MKJ (00:01.122)
Hey, hey, CEO, mischief makers, Mary Kathryn Johnson back at the microphone with you and Stephen Schneider. But we get to talk now about impact and innovation. And this is fast becoming my favorite part of the podcast because it is that messy middle. And I love the messy middle. I just love it. Anyway, welcome back to the conversation. Stephen, how are you doing? You ready?

Steven Schneider (00:24.085)
I’m great, I’m excited, let’s get into

MKJ (00:25.9)
Yeah, let’s go. All right, so if you haven’t listened to the mindset episode, please go back and listen because you will hear how Stephen’s journey has evolved and what type of mindset he had to adopt and change, which is usually the biggest mindset difficulty for most of us with any kind of an agency or service based business when we started out with the product ourselves. So now.

All right, you help people with SEO. I get that. It’s an important part of business. Who specifically? Do you just take any SEO client or are there specific clients you feel you can help best?

Steven Schneider (01:09.591)
Yeah, so we always start with a discovery audit. We don’t take on any client. We are all business owners first. And so it’s really important to us that meaning like we want the SEO to succeed. And so for that reason, we won’t take on a client that we just know that we’re taking money from. And it’s like, you have no potential upside of winning. Like we’ll just say like, go build backlinks for the next year, come back and get some content with us. But like, it’s just not a good fit at this time. So no, we don’t take on anyone. We like to work with people who have an established brand.

They also have to have a long term mindset just because SEO takes 6 -12 months to really get up and running. And so it can’t be people who are looking to experiment with SEO and want to just see what happens in 30 days. It’s like, that’s not how this works. So since day one, we’ve been pretty picky. And I think that that’s also kind of proven to be an advantage from our side of things. So we work with people who have a very

easy manner to work with. Like we don’t want to email people who are constantly emailing us and asking us for meetings. It’s like, no, we want to work with people who seem like a friend. Like, you know, it should always be someone that you can like go get a drink with or whoever afterwards. yeah, we try to make sure it’s a good fit, both sides.

MKJ (02:20.024)
Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. So I know you walked us through your previous experience in college and you were getting your degree in business in college. What was your degree? Finance. Okay, got it. And so through that degree and the way you were looking at the world, what did you think you were going to do in finance? What was your goal?

Steven Schneider (02:28.833)
Finance,

Steven Schneider (02:39.529)
I had no idea. I was actually in marketing originally and I figured that marketing was, and this is not to bash anyone with a marketing degree, but I figured that marketing was easier to learn on YouTube than finance and finance had more upside. Marketing was just so saturated, I think it still is. And so I just looked at it, was like, if I’m going to go to college and make it worthwhile and be in debt, I might as well get a degree that’s pretty hard and at least has some potential. I was probably going to go into

you know, VCs or, you know, investments or something like that, just cause that’s more interesting. But yeah, I had no idea. I was just going to like stay in school forever until I figured it out, like get an MBA, maybe get a PhD. Like it was just whatever, whatever in the course.

MKJ (03:21.272)
So through that, you definitely got an MBA and a PhD in entrepreneurship, it sounds like. Yeah, that’s awesome. But you didn’t have to go into debt, at least not that kind of debt, not school debt. I’m sure you went into other kinds of debt, but not that. Wow, okay. So with through that finance and that, it sounds like you just had an openness to like, hey, whatever, if it hits me,

Steven Schneider (03:24.621)
Yes, I did,

Steven Schneider (03:33.581)
Yeah.

MKJ (03:48.274)
and it’s interesting and sounds like I can do it and I have a, you know, some type of, I can make some kind of an impact in it and make a living at it, then yeah, I’ll consider it. yeah, I think is the number one requirement for entrepreneurship. You have to be open. You have to be open. You have to change when you need to change. I mean, the day we’re talking right now, the Dow just dropped, you know, thousand points so far and NASDAQ’s gone down. would?

Steven Schneider (04:00.289)
Yeah, yeah, good way to put

Steven Schneider (04:06.349)
Yep, absolutely.

MKJ (04:17.902)
four, almost 5 % or something. So lots of changes happening. And as an entrepreneur, if you look at those and think, my gosh, the world is ending, you’re probably not going to survive as an entrepreneur. You have to adapt and pivot and whatever other word of the day you want to use. So how does that finance and that openness and your foray into SEO for your own blogs, how did

How do you bring that into this new venture from an innovation standpoint? And just to remind everyone listening, I don’t define innovation as the Steve Jobs and Elon Musk’s of the world. I define innovation as every human being that takes their previous experience and looks at a problem differently because of that previous experience. It’s actually called tacit knowledge. So how did you take that previous experience and adapt it to

current venture with your SEO agency to make it different from any other SEO agency out

Steven Schneider (05:26.061)
Yeah, so I think it was, I feel like I’m naturally a lucky person, which has kind of been one of those weird things that we say out loud. And I think that like, it just happened to be this good fit because with the first company, you know, when we were publishing 400 articles per month, that machine was so finely tuned at that point that it was just like, nothing could go wrong. You just continuously scale and everything, you know, you add in more team members, et cetera. But when we come over into the agency now,

I had already figured out what that system looked like and knew it to a scale that like we’re, for example, coming up on year one when we’re publishing around 120 articles per month. So for context, like I already know how to scale four times bigger than where we currently are. And so once that was realized, you know, everything else was like little minor things I could just figure out along the way, like client communication or like client strategy, more of like clients as a whole.

It was just really kind of figuring out how to fine tune that last like maybe 15, 20%. So when I kind of flipped the script, I’m really only having to master 20 % of the entire landscape of things. And I think just kind of keeping that in mind and be like, the hard part’s done, the hard part’s done. And like reminding myself of that really just kind of allowed me to free up a lot of that mental head space so that I could focus on what was in front of me and not be so overwhelmed by the all the other moving parts of the business.

MKJ (06:53.964)
Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s take that because in our last episode, you talked about some black swan events. those are those, you know, I’m going to throw a wrench into that where yeah, I got this. It’s the same machine. It’s not the same machine. Definitely. So take me through that. How did that experience of going through those events help you innovate your current SEO agency so that now you can help your clients navigate those because

Steven Schneider (07:05.88)
wow,

MKJ (07:18.776)
We’re coming up to a US election, which, and again, we just talked about financial markets. Who knows what’s at Israel? Just who knows what’s on the horizon? So how are you innovating your space based on your experience with those events?

Steven Schneider (07:36.215)
I think the biggest thing is just trying to be very open and realistic and honest with clients. One of the things I always like to communicate with clients is that you probably didn’t get into business day one thinking it was going to be an overnight success. And if that’s the case, you have to zoom out and stop thinking in weeks and months and quarters and instead thinking years and be like, if this strategy is actually as strong as we believe it is and there’s confidence behind

Will I be happy when I look back two, three, five plus years later, when all of the pieces of content are fully published and bringing in that organic traffic and it’s fully pumping? Are you going to look back and say that you wish you had done more or are you going to look back and be like, wow, I’m so happy we held off on that? Like you have to kind of just zoom out. And I think that that’s the biggest thing to realize is that yes, there’s always going to be these weird bumps along the way.

But one of the best quotes I’ve been living by since meeting Connor, Nathan, my new partners is that conflict leads to change. And so as long as you can embrace that change and push through it and learn from it, the next one’s always gonna be easier. And I think that’s just the biggest thing is just reminding that and being mindful and also just of living the moment and knowing that it’s okay to feel that uncomfortableness, but over time it gets

MKJ (08:54.252)
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I remember the first big Google algorithm change, the very first. I’m that old. OK? No, I remember the first one. And it shook our worlds drastically because everybody was riding high and raking in the dough and all this kind of stuff. And then, boom, Google all of a sudden just goes, never mind. We’re going to go do this other thing. And

Facebook has done it many times. LinkedIn has done it many times. This is unfortunately one of the difficulties. If you, you, you, hook your business, if you anchor your business to any social company, any social media site, any outside force, and you actually hook it to that as your only possible success, then you will be broadsided. Absolutely will because

business doesn’t care about you, it cares about its advertisers and where it wants to put the next algorithm change so that they can make their most money, not necessarily just you. Of course, those goals are aligned most times, but not necessarily for affiliate marketers. So we’ll leave that one alone. so how really how are you able to or what do you do? We’ll get into this next time. But what do you do when a major shift like that happens? Like

we’re talking about. mean, yes, we can look at long term. Yes, those are wonderful things to think about. But ultimately, at the end of the day, your job is to your clients pay you to get them as high on the first page of Google whenever someone searches for a particular term as possible. And what that does is basically lists them well,

Google’s kind of changed their structure a little bit, so it’s not just a ranking of 10 anymore. There’s a lot of different stuff in there, including AI and all that. But still, that’s a list of their top nine competitors. That’s it. You’re on the list. If you’re in the top 10, you basically have just gotten yourself in line with your top nine competitors. So again, if you don’t differentiate yourself, basically, it’s going to be a race to the bottom of price if you look just like those other 10 competitors.

MKJ (11:17.582)
So I’m sure you help your clients not look like those 10 competitors if you’re looking at long -term success. Do you do that first off? And how in terms of innovation, in terms of the way you look at SEO?

Steven Schneider (11:34.069)
Yeah, so I love SEO because the or content SEO, say, because of the creative psychology that goes into the art of creating blogs and content. And so what I mean by that is any any person can write an article a million different ways. There’s never going to be an exact way to look at it. The same thing applies

SEO content and creating good outlines or briefs or kind of the structure bare bones of that content. and so one of the things that we really kind of like try to focus on is the reader’s psychology. And one of my favorite analogies is like, you know, there’s nothing worse than trying to look up an article or a recipe on how to bake a cake. And then you have to read the first 2000 words about getting the flour and baking the cake at grandma’s and turning on the oven and the experience. It’s like, just give me the recipe

We’ve all been there and like people overlook that in SEO. And think that that’s one of the things that we try to like sift through is how are you building in trust with your content? How are you building in that experience? How are you actually considering what that reader experience is like from the get -go? And remember that you can’t just create content for the sake of Google. Obviously there’s a lot of like tips and tricks you can do to optimize it. But at the end of the day, people are reading these articles. It’s not Google just reading the articles.

And I think kind of going back to like what you were saying in the first, you know, episode, it’s very relationship focused content is relationship focused. You’re creating this piece of asset for them. And so if you overlook just human tendencies, like, is it going to be boring intro? Is this introduction suck? Like all those little things where people just kind of glance over, we spend extra time on, like we hammer in the introduction. We always add a too long, didn’t read summary snippet at the top. Like, you know, we kind of just give them the,

information immediately and then let them decide if it’s worth carrying on or directing to a lead magnet for more information. So we’re always looking at ways to improve content and just kind of keep that mindset top of mind. And also just remember like we’re on borrowed time as it is once someone clicks on that piece of content. So how do you kind of fight the ADHD mentalities of people who just want to like get the answer quickly and leave and then also kind of meet the other side of the conversation which is people who actually want to read it in depth and learn about

Steven Schneider (13:57.057)
the task or whatever the guide is about. So I think just meeting customers on all fronts and keeping that psychology forefront of mind has really kind of taken us a long way because I don’t see a lot of people doing

MKJ (14:10.446)
Okay, so that thank you for saying that because that’s exactly what I’m talking about with this relationship economy, right? So that’s the relationship economy versus the attention economy. Attention economy is just get me on the top of Google, give me the keywords, splash it in, I don’t really care what it looks like, just get me on that top and then hopefully people will click and make me money, right?

I’m not putting it down your three to 400 blogs that you did way back in 2017. That’s the way it was. That was where it was structured, right? That’s the purpose of it back then, but it’s evolved. And especially with people like yourself and my sons, your native digitals, you guys pretty much your formative years have been on the internet. So all of those things, you can see them a mile away, right? You can see the, the, the tricks.

Steven Schneider (14:38.925)
Time and a place for sure. Yeah.

MKJ (15:01.184)
And I’m talking the true tricks that marketers, and I know the reason you were a little bit not exactly as warm and fuzzy about marketers, because I’m gonna tell you right now, they ruin everything. Absolutely ruin everything. Sorry, it just is. They ruined chat bots when I had my chat bot agency. I mean, yeah.

We won’t go into that. You can listen to many other episodes and hear Mary reminisce about her chat bot agency days. But this is the relationship economy and the reason it has switched to this relationship economy and what you’re talking about with being able to meet the customer where they are.

Basically, you’re meeting the potential buyer where they are. The TLDR you need for the native digitals. They know what TLDR means. Old timers like me, most of them have no clue what that means. They want to read the whole thing, right? They want to experience it’s a different culture. Doesn’t mean you can’t switch and it’s age based because, hey, I’m 60 and I’m in the TLDR, right? Doesn’t mean just because your age is a certain thing that you can’t do either one.

But that is, that’s exactly the relationship economy. That is demand generation versus lead generation. Lead generation is do an ad or something even organic to try and get them in my funnel, to try and get them down to the bottom to buy. Demand generation is us as entrepreneurs entering the buyer’s journey on their terms, not trying to get them into our sales journey. And so you’re doing

You’re doing that even with SEO, even though I don’t know whether you knew the term existed or whatever, but you’re doing that. You’re building relationships and you’re meeting buyers where they are. How? First off, have you heard those terms? And secondly, how are you then? I see that as your innovation. Did you do that on purpose or did is it just because it’s the way you

Steven Schneider (17:05.773)
Yes, I feel like a little bit of both. like when we like in the first company, I yes, I have heard those terms. First question. I saw like I studied those terms was like, this is the way we got to do it. But I just I wrote a lot of articles when back in the early days of kind of bootstrapping, you know, lot of my first company. And I just remembered like reading a bunch of guides and seeing like, what was the playbook people were doing. And since I do come

that affiliate marketing background, you know, you’d always have like a table at top. You’d even have like a bullet point list of products before the table and then a TLDR section below the table. And you’re just like literally like trying to get as many clicks as possible. And I think a lot of that and just common sense, I like at least it feels like common sense. It’s like no one wants to read a 4 ,000 word article. Like no one’s, no one’s reading a hundred words if you’re lucky. Like they’re just on a mission.

and you’re a checkpoint along the way. So, you know, I kind of just keep trying to keep that in mind and put myself in that perspective and be like, how does this flow? And then for, you know, people on the other side who want to read it, it’s like, do the sections flow organically? And it’s like, does a, should it go like, what is a, how does it work? What are the types of, you don’t just jump straight to like, you know, here’s the sales pitch. It’s like, you got to kind of like work down and kind of like building that knowledge.

so that at the end of it, they feel like they’re informed enough to proceed to the next checkpoint. And so I just try to create content. Like I think I would want to work through it and give or take, depending on the topic, I could be on either side of that conversation. So sometimes I just want it quick and like, you know, the recipe, like don’t care, just give me the recipe. Other side, it might be like I’m researching a new computer and like I actually need to study the nuts and bolts of it. So.

Yeah, I think just trying to keep in mind that people are human and some are antsy and some aren’t. And how do you find the best of both worlds?