Ep 58: Listener Q&A

Answering your digital marketing questions has quickly become my favorite thing to do on this podcast, so that's what I'm going to be doing today.

Hey, everybody, Jim Lastinger here. Welcome to another episode of Marketing In 10. This is the show where we talk digital marketing and I give you specific tactics and strategies that you can use in your own digital marketing campaigns, and we try to do it in under 10 minutes or less.

I absolutely love getting questions from my listeners, from social media followers, my email list. Those questions let me know what's actually on your mind when it comes to digital marketing and what you're struggling with right now. So a couple of weeks ago, I asked you guys for another set of questions that I could answer on the show, and you certainly did not disappoint. So here it goes, diving into another batch of listener-submitted questions.

Okay, the first question comes from Jason in Atlanta. His question is, "What is the number one thing that matters right now in SEO?" This is a tough question to answer because there isn't just a single thing that matters. Having quality content and a fast website are definitely important factors, but I would say that instead of one specific SEO tactic, let's just focus on a single mindset. So just do whatever is best for the user. That's the single thing that us SEOs should be focused on, because whatever is good for the user is ultimately what is good for us. And that's what's going to get you more organic traffic over time.

The next question is from Richard. I'm sorry, but I didn't have Richard's location here. I'm paraphrasing this one a bit, but his question is essentially, how can someone without a lot of technical skills and no experience get started in digital marketing? All right, so this is a good question. Digital marketing is really easy to get started in. The best part about being a beginner in this particular niche is that there are so many free resources out there that you can tap into that you can literally learn all of the tools of the trade for free. So there are several great industry blogs that you can read, and I'll put a link to some of those on the show notes. Plus, just about anything you could ever want to know, you can find it on YouTube.

My advice would be to spend a couple of months just absolutely consuming everything you can about digital marketing, learn as much as humanly possible, and then from there, you can try reaching out to maybe some digital marketing agencies and ask them about doing an internship, just so you can get some real world experience. And if you have any friends or family that have their own websites or their own businesses, you can volunteer your time there as well. It's a great place to start. It's all about learning at this point, not really about making money. And once you've had a few months of experience, you can expect to start getting paid at that point. Whether that's through a contractor platform like Upwork, which I always recommend, or just applying to an agency's job listings, you shouldn't really have any trouble finding a paid position, because people are always looking for talented SEOs and PPCs and all the different facets of digital marketing. That's a great question. Thanks, Richard.

All right, so the next question comes from Alicia in Michigan. Her question is, "I run a e-commerce t-shirt store, and Google Ads hasn't worked at all for me so far. What advice do you have?" Alicia, okay so without knowing exactly what strategies you've tried, it's hard to know where to start. My first inclination is that you might be using the wrong bid strategies. For example, if you're running a smart shopping campaign, you might want to try adjusting your target ROAS settings either up or down just to see if that changes the quality and quantity of the conversions that you're getting. On your search campaigns, maybe you need to try running enhanced CPC instead of max conversions. Whatever you're doing now, maybe try the opposite just to see if that gets you any different results.

I will say that I've worked in that industry before, so speaking from experience, advertising t-shirt stores on Google is pretty tough. I would recommend adding Facebook Ads into the mix if you haven't done that already. And what I would do is create ads around the interest groups that your t-shirts would appeal to. And once you have your Facebook Ads running, if that tends to be a little bit more successful, I would consider changing the Google Ad strategy up a little bit and only using that for remarketing purposes.

And finally, the last question of the day comes from Joseph in San Francisco, and Joseph is asking what SEO software that I use. Okay, so that's a good question. I've used just about all of the major SEO software packages at one point or another. I've used Moz. I've used Ahrefs. I've used both of those extensively. But what I've used for the last couple of years, and I don't see myself changing, is Semrush, because I've found that it does everything that I need to do for my clients. It's very actively being developed, and for my money, it's just the best one in the industry.

I also use Screaming Frog, which is a desktop app, to run SEO audits. SEO audits are a big part of my business, and I do a lot of those, so I spend a lot of time in Screaming Frog and wouldn't be nearly as effective without that. So highly recommend that one as well.

All right, thanks again for all of your questions. There are several questions I didn't get to in this episode, so I'll keep them on the list for next time. I'll have show notes and a transcript available at jimlastinger.com/58, so if you would, please take a couple of minutes to rate and review the show so that I can help as many people as possible and grow the show and provide value to as many people as I can.

As a thank you for listening, I've created a free guide that shows you exactly how to manage your Google Ads accounts in 30 minutes a week. This is the exact process that I teach all of my coaching students and includes everything you to be able to run a profitable ad account for yourself. You can download this for free at jimlastinger.com/guide. That's jimlastinger.com/guide.

That's all for this week's episode. I'll be back soon with another episode of Marketing In 10. Until then, take care, have a great day, everybody.