exactly, you know, do 30 minutes or an hour or just, you know, hey, look for the next 50 days, I'm going to tackle one page at a time. I'm going to go in make sure that all the the words are right, make some edits, put some new content on that page. You know, make sure the image sizes are all you know, just do make your checklist. You can't go wrong with checklists. Okay? This is a military veteran podcast, we all know about checklists, because we all had jobs.
Patrick Burt 48:59
Because I like to talk to my mom, like frequently and we'll talk and I'm like, Man, I got all this stuff. She's like, can you write it down? I'm like, No, she's,
Keith McKeever 49:10
she's like, she do
Patrick Burt 49:11
that. That'll make it easier.
Keith McKeever 49:14
Time blocked and project management checklist of some sort, even if it's handwritten, like you got to keep yourself on track. And it's, it's hard. And I think everybody kind of deals with that, especially with this wild as this world is, you know, everything that's going on and the attention the digital space and all that so,
Patrick Burt 49:32
yeah. I mean, I, there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of little things that you can do. But yeah, I mean, those those little bitty things that's that that'll that'll keep you busy for a bit. And then of course from there, just write blogs. Um, I mean, that's that's a continuous effort forever. So, you know, stuff like
Keith McKeever 49:54
that would be long. I mean, this short writing couple paragraphs, you know,
Patrick Burt 49:57
not it's not good In a, it's not so centered on the word of mouth, like it used to be, like it used to be. Blogs need to be XYZ words, actually, really, really cool trick. So this is something that a lot of agencies use. Um, and it's called the skyscraper method. So if you are in a business, and you're like, What the fuck do I write, I'm gonna Google up some of your competition, Google up some other people. So look up what people would search for whenever they're trying to find like a product, and then find other blogs. Now, the skyscraper method is let's say you find a blog that's like eight things to do when you want to go camping, you know, and it's on a camping site, and you run a camping company. Okay, well, we can already determine that that blog is ranking very well. And that is a very good, you know, it's high. All that. So now, take that blog, rewrite it, and make it 10 things. And it will have all of the proven content, but it will also have more content. And so Google would prefer that over the eight, because it's like, hey, I can give more information to my viewers. That's free.
Keith McKeever 51:15
Yeah, no, that's, you know, I've I've actually repurposed things like that, that I've found that all blog articles for, you know, companies that send things out, you know, and it even gives you ideas you get does blow your mind. You can also turn it into video content. Yep, turn on your camera, you got these eight things in these 10 things, put a sticky note on your computer, just go live or shoot a video and say, hey, you know, I want to talk to you about the top five, camping tools for 2020. You know, like,
Patrick Burt 51:48
a lot of people don't like getting on cameras. And so if, if, if all you do is say, You know what, I don't care, and I'm gonna hop on a camera, and you start doing lives, you start doing whatever, um, you'll get more benefit. I mean, there's a reason why YouTube, YouTube ads are actually a lot cheaper than people think. Um, and it's because people don't want to get in front of the video camera. And, I mean, but it builds rapport, it puts a face to a voice. I mean, it's, I saw whenever I started doing live assault, such a massive increase, just because people are like, Oh, he is a real person. You know, um,
Keith McKeever 52:25
you know, you can you can identify so much about a person, right, the way you talk, you know, act your personality, you can tell so much about a person. And I've heard in the realtor space realtors say that, you know, they start doing lives, even if they're not live videos, just YouTube, you know, pre recorded put to YouTube. And I've had people find them and watch their videos. And then when they need the service, they call and then data and they're like, Yeah, I want to work with you. Because I already feel like I know you. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the goal of business is to is to make connections and make money, right? Yes, sir. My revenue. So. But I was curious. One more thing before we wrap up. This one came, kind of came to me this morning, as I was thinking about it. Is there anything that you see out there and all the things you see, that is a big mistake that you see people trying to do way too early? That they get really put on the backburner? In all these different steps and everything?
Patrick Burt 53:24
I'd say ads. Um, I see people jump into ADS way earlier than they need to. People look at ads in terms of sales. But a better way to look at ads is more so eyes. Um, a lot of people again, a lot of people will jump straight into ADS and be like, Oh, I'm gonna get all this traffic and get all these sales. And but they they completely overlook the fact that let's say their website is trash, and they have zero online presence. And, you know,
Keith McKeever 53:53
they're bouncing in 10 seconds. Someone said no website.
Patrick Burt 53:56
Yeah, because it's not loading. Loading, or it looks like crap.
Keith McKeever 53:59
It looks like 995 or there's zero content on it. Yeah,
Patrick Burt 54:03
exactly. So that that is a massive thing. And another thing is even getting ads started without the right budget, a lot of people think that it's still 2017. And you can run an ad with $100 and make a bunch of sales. But I typically, I typically say the barrier to enter for ads. If you're trying to ecommerce, you got to at least spend like two $3,000 a month minimum. Um, other otherwise you're just not going to get in front of enough people. And then of course, it depends on you know, Google ads, inbound versus Facebook ads, emotional outbound. I mean, you've got stuff like that. But yeah, ads, I just see people doing ads way too early, and they end up not getting what they want. They end up spending money wasting the money, when they should instead of been focusing on something like let's do branding or organic milk sure you had your organic methods squared away first, before you do ads, if you are not getting organic leads, and you don't have you know, $30,000 to just drop, do not do ads. Um,
Keith McKeever 55:14
well, it should be like a layer, I try to remember the the term for it. But there should be kind of a layer to your ads, right? Let's just say you do a Facebook ad. The idea is to get people to look at the ad, right and get into your pixel or whatever it is, right? And then you should be taking that information and say, well, who's already seen it? Now running a different ad retargeting, retargeting, you know, and just keep doing that. And you might have to do that three, four or five different times to try and get somebody
Patrick Burt 55:39
lined up. I mean, there's another thing you can learn that there's not you don't have to do just ads. So if you look at ads is just eyes. You can get ads to run to collect an email campaign and then retarget via an email campaign drastically cheaper and cheaper than ads you can do. I mean, email is powerful. We have a copywriter that does like some witchcraft that I don't know about. But she's got like a 40% open rate. Like that's absurd.
Keith McKeever 56:11
Wow, that is.
Patrick Burt 56:14
I mean, like she she gets a 40% open rate. Now, of course to do that, like she purges the list. She has warm up email sequences. I mean, it's it's a full
Keith McKeever 56:25
professional. Yeah, it does. feel to it. Yeah.
Patrick Burt 56:30
Um, but yeah, like, just jumping into ADS too early. Is that is the biggest thing I see.
Keith McKeever 56:36
Now that does not surprise me at all. So yeah, it was one of those they hit me this morning. I'm like, Oh, that's a good Patrick's interesting take on that one. So, but we're gonna go ahead and wrap up. But I've got your got your Facebook here. For those that are on. They happen to be watching it. It's facebook.com backslash, PT. RK Bert. If you're in intrapreneur tribe, you probably already know the guy.
Patrick Burt 57:03
Just about all of my social media. So yeah, I'm
Keith McKeever 57:06
sure it's no surprise at all. Yeah, so you connect with him there. And and he's also given me a couple of guides on SEO and some other things. I think Google was one of them. So we're going to throw that on the website as a resource. And I'll have a link in the description for everything. So go, go check that out, download those, and it gives you a little checklist to get started anyway, and trying to get through these things. So Patrick, I appreciate you being here. Oh, of course. Let's get back to your day. I'm sure it's nice and beautiful and much warmer than it is here in central Illinois. Down there, Texas.
Patrick Burt 57:37
I'm sure what's the weather up there?
Keith McKeever 57:39
Ah, actually, I think we're having a high like 42 today. So it's a warm a warm front coming in.
Patrick Burt 57:45
I think we got we got some interesting weather, whether it was like 3030 degrees here
Keith McKeever 57:50
today or so. Oh, man, you guys ought to be prepared. That's that's not good. That's not good for Texas.
Patrick Burt 57:55
We ain't prepared for that. Well, you're what happened last year?
Keith McKeever 57:59
doesn't remember what happened last year.
Patrick Burt 58:01
33. Oh, well. Yeah, but you're from Massachusetts. So I wouldn't
Keith McKeever 58:09
I wouldn't survive in that. Would you? So awesome. Patrick, once again, I appreciate you coming on the show or people reach out to him get get get to get the guides yet so. Alright. I appreciate it. Man.
Patrick Burt 58:27
I met you take care. Yep, you too.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
