SEO Consultant (and reformed web designer) Meg Casebolt is our guest for the 183rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Since this is an area that we don’t have real deep knowledge in, we asked Meg all about what copywriters need to know about SEO and what they should be trying to rank for. And we spent a lot of time talking about the 3-week challenge she put together last year and how it helped grow her list. Here’s a pretty good list of what we covered:
•  how she went from graphic design to SEO—it’s about grabbing opportunity
•  what she did to learn SEO in the first place
•  what she did to work through the pivot from design to SEO
•  Meg’s advice for anyone working through their own pivot (or choosing a niche)
•  how she ramped up her client acquisition after the first few referrals
•  the best thing she’s done to grow her authority since her pivot
•  the surprising thing that scared Meg as she was running her challenge
•  how she ran her challenge and how she engaged her affiliates
•  why her challenge took off (and why people joined in the middle)
•  how she structured her challenge from start to finish
•  the results that participants got as they went through the program
•  how Meg kept people engaged in the Challenge from start to finish
•  why adding a deadline helped people finish their Challenge assignments
•  why she no longer does PPC as part of her services
•  what a copywriter needs to know about SEO and getting online traffic
•  why you shouldn’t try to rank for a term like “copywriter”
•  the importance of putting great content on your own website
•  how she has dealt with mindset issues around working with clients
•  the end-product she provides clients after a consulting session
•  why she decided to rebrand her services as she grew her team
•  what her team looks like today and where Meg spends her time

We covered a lot of ground in this one. To hear it, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher so you don’t miss an episode.

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The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Full Transcript:

Kira:  This episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Accelerator, the 12-week program for copywriters who want to learn the business skills they need to succeed. Learn more at thecopywriteraccelerator.com.

Rob:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Kira:  You’re invited to join the club for Episode 183 as we chat with SEO strategist, Meg Casebolt about planning and writing search friendly content, why SEO needs to be a part of your marketing mix, what it takes to run a month-long challenge as well as the results she got and why has she rebranded and refocused her business solely on SEO.

Welcome Meg.

Rob:   Hey, Meg.

Meg:  Hey, it’s so nice to be here with you guys.

Kira:  Yeah, it’s great to have you here. I’ve been able to get to know you over the last nine months or so through Tanya Geisler and I’m excited to just dig into your business more and talk about a lot of the changes that you’ve made and challenges that you’ve taken on, so let’s kick it off with your story. How did you get into SEO?

Meg:  Okay, so my story is, I think a pretty common one, which is that I had been working in communications for many years. I worked in nonprofits. I worked at an architecture firm for a couple of years doing all of their marketing. I got married, I got pregnant, and I looked at the cost of childcare and I don’t know if I can swear on this podcast, but I swore. So I kind of had to make this decision about how do I want to spend my time, how do I want to make money and I’d been sort of dabbling in freelance graphic design. Actually, when I was working in the nonprofits, I wrote grants to take classes to teach myself design for the nonprofits because nonprofit folks are always very resourceful like that. And so I’ve been freelancing a little bit on the side, just kind of playing around with my personal copy of Adobe Illustrator, and I went, ‘I wonder if I can make this work?’

And then I reconnected with some old friends. My first corporate client was literally my first grade best friend. My first subcontracting client was my next door neighbor from my childhood. And they both were huge experiences and really great companies to work for and so it kind of just took off on its own once I started to pursue this route of being a designer. And it was easy then for me to leave my job and stay home with my son part-time and sent him to daycare part-time, and that was kind of just how the business began. It happened a little bit naturally and kind of stumbling around which I think happens to a lot of us.

And then in terms of moving into SEO, I went from being a graphic designer, I started getting hired for more web projects, so I taught myself WordPress design, and worked my way through those clients. And I felt like I was working with clients on their brand and on their logos and on their websites and on their social presence. And I would launch these beautiful sites for my clients, and they would say, ‘Well, that’s great, Meg,’ but nobody’s finding me for this. And I was like, ‘Well, that wasn’t part of the scope of work.’ We didn’t talk about search, we talked about brand and positioning and voice and copy and all of the things that go into the website, but I had no idea how SEO played into it.

But I didn’t want my clients to be like disappointed with the money that they invested in me, so I started playing with SEO on the side essentially, and figuring it out on my own site and trying out new things. And I reached out to a number of designers that I just was friends with and I said, ‘Guys, how do you balance this building the website and doing the design and knowing the branding, and then also doing all the technical stuff that you need to do and the keyword research and the mobile friendliness and all the SEO stuff.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, God. It’s the worst. Wait a minute, do you want to do the SEO stuff, Meg? I would hire you to do it for me.’

And that’s how I found my niche. It wasn’t an exhaustive list of what are all the different things you can do in design, it wasn’t let me figure out the niche and then market myself into it. Every evolution that I have found in my business has been accidentally stumbling into a conversation with somebody or an opening, or some sort of opportunity, and then seeing the opportunity grabbing it and running with it.

Rob:   That is an awesome story, so what did you do then to learn SEO? Because obviously, you’re very resourceful as you taught yourself all of these skills and if somebody else were thinking, ‘Hey, I want to learn that.’ Where did you go? What resources did you use? How did you actually add that skill to your skill stack, so to speak?

Meg:  Oh, man, I wish I had like one resource where I could say go here and take this course. Well, now, I can because I teach it, but no, it wasn’t really a linear progress kind of thing. This was just me going to Google or going to YouTube every time I had a question and figuring it out and trying it out and seeing what works. So, absolutely not the fastest or most efficient way to learn something, but sometimes that’s the best way to learn it, it’s just to put it into practice and give it a shot.

Kira:  So Meg, I want to hear more about the pivot that you made and kind of leaving design and then focusing on SEO, at least that’s the way it sounds. How did you work through that pivot? Did you eventually leave design? Well, I know you did, but how soon did you leave design completely to focus on SEO? How long does that take and what’s realistic there?

Meg:  Yeah, I think the pivots don’t necessarily have to be 90-degree or 180-degree turns. I think that they could be 10 degrees, 10 degrees, 10 degrees, 10 degrees. And so I started rewriting the copy of my website to be web design and SEO, and then once I put that onto the website, I started getting more SEO inquiries, and just leaning more heavily onto those leads. And I remember the day that I took the words web design off my website, I was sweating because I knew that I wanted to always have that as a backup plan. And that’s not to say that now I couldn’t go design a website, I’m sure I still could, but it’s not as lucrative or as systematized or as you know, fun for me as doing more of the nuanced work, more of that niche component.

Kira:  Yeah, can you talk more about this, too, because you felt that anxiety around taking web design off your website, I feel like a lot of the copywriters we talked to want to niche down and want to kind of make that 10-degree pivot, but they are feeling that anxiety over like, ‘If I make a change, this is it for me.’ And so even if they know that’s not rational, I feel like we still deal with that. So what advice would you give to them if they are maybe shifting a bit to maybe taking something off their website for the first time and freaking out, what advice would you give them?

Meg:  Yeah, I think that the advice that I would give them and also the advice that I give to people who are working on their SEO, regardless of what you are thinking about, is maybe you don’t have to take everything off your website overnight. You can still keep those kind of generic keywords on your homepage or on your about page, you can still kind of cast a broad net there, but start writing some additional content or producing some videos that are about the new thing that you want to be known for. So, it doesn’t have to be even what is happening on the homepage of your website, if you can write some content that’s specific to what you want to be found for, that’s a really great way to dip your toe into a new topic without feeling like you’re shutting down the other things that you could potentially be selling.

And, and even if you have something on your website, that doesn’t mean that’s the only thing that you’re allowed to sell. If somebody comes to me now and says, ‘Hey, Meg, I’ve heard such great things about your web design. I’m willing to pay SEO level prices for you to do the website,’ I would be open to that, right? I would be willing to look at that again, but that doesn’t mean I have to have every single service that I could possibly offer listed on my website for all people to see. It’s okay to have secret offers. It’s okay to have upsells that you only offer to the people that you love working with, and it’s okay to have just a couple of things that people can really get to know you for, but have a broader spectrum of things that you can do behind the scenes.

Rob:   I love that that’s really good advice as far as niching goes, it’s you’re not all in and you can always turn around and go back and change your mind to do all kinds of different things. So you mentioned that you started working with designers or you were talking with designers who also needed help and that’s maybe where a few of your first clients came from. As you really leaned into this, how did you find clients for SEO? Was it all through search and paid ads or were you doing something else?

Meg:  Would you believe that I get very few clients through actual search engine optimization?

Rob:   I would believe it. Yeah, in fact, it seems like that would be a really competitive space.

Meg:  It is so competitive and I can give advice to my clients and I can get really good results for them if they’re in less competitive spaces or less competitive niches, but because SEO people are so freaking good at SEO, it can be kind of hard to break through the noise of that particular industry using the tools that they are also teaching by trying to teach those tools. So, I have gotten a couple leads from search. I’m very proud to say that I got a lead from the phrase feminist SEO, which makes my heart just sing. But for the most part, I still get my leads through word of mouth and through some unconventional promotion strategies. So I do a lot of challenges. I am very strong in affiliate marketing, having other people promote any promotions that I’m doing. And I try not to actually be on social media that much even though I know people love social media, I try to mostly do email marketing and fun trainings and teaching promotions instead.

Kira:  Alright, Meg, so when you decided to focus on SEO and you pivoted, how long ago was that now? A couple of years ago?

Meg:  About two and a half years ago.

Kira:  Two and a half years ago. Okay, so since then, catching up in time to now, what has been the most influential or helped you grow the most? Is there like one thing you did over that time that really did take your business to that next level?

Meg:  I think that probably the one kind of promotional activity that has put me on the map is actually, I think Rob you said this is how you first heard about me, is a promotion that I ran last fall called SEOctober. I had a friend who reached out to me, this was in August of 2019. My friend Ashley reached out and said, ‘I’m going to do a daily live stream called Small Changes September. Would you be willing to promote it to your list?’ And I said back to Ashley, ‘Yeah, I would love to and also I should probably do SEOctober. Ha-ha-ha. Oh, no, I think I have to do SEOctober.’ It was such a good name and I’m sure as copywriters you guys kind of hear that you’re like, ‘Oh, that name is so good. Now, I have to recreate something to live up to the potential of this name that just flowed out of my mouth.’

Kira:  Right.

Meg:  And so that’s where SEOctober came from, so what I did is I kind of worked backwards from it. I said, ‘Okay, if I’m going to have a promotion called SEOctober, first, I had to decide if it was SEOctober or SEO October,’ because there’s not an easy way to pronounce it. It’s easy to write, it’s not so easy to read. And so I started putting together SE October and I worked backwards and I said, ‘Okay, how many weekdays are there in in the month of October? If I want to provide one training per day, how many do I need it to be?’ I discovered there were 24 weekdays in October 2019, and I thought, ‘Okay, so the last week of this is going to be launch emails basically, trying to promote a course. So what are the 19 things that I need to teach before that?’

And I worked backwards? I thought, ‘Okay, what are the things that I can teach in three minutes or less that will help people understand what SEO is.’ And from there, the content actually kind of built itself it was just trying to figure out 19 different tasks, 19 different skills that could go into this that build upon each other. And I can’t believe how epically it took off because I just shared it with some friends and said, ‘Hey, would you mind sharing this with your community? Would you share this with your audience,’ and I put affiliate links on the front end of it, so that people could share this free challenge, which is a little different than a three-day challenge or a five-day challenge, but also, it’s free. People love free things.

And so I shared it with a couple of my friends and ended up getting over 1000 subscribers just from affiliate recommendations. There were no paid ads behind that at the time. I just reached out to friends and so, they would share it with their networks and then more and more people shared and shared. And it even started to snowball, where at the beginning of the month I had 600 or 700 people running through the challenge, and by the end of the month, about many of those people had told their friends about it and I had over 1000 people getting the daily emails.

So that was very enlightening experience in part because I think and you guys are copywriters, so this might sound a little strange to you, but I was a little bit scared to send emails that frequently. And I think that probably as copywriters, you guys are saying to your clients all the time, like, ‘No, people want to hear from you. It’s okay. It’s okay to email.’ But I had a lot of anxiety around sending a daily digest. And in every single email I said, ‘If you want to opt out to this daily email, you can,’ and only 4% of people opted out from the daily digest. People loved hearing from me daily, and it gave me a lot of confidence around being okay to email my list and knowing that if I have an email that’s valuable, people will actually want to read it and want to hear from me, which felt like a big revelation.

Rob:   Yeah. I definitely have a couple of questions about this. So first, can you give us maybe a sample of like what one of the daily emails would have been or would have included?

Meg:  Sure. So I spent the first week doing like three very simple lessons about keyword research to help people understand what search queries are, and how can you find out what people are searching for. And then I spent a week saying, ‘Okay, here are all the places that you can put those keywords. You can put them in your headline, you can put it in your Alt tag, you can put it in your body text, here’s how you can use subheads in a blog post,’ and that was four different lessons. So, it wasn’t me trying to teach everything all at once because I found that people get really busy and they get really overwhelmed.

I use a platform called Member Vault to deliver this content, and so I was able to see that people would binge, they would wait until Friday and then they’d do five days’ worth of lessons, so that made it a little bit easier for me to think, ‘Okay. It’s okay if they’re not opening the emails every day. It’s okay if they’re not doing everything the minute that it arrives in their inbox. People are going to set aside time for things.’ And that gave me a lot of support back from the community saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to do this whole week right now, so if I have any questions, let me dig it.’

And there was a Facebook group and people could put messages below the videos and ask any questions they had, so it was a really great interactive learning experience for people where they could then go into the Facebook group and say, ‘Here’s the post that I wrote this month. What do you think?’ And get feedback from other people who are working through the same process.

Rob:   Okay, so yeah. Next question. So you had a Facebook group to support everything that you were doing with the daily email as well where people could check in and report?

Meg:  Yeah, and so I would probably post like, once a week in there. I didn’t feel like I needed to engage the community every day because I was also sending daily emails and it’s a little bit much, but I still had a Facebook group where people could interact with each other. And that seemed to me to be the most important part was interact with each other and to get some feedback from me. And I would also say to people like if you’re caught up, I would do Facebook Lives in the group walking through, doing quick analysis of what people were doing on their blog posts.

Meg:  So just really quick, like, ‘Hey, I see that you did this. This is great, but have you thought about changing the title to this instead because that would probably get more clicks.’ And giving people really quick feedback, just to give them an idea of how SEO can work for them and the things that they can do, which are these little changes that can actually make a difference in showing up in those search results.

Rob:   And then, as far as affiliates go, it’s a free offer and so, there’s no money to be made here. What did you offer them for bringing people to your list? Was it follow on sales? Did you upsell to some other products? What did that look like?

Meg:  Yep, so I had an upsell like basically a limited time offer when they signed up and then I also had an upsell after the month was over. So the first part was that I took those same 24 videos, if you signed up for free, they were dripped out to you daily or you could upgrade when you signed up and for $24, you could get all 24 videos, lump sum. And so I think something like 6% of people took advantage of that offer and my affiliates made 50% if people signed up for it. Because it was no problem for me to give them a good payout, it was 12 bucks. I don’t mind that.

And then at the end of the month, I pitched my content strategy course, which is all based on keyword research and if somebody who signed up for the challenge through an affiliate link purchased the course then they would get a 30% payout, so it was absolutely worth it for my affiliates to promote the challenge, but it wasn’t just asking my affiliates to say, ‘Hey, can you send people to this very obviously high-pitched webinar?’ Giving a ton of value on the front end made it easier for them to promote it without it feeling like, ‘Look, I have affiliate money coming in from this if you buy it.’

Kira:  Yeah. No, that’s a really great point. And how much was that initial offer for all of the videos together?

Meg:  $24.

Kira:  $24, okay, all right. Well, my question was why do you think this took off and you had 1000 subscribers, beyond asking friends, colleagues who want to support you, and you made clearly made it very easy for them to do it by a challenge that was value based and leading up front with content, you made it easy for them, but why else do you think it took off and that you had 1000 subscribers and people were talking about it and joining halfway through the month?

Meg:  I think because it was taking something that felt impossible and breaking it down into demystified simple steps. I think that the more complex the things are that we do and you guys are all copywriters, so you are so accustomed to doing things like market research and writing copy that is in a particular voice and there are things that really start to come naturally to you, the more you do it. And so it can be really hard to work backwards and take yourself out of that curse of knowledge and explain things in normal words.

And so I think that that was the biggest benefit of this free challenge was breaking things up into three minutes a day because if you try to learn everything overnight and absorb something highly technical or something that requires you to actually implement it in time, it can just make you want to tear out your hair and run in the opposite direction. But by splitting it up into something and stretching it out over a period of time, I think it made a huge difference for people and saying, ‘Okay, I had no problem with day three. Let me move on to day four. Okay, I think I understand day four. Let me go try it on my website before I go to the day five lesson.’And having the space to implement in the midst of the lessons was such a huge change maker. Instead of just binging YouTube videos where people are talking in really confusing terms, breaking it down into those bite-sized pieces seem to make a huge difference for my audience.

Kira:  Okay. And this is getting into the weeds here, but I feel like it’s necessary, so if somebody’s listening or if I want to run a similar challenge around something copywriting related, could you just walk us through what we need to think about and do step by step? I mean, clearly there’s like the Facebook group component, daily emails, daily videos. Can you just walk us through to that structure?

Meg:  Sure. So I would say the first thing to do is to come up with some quick win, to come up with the goal that the person will have by the end of the training, and whether that’s a one-hour webinar training or a five-day 10 minutes a day training or whatever the structure looks like, that part’s not actually that important, but becoming super clear on the end goal and the outcomes that they can expect by the end of the training and then working backwards from there. So I already said like, I got a little weird this time because I thought, ‘Oh, well, I need to fit 19 days and this is the course that I want to promote.’

But really what I did is I took my course, I pulled out half of a module, and I broke it up into that. So I was taking the content that I already had in the course, and I was able to say to people, ‘If this feels good to you, here’s how you can get more information about this.’ I was making it very clear in the challenge, ‘This is what’s covered in the course and more.’ So it was really just giving an introductory level explanation of what they could expect if they worked with me and making sure that people knew the way that I teach and what I sound like when I teach and yes, I include way too many gifts in all of my trainings and I try to put in pop culture references as much as possible because that’s just what makes sense to me in my brain and the way that I want to share with people.

So making sure that as you’re putting together the training, yes, you can send out daily emails or don’t. You can do it all in a Facebook group or don’t have the Facebook group, but making sure that the way that you plan the challenge is both outcome driven and your brand voice is built into it. And I think that will warm people up better than anything else is just knowing exactly what to expect when the upsell comes because the point of the challenge is to upsell, but when the upsell comes, they feel like it’s a logical progression towards what they’ve been working towards this entire time.

Rob:   So it seems like there’s a really big success for you. You certainly were able to grow your list. It sounds like you got people to join one of your programs. What about the people who went through the challenge? What kinds of changes did they see in their business or what kind of successes did they report back?

Meg:  I mean, people were very clear about, even if they weren’t ready to join the course and I’ve launched the course since then, and some people said like, ‘I was in SEOctober. I loved it. It just wasn’t the right time for me to buy,’ so it still is having some ramifications for me a couple months later and sales ramifications too, which is nice. But I think also people just felt like, ‘Oh, this isn’t this giant thing that I don’t understand. This isn’t a behemoth. This is a checklist.’ I think that the biggest change for people who went through this challenge was just knowing that they could do it, that they didn’t have to be scared because there’s a lot of digital marketing trainings and strategies that are very complex and that they build upon each other.

And sometimes, we as marketing people, forget all the things that we already know and we leap in at an introductory level without actually explaining the foundations of what it is that we’re talking about. And so I think by breaking down foundations, people who have been in business for six months, two years, somewhere at that point, and they’ve always been told like, ‘You need SEO, you need SEO,’ but they didn’t really get what it was. And I think that when you can demystify something that feels overwhelming, people will trust you very easily. So it may just be, instead of saying, ‘I’m going to do a challenge to rewrite your entire website, so that way you can get all the customers in the world.’

Maybe the challenge is just writing your about page. I would love to go through a challenge that’s that specific, just, ‘Here’s how to write your about page and part one is the headline and part two is writing from the customer’s perspective, and part three is the bio at the bottom,’ and you can kind of stretch something out and break it down into foundational pieces and do teachings on each piece of the puzzle before you expect them to buy into something bigger. And if people just do the challenge, it needs to be a standalone value on its own.

I think sometimes we’re told to hold back the best stuff because we think, ‘Oh, well if I give away everything for free, they won’t buy it.’ But I think sometimes giving away the best stuff wets your appetite, that you want more, that you see the results that you feel like you can do something.

Kira:  Yeah, I mean, I think the challenge with that, too, is not even just like giving away my best stuff, but it’s like giving away so much that people feel overwhelmed and maybe by the time we get to the offer, they’re so overwhelmed. They’re like, ‘I’m still working through the daily challenges.’ So could we just talk a bit about like, how you dealt with engagement, because clearly you had a lot of engagement, people had wins. How did you incentivize them to check in daily and work through everything? And how did you deal with overwhelm throughout the challenge?

Meg:  Sure. So, I actually built a bonus structure into the challenge and this was also a way of planting the seed that I was going to have an upsell at the end of the challenge without being over the head about it, so if you finished five days of the challenge, you got 5% off the course. If you finished 10 days of the challenge, you got a free workbook that walks through some of the process that’s included in the course, and so everything was leading towards it.

I think it was if you finished 20 days of the challenge, I would do an audit of your website, like a 10-minute audit of the SEO of your website and walk you through some things that you can do that are custom to you, that you can do right away that might make a difference on your SEO. And I found that if people made it to that 20-video threshold and then earned themselves the SEO audit on their website, then I think I got about a 40% conversion rate from people who got there.

Kira:  Wow. Okay, and you were able to manage all of that through the platform and through member vault with the rewards?

Meg:  Exactly.

Kira:  Okay. So what would you change? We’ve talked about you doing another challenge. Clearly, it takes work to put this together. What would you do differently? What surprised you along the way and what lessons did you to learn? So sorry, three questions there.

Meg:  I have no idea what they all were. No, I think that the biggest takeaway that I had because I do want to do this challenge again next year. So guys, get yourself ready. I don’t even want to pitch this. I was about to say, ‘Go to SEOctober and sign up for the waitlist,’ but it’s February, I can’t bring myself to say it right.

Kira:  Everybody get ready. It’s coming soon.

Meg:  It’s coming. It’s coming. No, I plan a year in advance, but not like that. Gosh. No, I think that the biggest takeaway that I had was to build it based on the fact that it would scale. And so when I started putting it together, and I started putting the bonuses into place, the final bonus is a half an hour call with me, and then I had 100 people finish the course. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God. How am I going to do 100 half an hour calls?’ That is really time heavy for me and even with a 40% conversion rate off of them, I mean, not everyone booked the calls, which is also crazy pants that you worked this hard getting through it, then you didn’t book the bonus call.

But going through those calls, it was like, ‘Oh, my God. My month of November was a lot less time to work because I had all these calls booked in.’ So when I do it again, I will be changing the bonuses to be less time intensive for me, so that might be having somebody else do some of those calls or it might be systematizing the audits that I do to make them a little bit easier and less time consuming for me to actually do, building it based on the fact that I won’t be able to give the personal attention to people as more and more people sign up for it.

Now, when I started building it, I had no idea that 1000 people would sign up. I was expecting like 200 or 300, so it was a big surprise to me that it scaled as well as it did. But another thing that I noticed because I’m using the member vault platform and they track everything that people do is that I noticed that the day that the bonuses expired, I had a huge surge in people doing their homework until literally midnight on a Friday night. By putting a time sensitive ending in place and giving them an incentive to work towards, instead of seeing the usual drop off that you see on challenges after three days even you see a big drop off in things, but I actually saw a surge in the last week because I had gamified and incentivized finishing the challenge.

Rob:   Yeah, urgency and scarcity work, who knew?

Meg:  I know this is a big surprise to copywriters that urgency and scarcity are part of a good promotion.

Rob:   Exactly. So I want to shift gears just a little bit and talk a bit about some of the changes that you’ve made in your business in the recent past. So we talked about niching earlier on and you used to provide at least some help with PPC if I’m not mistaken, but now you focus entirely on SEO. Will you talk a little bit about the reasons why you decided to make that change?

Meg:  Absolutely. So, when I made the shift into search engine optimization, I got really damn good at keyword research and I think that that’s maybe the thing that I do best and that’s why I love teaching it is helping find the keywords that will turn into sales and then I was working with some larger companies and corporations who also had a PPC team in place, who were duplicating the keyword research and I was like, ‘No. Why don’t we have a comprehensive keyword research strategy for organic and paid search, like these should be working together.’ And then once I kind of started to dip my toe into PPC keyword research and figuring out which are the keywords that are attainable and reasonable to pursue organically and which are the ones that need to have some revenue be earning, some money behind them to see a conversion on it, once I started to look at that, I was like, ‘Well, what if I just ran the ads?’

And obviously, I think all of us as entrepreneurs are willing to put on new hats and you already heard at the beginning of this with my origin story that I’m like, ‘Well, I’ll just teach myself to do that, too.’ So I started running the ads. I actually did take some pretty structured classes on Google Ads Management, which were both private and directly through the Google Ads platform. I went through it and did their whole training on it. And I think I was getting pretty good at it, but I was burning the hell out from trying to do too many things. I was trying to manage ads and ads require so much hand holding.

With SEO, you can write a blog post or optimize a website or rewrite some copy or change out a title tag and then you wait a month and you look at it and you see if it’s made a difference. Whereas with ads, the monitoring needed to be twice a day. I needed to be going in and taking a look at what things were working and what do we need to turn off, and what do we need to turn up and how are people behaving on mobile versus behaving on desktop? And okay, this keyword is clicking through. We’re getting great click through rates, but we’re not getting conversions on it. So how do we need to change the landing page? And it just felt like a double full time job for me to be working on the organic and on the paid.

And so I actually brought somebody onto my team, who I love and trust who has PPC experience. And, even then I felt like I was always struggling to be the liaison between the..even when I had the person directly communicating with the client with my PPC manager, I still felt like I was always struggling to keep up with what was going on with PPC, like it really needs to be a dedicated person full time to make it make sense. And I also felt like I couldn’t figure out how to make good revenue doing PPC. If I was charging people money for my services and then also worrying about what is their budget and does my fee go up as their budget goes up, I could never find a way to make it feel profitable for the size of the companies I was working with. And so I just decided to continue working with my existing PPC clients, I didn’t want to leave them out in the dust. But to not offer that anymore to new people coming into my business because I didn’t like doing it that much.

Kira:  So are you still doing it today for some of those original clients?

Meg:  Yeah, and those people are, I wouldn’t say that they’re coasting by any means, but we know their keywords and their conversions so well, but it’s more of a maintenance as opposed to an ongoing management, consistently updating everything situation.

Kira:  Yeah, and I’m just wondering, too, if you have advice around like when we’re dealing with burnout, which it sounds like, in some ways, maybe you are dealing with a burnout and being stretched too thin and making a really smart business move by pivoting. So how do we know when it’s the hard work that’s needed to grow? And it feels like burnout, it’s just tough versus really real burnout where it doesn’t make sense and we really should question what we’re focusing on are some of our offers or how we’re operating our business. Do you feel like you have a clear difference from that situation?

Meg:  I think for me, the distinction is how I feel, what is my energy as I shift between multiple things. Yeah, keyword research is not the sexiest or most exciting way to spend my time, but I enjoy it. I look forward to finding those keywords that make sense that will make a difference in my clients’ business. I get I get energized when I feel like I’m moving towards something. Whereas for me and I’m an Enneagram Seven, too, so I think when I can pursue something and see an end-in sight and follow the shiny objects and get where I need to go quickly, I get a high from that, whereas the long term strategic checking in on it every day just felt like a slog to me. Maybe an Enneagram Five would do way better on that or an Enneagram One would be perfect, but as a Seven I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m doing this again? And still, every day I have to go do the same thing?’

It didn’t feel energetically enthusiastic. I didn’t feel enthusiastic about it. It felt like a chore as opposed to something that I was looking forward to. And yeah, there are times where you have to do things you don’t want to do in your business. I don’t love doing my bookkeeping, but if I don’t do that, the IRS is going come after me. There are things that you have to do. Well, you can outsource some of it. But for me, it felt like, ‘Why am I pursuing and trying to get clients for something that I don’t actually want to do when I have other clients lining up to work with me for something I enjoy.’

And just checking in with what my gut was telling me was such a huge game changer and it was really hard. Same thing, where I said it was hard to take web design off of my website, it was hard to take Google Ads off my website, but if I didn’t love doing it, and I couldn’t find a way to make it as profitable as the other things I was offering, it had to go.

Rob:   So now, you’re focused almost entirely on SEO, and I’m curious, if I wanted to start to add content to my website as a copywriter or somebody who’s listening maybe wants to get serious about getting found for particular keywords, what are the kinds of things that we should be thinking about as we start to create content and either put it on our site or maybe in other places, so that it can direct traffic back to our site?

Meg:  I love this question and I think this won’t be a surprise to copywriters because you guys are so accustomed to thinking about and hearing the voice of the customer, and have trained your ears to do that. But I think that the biggest shift that happens as you start to think about how to be found for SEO is that instead of talking about, ‘This is what I do, this is who I am, this is how you can pay me,’ the shift happens into, ‘This is the problem I can solve for you. This is the solution you’re looking for. This is more about you and your needs as the end client than it is about me as the service provider.’

And it probably feels a little on the nose as a copywriter because you guys are talking about that so much with your clients, but I still will go to copywriter websites that say like, ‘I’m a copywriter, I’ll write your web copy, I’ll do your funnels, I’ll do your launches.’ And there may be people out there who are specifically looking for launch copywriters or conversion copywriters, but there may also be people out there who don’t know what a copywriter is, and those websites, maybe you don’t want to have the people who don’t know what a copywriter is, maybe the people who you are trying to be found by are far enough along on their customer awareness that you don’t want to have to explain the difference between a copywriter and a newsletter writer.

And that’s okay, that’s a decision that you can choose to make. But being aware of the fact that different people will use different words to describe the same thing. And it’s up to you as the writer to decide which of these terms are the ones that I want to be found for? Which of these problems are the ones that I want to solve for people? Beyond just, ‘I’m a copywriter, hire me for copywriting.’ It can be, ‘Is your sales page not converting? Is your email sequence dropping subscribers like flies,’ or obviously, you guys are copywriters, you’ll come up with a better metaphor than that, but just, thinking about not just what are the services I want to offer, but being aware of what those services do for the people that you are trying to work with. And I think that that is the biggest first step in writing copy that makes sense.

And then the second thing is to go and do some research about what exactly are people looking for? What are the words that they’re using? Copywriters are great at market research and doing those customer interviews and finding the voice of the customer, but there’s a limit to the number of people that you can interview in a week or a month or a year to get that direct one-to-one feedback or focus group feedback. I like to think of keyword research as just a much broader version of finding the voice of the customer, where you’re taking a look at hundreds of thousands of ways that the people use their actual words. Instead of needing to have these one-to-one conversations, you’re able to see things at scale and understand the volume of the problems that you’re trying to solve for people.

Rob:   So yeah, just to make sure that I’m clear on this. You’re really suggesting that rather than try to rank for a term like copywriter, which is going to be highly competitive just given the number of people who call themselves copywriters have that on their website, that maybe we should be looking for problems as defined by our clients. So, a client who might be typing in something like, ‘Need help with retention strategy?’ or something that still deals with the problems that we solve as copywriters, but it’s not necessarily the word copywriter. Is that correct?

Meg:  Yeah, I think you can still put the word copywriter on your homepage and your about page obviously, so that people know what it is that you do, but then you can create additional content that is retention strategies or maybe your people aren’t even using retention strategies, maybe that still feels a little too jargony. Maybe it’s, ‘Why are so many of my subscribers or why are so many of my email people unsubscribing? How do I decrease my unsubscriber rate? How do I increase my open rates? How do I get more people to fill out this form on my website?’

The outcomes might be the things that they’re looking for, as opposed to the words that we use to describe, ‘How to decrease churn?’ That might not be the words that your ideal client is using, even if it’s what you help them do. It comes back to that same idea of sell them what they want, give them what they need. You say to them, ‘How do I keep people in my membership site?’ Instead of, ‘How do I decrease churn?’ Because they might not know those terms.

Rob:   Awesome. Makes sense. Okay, so my last question on this is, let’s say that I know the keywords that I want to be writing about, I’ve got some ideas. Should I be putting this on my website or should I be publishing on other platforms, things like maybe medium or LinkedIn or even other blogs and then trying to drive traffic back to my website? What are the things we should be doing there?

Meg:  Love this question. Always, I don’t want to say always. If you are trying to become a thought leader, you can use a platform like Medium to build out a following, but if it’s something that you want people to find on your own website, I would recommend putting it on your website, and then syndicating it and importing it over to a platform like Medium, so that you’re still getting the traffic coming to your site, but you’re getting people finding you on your website and finding you on Medium for that same content. Medium is actually built as a syndication tool, so you can get that traffic but not also cannibalize your own content by having people find you on Medium instead of your website.

We also have the opportunities to do guest posts or to talk about things on other people’s platforms, which is wonderful because not only can you get referral traffic over to your website from those thought leadership pieces, but you can also get backlinks and authority and so, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of backlinks. So if somebody from like a larger publication, if you get listed on Copy Hackers and you write a piece for them, then not only are they putting a link to your website on their author section of your page, of your publication, but also that link coming from Copy Hackers to your website will carry a certain amount of their SEO authority over to your page.

And every page and every domain has a certain level of authority that Google doesn’t share all of its algorithm rankings with us, but some other keyword research and SEO tools can estimate approximately what people’s domain authority is. And if you can get your content placed in third party highly authoritative, well-respected publications, then that will help raise your domain authority. So even if you don’t change anything else on your site, if you’re able to produce really high quality content and get it placed on other authoritative platforms, the content that you have on your website will start to grow in the ranks because Google trusts you more because places like Copy Hackers trust you more or other places that are popular around the internet. If you want to write first Social Media Examiner and you get a post back to your website from that that would be another backlink from a highly authoritative source.

So, there are times where we want to create content on your website that will help people find you and then there are times where you want to take your best content, shop it out to other highly authoritative platforms, and get those links coming back to your website and get that traffic coming back to your website from it. You have to have a combination of both for really great SEO because you want to be seen not only found for your content on your website, but also get the authority from other people’s websites to promote yourself.

Kira:  Alright, there’s a lot that we can continue to dig into there. I know that could be a whole another hour, but we do want to spend some time talking about how your business has grown more recently. So I feel like hearing you talk through all this and knowing you behind the scenes of it’s clear that the challenge in SEOctober really helped you hit that ‘next level’ and increase your visibility, grow your list, it goes on from there. So I’m just wondering if since then, as you’ve reached this next level, if you’ve hit any struggles, mindset challenges like and if you have how you’ve dealt with it.

Meg:  I think the biggest difficulty for me and I know that a lot of us have gone through this is that suddenly my marketing and sales isn’t necessarily a problem. I have plenty of leads coming in, but I didn’t have the capacity to work with all those people. And that really, it’s really disappointing when you have these amazing people coming to you and they want to work with you and they want to give you money and you have to say, ‘I don’t have time to work with you for like three or four months,’ or, ‘Oh, I know that you want to launch in two months and I can’t help you right now.’

And that was really stressing me out because not only am I saying no to money, which is always a difficult conversation to have, but these were ideal people and my heart wanted to work with them. And so I had to restructure my business to really adjust from being a solopreneur, who’s wearing all the hats and doing all the things to building out a small team and relying on other people to get the work done for me and knowing that I can’t necessarily be doing all of it myself. And so I actually brought a Director of Operations on board and I’m working with her team to create standard operating procedures for everything I do in my business.

And I already mentioned, my Enneagram Seven type which is very much like ‘Let me pursue all the shiny objects everywhere. Let me rewrite every proposal from scratch every time because everything is different in the world is magical, and I’m enthusiastic about everything and everyone deserves rainbows and sunshine.’ My wonderful Operations Director was like, ‘Meg, this is crazy. Stop redoing everything from scratch every time because 90% of your proposals are the same. And how do you want to work with people? And what do you want that to look like? And then let’s build the proposals not based on what the client is coming to you telling you what they want, but create a system that you can replicate that will meet all of these client’s needs.’

And obviously, I resisted because we all resist change, but once I started changing the structure of how I work with people, it cleared my schedule so much and it made things make so much more sense because I didn’t have to do all the work. And so when a new customer comes to me or when a new prospect comes to me, the first thing that I pitch is actually I think a lot of people would call it like a road mapping session or an intensive session like a VIP day, I call it a search traffic accelerator. So I spend a couple hours with the client really getting to know their business and then I come up with a custom SEO plan for them based on that, which is often keyword research, how to update their websites, what blog posts I need them to write, what YouTube videos they may want to create, coming up with a content plan and an optimization strategy for your website.

But all of that fits into a one-day package, because a lot of SEO people just want to tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak and that just doesn’t work for me. I don’t necessarily want to be updating everyone’s website two times a week for ad infinitum, like for forever and ever. I want to give you a plan and give you time to implement it, which is a very unusual way to do SEO, but once I hired the Operations Director Theresa, she was like, ‘Well, find a way that it works for you that you can replicate.’ And that has made such a huge difference in the way that I work with my clients and the way that my energy feels at the end of the day because I don’t feel like I’m constantly just making these little tiny adjustments. I feel Like I can share some big picture strategy without it all resting on my shoulders.

Rob:   What do you charge for that road mapping session?

Meg:  At this point, it’s $1500.

Rob:   Okay. And then the deliverable at the end, basically, is all of the things that you can help the client do to improve their SEO moving forward, right?

Meg:  Not me. No. I want them to do it themselves.

Rob:   Oh, okay. So, you’re just doing the strategy, you’re not providing, saying, ‘Oh, we can help you with these four pieces of content or we can help you script out the videos for YouTube,’ you just do the strategy plan?

Meg:  I just do the strategy plan and if there are things that I feel like, ‘Oh, this client needs to put together a blog strategy, but I know they don’t want to write blogs,’ then I have content writers that I can introduce them to and those content writers have now gotten accustomed to seeing my sort of insane air table bases and they’re like, ‘Oh, okay. I know exactly what to do with this.’ And I teach the client, ‘Here’s how you can use this system to track your progress on things.’ And I build out Google Data Studio dashboard, so that way they can see at a glance how things are changing in their business.

And I want to educate them on how to do the work themselves or outsource it to their teams instead of becoming reliant on me and my team, and also to track their own progress and to know whether or not the marketing that they’re doing is working. It’s nice to have an SEO person in your back pocket, but you don’t need to have somebody on your website every day telling you whether or not it’s working, because you can look it up yourself and there are ways to learn how to do that, that don’t require a really expensive monthly retainer contract.

Rob:   Yeah. I’m guessing that there may be one or two listeners who will be reaching out to you saying, ‘Hey, I can help you with that content, too,’ so.

Meg:  Yeah, I would love to love to get connected to content writers, to copywriters. I’d love any introductions because I’m always looking for people to partner up with and it’s nice to have referral situations that go both directions, too.

Kira:  Alright, so, Meg, talking through this road mapping session, this is something that’s really exciting and top of mind for a lot of copywriters that might be ready to change some of their offers and offer more strategy and think on a higher level. So what advice would you give to them around ways we could approach it, what works, what doesn’t work if we’ve never created this type of offer before and I might be a little bit anxious about putting it out there based off what’s worked for you.

Meg:  I think it can be really intimidating to make the shift from being a service provider that ends with deliverables to a consultant, who has the outcomes of strategy and next steps for a client. And I think those of us that are in the business of providing deliverables so if you’re a copywriter, you’re saying, ‘Here’s all your website copy, here’s your email sequence, here’s your sales page copy.’ I came from the world of web design where it’s like at the end of our contract together, you have a website. It’s a very tangible thing that I was selling that you guys are selling. And when you shift over to something more strategic, like, ‘Let me do a review of your existing sales page and give you ways that you can improve the conversion rates on it,’ that can be a little bit scary, because you no longer are able to have a very clear outcome for what the client will get at the end of it, and also, you can’t take credit for the work anymore.

When I was the one actually going into the backends of people’s websites and saying, ‘I’m going to change these title tags out and I’m going to be the one that makes your website run faster by installing these plugins,’ or whatever the recommendations were when I was the one doing it, I felt like I was getting this boost when I would see their search traffic have an uptick because I felt like I was giving myself the credit for it and shifting the focus and saying, ‘Let me empower you to do this for yourself, let me tell you what to do when you go do it or you have a team member do it,’ it’s a little bit harder to sell, at least at first, because instead of saying, ‘Here’s the outcome you’re going to get,’ you’re saying, ‘Here’s the task list that you have to do.’ And you have to then also provide training and support for when they have questions down the line.

So with my VIP day, I will have that VIP day, I’ll present everything, I’ll provide a walkthrough video of, ‘Here’s everything that’s in there.’ And then we have a check in six weeks later, because I know that people get stuck along the way, but they don’t necessarily want to have to reach out and say, ‘Wait, what did you mean by this?’ So we want to have those checkpoints later on and give people some accountability and some support down the line and say, ‘If you have a question, just email me.’ So you still have to be accessible. You can’t just like turn something over and then expect the client to take it from there, but if this is something that you want to get accustomed to, to an extent get paid for coming up with a plan for them and then you can decide whether or not you implement it or not.

Just be super clear about what are the outcomes that they’re going to get and focus more on how the strategy can help them in your proposals or in your sales copy than like, ‘Here are the deliverables you’re going to get.’ I mean, you guys know it comes down to features versus benefits. It’s about if you are paying me to come up with a plan for you, you don’t also have to pay me $150 an hour to go in and update your website, but you can find someone who can do that for $15 an hour. So, why don’t I come up with the plan which is what I love doing and then you can make it work with these support mechanisms that we have in place and I can still be a guide for you as opposed to being the one doing it for you.

Rob:   I want to throw out another topic change for us in addition to the shift from PPC to SEO like you’ve built this great brand, Megabolt and recently have actually gone through a complete rebrand to Love At First Search. So tell us a little bit about why you decided to make that change and maybe more importantly, what you did on the SEO side to make sure that the change doesn’t affect any SEO rankings or the good Google juice vibes that it already had.

Meg:  Totally. So, this is a very difficult decision because when you’ve built a brand and I know we’re all in this space where you’ve built a brand and then you realize, ‘Oh, dammit. I think I’m outgrowing this brand.’ So, Megabolt Digital was such a labor of love for me because Megabolt was my superhero name. My name is Meg Casebolt. Once I got married, people started kind of joking around and calling me Megabolt and I was like, ‘Oh, this is such a fun, playful brand.’ And I loved that I could break things down and be kind of irreverent about SEO because so many people take themselves so seriously. And by putting this comic book character on it, and being all these bright pops of color and wham, pose up, like it felt more approachable.

And I loved the Megabolt brand, but I also felt a little bit weird when I started to grow my team and have them have my nickname as their email address or have them introduce themselves as something that felt very personal to me. And to an extent it felt almost more personal than a personal brand because it was more playful. It was a fake superhero nickname. It wasn’t just, ‘I’m Meg Casebolt and I’m from megcasebolt.com.’ So, making the shift to Love At First Search, well, I know I kind of was outgrowing Megabolt Digital. I didn’t know what I wanted it to be and then I was actually writing an email for SEOctober, and I was talking about how the first time that I opened up Google Analytics, it was like Love At First Search. And the words just came out of my fingers, which I think will resonate with this audience more than many others where you’re just typing and typing and something comes out and you’re like, ‘Holy, whoa, that is not what I expected, but that’s awesome.’

And it’s the same thing that happened with SEOctober where I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a great name. What am I going to do with that?’ And over a week or two and I actually had a conversation with Kira about it at this point, where I said, ‘I’m thinking about rebranding to this new name.’ And part of the thought process was, as I grow the team, I want it to be able to be bigger than me. I don’t necessarily want my superhero, secret identity to live forever. Part of it was I was reading the book, Built to Sell at the same time and I thought how would I sell or grow or scale something that is so based on me as a personality and then part of it was knowing that from a search perspective, having a word that you want to be found for in your domain helps you. And it’s not something that I would recommend to people only for that.

I have a client who has an interior design studio in Dallas and she just reached out to me because she got an email from a domain provider that said, ‘Dallasinteriordesigner.com is available, do you want it?’ And she reached out to me to say, ‘Should I do this?’ And I said, ‘Not unless you want to move your entire website over there and rebrand everything,’ because just having a domain doesn’t help you having your website live somewhere helps, so it is a much bigger deal to rename your entire business than just to have a domain that that points to something.

So, as I was kind of weighing the pros and cons of this, I knew I wanted to move into a larger brand, I knew Love At First Search felt like, I’d like to say it’s like that feeling when you’re Googling something and you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t even know what this is called? What exactly am I supposed to type in?’ And then you type in whatever comes to your mind, and you’re like, ‘Yes, that’s the thing that it’s called.’ I think there’s even like a word for that feeling of once you learn a word, it shows up everywhere.

So once I came up with Love At First Search, I knew I wanted to move everything over. I knew I wanted to rebrand, and so I hired a developer to help me make sure that everything went really smoothly and made sure that all of my page redirects were going to the same place and that as if people looked for a specific page on Megabolt Digital, they would just automatically be redirected to the same page on Love At First Search, not redirecting everything back to my homepage, but doing a page by page shift over of all of my old blog posts, lining them up, mapping them out, making sure everything moved correctly.

This wasn’t too painful for me, because my old site and my new site are both on WordPress. If I’d been moving from Squarespace to WordPress, then the permalinks would have gotten all messed up along the way and so I would have had that literally write each one out. And then also writing a blog post at the beginning as soon as I announced the new brand and said, ‘Megabolt Digital is now Love At First Search,’ in the title tag so that people who are still looking for Megabolt Digital, even though it doesn’t say it that often on my new website, and also on my about page, saying Love At First Search, formerly Megabolt Digital, keeping that old name in the new website to make sure that any brand recognition that I had for my old brand will transfer over to my new brand is really important to me, obviously. I’ve spent years building up this persona and this brand, and I didn’t want to lose all the juice from it.

But there are absolutely ways that you can rebrand and not lose any of your old search traffic. You can just figure out ways to make sure Google knows this is where it was, but this is where it lives now and this is who I was, but this is who I am now. It’s kind of like when you get married and you want to change your Facebook name. Please put your maiden name in your Facebook name for like at least a month, so that way the new person doesn’t show up in my feed. And I’m like, ‘Who the hell is this?’ But now, you kind of transition everything slowly and let people know that the old name is now the new name.

Kira:  I definitely did not do that when I got married and changed my name.

Meg:  You are part of the problem, Kira.

Kira:  I am part of the problem in this world. If I ever, yeah, change my brand completely, I will want to work with you, Meg, but I mean, it’s just done so well and seamlessly. So, as we wrap up, I want to hear a little bit more about where you are today. You mentioned you’ve grown this team, you brought on the Director of Operations, shout out to Theresa, who you introduced us to and now, we’re working with her as well and she’s wonderful. I’d love to hear-

Meg:  Oh, my God. She’s so brilliant.

Kira:  She’s just so brilliant. I don’t want to talk her up too much because I don’t want to share her with the world. I feel like you we should just share her together because she’s so brilliant. So who else have you brought on to your team? What does your team look like today? And then where do you spend most of your time today beyond the road mapping session, where are you focused in your business day-to-day?

Meg:  So I also have my part-time ads manager Chrissy, and so she is still running that side of the business for the clients that I love and just didn’t want to let go of and that weren’t also in a scaling period in their business, if we can just maintain and make sure that things are still running smoothly and they’re getting good ROIs, I feel like we can just kind of keep going with that. And then I also have, with Theresa’s help, we brought on a project manager and some virtual assistants just to keep things running.

I have a couple of courses that I launch and sell and I’ve got some webinars that I’ve got running at any given time and I’m always up for doing challenges and other people’s groups and I do a lot of online summits. I have two really small kids, so I don’t love to travel very much, so I try to do as much promotion as possible from my desk in the cold Rochester, New York weather, whenever possible instead of needing to find childcare. So I have a lot of different ways that I try to be very visible online without needing to travel all over the country. So big on virtual summits, JB webinars, just trying to get as much done as possible without needing to leave my house or put on pants.

Kira:  And before we wrap up, we’ve got to talk about karaoke because I’ve heard you’re a karaoke star. So Meg, what is your favorite karaoke song? If we’re doing karaoke tonight, what are you singing?

Meg:  Oh, jeez, that’s so hard, because so much of it is like the mood of the bar. You know what I mean? It’s one thing when you go into one of those karaoke rooms with your friends and you can be a little irreverent, but you also want to like read the room to figure out what’s appropriate and what’s going on before you and after you.

Kira:  Well said as a marketer, well said.

Meg:  I have a strategy here. No, I would say that like my two go-to karaoke songs are probably, Irene Cara’s What A Feeling, like nice ’80s power ballad or Madonna’s Like A Prayer.

Rob:   Nice.

Kira:  Yeah. That’s awesome.

Meg:  You got to have like something people can belt along to like maybe Pat Benatar Hit Me With Your Best Shot. You want something people can like get energized by, not like something that’s going to make them sad and weepy, especially if you’re in a bar and people had had too many. You don’t want to bring out the drunk in the bar.

Rob:   What if it’s a sad and weepy bar. This is the break-up bar. You got to be prepared.

Kira:  I feel… yeah.

Meg:  Then you need to find a different place to hang out, right?

Kira:  We hang out in sad bars. That’s what we do. That’s part of how we hang. All right, well, we’re going do karaoke at some point, Meg, and over the next five years, it’s happening.

Meg:  Well, my entire wedding was karaoke. Did you know this?

Kira:  No.

Meg:  The entire thing, the entire reception was karaoke, from the first dance until the last song. My college roommate sang our first song which was At Last, and then we ended the night with I Had The Time In My Life, my husband and I doing a duet and the whole thing in between were all karaoke.

Kira:  Wow.

Rob:   Yikes.

Kira:  That’s awesome.

Rob:   Oh, yeah. Okay.

Meg:  I’m so glad we have talented friends. Otherwise, it could have gone downhill really quickly.

Rob:   Yeah, that would have been the case in my wedding I’m afraid so. If somebody wants to connect with you, Meg, find out more about maybe next year’s SEOctober or get on your list or even maybe connect with you to sing a little karaoke, where should they go?

Meg:  Sure, you can find me at loveatfirstsearch.com. If you’re trying to get started with your SEO, you can go to loveatfirstsearch.com/start and download my free SEO starter kit. I try to break it up as simply as possible to kind of explain how Google works, but also then help you write your Google content in the most fun way. So I have some Ad Libs in there. I have some flowcharts with memes from the office. I tried to make it as approachable as humanly possible. You can also grab me on Instagram, that’s probably the place where I hang out the most and that’s Love At First Search.

Rob:   Awesome.

Kira:  All right, Meg, thank you so much. This has been really fun today.

Meg:  I loved hanging out with you guys. Thank you so much for having me.

You’ve been listening to The Copywriter Club Podcast with Kira Hug and Rob Marsh. Music for the show is a clip from Gravity by Whitest Boy Alive available in iTunes. If you like what you’ve heard, you can help us spread the word by subscribing in iTunes and by leaving a review. For show notes, a full transcript and links to our free Facebook community, visit thecopywriterclub.com. We’ll see you next episode.

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