122 | How to Outrank Anyone and Any Thing w/ Damon Burton

Damon Burton pulled a fascinating trick on me on LinkedIn, and it made me want to find out more about him.  He's also an SEO expert and author of the book, Outrank.

It just so happens that I have very little practical knowledge about SEO, so I took the opportunity to reach out to Damon to have him on the show so I can ask him about it, and find out what other tricks he had up his sleeve.

Turns out, he's a master connector with a ton of great advice about SEO, relationship building, and how to scale a business.  ENJOY!

Connect with Damon:
His Book

His Website

His Business

His LinkedIn

Connect with ME!

Also, I'd love it if you connected with me on LinkedIn or Instagram.

Or shoot me an email at youshould@connectwithpablo.com with the "Heard CEC's Damon" in subject.

This that's a genius email address?  Me too, but I didn't come up with it.  It was the idea of my good friend, and super talented web designer, Nathan Ruff.

If you want your website redone, updated, and managed with unlimited updates for just $250/month (CRAZY GOOD DEAL RIGHT??), go to Manage My Website and hookup with one of the smartest, most talented guys I've ever met- THE Nathan Ruff.

Transcript

Pablo Gonzalez: 1:42

Welcome back to the chief executive connector podcast. I am Pablo Gonzalez, your chief executive connector. And today I got somebody that I hope is becoming my new friend as we speak right now. Curiously reached out to me on LinkedIn in a, in a, in a very interesting strategy that I want to dissect. And that's how we first connected, but he's an SEO expert. And right now I'm kind of an SEO idiot. So, and I'm, and I'm working on it in my business. So I'm really, really pumped to get some really tactical advice from Damon Burton. Who's built out a 30 person, seven figure SEO business called SEO national without ever spending a dollar on advertising. It's all word of mouth and SEO and him being a great businessman. He's also the author of a book about SEO called outrank. He just told me that he was a hip hop DJ and is an outcast fan. So that immediately infused me to him apart from his handsome beard, that I am incredibly jealous about Damon. Welcome to the show, my

Damon Burton: 2:38

man, how you doing? Well, I don't think there's anything left to say, so thanks for having me Papa. It was a pleasure talking. Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity to chat. So, yeah. I, when I was in, when I was 1920 through 26, 27, I worked on air in salt lake city and that was fun. yeah. And, and been an SEL for 14 years. That's actually why I left radio was as I said, oh, well actually in between what I was going to say is, was to pursue the career, which is true. But in between is when my wife and I were getting married and I called up my boss. I said, Hey, can I take a little time out for a minute? So I can plan this wedding. And you know, for, for benefit of timing or whatever business kept going. And I just kind of never went back and I'm still friends with them, all my friends radio. And I told you, before we hit record, I could tell you about this mistake and that actually relates to radio. So the mistake for the listeners is I'm turning 40 and this will, this. Random ramble illness will come full circle. I promise. So I put out this post saying, this is either the best idea or my worst. I'm turning 40, who wants to come on by and flight tickets. And so I ran it out, this massive lodge, like the 7,000 square foot lodge who wants an so well, it was funny is I hit up, come back to radio is I hit up some of my old radio friends. I'm so good friends with a lot of them invited my old boss to the party, hit up. Some of my other friends said, Hey, do you want to come do the music at the party? So I think me in bringing this up, it's going to underscore what we're going to get into talking about is the value in relationships. And you know, we're going to focus on business, but in reality, all facets of life.

Pablo Gonzalez: 4:07

Yeah, man. Yeah. That's that dude that makes me want to go down a couple of them. Let's just get into it. Um, radio guys, right? Like I feel like, I feel like talk about an industry that's been completely disrupted and now for the ones that. See the game have a major, major opportunity, right? Like this, this idea that has never been more valuable to be a content creator than, or, or, or, or an artist before. Do you see having a network of people in radio? Have you seen like a stratification of the people that have evolved versus the people that are just like, nah, this is what I signed up for. Why has it

Damon Burton: 4:41

changed? Like, are, are you seeing that? there's definitely something that I'm seeing, but it's none of the above. It's like, holy shit. I need to get out of radio fast because you know that long before COVID happened, radio was already having competition with Pandora and Spotify and podcasts and radio will never go away because it's a unique, portable format. But I think its glory days are over. Because the problem that you run into is the unique thing that the value that radio had is their ability to communicate to the masses. But now there's so many other ways to do that. And so it's not that radio became less effective, but the pricing structure that it was built upon is not realistic anymore. So radio is just a business. Hm. Like the reason why they do catchy hooks and jingles and giveaways is because they want your listener count. And so as soon as that listener count starts to drop, they lose ad revenue or, you know, the cost per whatever they want to measure it by. It goes down. And so it's not that radio is necessarily less effective. It's just not as competitive from a pricing standpoint, because it used to be like a couple hundred bucks. I mean, this will vary by market, you know, the bigger your market, the bigger the list, the more cost to run an ad, but even on a, a respectable market, like in salt lake, I mean, it was a couple hundred bucks for like a 32nd mention and you have to buy those and tens of thousands of dollars of chunks. And so. From a business owner's perspective. If you're presented two options, option number one is, Hey, we can either build an asset that you own like SEO, and you can monetize this more or less indefinitely, or you could put ads towards Facebook and get a quantifiable return, or you can spend five times that much. And we can just take a shotgun approach and throw it at, you know, vomited over the airways with, with nothing to show you who it reached and how and what converted or not. Like it's just not competitive anymore. So if radio. Would accept that because radio is still much very corporate company and an old white collar company. And it's, it's not the employees that don't see this happening. It's the old money guys that don't want to change their ways. So I think there's still a lot of blood to in the radio world. And a lot of my friends that they were kind of already had one foot out the door anyway. but this just definitely expedited. I've talked to a ton of radio just like two weeks ago, which maybe we can talk about here in a minute about meeting people in person. Just two weeks ago, I went and met a contact that my old radio boss made an intro to. One of his friends, that's thinking about getting out of radio. And he said, go talk to Damon. He got out of radio. He's had had a good career and just see what he had to say. And so I get, I have those conversations a couple of times a year where there's like a long-term veteran and radio. That's like. I just got to get out.

Pablo Gonzalez: 7:38

What do you, what'd you tell that guy as far as like, what's the, what's the move. If somebody comes to you right now and they're like, I need to make a shift out of radio. What's what, what's the best advice you got? They give him,

Damon Burton: 7:48

well, this guy specifically, he, he, he, he was one step ahead of a lot of the others. he hasn't necessarily got in a physical foot, out the door quicker than the others, but mentally he's a step ahead. And so he's like, how do I take my skill sets and from radio and apply that to something else. And so for him, it's like, okay you know, Content creation voiceover talent, things like that. And so I said, yeah, do that. You know, you don't have to do like a cold Turkey cut. Like I have a ton of radio friends. I don't know why, but like they're all flocking to real estate and that's not to say anything for against real estate, but it's just a weird common denominator that the radio guys are moving real estate. So he, he wasn't one of those guys and he said, you know, I want to, I want to do commercial work or voiceover work, but I want to do my own thing. I want to do it outside of the scope of radio. And so I gave him some advice on, you know, very similar to what you do, engage people with on podcasts, repurposed, the media and things like that. So regardless of it being radio to voice work or any industry or any transition, you gotta, you gotta start with, you know, what areas. Do you like? because I think that there's two questions that the listeners can ask themselves. One is what are you good at? And the other is what do you like to do? And those can be two dramatically different questions, different answers. And so I would say, start there, like, okay, you're, you're you historically have a skill set and voiceover work and radio talent, but are you just doing that? Are you just looking to transition into that? Because it feels safe because if it, if you're doing it, just because it feels safe, you're not going to sustain that move. You know, you might last a couple of years before you burn out again. So I think it depends on the person where you got to really analyze, like where do you want to be? And that's one of the beautiful things about all the crap going on right now is that it's kind of forcing people to go, holy shit. Well, a lot of, not only what am I going to do, but what do I want to do? And I don't think there's a better opportunity to really take that to heart and make the better long-term decision instead of the safe choice that a lot of us would probably made in the past. So

Pablo Gonzalez: 9:54

great advice, man. The, the figure out where you want to end up and reverse engineer is, is like that number one piece of advice of like, and then, and then try to weave in what your super power is and how you can serve people with it is, is absolutely to me, that's like that golden triangle, right? Let me, let me flip that back on you. When you were, when you were transitioning out of radio and you asked yourself that question, was it as simple as saying, I love SEO and I'm good at it. And I'm going to go do this, or, or did you go through more of an iteration process before you became a, the SEO expert that stands before.

Damon Burton: 10:28

the, the radio answer was easy, but I have I have that same moment where it was harder with, with a different part of the equation. So I knew very quickly that I did not want to pursue radio as a long-term career. And so that was never a thought in my mind, not now the reason why is because I saw how transient it was you know, if you lose a job in radio, you just don't get a radio job across the street like you do if you worked in retail. And so I would see literally families uprooted out of nowhere. And so you would have to go from Utah to New York, to Texas, to Idaho, to Florida, like there was zero stability. And for me that goes deeper than for me, that goes deeper than the obvious of that would suck. But for me, like I moved a lot when I was younger, I moved as many as two to three times a year when I was a kid. And, and that was one thing that even though when I first started in radio, I was 1920. I knew at some point I would be a family man, and I didn't want that for my kids because I knew that it, I knew the awkwardness of it having just come out of it. So it was, it was super easy for me to say no to radio, but, but at the same time, it's freaking radio. And how cool is that? And you're on air and you get to meet cool people and go to all these concerts. And so w I, I was able to position myself to be the guy that was always available, but we'll never be here forever. And so I could do so I actually had a day job on top of that. And so I worked in these corporate offices at this bank and. I would go do the, you know, like 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM shift at the bank offices, and then I'd go to evenings and weekends and radio. And I got really fortunate to get into radio, which ties into, you know, did I have that fork in the road? And my fork in the road was with college, which was how I got into radio. So I went to, I I'm the, you know, the first one as far as I know in my lineage to go to college. and I dropped out and I dropped out with one semester left. I didn't drop out because it was hard. I I've always been, you know, done well with, with educational material. but my fork in the road was for me college and this isn't like a pro four against college rant. But my moment for me was you go to college with the hopes of maybe money. And what I had developing was doing web design on the side and all that right. More on that in a minute. But what I had was. maybe opportunity by finishing college and a pretty, for sure opportunity that was already putting money in my pocket with web design. And so that was the decision I had to made. That was comparable to you asking about radio. As I, as I said, do I continue pursuing college, paying more for it to then go get a degree or to get a degree to apply it to a job with who knows where or do I keep doing this web thing? Which is kind of cool. And I like it. There's a personal interest in it and I can do my own thing. So that was a little bit more of a difficult decision. I wouldn't say it was really too difficult, but it was certainly that I had to make an intentional decision. So I never went back to college. And that's when I started to do design on the side and I'll give you the short version of my career and we can circle back. So after that is when I was at college, that's when I started to go to radio because I had, one of my electives was go get an internship in a media company. And I got super lucky with that because if you know anything about radio, usually the first time you get on it, It's not what the radio station or the music you like. Like if you like rock and roll, you're going to a country station. If you like country, you're doing on to hip hop station, I guess just the way that the world works and radio. So I got really lucky cause I liked hip hop and I got to work at a hip hop station. And so I didn't go there to start working on air. I just went because it was cool. It was cool to be exposed to that new world. And I got really lucky where within two months I was on air, started doing overnight shifts. And then as I sucked less, they started giving me weekend shifts. And then I started filling in prime time slots. And then I started working, you know, radio stations or the companies that own radio stations usually own multiple radio stations. And so then I started doing 40 hours a week across two or three different stations owned by the same company. And then all the while the way this relates to SEO is that's what I was doing. My side hustle is when you're on radio. It's very much like the setup I got. Now, if anybody's watching this and not just on audio, like you see me on camera, You got the mic right here and then you'd have a computer off to the side. So in between my on air breaks, I was working on web design and then I built up clients on the side. And then, then where I had the biggest decision of the fork in the road was when my, my side hustle was matching my day jobs, income. So I had, I was making, I was making probably 40% of my income from the side house on 60 from the day job. But the day job was taking up 80% of my time. And so I had to say, okay, it would suck to lose that income. But this sounds like his calculated risk is I can take. And so that's when I, I went all in on, on the entrepreneur gamble and it was the best move ever. I mean, I made that money by freeing up that time. I made that income back in like three months was doing six figures, probably two years later. And then here we are in year 14 and now I got 30 employees and we kind of do seven figures a year. So that's a lot. I'm going to take a nap now.

Pablo Gonzalez: 15:47

Listen, I thought, I thought it was awesome. And there's a lot of like forks in that road that I would love to take. I, I wanna, you know, a couple of things I just want to kind of highlight is this idea of your decision of make for real money or. Sit around for maybe money. I feel like that's the decision of like declaring early for the draft, right? Like, do you, do, do you spend your last year playing ball here or do you just go get guaranteed income? Right. Like I, I think it makes perfect sense and I think it too often gets vilified, man. So it is a courageous thing that you did. And I, you know, I apply, I applaud you for that, man. I think it's cool. And I also want to highlight this idea that after listening to some of your content, man, I know that you have really good employee retention and you've, you've created all these systems around your business where you, were you always a system culture guy or was that like a get kicked in the teeth by entrepreneurship enough

Damon Burton: 16:39

times until you figured that out? Yeah, unfortunately it was not the ladder, but it's definitely been a learning curve. I think I've always had some sort of mechanics in me to be organized. I mean, one clear moment is when I was probably. 10 or 11. And, you know, my parents divorced when I was two. And, and so when my, when we would kind of do the holiday rotation kind of thing, and my dad came over to pick us up after we did the Christmas thing in the morning with my mom one of the two had given me a CD case, you know, like the nice ones, like the, the two stack ones that would hold a hundred CDs. And so I start putting my disks in there and my mom stops and goes, are you alphabetizing those? So, yeah, I think I've always had a little bit of that in me, but where I really became more intentional about, it was probably probably about eight or nine years ago. So six or seven years into the entrepreneur journey. what had happened was that there was kind of three things that happen all within the same timeframe. And so what those were is one I was listening to E-Myth revisited. Two, I was listening to four hour work week and three, I was asked to go to a meeting with a VC company. So what happened was I have a friend who he started as a client. He's gone on to build and sell five businesses in 10 years. Now he's on his, his grand finale. He's got a 200 employee company. And every time he's from that first opportunity of establishing a relationship with him and being transparent and all these things, we'll talk about the value of relationships. I became his SEO guy. And so out of those five businesses in 10 years, every time one of them SEO is applicable. There wasn't even shopping around. It was just like, Hey Damon, come do your thing. So when he started, the, his current grand finale company is in its infancy. He had the company for probably, gosh, I don't know, however many years. And so he said, Hey, I'm looking to start this company, but we're going to focus on this type of marketing only, but I'm looking to take on funding to scale it quickly. And the VC company. Is going to ask me if we can roll it in, if we can merge multiples to make it a mega marketing company. And so at the time I was, I was certainly successful, but it was just like a couple hundred thousand a year. And we had, I had maybe, I don't know, seven, eight employees. And so I said, well, you know, I'm not in a position. I don't think I've, we've met our, I don't think we're at our peak yet. And I want to continue to see where things go, but I'll come entertain the conversation just as a learning experience. And so I went and had this meeting with these VC and I, it was very quickly that I declined the engagement to go further. you know, it was just, something was gross about it, but I've learned some interesting things. And so w some of the things that I learned is if you ever want to exit a business, the buyers primarily want two things. So the first thing that. Is the keys. They want to turn key business so they can take the keys and run. The second thing they want is they want to know where the fire is, the cells, so they can just come in and pour more fuel on it. So after that is, I wouldn't say it was my kick in the teeth, but that's probably the closest, you know, example is that when I said, holy crap, I need to, I need to take everything that I'm getting from what I learned in that meeting and listening to E-Myth revisited and documented processes. And so if you haven't listened to EMA already myth revisited, it's, it's hard. The importance of building a company that's built around that's dependent on processes and not employees. So that way as talent comes and goes, there's no hiccups because you have processes and the people are interchangeable because the processes are locked in. And so I had processes, but they were somewhere in my head and somewhere on a spreadsheet and somewhere over here and whatever. And so I, I went through the steps to document absolutely everything that we could possibly do. And that freaking sucked that took probably two or three hours every other day for a year, but it's because I wanted to do it right. And it may not take that long for listeners. For me, it took that long because with the types of marketing, the types of components going to SEO, there's like all these different things, all these different variables, different possible outcomes. And so I had to say, if I'm going to give this to my team, I have to be confident that as long as they can read and follow directions, they can't screw it up. They can't find the gaps, whether they did too intentionally or not, they are going to find those cracks in the processes. And so I wanted to make sure that I, other than, you know, updating processes as need be, I never had to do that again. So that took forever. Now, the reason why I also mentioned mentioned four hour workweek is because four hour work week is valuable and telling you how to cut corners, but you can't, you should not cut corners until you know what you are potentially cutting until you know, what your processes are. So it was really valuable for me to go through that BC meeting and be able to quantify the importance of documentation and scalability. But then also go, oh, I'm listening to this right now, so I should do it. And then after that, then figure out how to scale and streamline it. So I wouldn't do four hour work week first, cause you're gonna shoot yourself in the foot. But I had that. That's kinda, that's kinda the moment that relates to what you had asked.

Pablo Gonzalez: 22:01

That's awesome, man. And I, so a little, you know, context on that for me, how it hit me. It's I've spent the last eight months documenting processes with my partner that I brought on ESR in our business. That's also, you know, it's, it's not SEO. We're actually bringing in some SEO services, which I want to talk to you about right now and kind of like get your opinion on what we're doing. but it's content distribution, right? It's like content creation and distribution. So a lot of moving parts and it's exactly what you said. About three, three times a week, two hours at a time for the last like six months, just sitting down and going over all the different processes and documenting it and all that good stuff, man. So it very, very much echoes with me. And then the other thing that really much, very much echoed with me is the don't cut corners before you build a corner before you build a house, right? Like that's the idea of like focus on the unscalable and then once you figure that piece out, then you can start scaling is, is something that I think is really misunderstood by a lot of young entrepreneurs that are just like, yeah, man, I just want to, you know, do like this and this and this, I can hit scale and I'm like, no, bro, like first you gotta really figure out that, you know what you're doing before you can scale where else is going to come back to bite

Damon Burton: 23:08

you. Right. For sure. I think I, you know where I'm at now compared to where I was at 10 years ago. If I went and went back in time and I was like, look, you know, here's where you're going to be. Or here's the potential that you have. Do you want to move now? That would have been the worst decision ever, because like, there's going from one to 10. You learn things at two and five and seven that unless you learn them personally, that you, you can't, there are certain things that you can't read. And if you do read, you don't turn analyze them, just like me talking about the importance of documenting processes. Well, duh, we all know that we all hear that, but until I was in that moment with that VC company, it didn't click for me in a way that was tangible. And so there's a lot to be said about giving yourself the grace to trip over yourself for awhile. And I think that's, what's led to a lot of my success is I was never in a rush to be on the next phase. And so for me, my evolution was okay, year one or two is cool. I'm self-employed I can do my own thing. I wake up whatever I can work late, whatever, but I was making like 40 grand. And I'm not saying that's a lot or not a lot, but it's not where I'm at now. And so if I was to say, if I was doing that financially there versus now, I had to go through those moments of just being self-employed. Of learning responsibility of not drinking a beer at 9:00 AM, just because I can, and then going to the next phase of like, okay, year or two later, this is growing. So let's embrace that opportunity. Let's bring on one VA, holy crap. Another person is going to be dependent on me. Holy crap. That person's wife is pregnant. And so now multiple people are dependent on me. Like those are things you don't think about and you don't understand how to process them unless you're able to have the freedom to do it slowly. Like if all of a sudden I hired 10 people and they have families that depend on me too. I'm not going to be as empathetic to how to properly handle that. So there's all these intangibles that you don't learn unless you, unless you go through those, those middle steps. Sure. Have the big goals, but you might get lucky getting there faster, but it's not going to last. Yeah,

Pablo Gonzalez: 25:20

man. That's that's really, really good advice, man. That's good. Well-formed businessman in the way that you described that you said something really interesting in the part before that, when you said he brings me on to SEO, when SEO is applicable, when is SEO not applicable?

Damon Burton: 25:39

Where I turned people down the most is on a retail product with small profit margins. So you have to, it's not to say there's ton of opportunity to retail. We have ton of retail clients, but that's usually where I say no. And the reason why is because SEO is a slow process there's logistics behind improving the site structure and making sure it has good call to action. And then the longer term plays into the content creation and distribution. And even before you start writing the content, you have to understand the buyer intent and align, like, what is your message behind why you're writing this? Because what you should not be doing is not putting out SEO garbage. And so you should putting out value added content that focuses on solving a problem. And so. When you go through that discovery process. And like, if you have a retail product you know, when you balance the logistics of profit margins on a lower price point retail product with how slow of a process SEL is that there's some truth to the statement that you want to kind of mentally commit to at least a year and SEO before you drive a return. And that's not to say you don't see progress over there, but the reason why you want to mentally commit to a year is because I could get you from page 57 on Google to page three, which is hundreds of increase, hundreds of rankings and improvements, but nobody goes past page one. So I can show you tons of progress and you'll see all the content that's being pushed out and you'll see all these amazing things we do. But until you get to page one, you're not going to monetize it. So when you, when you're able to understand that and you go, okay, well, if I'm going to pay$2,000 a month,$5,000 a month,$10,000 a month for SEO and I make 99 cents. Profit on every unit sold. That's going to take you a long time to not only break even. But then make back that investment for the last year before you started to break even. So it's going to depend on what your profit margins are. So I think there's a little more flexibility with service-based types of businesses that have less overhead, less inventory logistics, less cost to landing, things like that. but on the retail side where you can succeed is, A you got to own that product. It can't be a drop ship, product and affiliate product. I mean, there's people that do affiliate SEO and that's fine, but you know, if you own the business or you're trying to do your own thing, and you're not just like a solo affiliate SEO, like you've got to own the product and then it's gotta be something that has reasonable profit margins too, because you're paying a big investment for a long time. And then the other thing is, is you got to understand. You know, is your product seasonal or not, or does it have a long life span? Because if this is something that's trendy and is only going to last for the next 18 months, you might get a couple of months of a good run with SEO by the time it kicks in, but like, what are you going to do after that? Like, is it worth that much time? so just depends on what the longterm potential is to determine if SEO is realistic or not awesome,

Pablo Gonzalez: 28:32

man. That's a really, really good description. Like I, I see two good pieces of micro content coming out of that one, right? Like the, when is it not applicable? And you kind of talking about this, like how you got to create the stream of content and then at the end, how you just broke down. The, those three things for retail I think is really, really valuable, man. I appreciate that. So we are show right now we are kind of folding in a little bit of SEO into what we do for our clients. And let's give it a little view of, of my business. Right? My business is essentially instead of a client having a webinar and, or just a podcast and, or just a YouTube channel. We turn a weekly live show about their clientele into all of those things, right? So one of the things that is now, and we trade all the micro bonds and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think you probably understand the business model and the car are our differentiating factors that we like the strategy of making it so that people are actually showing up so that when you bring somebody on to talk to them, you're giving them extra exposure and then creating community around it. But one of the things that we're starting to add to it is a blog based on what we're talking about. Right. And, and our, our SEO strategy right now being not SEO specialists, right? Like we're bringing in somebody else to also give us a little bit of help on the technical side, which I don't really know what that means. Right. I understand tackling whatever, but I know that's the term is we're using SEM rush to map out, to like, look at what the keywords are that we really, really want to go after. Right. And then we are mapping out the schedule of the show. To be able to interview people that talk about these actual terms so that it can feed that and then turning those into blogs where we have these these terms showing up. Right? Yeah. when you hear that strategy, what kind of advice would you give of like what's, what's missing in that maybe you can explain to me technical SEO, like what, what, what would you give me as advice if I brought you on as a consultant of like, w w where am I

Damon Burton: 30:30

going? So the content strategy, that's actually a lot better strategy than I usually hear. So kudos to that. so let's take a step back and look at the greater scope of SEO before we dig into content. So there's a lot of things that go in SEO, but they primarily fall into two categories. So one category is what you do on your website. The other category is what you do externally to website, and then content sits in between there because you can have content on your site. And then external. Now most of the gains are going to come from content. And as you said, backlinks, which is when another website hyperlinks to you and so content and that external credibility is where most of your gains are gonna come from, but that will only be as effective as your structure is solid. So you have to dial in the structure first because you can do all this amazing content. And if people are sending. Backlinks and traffic back to your website and the design sucks. It's not mobile friendly and it's painfully slow, slow, slow loading time. Then you're going to dilute all these amazing efforts that you're making. So I recommend people start with the structure first. Now you can, you can start mapping those other things out. That's fine. But by the time you start loading them, hopefully you have a locked in site structure. Now, as far as the content strategy, you have an amazing strategy. And that's largely what we do is we figure out what is the best way to create an original piece of content and then repurpose it because content sucks. Like it, it's hard to do it's time consuming. So where we start is very much, like you said, as we go, okay, what words can we monetize? And so, in addition to just looking at what your gut tells you, like when we start a campaign, I'll tell the client, what words do you think you can monetize? And then what words do on our experience? Do we think you can monetize? What we do is we marry all those key words and then we go run them through some reports and then let the data to start to tell us what ones are good or bad. And so we'll take the. Anywhere from 20 to a hundred keywords, potential targets. And then the data will turn those into several hundred. Then we'll start to quantify those. And we quantify them a couple different ways. So one thing you want to do is you can do this on a desktop when I'm about to tell you what we're kind of mobile, but on a desktop, you can go to Google and just type the freaking thing in type in whatever phrase you want to target. And look at two things you're going to quantify two things. One is. On a desktop. Google will tell you how many results show up for that word, that phrase, how many websites show up? Now, there are not a hundred million websites that are your direct competitors, but from an SEO perspective, it doesn't matter because they're in your way. So those are the sites you're fighting against. So you have to go, okay, how, and don't, don't be discouraged by a large quantity of results, but use it to set more realistic expectations and go, okay, well, we've got to fight against a lot of guys for that term. So that's not in the year, year one plan for return, but we're, but because it's a slow process you got to start now and then maybe that's in year two or three return. Now, the second thing that you got to look at is who is showing up in the results. So let's say if they there's a search result that had a hundred thousand or less competing, results That would be amazing that like relatively speaking, that's an easy target, but if the first person that's shown up as Amazon and the second one was Walmart. That's still a big uphill battle. So you not only have to look at the quantity, but you have to look at quality of the people you're fighting against. So after you understand like what keywords you can monetize, how realistic is the landscape to target them, then you have to focus on buyer intent. So you have to go, okay, what you described it perfectly well is you have to say, okay, what type of content we map out to support these targets? So whether it's in your case, guests that can come on and talk, be a subject matter expert. And you know, through the context of the conversation, they're going to reveal those keywords and have those sexy mentions. You figure out how you get that content, whether it's either written word or audio or video, and if it's audio or video, then you transcribe. Now Google is getting better at understanding rich media, but it can for sure understand written word. So it's always more valuable to get any sort of format into a text-based content. So like if you do a podcast or a video, then the way that you get the best of both worlds is because your audience wants a bit wants the video, but Google wants the text So you do both, you do the video first because it gets to what your customers want. And then you do the wall of text below it, because then Google can read that. Now I'm going to give you a one layer of, of step. I'm going to help you take this one step further is there's a type of, I don't want to call it code. It's called markup, but there's a type of formatting text called schema. And what schema does is the way search engine. Go to a website, is it makes a lot of educated guesses. It says, Pablo, I think you offer this product. And I think this is your price point. And I think this is the product description. And I think this is your phone number and your business name, but what schema does is it wraps a little snippet of code on the back end. You don't see it visibly on the front end, but on the back end and the source code of the website, it says Google, guess what? You don't have to guess anymore. I'm telling you very specifically, this is my product. This is the product price point. This is a product description. So around every little, one of those things that in version a has your product name and price in version B, it still looks the same, but in the code. There's that little scheme of snippet that says price equals X product equals Y. And then what happens is Google comes into into the page and then, then it sees your transcribed product podcast or your, your transcribed video or your product. And it goes, I trust Pablo's website more because he took the time to clearly communicate what this variable is. So you have the right idea align with buyer intent and then figure out how you can best communicate that piece of content to not just search engines but your audience. And that's why you do the best of both worlds, video and text space. but I'll leave it at that. I, and I'll let you chime back in. And then I got a funny story that I can, I can share after about going down the, the journey, the discovery process of finding content to create the supports buyer intent.

Pablo Gonzalez: 36:25

Love to hear that story. Like, I mean, really my only question is how is a schema? S C H E N a like, so I can start like,

Damon Burton: 36:31

Yep. Yeah. So you can go like schema.org. It's like kind of rocket science, Edo, schema.org. Like if you're not into web design, you're going to go there and go, what is this dictionary like? It's, it's, it's a fricking dictionary, but you know, for the more average type of developer a lot of listeners will be on WordPress. There's a cool plugin called WP schema pro, and it will do all the nerdy stuff for you. You just basically fill in the blanks, it'll say like, is this a product or a business or a book? I mean, there's schema for everything. And then you just go, oh, it's a product. And there's going to be great. What's the product name? What's product price. And they'll just walk you through this, like wizard builder to create the schema that you need. Now, if you're not on WordPress, then just sort like if you're on Shopify, Shopify has schema built into product name, price, and description. So you're already good to go on, on e-commerce sites. And if it's anything beyond that, you know, like let's say you're an attorney or what? Pick a pick an industry. There's, there's a schema for it. You can just go attorney schema generator. X schema generator, and you'll find free tools. That'll kind of help populate that for you. And then you can just copy and paste the text or, you know, the little output of code

Pablo Gonzalez: 37:36

super, super valuable, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Tell me the story, man. I want to hear, I wanna hear the story of a client discovery.

Damon Burton: 37:42

All right. So funny story was when we were working with the Utah jazz, they had a new retail division called team store. And so team store, the goal was to sell more hats and jerseys and merchandise and for the listeners that they're not, but that might not be familiar, you know, every once in a while get somebody that goes, why do you have to do SEO for an NBA team? Because. They're their own team. There's not like two Utah Jazz's, but what they don't realize is they call it a franchise for a reason, the NBA owns the teams. And so the NBA is who defines where the merchandise gets sold. So the jazz don't have the exclusive rights and signing their own merchandise. So they have to fight for their own branding on selling the merchandise. So when, when we're having that discussion and said, okay, well, where's the best bang for the buck. And so that's going to be newer star players like Donovan, Mitchell, and it's going to be legacy players like John Stockton and Karl Malone. And then everyone in between, there's either not enough man, or we don't know if they're going to be around next year. And so let's focus on. And so as we're going through the discovery process with Karl Malone we, we were digging into the data and their tools that you can use that will help you understand what the market is already asking. So I'll give you one free tool. It's called answer the public.com. So if you've got to answer the public, you just type in a word or a phrase, and it's going to pull data from search queries and say, look, this is what people are already asking. And so what that is, is it's telling you exactly what your audience with the pain points they already have are but the questions that you need to answer are you don't have to guess. And so when we're going through that discovery process of, okay, there's the obvious stuff of what college did Don and Mitchell go to? What was Karl Malone's high scoring game. And there's a gazillion other websites already talking about that. But one of the interesting things that were revealed was how did Karl Malone die? People are asking how Karl Malone died, but Karl Malone's not dead. So here's, here's the wrong question, but you give it the right answer. And so what's interesting about that query is that's what the market wants to do. That is something that is a pain that they want solve And so what you do in that example is maybe you come up with a piece of content to say, Here are the top 10 myths of how Karl Malone died, wrong question, right answer. And that's going to rank really well because that solves the pain point that the market has revealed in the data that they're wanting to know. And the other interesting opportunity to why that would rank real well is Karl MAlone is not dead. So nobody else is writing about it.

Pablo Gonzalez: 40:11

That is a that's awesome, man. That's really interesting. So that answered the public.com kind of works for everything it'll work for any industry. Just like if you're asking questions about something or is it always like a person's name?

Damon Burton: 40:22

No, it's anything like in my slide deck on lot of presentations, the example I have is shoes. You just go type in shoes. as long as there's enough search demand out there for it, it will give you data on it. Now the more granular niche you get, there might not be a lot of data, but yeah, you can. It's not industry specific, fascinating man, super,

Pablo Gonzalez: 40:39

super valuable. Like I feel my SEO IQ went from a one to one. Seven right now in a scale of a hundred. So you definitely like, you know, like I've never known as much about it, right? Like I really don't. I spent a lot of time. I kind of parachuted into marketing just because I'm a super, emotionally intelligent guy and I mean, humblebrag, right? Like I'm

Damon Burton: 41:01

obsessed.

Pablo Gonzalez: 41:04

I'm also the most humble person ever. I'm just really into relationship building, man, and I've always, I approach. Marketing like I've approached networking for the last 15 years and reverse engineering. That stuff into content has made me ascend really quickly and just three years into a successful agency. Right. But like the, the technical stuff is, is my, my serious weakness that I need in smart people like you around. And thank God I have this tool, but I would, I would love you strike me as a super, emotionally intelligent guy. Right? Like you clearly have a wide network of friends that you are renting out a whole like ski lodge for, or whatever you're doing now. I don't know if it's the high west distillery or whatever you're doing over there, but I would love to talk relationship building with you, man. Let's talk about how we met, man, is that, that little, that little trick of somebody view my LinkedIn profile, you reach out again, man. So are you checking me out kind of creepy? Do you want to be friends? Like how'd you how'd you come up on that little Hack man

Damon Burton: 41:57

so that there's some literal on this to that and, and some, a little bit of allow elaborative storytelling in there. So it does say creepy, but in a non-creepy way. So that's what, so that example is how I engage on, on LinkedIn. So I get the majority of my business through social proof and historically it's been through just referrals and referrals. Hasn't slowed down any it's just social proof has skyrocketed. And so part of it is exactly what Pablo just said is like, how do you, how do you. Protect the scalability of personal engagement, right? So how do you maintain a personal engagement, but scale it, because I don't have the time to live in my inbox anymore. I don't have the time to moderate all these comments anymore because my visibility on social media is continuing to grow. So it's doing what it's supposed to do and it's working because I'm personal. So how do, how do I protect that? Like how do I, like, I can't have the thing that's working also kill itself. And so what I had to do is I had to go, okay, how do I, how do I create a process out of this? And so now I have my team members, I have two or three team members that do nothing, but help me moderate my inbox and my comments. And so the first step to that is, Hey, you're hired, do nothing for a month now. And so what I mean by that, Don't post a single thing. Just sit back and watch like, figure out who Damon is, understand his personality, understand how he engages with people. And so that's where I start when I first started filling that role was so Catherine is one of the first ladies to fill that role. And I said, Catherine, like, seriously do nothing. I'm going to pay you for the next month to just read my crap. And so that way she could absorb my personality because I want keep that, that realistic relationship and personality. And so now the way that we do that while scaling is any of these, we have a couple touch points, like the creepy one, which all are right on it. And then like in the comments. So anything that is just a general comment, like, oh man, cool story. Or just a supportive thing on my posts because I'm on LinkedIn Monday through Thursday, right? Every day I come in and post Facebook I'm on there probably two or three times a day. And. But my exposure on LinkedIn is a thousand times more than on Facebook. And so that's where things are starting. I'm starting to have pain points. And so Catherine helps over on LinkedIn. And what she does is, is if I make a post, every one of my posts, average is somewhere between 3000 and 10,000 views every day. And so out of that, I get dozens to hundreds of comments. That's where I'm starting to have a hard time keeping, keeping control of that. And so Catherine goes in and says, okay, is this just a positive encouragement? Then I will acknowledge it. Hey, thanks for the positive bow, you know, thanks for whatever and, and reciprocate. But anytime it's an opportunity for me to give a personal reply or share my expertise or solve a problem. Every morning, I wake up on Skype and I got 500 freaking links, but 500 is better than 10,000. And so then I go through those, okay. It's not 500 is more like 20, but then I go through those 20 and she's like, Hey, I took care of the other hundred. These 20 require a personal touch point. And so that way I don't have to, I don't have to go through all the weeds. I don't have to filter out everything. Like that's what she does. And then I can go through and I can go, oh, this person has an SEO question. Give them the answer. Oh, this person says, Hey, can we do a podcast thing? Maybe tell me about it. Here's my schedule. You know, and, and then I can decide on where we take the action items. So that's, that's kind of the first, the, the first tricks hacks, whatever you want to call it. Now, the creepy thing is relatively new, but it's been profoundly effective. And so if you pay for LinkedIn, whatever, whatever their paid upgrade is, then it'll tell you, if you get views from people like who's viewed your content or not only your content but your profile. And so what I've tasked my team to do is every other day, or whatever, frequency go in, look at that report and click on everybody that A is in the us because I can't help them as easily if they're in, if they're overseas. And so it's focused on those first and then. After you qualify that, then next qualify them based on, have we had a discussion already? So like if you click on their profile and go to messages, if we've already exchanged, then don't reply because then it's going to look weird. Like there's been clients that will go look at my profile. And before when this was a new process and I didn't define that yet, there was clients that probably went to my, profile, but there was no messages. There was no historical exchange. And then here's my here's cath go. And Hey Courtney. So I checked out my profile, LinkedIn rattle you A little creepy, right. Anything I can help with. And then they're like yeah, put in that qualifier where it says, if there's any historical engagement, don't reply, but if it's a blank slate and they fit, these other criteria is that I can help them then follow. up You know, if it says that they're a cashier at Walmart? Well, I probably can't really help them with their business goals. And so there's like certain criteria where if those flags or filters are, or are not met, then we have kind of a canned message where it says, it says I'm not going to hit it perfectly off the top of my head. But it says like, Hey, Pablo, LinkedIn told me, viewed my profile kind of creepy. Right. But just checking to see if I can help you out with anything. So that message was very strategic. The message was so that I can pre buffer that this is not a sales pitch, because like you, I'm very relationship driven. So I don't want to come back at it and go like, Hey, are you looking for SEO? Because you viewed my profile because then it's just weird. But then I can also, I can also, you know, proactively address them, asking the same question. Why is Damon writing me. Because then I say, well, LinkedIn's algorithm told me he looked at my profile. So if you look at my profile, is there a reason I can help you? And then the last sentence is, is there anything I can help you with? It's not, do you need SEO? Do you need this? Or do you need that? It's just like, where does this conversation go next? So, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a structured strategy. but there's a lot of emotional intelligence behind, like how you approach it. I could tell

Pablo Gonzalez: 48:37

man. And I, and I, you know, I, I knew enough to know that that was a system that you had developed and it probably wasn't you reaching out. But I thought it was brilliant and it, I hadn't, I hadn't thought about this, but in my early twenties, when I first started my career, I got moved to California to live in orange county and run some stuff over there. But it was like the early days of my space and I had no friends. Right.

Damon Burton: 48:57

So separate Tom. Huh? Except for Tom, Tom.

Pablo Gonzalez: 49:00

Exactly. Yeah. No, I had no like real friends. Right. So like, I was like, I was like trying to pick up chicks on my space. Right. My, my outreach would always say, remember how my space would always be like, Tom would recommend three friends. so, so I would always like if I saw someone that I wanted to meet generally a woman and I would, I would send them a message saying, Hey, Tom, Tom said, we should be friends. Is he lying? Or are you lying? You know? And, and, and that would start, it was way better than like the prototypical slide interior. I'm like, yo, what's up, babe? I'm new to California or whatever. Right. So it kind of now that you, now that

Damon Burton: 49:33

you that's dead on. Yeah. That's exactly what that was now. Now one thing though, that that happens is, so even though my team initiates that, that you got to look at a couple things, one is they push the send button, but that was me that wrote that. So it's still my persona. And then. If anybody replies that comes back to me, all they're doing is gatekeeping. They are not being me. They are just initiating the opportunity for me to scale being me. Yeah.

Pablo Gonzalez: 49:59

Yeah. Yeah. That's super smart, man. You also mentioned, you know, we're, we're about to go back into like, in-person interactions again at some point pretty soon here, right? Like how do you, how do you see this evolution of, of, of making friends online and making friends in person? Like how do you, how do you approach more of like the in-person relationship building? Where do you meet people? Kind of, do you have any

Damon Burton: 50:22

go-to there was a story that was, I just came back. Yeah. nothing's really going to change much for me because I was already doing, if anything, I had to stop what I was already doing, so I won't be starting anything new. I'll just be restarting what I was already doing. So I take the very similar approach. If the contact was in, you know, I'm in salt lake city area. If they were in salt lake, then I would hit them up. And so, so now what I would do then versus what I do now is largely the same. It's just, instead of, do you want to go crab coffee now it's going to jump on zoom. And so I like those personal relationships and I'll tell people straight up. Do you know, do you want to go meet for coffee? No agenda. And I just had another guy. I get people that hit me up all the time, but they of course have the sales pitch. And so I will disqualify those people if it's totally obvious because they're like an investment person or insurance person. And I know it's just for opportunity. Yeah. I can tell I'm just part of their lead gen funnel. Then I'll just tell them now. But if they're in like an interesting industry or something where I think there'd be an opportunity to meet them, then I will very specifically tell them, Hey, do you want to meet no agenda? And in fact, there was a guy that reached out to me, you know, the other way around. He engaged me. And I can't quite, I'm not sure on him yet. I'm not sure if this is a, if he's been vague enough yet and a sales pitch is coming or if he's legit and he just wants to, to network. And so in that case, I told them straight up, I said, less agenda. And like, I don't go into these. I don't want an agenda. I don't want to know, you know, I w I'm interested in what you do, but I don't want to be part of the process. That's if you're doing it, I don't want to be part of your lead gen. I don't want to pitch you on SEO. If you want to ask me about it, I'll tell you. Yeah, but that's what fosters like these evangelic customers and relationships. I get leads. It's all the freaking time. The call that I had before I was recording. This was with a gentleman in, where was he in? He was somewhere in, he, he was, he was referred from a gentleman in Ireland. He, this other guy was not in Ireland, but was in the UK. And I spent an hour on, on zoom with him. And that guy will probably ha he will never become a. And that's totally fine with me, but I guarantee you, the next person that needs SEO, he's sending them right to me. The guy was damn near crying. By the time we got off the phone, because I just said, look like you're starting us to emphasize this even more. He's a theoretical competitor. He starting an SEO agency. And you know, what I did is I shared my screen and I showed my entire blueprint. I told them exactly how we operate. I said, here's a copy of my book. It's on the way I gave him all the answers, because there's so much opportunity out there that being selfish about it is not going to do you any good, but by, by sharing your knowledge, that's what opens up the relationships like we were talking about, you know, before we hit record, I'll share some screenshots of how my clients introduced me to other referrals. And like, I have more leads than I can ha I literally hired 10 people last month thinking that I overhired. And one of those was the lead gen person too. I am already at capacity I'm. I are already hiring more. And that lead gen person who is the first lead gen person ever hired, I've never done any lead gen in 14 years, but I want to shoot for the moon now. And so I brought that person on because like we talked earlier, you can't go from one to 10 of that learning things and I'm at 10 now. And so now I want to go to 11. And so I brought that person on. So not only are, are we at capacity with 10 people, but the one person that was hired for lead gen, I said, don't do lead gen. Don't even think about it right now because we need to get the center control. And so she's helping with content and data analysis. And so mean, this go a couple of, couple of different ways of losing my train of thought a little bit, but the thought is like this whole approach of relationships is. It just feeds itself relationships. I like to say lately, I don't like, I don't fight for sales. I fight for relationships because relationships feed the sales And then if you have a relationship driven client. Then that person, yeah, you sold them, but then they restart the cycle of feeding more relationships. So like some of those examples that I was, that I got up here on the screen is this is, this is one of my clients word for word. She said, Hey, I'm sending you an intro now to lady that I was just doing consumer consulting for. So this lady is a, she's a pediatric sleep consultant. So she helps parents that have kids that have sleep trouble. So she said, Hey, I'm helping this mom that starting a new business. The intro I made said something alluding to quote, let me tell you all the shit that's wrong with your site and why your other SEO company sucks compared to Damon. It was that type of intro, but in a classy way, of course, these are my clients. Like these are my clients going out of the way to fight for me. And I get probably. Probably one or two a week of some sort of intro like that, or it's just, it's just entirely, emotionally driven. Like Damon's gonna take care of you if he's not right now for him, if he's not the right solution for you, now he will tell you that. And he will tell you what the right solution is. That's

Pablo Gonzalez: 55:31

phenomenal, man. Listen, as, as, as you're telling all of this, right, just makes me like you more obviously. And I told you from the beginning that I want to be your friend, like, like, like when we started then yes. But when we, you know, when you say this, I I'm hearing a major pain point that I have. Cause I'm the same way, right? Like everything you said. Yeah. A hundred percent, a hundred percent aligned. All I want to do is take calls and help people. I do the same thing when I get, you know, there's a lot of people that are having problem repurposing content. I'm like check out my system. This is exactly how I do it. Like, look, use this software, look at my batch boards, look at my process management. Like I'm happy to talk them through what I struggle with most right now, because I'm in this inflection point, right? Like I have, I have some really, really happy clients and I'm, and I'm trying to find what my total product market fit is that I can, that I can scale around. And and I'm trying to understand who I'm really selling to. And I find myself now being very limited by the amount of meetings that I can take that aren't going to help me get to that point. Right. Like just genuinely, right. Like, I, I wanna, I want to be a selfless as possible, but I'm very generally limited by that. And, and what I hear in your story is. You probably got there to the point where you can take these meetings by building out these processes. So now you're like free to operate and do that more. But before you were at the buildup process level, like when you were in that, in between stage, right, like didn't have the process to totally free you. but still wanted to take all these meetings. How did you approach that man? Like how do you say no to, to the meeting of somebody that, you know, like, fuck man, I would love to, I would love to help you do it. I'm just so busy right now. Right? Like it's like, like that piece. How do you how'd you approach that

Damon Burton: 57:10

yeah, I can tell, I can tell you when that happened. It was when I was spending two hours every morning on LinkedIn. Like just managing like the comments I was getting that much engagement and people just cause like, when I put my, my approach to content on social media is the same. It's none of it. It's never, it's never, Hey, do you want to top 10 secrets of SEO? Cool. Click on the first link in the comment below it's like, I never sent him to link. I don't have an email list. I don't have a funnel. It's always, here's the problem. Here's the solution. Here's your pain point. Here's the answer. And so those get a lot of engagement because people are like, holy shit, like that. That's my fix right there. Like I can just go do that thing now. And then they're tagging their friends, like, look at Damon's thing. Like this is what we were talking about. So I was getting a lot of engagement that way. And, and, and that's where I get the clients, because then the clients know your expertise and they trust you because you share those vulnerable stories without asking for anything in return. And so I was getting to that pain point where I, and I still get those. And, and I think I'm at round two of this, like just yesterday, I went on my calendar and I'm looking at here off screen. for the next four weeks I went and randomly put in four hour times a block off every other day for the next month, because it is starting to get out of control. And so I'm kind of in phase two of that right now, but phase one was documented. Processes is a big part of it. But I think, I think the, the short answer for me is that I have a course in a book. And so the book which underscores the whole concept even more is it took me two years to write. And I give it away for free. Like that was probably one of the most time intensive projects I've ever worked on in my life. And I give away completely free, not just a digital version, but if people message me, I will ask them, are you a physical copy reader or a PDF reader? And if they say they're a physical reader, I will mail them a copy. And I don't care where they are. The guy in Ireland that referred the other guy. I sent him a book in Ireland. Like I will pay, I will take the$10 loss to print the book. And in that guy's case, the 30 something dollar loss to mail it, just to establish that relationship. So for me, it's been, what's really helped solve that is you're right. You, you have, you want to be a selfless as you can, but like my example of the Walmart cashier, like there's certain people, you know, that you could give them all the advice in the world, but given the state of their, the, the time that they are at in their career, like it's just not applicable. And so you can give them all the answers, but they're not going to internalize it where it's just not the right time to benefit them. So there's no point in having the conversation, but you can't say that to them. You can't say you're not there yet. And so having the book and the course, so like the course is the same kind of thing. I spent all this time, documenting our processes, generalizing it into an onscreen format. I wrote it out to these lengthy PDFs. And then when you log in, then I brought up the PDF on screen, and then I recorded me going through the video, the PDF on screen. So that way for left brain, right brain, if you want the PDF, there it is. If you want the video watching me do it, there it is. That took me months to build because I don't have the time to support it. I give it away. for free So my book and the course has been how I've solved that because then I can go, Hey, super cool. I'm excited. Check out this book. It'll probably point you in the right direction when you're done with that. Let me know. And then usually that's, what's going to weed them out too, because most of the people aren't going to spend the time to go read 135 page book, unless they're really interested in, in SEO and marketing. And if they are great, because I just sat solved 99% of their questions. And now that 1% that they have left, I can actually really help them in one call. Yeah.

Pablo Gonzalez: 1:00:51

That's awesome, man. That is, that is why I love content, right? Like, like to me, you know, your, your systems is one thing, but to me, Content is a way to systemize and scale helping people, man, like that. That's, that's exactly how I approach things. Also. Just I need to build the library and organize it in a way as a course and as a book and I've already commissioned my ghost writer and I'm, and I'm putting the whole relationship flywheel thing I do into a book. And then the next step is to create that free course. That's just like, dude, go, I think everybody should do this. Right? Like you don't need to be paying me 7,500 bucks a month unless you're a hundred million dollar company. Like I want everybody to approach life like this. Cause I agree, man. It's like give out the valley for free because most people are like, I, I have this philosophy of I'd rather be a king maker than a king. Right. Like Mo you know, like it's just more sustainable, man. I

Damon Burton: 1:01:40

love it. Yeah. I'm bringing up a, a message here on screen while you're talking. There was a good example to underscore this. So a lot of people, you know, a lot of people are going to are probably going, well, why would I give away all that for free now, hopefully by now, you've already understood why, because of the way it builds relationships and that feeds into sales. But if you want a literal example, like, let me bring up this So here's a gentleman that reached out to me. it's probably about three weeks ago and he said, I'm just going to read in the sunscreen. So about three weeks ago, I reached out and said, Hey I love your intro message. So one thing that we skipped over was my intro message. Not to create, not the creepy followup message, but so the creepy follow-up message comes. If someone. Looked at my profile, but didn't engage me. So just blindly out of nowhere, they clicked on my profile. LinkedIn will tell me, but then of course, on the other side, I try to scale who I engage with. So I go through and I pre-qualify and try and identify people based on, do they have President in their title or owner or manager, things like on the type of level that I would want to engage with. And then what I do is my team sends a message that says, Hey, what's up? I'm Damon, you know, Hey, Pablo, I'm Damon. I think this is remote people vomit sales on you, but I'm not going to. And so I proactively diffuse saying, look, this isn't a sales pitch. And then I start with something personal. I go, I've been married for 14 years. I have three kids, my favorite place to San Diego. And then I get into just one line of credibility. I've been doing SEO for 14 years. It's been really cool to work with NBA teams, shark tank businesses. And I also wrote a book blah-blah-blah and I read, I literally type out, blah, blah, blah. So then, then we know. it's Not just like you, some people might think there's a little bit of systematization to it, but even if they do, they don't care because they're like, ah, that's humorous. And then I turn it back on them. And I say, you know, your turn, thanks for connecting Pablo. And so if they don't reply to that, that is totally fine with me because I don't want to sell them in the DMS. I want them exposed to my expertise in my content because once we've engaged, then LinkedIn is going to start showing them my content. And then they're going to come back a couple of weeks later and say, Hey, I know what you do now. And I need that. Where do we start? So I had a gentleman that reached out and he started engaging me. He started following my content and then he said, dude, I love what you put out. Can we just meet? I just got some couple of questions on the spot. I just started a small agency, same thing, and just helped them out. And now he's like a raving fan. He's messaging me all the time about, I sent him the course for free. I said on the book for free, he did a post. When I sent, if I send a physical copy of the book, I send it like, I got a wax stamp that I stamped the craft piece of folder the craft folder with that, I manually heat the gun up. And then I put it in this golden envelope and I send it and then like, I get people to make posts about that. Like, this is how it is it's done. And then it's got my branding all over it. So then he started engaging with me and same thing. I showed him all our processes logged into our backend and just gave them all the answers. Well, now he followed up and said, look, I'm looking to take some of what you've given me. And I'm moving to the next phase of growing my agency. We're starting to implement some of these things, but here's one of these pain points I have and it was about content. And so I gave him the answers. Every other, like if I know that the person's not going to waste my time and actually take action on what the, what I will give them, I will give them as much time as I have available. It's only if I know that they're going to not actually internalize what I'm giving them, or I just know that they're just bullshiting that's where I check out, but this guy keeps coming back and it keeps implementing these things. And so I keep helping him on the next level. So to come full circle about, you know, that kind of underscores what we've already talked about, but to come full circle on giving away stuff for free, I, he says, well, here's this next thing. I don't know how to overcome it, but this thing was requires manpower. And so it's not a thing that I can help him with. I can give him the blueprint, but he's got to get the manpower to fulfill on it. And so he goes, well, what's next? And I go, Hey, I got this course. I used to charge 2,500 bucks for it when I was, when I was supporting it, but I don't have the time to support it anymore. So. If you want access, I will give it to you for free knowing that I will not help you with the material that's in there. And so what he wrote back is I'm reading right here. Word for word, I'd love to take a look at the course. If anything, it will put us on a faster route to hiring you. Like that's why you do it because you're, you got three types of content consumers. You got the guy that's going to take the advice and run, which is fantastic because he was never my customer anyway. Or you got the person that's going to take the advice and go, I don't need that now, but I probably will later. And if I don't, I know somebody who does or you get the guy that goes, holy shit, that solved my problems. Where do I sign up? So there's no reason to not give away all of the answers.

Pablo Gonzalez: 1:06:14

All right, man. It's official. You want to be BFFs

Damon Burton: 1:06:16

I'm in. Yeah, let's do it. One thing or the tattoo thing.

Pablo Gonzalez: 1:06:22

Yeah. Tattoo. I call it lower back. You can have lower back. Um, yeah man. So a hundred percent stamp, everything that you just said two to two things that two things that I want to just make obvious there for our friend that's listing on, on two different scales. Number one, which I think is most important to me to show is that. On the flip side of that. If you want to create relationships with really intelligent people that are very talented, the best thing you can do is execute on the advice that they give you. For sure. Right? Like that is, that is the way to get your time, right. Is to like, is to show you that you are going to execute on the, on the advice and to, if you want a business develop and scale your time, if you can create content, you need to create content that is enable your client to get to where they need to be without you. And then the moment that they need you, they're just going to enroll. Right. Like I, I just think, I couldn't believe and that more men I do outside of that, I don't want to take it, but anyway, I feel like we're going over on time. I could talk to you forever, man. And I, I'm not going to go into my lightning round and all the other zany stuff that I like to do, man. But I just, I really appreciate all this advice, dude. I. You are the perfect archetype of the business person of the future that I am evangelizing, and to get to talk to you and, and, and get advice from you and feel it real time and, and have somebody that's having so much success, just put it out there. Exactly how I think it should be done is an incredible value. You know, to, to my psyche when things are down and to my life to have you in, in, in my friend, you know, like as a friend. So I just really appreciate you doing this, man. This is really, really awesome. And you've totally, over-delivered what I thought that this conversation could lead to men. And I, I really mean it that I hope that we we stay in contact and I can add value to your life in some

Damon Burton: 1:08:13

way, man. I really appreciate this. Yeah, it's been fun to talk. I it's, it's interesting to see this trend grow more and you can tell what you, this is something that's always been with you, but I think to the masses, it's something that's coming more into the limelight and it's been interesting. so I appreciate the opportunity to chat and I feel fortunate that I've, I've kind of a step ahead where I can share these stories and help other people. I do have to go on five minutes, but can I share my last grand finale of this that just brings us all home,

Pablo Gonzalez: 1:08:38

please? W you know, right when you're, before you say it, I'm going to link to free Psalm book.com. You know, like your book, your, your website, your SEO, national, your LinkedIn, I'm going to link to all that stuff in the show notes. And I really encourage anybody that just listened to this, to, to connect with you, but yeah. Do your graphing out,

Damon Burton: 1:08:55

please? Yeah. find me on LinkedIn. Find me on Facebook. The book is free SEO book.com. There's no, up-sale. they asked for the email to send it to you and on thank you. Page invites you to our group and that's it. Um, Grand finale So I'm turning 40 this summer. Yeah. So this is like, for those that can see, I got this chart on screen and I made a post, gosh, like two days ago, it was all. And I said, this is either the best thing I've thought of or the worst. And I'll probably delete this post in 30 seconds. And so what unfolded in the minutes later was I said, Hey, I'm turning 40 this summer. And I'm going to rent out a 7,000 square foot lodge and who wants to come? I will pay for your tickets. And so I opened up this lodge that sleeps 18 people. By the time you're listening to this, all seats, all the beds are taken. So I'm sorry, you're not coming. But what I did is I used this as an opportunity to do all the things We've already talked about. So, you know, on night one, I got up for two nights on the first night, I'm having just family and close friends, more mellow night, but then on the second night, I've invited half the people that are coming, like I've never met in person. There are people that I've engaged with on LinkedIn. And I got miles to burn on Southwest. So I am covering six or seven different peoples, like with no objective. Like, I don't know if they're ever going to become a client or not. I don't really care, but there are people that have engaged with online, but what's going to happen after that. And this isn't why I'm doing this, but just like I'm doing this because. I like to create moments for other people. Like I've done the cool things like I've traveled, I've went and ran around racetracks and Supercars. And so let me take a step back in time. Real quick. The story I was gonna tell you earlier was one of the gentlemen that reached out to me was a guy that was in Australia and he was flying to Vegas. And he said, how far away is Vegas? And I said, close enough. And it's a one hour flight. So this gentleman's name is Gary. And he still preaches this event to this day. He had like this two week trip in the U S and this is the only thing he talks about. And what happened is I met him in Vegas, but what he didn't know is I rented a limo and then I took him out to the racetrack. And so I pick up this guy first time we've ever met in person. And I come rolling up in a limo and I'm like, you're ready to go the racetrack. And so we go to the racetrack those are the moment I do it, because those are the moments that make me happy. Like seeing his face in that moment is what makes me happy. Like I've done the cool stuff. And so now that's like the new thing. That's what the 40th birthday is turning into is the new Vegas trip. it's like Not everybody's been to like a gigantic lodge in a nice place like park city and not anybody's been invited and have their flights paid for, it for no freaking reason other than to come party. And so I can only imagine I'm I'm doing it because it makes me feel good, but I can only imagine what stories are going to come out of it here in a couple months. dude amazing.

Pablo Gonzalez: 1:11:40

Are you um, Are you going to get content out of it? Like, are you going to have like a video crew and stuff like that?

Damon Burton: 1:11:44

Man, I, I did have as an afterthought, luckily it's still like eight weeks away. So we got plenty of time. Yeah. So at first I didn't think about that, but I have a videographer that I have fly out and do testimonials with clients. And he's another great example when I fly him out. Like every once in a while I'll I'll pay for first class, like why not hook him up? So, you know, doing something for me. And so yeah, I think I'm going to see if I can get him to come out and record it. I said, Hey, I tagged them in the post. I said, Hey, do you want to come, hang out, be next video.

Pablo Gonzalez: 1:12:15

Love it, dude. Very cool, man. That's epic. That's epic. I'm going to make a piece of micro content about that and just like praise all over you, man. Because of that, that's that's really, man