John Jantsch is an author, speaker and marketing consultant. His company is Duct Tape Marketing and he has been around 29 years offering insights. His new book is “SEO For Growth.” John seeks out knowledge for his own personal growth, which then spills over into helping out clients. One of the major ways to build your brand is producing new, information rich and constant content. Michael and John talk about Twitter and blogging strategies that help tap into your marketplace so you reach your optimal audience. Creating constant content won’t build you or your brand up very much if nobody reads it. Moving on to SEO, John says “Page one results [on Google search] is your new business card.” When you hear a friend talking about someone or if you are looking for products and services, the first thing you do is search their name or brand. Having an active Twitter and LinkedIn account is a good start to getting your name out there. However, if you take it a step further and write an article for a news source in your field it could give you a much larger leg up on your competition. There was a recent study done with 2,200 buyers. 80% of these buyers made their decisions to buy before ever even contacting the company. They are turning to search engines and their social networks. If you do not show up in their initial research, then you do not exist. Google’s original objective (when it was founded) and its current objective is for people to get the most relevant results related to their search. Over the years Google has gotten better at refining their objective by creating new code and stopping fraud. John dives into ways to help out your SEO with Google. Essentially it all boils down to creating great content. “Build it and they will come” rings true more now than ever before. What are some of the things people are doing right now that are on the Google “do not fly list?” The biggest mistake made is paying people to get results by bogus links. It may work for a month or two but after awhile you will probably get blacklisted from Google’s search engine. This is the most obvious of the “do not do’s” with SEO. Content creation will help the most with SEO, and getting people to stay interested in what you are doing. Ebooks, podcasts, books, articles, etc. all count as content. Responding quickly to client emails or calls is also a great key to gaining strong followers. Expectations have gotten so low on the customer service front that something as simple as returning an email in a timely fashion may be the differentiating point between you and the competitor. In this episode of Trend Following Radio: Benefits of podcasting Evolution of podcasting and blogging SEO Behind the scene of the Google algorithm Seven stages to your hourglass Critics and criticism Voice activated searching