Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I want to talk to you today about exact match domains. What I mean by this is having a domain that precisely matches the keyword that you’re looking for. To be specific the TLDs, or top level domains (which means the thing after the “.” .net .com .org) that matter for exact match domains are “.com,” “.net,” and “.org.”

If you’re going out there and you’re trying to rank for a particular keyword, you can launch a site on one of these exact match domains. If you can acquire that name, as long as it’s one of the three TLDs that I mentioned, you’ll have a pretty good chance of ranking. You get a little bonus. It’s called the “exact match bonus.”

So that’s a little tip. This is part of what intrinsically makes some domains viable. So, I want you to take that tip and use it. I use it a lot. My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today I want to talk to you about “sitemaps” with an “s.” You’ve got to have both.

Back in the day a sitemap was a page that you put on your site that listed all the pages on your site in some kind of directory branched-tree style, and you still need to have that page.

Now a couple of years ago, the search engines started implementing more specific sitemaps. It’s a structured, XML sitemap. All of the big engines will respect and read this same sitemap in an xml file, but it’s still important to have both.

Why have sitemaps? The reason you need to have sitemaps, both of them, is to let the search engine spiders know what pages you have on your site. A lot of times it’s difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get to every little nook and cranny and every little page on your site, so you open your site and show them all the pages on your site so they can indeed go and access them. Don’t forget about both. Don’t just do one and not the other.

My name is Charles Lumpkin. I hope you’ve found this helpful. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today I want to talk to you about building a network of sites. Now, this is going to be another one of those infuego issues that I’m going to get crushed with email on. That’s cool. I’m just going to put it out there for you and let you make your own decisions.

What this is all about is… Ok, you’ve got one site in an industry. Now, from an SEO perspective it’s called a “Link Network.” You’ll hear a lot of people say that link networks don’t work. They still work, but the tend to work in smaller niches. You’re not going to be at the top of the keyword “tables” by building out solely on a network of sites.

So here’s the thing. You create several sites, and you strategically link those together. Now, Google hates this. Absolutely hates this. Again, if they find you, they’re going to burn you. Now, how do they find you? They’re going to do some link analysis, so don’t go crazy linking every site to every site. That’s one thing, but another thing that you want to avoid is when you register these domains, registering these domains in your name. You have to register them privately. When you first do the hand registration for those domains, you have to register them privately, so when they’re created in the system, from the first time it doesn’t show your name. Why is Google a registrar? It’s not because they’re trying to make money off of domain names and their registrations. It’s because they want the data so they can connect the dots and understand who understands who owns which sites. So take the defense on that side.

Now, again, I’m going to get flamed up for this one, and that’s cool cause I’ll start some controversy and that’s fine. My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today I want to talk to you about how you can get links from .edu domains. I blatantly stole this technique from a friend of mine called Peter Askew, and I’m going to call it the “Skew Method.”

In the Skew Method, you want to go out and find links on .edu domains. How you’re going to do this is go find college organizations to sponsor. You go contact them, thrown them $50 or whatever, and say “Hey, I’d like to sponsor your organization if you’ll just give me a link back to my site from yours. That’ll be awesome.”

Now, why .edu domains? Well, this is really where the whole thing started, with .edu papers referencing each other. It’s kind of where the link world really started. .edu domains are still very trusted in the eyes of Google and the other engines. It’s less likely to have spam on it and all these other things. So, it gives links from .edu domains a little more weight to them.

So, how do you do this? It’s pretty easy. Go to Google and do a query. Type in “site:.edu” then space, then your topic whatever it is. Let’s say “photography” and “club” or “organization” or “association” or something like that. So, “site:.edu photography club”. That’s going to return a lot of clubs and organizations. They’re student organizations you can go to and say “Hey Photography Club of Georgia Tech, I’d like to sponsor your organization if you’ll give me a link back to my site.” I’m sure somebody will give you a link. It’s a great way to get a link from a .edu domain, and it’s a very powerful link indeed. My name is Charles Lumpkin, and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today I want to talk to you about SEO and (insert ominous dun dun dun) paid links. Paid links is like the biggest four letter word in the SEO world, and the reason it is this way is because Google and others, specifically Google, has made a hard and right stand against it.

Now, if you get caught, supposedly you’ll get banned. I’ve had sites banned, so it is possible to get banned. I’ve also known others who have had sites banned, but let me tell you the honest and ragged truth.

The truth is that most of the largest sites on the internet pay for links. Most of the largest retailers pay for links. They don’t advertise it. They don’t say, “Hey Google. Thanks for coming around for our quarterly meeting. We’re paying for some links.” They don’t say that, but it’s the truth, and do you know why people pay for links? If you do it right, it works. I’m not kidding.

Now, before you get all crazy on me. It’s important to do this with caution. So if you’ve got one site that you have in a market, you have to walk on this line gingerly. If you’re wanting to expand your presence in a market, I’d recommend starting another site and trying out some paid links on that guy. No harm. No foul. If it tanks, it tanks. Cool.

Paid links can work. I’m going to catch so much flack for this video, you don’t even know, but I have to say it. Think about it. It’s a strategy, but you have to be careful with it. My name is Charles Lumpkin, and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I want to talk to you today about link variety when it comes to SEO.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when they’re first starting with SEO is that they go out and learn about a specific kind of technique. Right? Then they go out and do that technique and only that technique like that’s what drives them.

You’ve got to have a smattering of all different kinds of links. There’s several that I use pretty commonly, and there are a lot of different types of links. I’ll just name a couple off the top of my head.

Stuff like news releases still work. I’m serious. Send out a news release put it on prweb. There’re a couple of other news release sites that are good. It syndicates that article out, and you do in fact get links back to your site. Pretty cool.

You can go out and do the low hanging fruit on blogs. Go and join the conversation on blogs. Now don’t just go spam up people’s comments. First, you want to find blogs that are “follow-blogs,” but don’t just go spam up people’s comments. You’re going to be talking in blogs that are relevant to your sphere anyway. You’ve got to have links from relevant sites, so go join the conversation.

You can get links by holding a contest on your site for instance. That’s a good way. Say “Hey. I’m giving away $500 worth of free stuff.” Go talk to other bloggers, and they’ll say “Hey, Charles is giving away $500 worth of free stuff. Go over there and hang out with him.

You can form relationships with people. In fact, the old school find-out-who-owns-this-site. Email them. “Can you give me a link?” Sometimes it works. It’s a numbers game and you have to do it on a consistent basis, but it does indeed work.

So don’t just go out and hammer one particular kind of link. There are a lot of different styles and types of links that you can get. So be diligent about it. Try to play and experiment with a lot of different types of things. My name is Charles Lumpkin, you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. We’re going to talk about the basics of SEO. Yesterday we talked about “What your site says about itself.” Now we’re going to talk about “What other sites say about your site.” This is the other part of it.

So essentially, you’ve got to get participation from other sites on the internet. You’ve got to get links. What’s going on is that each link that is pointed to your domain or your website is essentially a vote being cast for you. Now if you can get a link that has the anchor text that you are interested in somewhere in or around it, that’s definitely favorable. Get those links with the highest quality and highest relevance that you possibly can.

So, you’ve got to elicit participation from others in the community. It’s all about links in this world. Link juice is king. You’ve got to do it, and we’re going to talk about several different ways that you can get links. You’ve got to have link variety, and we’ll talk through all these topics, so stay tuned.

My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I’d like to talk to you today about the basics of SEO. How I say it is basically “What does your site say about itself?” and “What do other sites say about your site?”. Today we’re going to talk about this first one—“What does your site say about itself?”—and it’s pretty straight forward.

First of all, in order to rank for something, you had better talk about that term on your site. You can’t expect to rank for photo umbrellas if you’re talking about tables all day long. Right? So, you’ve got to have the content to support that particular phrase on your site. When I say, “content” I mean several paragraphs of content on your site. Seriously, don’t try to skimp on it.

Now, the other part of this is making sure you have your pages structured in the right way. You want to have the correct titles, meta-tags (which is a description), URL, a heading tag, and content, to support the entire keyword that you are looking for. So, I try to go with one page per keyword. So you’ve got one page lined up for that keyword, then another page lined up for another keyword, and that’s how you roll on down the list. You want to have that meaty content there and all the supporting things, so that when Google goes around and says, “What is this page about?” well clearly, it’s about photo umbrellas.

Now the other thing that you need to be aware of is making sure that your site is indeed crawlable. This gets a little more complex. Essentially there’s a whole host of things that can keep Google from getting in into the interior pages of your site. So, you may have really nasty URLs that are difficult to figure out, or you may not have links to some of the pages from other places on your site. You need to have a sitemap that will definitely help with all this, but in a lot of the times you need to clean it up and make sure that it can be easily crawled and is accessible.

So, that’s a tip that I hope you use. My name is Charles Lumpkin, and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. I want to talk about testing domains in your ad creative.

Out there on the search engines and contextual advertising campaigns. You have a URL – it’s called the display URL in most cases. What you may not realize is that you should test your domain (especially if you are a new start up). One will always work better than another.

In fact – just last week I did a campaign for a medical company. The medical company had a domain name that was – frankly – a little bit scary. Now on the other side there was a domain name that is a little bit more positive. I put those against one another. It was a 25% improvement in click-through rate. It not only effects how much you are going to pay, but it also affects the volume that you are doing. If you are producing and your volume has plateaued off. Would you like 25% more? I sure would.

You can’t do this on Google any more. Which is one of the many things that irritates many about how Google has progressed. They’ve gone away from the advertiser over the past few years. Run these campaigns on Bing. Run them on Microsoft Bing and then port your results over to Yahoo. And then take the results to Google.

Run it on Bing and port it over.

My name is Charles Lumpkin. I hope you take that tip straight to the bank. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com.

Transcript
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today we are going to talk about Direct Mail. I’m not going to talk about all of the different varieties and things you can do with direct mail. And I’m not talking about mass Direct Mail campaigns. I’m really talking about Lumpy Mail.

I got this tip from Perry Marshall. If you haven’t heard of Perry Marshall – he is phenomenal. That’s where I learned some of the first stuff about pay per click marketing. So kudos to you Perry Marshall. It’s the concept of using a package in the mail to go directly to someone’s heart and really connect with them. We construct campaigns online that are for large audience. What I’m talking about is a very small, very targeted audience. It can be one person or one hundred people. You want to create a package that reaches out and touches someone.

You want it to be something that is just jarring. Something that is completely unexpected from what you’d normally see on a day to day basis and that cuts through the clutter of everyday life. It needs to cut through all the marketing messages that we see everyday. And it says “I made a campaign for YOU, specifically.”

I’ve got another friend here in Atlanta called Matthew Sweezey. And he helped us along with several other people to create a direct mail campaign to send to surrogacy agencies. These packages were a stork box. We had some custom design all four sides of the box as if you were looking at the stork from different angles. Then when you opened the box you see the stork beak comes out and it’s holding a sac that looks like a baby. And it was filled with fortune cookies. Maybe that could have been something better – it was cheap at the time. It was a very pointed and directed campaign. Its not like this is the 150th marketing message you’ve seen today. This is the marketing message that was made for YOU today.

I’ll give you another example. One time we created another package that was sent to the same audience. It was a box and when you opened it there was a balloon inside of it. The balloon would come out of the box and attached to it we had our sales letter there that explained why they needed to be members of a community that we had. In fact, one lady said, “this is the best piece of marketing that I have ever seen.” And that is the reaction that you want. You want to reach out and touch someone. Lumpy mail campaigns are a very powerful way – especially if you are trying to do a sales effort into a small audience.

My name is Charles Lumpkin. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com.

Thank you.