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[00:00:00] Stuff with the Web pages and things hasn’t happened, it’s sort of fallen in a hole because it requires him to do a few things, and now the good news is he’s okay, but it’s slowed my progress down a little bit from what I was trying to do, right?
[00:00:16] So what was the what was the experience like, did you present it in front of everyone and
[00:00:22] Not haven’t done that bit yet? With that initial meeting and trying to work out what I’m going to present, either the combination of reputation management and heat maps or just one or the other or do one now one later haven’t quite worked that out yet, but he’s really keen on both things. Eyes get out of his head and looking at the heat maps and things, so. You think he sees a future for doing that? That’s the plan. A minute.
[00:00:55] That’s good, man. I mean, it starts there, right?
[00:00:57] And then. Absolutely.
[00:00:59] Yeah, it kind of grows from there. That’s good. That’s good. Mark, I’m glad. I’m glad things are moving in a good direction for you. And it sounds like Australia has kind of got this this outbreak under under control. Unlike a lot of other places.
[00:01:13] No, not from what I hear, but oh, didn’t
[00:01:17] You say there was only five cases or something?
[00:01:20] Oh, there’s only been one in Australia, but it’s all down for five days down here because I didn’t know it was going to spread or not so good out of quarantine, people still bringing people, Australians coming back into into Australia. And this people still can’t get back in. But they’ve only got a limited number of quarantine rooms in hotels, which are shut down for some reason. This new, extremely virulent version of it got out to the guard that was in the corridor, keeping the people in their rooms, and he got it. And so they everywhere he went for two or three days until I found out he had it when he fortunately got sick. They contact trace all those people, but in the meantime, they shut down of all Perth and South West. So, yeah. And, you know, and that’s up five days later and the rest of the main area a week after that, so. I hope I hope they do.
[00:02:25] I hope it doesn’t turn out to be a huge outbreak there for you guys because,
[00:02:29] You know, a lot of people have different viewpoints on it, but you know.
[00:02:35] Nobody wants to deal with it. Whatever it is, so hopefully it’s minimized for you guys, but I’m glad I’m glad things are moving good for your business. So it’s obviously been kind of a big week for not only some people in J-K, but as got saw, we got our our. Api back. Right? So we got we got our API back on line for GMB, so you guys should all be able to access those. There’s definitely to be some changes and it’s not changes that I want to make, but it’s changes that I feel like we’re being forced to make. So it turns out one of the reasons that Google. Kind of took down our API and it wasn’t just us, you know, they did it to. A lot of our competitors out there, I actually don’t know of anyone that it didn’t happen to. And we appealed it and, you know, they said that our suspensions were were too high. So they track the percentage of suspensions for the people that are connected to the API. And you know, part of it, I know that there’s people that were using our system to kind of set up games, set up lots of games, you know, when they were doing some things that I guess we Google didn’t like. They actually cited it specifically. That’s, you know, there’s some issues there. So temporarily we have brought it, but we brought it back. Hopefully that’s not temporary, but we’ve brought it back and you guys probably noticed that you can’t make any edits on it right now. So the reason it’s that way is just because we know that part of what was causing the suspension is like people using the API.
[00:04:16] And previously I would I wouldn’t fault anyone for this. It seems like a really good way to try to push through changes that maybe wouldn’t go through on like normal Google, where you’re like changing the name and then changing the category, then changing the name again, you know, changing the name like nine times and then kind of moving it in the direction. So we’re going to have to put some defenses in there to make sure that we that we have longevity for for everyone that’s using the system moving forward. So we’re going to probably end up tracking suspensions on like an account level. And if it reaches a certain point, then we may disable the ability for people to make changes. So I don’t know, this is all kind of happening in in real time, and we’ve been working with Google back and forth and back and forth, and it’s just been kind of a nightmare going back and forth with them. But I’m happy that we got it back. And I know that some people probably that’s one of the main benefits for them. And I’ll tell you that Google didn’t single us out and they didn’t single. There’s all these other companies, so there may be companies that take a different strategy and we’re going to pay closer attention to those. But but my goal is to make sure that I give you guys a product that’s going to be good long term, right? So I didn’t hear about anybody having their account suspended like any jobs that were a result of this.
[00:05:38] So so all those were really well protected and everything. And I don’t think there’s any higher risk. I think the risk is is on our end to try to make sure that that we set things up in a way where you guys are always going to be able to use that GMB API. And I’ve got a lot of ideas on what we’re going to do. So I don’t, you know, it’s kind of fluid. I don’t know exactly if we’re going to do all the ideas, some of the ideas or what. So we’re kind of doing that. So right now, just as a blanket process, we’ve got we haven’t added back the functionality to edit. So we will be adding that back. We’re just going to add it back with and make sure that we do it in a way where if one person is like trying to like really spam the system, that doesn’t cause the whole API to go down. Right. And I think there is like maybe a few users that were probably accounting for more than 80 percent of the problem. So we’re just going to be, I guess, we’re forced into having to pay attention to this stuff now, which is like not what I wanted. But, you know, Google basically said they’re going to take away the API if, if not, it’s I saw every single like I said, I saw all the all the competitors went down the same day, right? So this seems like a process that they’re just going to be instituting across the board.
[00:06:59] But it’s just one more thing, you know, entrepreneurs, we solve problems and this is just like one one more problem, you know, like this is what we have to deal with this week and next week. It may be that, you know, whatever the citations are. As a factor, we don’t know, it’s changed over the last like six or seven years that I’ve been doing this, it’s it’s changed so many different times and I just kind of view this as as one more change. I don’t think it’s like a huge deal. I just, you know, we just continuously pivot. So I kind of wanted to make that clear and mentioned that to you guys, today’s call and a lot of these calls moving forward, I’m going to shorten these calls but provide more value like I did this last week. I posted the video and therefore for traction and the book and just kind of like coming to you with a shorter video, but also having like maybe one video a week where I’ve got more of like a training. That’s not maybe maybe it’ll be geared towards really generated or maybe it’ll be geared towards like the lead generation business, right? So one thing I want to talk about is, you know, it’s, you know, I’m sure of you guys saw that that Chris Fernandez passed away. Suddenly, he was in a car crash. He was in an Uber, and it appears that the other driver may have been, you know, drunk and and he was he was gone.
[00:08:24] And, you know, I met Chris one time briefly, and it just seemed like this guy had something special about him. Just a lot of energy really connected with him in the short, brief time that I spoke to him. So it was heartbreaking for me to see him gone. So sad. All right. So quickly, so young. And you know, it’s I’m the type of person I really like to reflect on these situations. And, you know. I think it’s important for us to to as much as possible, like use this. Chris was, I think he was thirty four. I just saw that A.. So yeah, Chris, I think he had just turned thirty four. He’d worked for Go Daddy and then met Dan and then became like a part of the J. K sales team. Right? But like Chris, had no plans on on getting killed in Uber. Right. And we none of us have plans on that happening. But it goes to show how quickly things can happen and how how how stuff can change so fast. And for those of you that are kind of. And I’m certainly guilty of this like kind of living in the future. Right. Your trading days today for like what are supposed to be better days of the future. And there’s no guarantee on those days. And you know, a lot of you guys that are new to this business and maybe money’s funny. And you know, they say money doesn’t buy happiness right now. Hold on one second. Somebody. I don’t know who that is.
[00:10:12] I got you been.
[00:10:15] You, too. Oops. Sorry, I didn’t mean to ask that, Adnan. Mark as well. Ok, cool. So, you know, I think it’s important for us to for those of you guys that are struggling and you’ve invested a lot, you’ve invested some some money and time and maybe you’ve gone at this business with like 50 percent of your of your capability, 50 percent in your fire. And I’ll tell you, that’s not the way to go about it. That’s how you drag on like a marginal lifestyle for for a long time. Right. And you never really get to where you’re going. So I think it’s important, though, like, go all in, go after this, get your Typekit on the other side of it. You know, if you kind of think about this and I’ve used this analogy with people before I lost a developer who is one of my closest friends. A few years ago, he died, suddenly had a brain aneurysm. I talked to him in the morning. That evening he was gone. And it was a huge wake up call because there’s all these cliches that life is short and you hear that stuff. But when it actually gets put in your face and you see it, that’s when it starts to. That’s when it starts to change. And, you know, like a week after he I had bought four houses and I was driving a car that was probably worth like twelve hundred dollars and I was there and I had never been to Hawaii. And like a week afterwards, I bought myself a car that I had liked and like, I want to enjoy this.
[00:11:34] And then I booked a three week trip to Hawaii. And then like this, happening with with Chris is another reminder for me that, yeah, I made that shift right after. But it didn’t. It didn’t stick. And I think it’s important that we that when you are, you don’t have a lot of money and you’re struggling to pay your bills. It’s like, that’s not how you want to live. It’s not like, yeah, money maybe doesn’t buy happiness, but not having to worry about that stuff, like, that’s certainly it’s just going to be hard to be happy when that’s existing. And, you know, we’ve only got so many days if you think of it kind of like a football field that’s maybe a hundred yards long. And for some people, it’s not one hundred yards long. Like for Chris, maybe it’s thirty four yards long. Right? We don’t know how long it is, but as we move across, we certainly can all guarantee that we’re running out of time. And it’s like you draw this line and you say, Hey, all these days over here, we’re like days where I couldn’t live life on my own terms because I was limited by my finances or I was limited by like this, that or the other. And the days after that are kind of like infinitely better when you don’t have to worry about that stuff. It’s important that you guys work in a manner that’s going to get you to the other side of that as fast as possible, because once you get to that spot where you have like 10 20 thousand coming in a month, then it changes things a lot.
[00:12:56] Right? I’ve worked a long time without taking days off. And, you know, last week and a half or two weeks, it’s kind of been tough. We love the GMB stuff went down. We had a number of other errors pop up some some issues in my agency. We were without electricity, without water. We went to a hotel, stuck inside the hotel for like three days and it was freezing. So I decided what I’m going to go on a ski trip. So like right now, I’m in Park City, Utah, with my two best friends and we’ve spent like the last two days skiing. And, you know, we’re staying in like a beautiful resort with a hot tub and like, this is something that I could do a lot more often, but I chose to try to put, like all my effort and all my work back into like not only lead generated, but for my clients and my agency. And I just think it’s important when you have like something like this, like let’s take something that’s terrible, that’s awful, like losing, you know, like I said, I didn’t know Chris very well, but like losing somebody like this that appears to have just made such an impact on people, which let’s take away something positive from this and let’s like shift our perspective and say, like, how can we how can we change, change the way we’re living so that, you know, we’re not always living in the future like, you know, your trading days days that you’re not going to get back.
[00:14:13] Some of us are older than others. So I just kind of wanted to share that with you guys. I hope that you guys can can find something in that and take something away from it, because I know for me, it’s certainly a learning lesson to like we like. And you know, I spent the last couple of days talking about my two friends that I’m here with this about is like, our business has done really well, but I’ve put a lot of the money back into the business and it’s always been like work, work, work. And it’s like for for wind and for for for what. So it’s something that I think it’s important for you guys to be thinking about as as we move forward. So hopefully you guys find some, some some value in that. Maybe for some of you guys are already living that way and maybe that will resonate with with others. But it’s certainly a lesson that I took took away from this and I just wanted to share it with you guys. Ok, so I’d love to hear from you guys as anyone. Is there something anybody that is struggling with anything with the business with with Lee generated? I know we’ve had a number of issues. I think that we’ve plugged a lot of them. Just go ahead and type into the chat. If anybody is stuck with with anything and a couple of
[00:15:20] Quick questions that you could probably knock out really fast while they’re doing that, Patrick Lu is asking Are we able to post to our GMB through lead generated? That helps a ton. I think somebody else posted are we are able to post pictures and and whatnot. So is that still live or yeah?
[00:15:40] So the only the only thing that is not live, to my knowledge, I haven’t actually tested a post since we’ve had it back and tried to get it back for you guys as soon as possible is the ability to edit, like the details of your GMB, such as the name, the category, phone number hours, this type of thing description. So like I said, we’re going to be bringing that stuff back. Everything else should be functioning exactly how it was before. We’re working towards improving the posting. I know that we’ve had a number of issues, a lot of the things that we’ve struggled with when it appears that your post doesn’t go live is actually Google is rejecting it and we’re trying to get our kind of validation in place. So as you guys make this post that we reject it before it goes to Google and then Google rejects it, and it appears that like your post didn’t show up. So that’s been we we have a log and every single one of those was because Google was rejecting it, so posting should be working. And then I know one of the things that a lot of the the patterns that existed for the rejections of the post was people that were putting URLs and phone numbers. Google, like, gave a message that they didn’t like it, but some of them seem to go through. So I’m not exactly sure like what their criteria is for allowing that, but I know that the phone number and URLs inside the post were something that Google that was that part of the error message that they were sending to us when those were getting rejected. But you guys should be able to post without without any issues on that. Cool. One other question that’s
[00:17:08] Coming into the lead generated group for approval is can you geotag pics on your GMB? I thought the answer was yes, but then he saw an attachment. So can you speak to that?
[00:17:21] Not a hundred percent. Sure, I understand the question. Can you do it? Does it mean? Can you do it within regenerated generated? Is that the question?
[00:17:28] I understand it. Yeah. Can you do it within?
[00:17:30] Yeah. So we actually you cannot right now do it. And I had that as a higher priority for our development team, and I moved it down because especially over the last month or two months, there’s been a lot of. Speculation over. Like how how Google is interpreting the geotag photos. You know, it used to be when you would download it back that the photos would still remain geotagged. And now if you download it, download it from Google, it appears that the geotagging has been removed, so that doesn’t mean that they’re not using it in the same way they might have changed something. A lot of what we do is guesswork. Google doesn’t come and tell us, like, geotag the photos and that’s going to be better, like they want it to be. So like, it’s a lot of like reverse engineering that is going into this. So I think it is something we’ll be adding in. And if I were like, in your guy situation where I’m trying to get every edge I can, I would still be geotagging my photos on my agency. Jeff and I work with geotag our photos not unsure of like the fact I think it’s always been something that is like it’s not going to move the needle as as much as some other things. Like I would try to focus more on getting reviews. I would focus more on the citations and backlinks and content on your sites as a way to kind of move that needle, especially mentioning the areas that you want to rank for in the services that you want to rank for within the reviews.
[00:19:00] Ok. So I see that Greg says any anyone know why the numbers are showing 80 percent complete because they are missing the business logo and logo is actually there in photos. I have the situation in several of my games. So Greg is 80 percent complete. I imagine that’s coming from Google’s dashboard, right? Yeah. Ok. I’m not 100 percent sure, I think I’ve dealt with this a little bit in my own agency. I’ll tell you what is. I know that there’s a there’s a couple of people from my team that are on here. I would love to find out if that’s the same situation. Let me just message one person for my team and see because I think we’ve experienced that too, where we think we have everything filled out and it still shows like we’re not at one hundred percent. That’s actually one of the pieces that we’re going to be adding in there is that that percentage completion into the GMB profile. My goal is to help you guys try to identify the weaknesses of these jobs and to do it programmatically. So so what I mean by that is I want you guys to get notifications if something hasn’t been done right. So like if we can determine the percentage of completion and we can understand, like if we can pull in all the information from Google and we can say, Hey, you know, this is like, Hey, Greg, you’re at 80 percent because you’re missing this and this, right? I think that would be really useful.
[00:20:26] And then if we could start to almost apply some like AI, where we start noticing patterns of, hey, the ones that seem to rank the best have this in this market. So that’s the second part of it is really long term. But that is where I want you guys to know where my mind is on this because that like I look at this and I think about this and I’m like, What can I do to try to make this easier for you guys? What’s missing? Like, where is the like, the disconnect on this? And I think providing that type of information, we have the data points. So like, how can we analyze the data points and put it into a system where we can deliver this to you guys and have it be kind of a notification system and not so much of the like? Take some of that. Take some of the work out of your hands by using some some of this automation. So that’s that’s kind of my plan. I don’t have a great answer for you, Greg. I’m just going to message a guy on my team and see what he says about this.
[00:21:25] Now, just for a little more information, I’m sure that at least most of these that are showing 80 percent complete now, we’re one hundred percent at one time when I loaded the the logo in there to begin with. And I’ve gone back in in several cases and tried to add the logo in multiple times and did a refresh, got out, came back in and everything else, and it’s still showing 80 percent.
[00:21:47] Why do you think it’s the logo?
[00:21:49] Well, because it says, Oh, it actually tells you that there is at a logo. Yeah, it says 80 percent complete. You need to add a logo or the logo is there and it’s right in the logo. The logo? Yeah. You know,
[00:22:03] It sounds like it sounds like a Google
[00:22:05] Glitch to me. Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like something’s going on with them. But that’s why I ask anybody else having that problem with nobody else seeing that having that problem. I’m having that problem. But I don’t think you should worry about it. I think a couple of weeks ago, I don’t know if y’all noticed people with the GMB app. Was there photos it went through the same thing on the GMB app, on their phones? So I had a client reach out to me and say, like, Hey, did you remove my cover photo and my logo photo because my GMB app is telling me that it’s not there? And so we logged into his dashboard, everything was there, and then I’ve had multiple people come in and say, Hey, they were using the app. The app had some sort of glitch. A couple of days later, everything was fine. So I’m sure it’s just probably some update Google did. It’s going to resolve itself. It’s probably something that’s been going like this for a couple of months. I go on there periodically just to try to boot it up there and change it. You know, everything needs to be 100 percent, my opinion. And it just it was there at one time and it’s gone again. So yeah, just kind of, where are you?
[00:23:12] Are you experienced with like the communication and outreach back and forth with Google? My business.
[00:23:18] I’ve tried it a few times on some suspensions and things like that. I had about 50 50. Look on it. I’ve got one that’s that got suspended right after right after I activated it out of out of three that I recently activated and the other two went through fine and they’re all set up the same, basically, you know?
[00:23:39] Yeah, I think I think it could be a good idea. Jeff, maybe we could do this on our team is to find one of these profiles. That’s not at one hundred percent when we believe it should and just reach out to Google and have them confirmed that it is a glitch because I think it’s important when we’re in these situations like. We want this to rank as quickly as possible, and if there’s like a small edge that we can take on this and we should be doing it and one person solves this problem, we can all assume it’s a glitch. But if we can just seek a confirmation from Google before we completely, completely make that assumption, then I just I don’t want to be leaving any money on the table based on just like an assumption. Just because Google has glitches sometimes doesn’t mean that like this is, maybe there’s some weird little thing that we all can do. And we’re not just like none of us have understood that that’s what we need to do to get it to the 100 percent mark because I know that when I was the one that was doing it, I would always get it there.
[00:24:38] And obviously a lot’s changed since that’s happened. But I just want to make sure before we take it for granted that that that that in fact is the case. I think it’s really important for you guys that are, you know, it seemed like Google had kind of a freeze on the jobs there for a while. And about two weeks ago or so, it seems like stuff started coming out of that freeze. And we’ve been able to get a lot of our games verified again, where it seemed like maybe for two months, we were not one of the the the things that has worked for us and I encourage all of you guys to do this. Greg, for years that are suspended, that’s not the end of the story. That’s just like I would say, probably. I would estimate seventy five percent of the time when our games get suspended, we make them live like just back and forth with Google, like just we put it on a Google calendar and we just harass them until they let it go through. And sometimes they’re asking for additional proof
[00:25:37] Of of
[00:25:38] Different things. And, you know. I’ve heard of people that are doing different like things in Photoshop to try to get things life right, so I would not be giving up on anything if anything has been stuck in pending for more than like three days, I’ll be reaching out to Google. And like if it moves into suspended, then I would be like trying to get it on suspended, right? Just don’t be giving up on these. The the GMB process has changed a lot. I was talking to I was talking to someone the other day about how much has changed in the last five or six years. And it’s almost like the GMB process used to be automated in the past. And now it’s more of a manual process that requires our interaction. That doesn’t mean that, like it’s not it can’t be successful. That’s absolutely not the case. We’ve seen it in our agency. We’ve over this last week. I think we got like five or 10 of them that went live, right? So and the key was just that back and forth with Google kind of having those having those conversations and you have to be the one that follows up with them. Because like while they might call you twenty five times a day for Google ads like apparently you don’t really care if like your GMB stuck in pending, it’s like for whatever reason, they don’t seem to have the same follow up, right? So I think just staying on it, you’re going to get a lot of success by going back and forth with Google on those things.
[00:27:05] Yeah, I’ve tried a number of things with them, you know, pleading with them that, hey, we’re in the middle of a pandemic here. Everybody’s working out of their house or whatever. You know, we’ve got a residential address basically for for most of my properties, and they want me to send pictures of the sign and everything. And I said, you know, guys, I can’t put a sign up on the front of my my condo, you know? Right? I just, you know, it’s not allowed by the association. I don’t do most of my business out of here. I go places to do my business. Right, right. You can explain that to them all you want. They read between the lines and say, No, you know?
[00:27:43] Yeah, yeah, I mean, Greg, situations like that, like, what if, like, I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, Google is not the police, and you could put a sign in front of your house, take a picture and then take the sign down.
[00:27:57] Right? Yeah.
[00:27:59] And or you could like it can be done in Photoshop pretty easily. You could hire somebody from online job stop and probably pay him eight bucks and then send that over to them. Right. This is the company that has that’s monitoring our our phone calls and monitoring our searches and all this stuff. And like like what we’re doing is we’re trying to help small business owners right in the end, like if we’re good at what we do, we’re trying to deliver more business to them. And like. This this like there’s no sign, it’s just one problem that needs to be solved. It’s not. It’s certainly not going to be what stops me from getting a job in a place. And you know, my business, my business owners that call me up and tell me how important it is and how they’re taking their family on a vacation. And you know, I’m not going to let like Google. I don’t have a like, that’s not how I’m going to fail. Right. So not that you’re failing, Greg, but I just I would. I would just be just like, I never want to do anything immoral in my business, and I encourage you guys to stay in integrity with that stuff, but you know, you guys got to decide what that means for you guys. And but I’m just like, I’m committed to trying to be successful for for my clients, and I’m not going to let.
[00:29:15] Google’s last communication I got from one of them now says, I’ve got to participate in a video call with them or something, and I just haven’t had had a chance to do it. You know, I’m in Texas, I’m right down the road from you. I guess I’m in north of Houston by contract and I feel like I’m sorry.
[00:29:33] How would you like that?
[00:29:33] Freeze last week didn’t care much for at all. I spent three and a half days in my house without any air conditioning or without any heating, and it’s 41 degrees in my house. And and then on top of that, we ran out of water. It was the same for us when
[00:29:47] We got down to, I don’t know, actually, I don’t even know how low it got down, but I was at forty seven degrees and I had my assistant. She actually called forty seven hotels before she found a hotel for us to stay in and then we ended up driving. It was called, we went. We drove to College Station and got a hotel for three days so that like, I can’t afford to be off the grid. And I knew that I was, you know, like I was going to be taking a trip. So I can’t afford to be off the grid like, you know, I’m getting my tickets coming in and my support teams asking me questions. And I don’t know if this was happening for you, but my cell phone signal, just like I don’t know if it was because everyone was drilling the towers on their phones, but I had like no reception for two hours and then it would come back for ten minutes and then it would be gone. And it was just like,
[00:30:30] Man, this was pretty consistent. We lived off our phones, you know, we we hooked our computers up my, my laptops, got broadband and built in. And so it’s a lot stronger than my phones even. And it was pretty, pretty reliable. But I had to go sit in my truck to charge it, you know? Yeah, cool.
[00:30:49] Yeah. All right. Well, we had talks. We had talked about getting together with some of the Texas people. I want to make sure that we keep this call focused on stuff. But we talked about organizing like a meetup group, and I’ll make sure that you’re if you’re open to joining us, Greg. It’d be cool to get some people together and kind of do a mastermind. Anybody else, obviously outside of Texas is welcome to. I’ll put more information about that when it comes down.
[00:31:16] His encore. What’s up, man, how are you doing? Doing good, man. I go ahead and share my quick story with for the GMB. That’s OK, because it just resonated also about not giving up on them. And I had one that went into suspension. I was actually kind of freaking out because it was one I had set up so long ago, like two to three years ago. And so it was this something that had been around for a while, right? So it’s even more scary. And yeah, sure enough, you know, as paranoid as I was reached out for support or whatever or reinstatement and then got the classic message, Hey, you need to submit proof and documentation. So I didn’t want to go the DBA route because at least when I looked it up, it was a little bit more expensive. I thought it was a little bit more involved. So I actually just was able to get a utility bill. Look at if that certain utility was used in that state and just honestly photoshop the address. So I want to bring that up because. You know, it is possible to get a re verified, and that’s what happened. And they did reinstate it, but there was a lot of back and forth. And what’s actually funny is they ended up calling, I think, like I’m not 100 percent sure, but I think they call that line and my guy picked up, thankfully, you know, and it worked out, but it was like the funniest thing because the business owner that I have on that, he’s like a really sturdy guy.
[00:32:59] And he was like, Who is this? And they were like Google. And he was like, Google. Well, listen, sir, like any solicitation calls, you can reach out to my email and they were like doing this like verification thing. That is it connected to a business owner. But the way he spoke was so authoritative they were. They were kind of like, OK, I guess it was just the funniest thing to me. I have it recorded, so I’m just saying it’s live right now. I think I might have gotten a little lucky. I was a little worried that they would reach out, and I was like, I don’t know, do I connect the calls to myself for the time being or whatever? But I just left it. But I got kind of lucky because I hadn’t told him about the reinstatement. I didn’t want him to freak out. But afterwards, I had a quick conversation. So I guess what I’m trying to say is like, if you have a client on the hook already and then it gets pending or suspension or whatever, work with your client and let them know of the situation. If they’re a good client, you’ve been working with them, they’ll understand, you know, they’re on your side. If you found like a decent guy. So I literally just told him, Hey, by the way, if they do perchance call for reverification, here’s the stuff. Ok, your name is Ben. This is your address and this is your phone number. And he was like, Cool, man. Got it! You know, so, you know. Absolutely that.
[00:34:23] Yeah, yeah. That’s that’s good stuff, man. Because we do the same thing we had. We had a couple and we just I have a I have a girl who answers calls in my agency and we just moved over the calls for the ones that we thought Google would call on. And they did call on us. They did call and we had the information prepared for her as well. So she was like, Yeah, well, I work for them. This is the name. Here’s the address. Blah blah blah. And then I think within only a few hours after that, it was or maybe it was the next day or something, but it went live again, like,
[00:34:55] Ok, wait, so that was when you say, Girl, that was your team, that was your staff, like VA. We took
[00:35:02] It off. We took it off the client for a little while and we just had her handle it just to make sure. But I would feel comfortable, probably with most of my clients. You kind of know, like you probably know, like based on you’ve had conversations with the client, like did they seem like you’re going be able to handle the situation effectively or not? And then, right, explain to them like, Hey, like I just we got to get this perfect because we got one chance and this is going to be worth a lot of money to get this thing back live again to you. This is where this is going. We got one shot to get this right. So I would like this person in my agency has handled this a lot. She knows exactly what to say. She knows. So that was kind of how you could frame it if you needed to. But that’s I think that’s great because, you know, I’m sorry. How do you pronounce your name in court?
[00:35:51] It’s there’s a lot of different pronunciations, but you can just say on court.
[00:35:56] So it’s on course that I think this is a really, really good thing for you guys to know. It’s kind of like the one two punch follow up to what I was saying a few minutes ago, where it’s like, Stay on these people. I just just keep harassing them until you get your GMES back live or you push them through pending. And this may be one step that you have to deal with as a part of that right? And what he said about the electric bill, I’ve heard that’s really effective way to do it, too, so I’m pretty sure you could probably Google whatever the city is electric company. And then once you know the electric company, just say electric company bill and you could probably download it.
[00:36:30] And yeah, like so one thing I’ll add is like, I don’t I think it’s. It’s someone, you know, like whether it’s like goes to India or whatever, they’re not looking at it. And like this fine print amount of detail, I think personally, so you can get away with like an OK job, but do like the basics. So like mine was in Indiana, so I made sure that utility company was in Indiana. That’s all, you know. Yeah.
[00:37:01] No, you’re not trying to fill. You’re not trying to like Trick an engineer at Google. You’re trying to trick like. Probably somewhere close to a minimum wage employee like that, like they’re just trying to do their job and like it’s it’s, you know, I don’t want to spend a ton of time focusing on on like trying to deceive them, but I would just like you guys like don’t give up. Push through this stuff. Be creative. Find ways. And just like honestly, a lot of times you don’t even need to go this far. You can just like back and forth communication. Explain to them, you know, like, it seems like this is going to be just become part of the process if it’s not already like, it seems like
[00:37:47] That’s where things are moving. I think, like the Reframe is maybe important. I think it’s a good and bad thing because let’s say that these are a little bit harder to get up right, which obviously does what Patrick is alluding to. But doesn’t that mean that less and less people are going to be willing to go through that today? What’s that? I won’t get one these days. Then you’re you’re separate yourself from the people that just kind of gave up, too. So like if you can have that mentality, whatever, you’re fucking waiting on it, bro. What are you going to find out? This is Matt. Make me fucking run.
[00:38:22] Oh, all right, let me. All right, sorry, Encore. I just.
[00:38:27] Oh, no worries. I know that, you know, I was actually looking at Jared’s post, and I think that was inspiring. He was like, I just got this verified. And then someone asked, like, How’d you do it? And then he was like. Well, I change categories if I had to. I got it out of, you know, or I emailed them back and forth. I, you know, if all else fails, I was just going to push through and just put another one or whatever. So that’s basically the right mentality. And I think, I guess if we continue on that, it would actually make us even more unique because the process is harder. But once you do get through it and hopefully it’ll stick right.
[00:39:11] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is this is the the moral problem that I have with it is it’s also harder for the small business owner now to get these lives and they and they need them, you know, and it’s it’s you can’t stay like this, like, I think long term because. So they have so much value, it’s just like we can’t have the small business owner who doesn’t understand the GMB process, having to jump through all these hoops to be able to because we’re not going to find all the small business owners, but they should still have the opportunity to have a successful business. And the GMB is a part of that. But I like I said, I’m keeping this call to an hour today, so I’m going to make sure that we we cover other topics. I’ve got a lot of updates. I know that we I’ve mentioned this the last few weeks and I’m hoping that we’re going to get them live here pretty soon. We had to put a lot of our focus over the last week towards this GMB API issue that we now have live. One of the updates that we did release, I know that a few of you guys have been struggling with heat map credits, not renewing if those if that’s still happening, obviously, just let me know. We’re working towards fixing that. But we did release an update where you guys will now be able to purchase like packs of heat maps.
[00:40:25] So if you run out, you’re not limited to your plan and we made them really affordable. Like I looked at all the pricing that existed for for like the for the heat maps within the different plans. And then I chose something that was that was really comparable to. So I think it will be affordable if you spend a little bit more. The price for a heat map goes down. So and these new ones, the credits won’t expire. You’ll see this pop up if you run out of heat map credits before it was confusing for people because there was not really any feedback that would say why the heat map wasn’t running, but the person the person would be out of credits, right? So but now it’ll be really obvious. It’ll just say like, like purchase, purchase more when you hit that that spot. Obviously, you can always upgrade your plan, you’re going to get more on a monthly basis. But and then, you know, kind of moving in towards this direction of trying to like if you maybe you don’t want the whole plan and maybe you want certain modules. So we’ll have those options as well. But the heat, the heat map one is probably going to be the one that goes that way first, because that seems to be the one that people are exhausting. I would love to just be able to give unlimited heat maps to everyone, but it actually is something that like because of the way we do it.
[00:41:36] It hurts. It’s just like a really server intense process to go and move it different all the different longitude spots and then scrape all the results and then put it like. So that’s why you guys get put into a queue sometimes where it says not started, because if there’s too many people running at the same time, we put it in your queue so it doesn’t slam the server and make sure we’re also we’ve made a number of changes and we’re going to be moving that. We’re going to be adjusting the number that are running at one time up quite a bit. So I didn’t know what to expect when we launched this thing of like how like how much is I knew that I was going to slam the server when one of them runs. But so like, what if ten are running at the same time? Like, what effect does that have? So now we’ve kind of like got some of this test results in and we’re moving it up and we’re upgrading our server. So so far, the feedback I’ve got is that it usually starts within a couple of minutes for most people. So we just want to make sure that that user experience is always great for you guys. And so we’re kind of monitoring these different things. So those are some of the other changes. We’re really close on releasing the pipeline system.
[00:42:44] We’re working with cross-selling to have text messaging built in where you can have like the text messaging come from, like for your review requests, right? Or to have like automated follow up and using like text messages as a part of it. So kind of working with the crosslink team to make that happen. I know that some of you guys have had an issue where you delete calls and then our system is like trying to sync with cosplaying so you delete it and then it like brings the call back in. So we’re going to be making this change. I was hoping that it would be live by today, but it looks like it will probably be a few more days. We’re actually not going to allow the deleting. We’re going to market that spam and the reason that I want to do it this way. This bit, you’ll have the option if you mark it as spam. By default, it won’t show the calls that are spam, but it’ll just be a toggle switch and you can turn it back on and don’t show your spam phone calls again. The reason I want to do it this way is I want to use that data from the spam phone call, so lets say a spam call or calls Jarrett and then he calls Greg, and they’ve both marked a spam. What I want to set up is like a like a pooled, confident, like a confidence level based on other users.
[00:43:55] And so you could set and say like, Hey, this is spam that we can automatically mark this no, as spam. So that’s kind of like where I want to take that. I think that like, you know, we’re probably getting banned by a lot of the same numbers, and it just seems like let’s try to use that against them with our strength in numbers like we’re like, everyone is like blocking the same number. Like, how can we do that? And like, take it back to call Sling and say, Hey, call Sling. Like, twenty five people have marked this this caller as spam, and then the user can determine whether they want. They want to, like automatically block the caller when they call based on like whatever confidence level you set. So that’s kind of the direction I want to take this in. But before we get to that spot, we should have the spam and there in that kind of spam toggle. So that’s that’s one of the ones we have a completely modified email system where you guys are going to be able to for the lead management, the GMB management. Reputation management and questionnaires, you can basically set up an email like you authenticate, so maybe you have like Yahoo, or maybe you have your own domain brand and one you can add that into our system and then on a company level and on a module level, you can decide like, hey, for the lead management model for Timmy’s tree care.
[00:45:13] I want it to come from this email address, but for window cleaning, I want it to come from this one, so you’ll have a lot of flexibility. We’re also working hard towards the user roles of like being able to set up your own user roles. I posted this question in the group didn’t get a lot of responses, but I would love to hear like if you guys had additional users, what permissions they would have like, what would you like to see from these, from these, from the like? It’s really easy for us to just like, go through and say, OK, we’re making a user all called like GMB person and they can do this and we’ll make another one building out. The logic for this, like custom user role is taking us some time, but I could probably in just a couple of days, I could have another like three or four different user roles. And I’m just wondering what you guys would like to see for those user roles. So if any of you guys have strong opinions on that, look for my post in the lead generated group on that and share it. And let’s let’s talk about how we can create these extra user roles as a temporary workaround until we give you guys the ability to fully customize the users. So that’s that’s some of the stuff that we’re working on.
[00:46:25] I mentioned the pipeline stuff. We’ve got a couple of other things, some of the things I want to keep under wraps a little bit. We have the heat map averaging where you’re going to be able to have like groupings of of averages. So let’s say you want to see the average for all of like for like you’ve got like GMB, one for Timmy’s tree care and you want to see like, what’s my heatmap average for all of these? Having that and then also having like a compare screen. So those are some of the things that should be coming in the near future. Really excited to get some of the stuff out or mobile apps. I’ve just got our first version of our Android and iPhone app, so that’s kind of exciting to see that that’s been worked on for several months. So we’re kind of reaching this point where just months and months of development, where you guys maybe haven’t seen some of these updates that are a lot of them are going to hit at the same time, and it’s really going to change the system a lot. You know, it’s becoming more like a lot of CRM functions with deals and reminders and this type of stuff where you know, you can assign them to different people on your team, this type of thing. So what we see here is anybody struggling with questions? Are there any questions or anything anyone struggling with right now?
[00:47:41] Patrick Yeah. Can you point me to where I think? Excuse me, can get some more information on saving and using different grids there so I can have a couple of different ones. And also related is the use of the averages and how it works. Is there? Is there something on all that stuff, please?
[00:48:03] Um, I I understand your first question, the use of the averages and how that works. Yeah. You want me to. You want me to explain how the average is work or is that your question?
[00:48:14] Well, the grid is one one question. Sorry, the other one was the average. Yeah, how it works or I see your information there, but I’m not sure I understand how to use it.
[00:48:24] Ok. Let me share my screen. Let’s let’s jump into it and let’s talk about it because I know that I’ve answered this same question for people a few times in chat request. And OK, so let’s go down here. We have a user interface that’s probably going to be user interface change for the heat map that’s going to probably be out tomorrow. I’ve already got it working on my my test server. So we’re going to it’s just going to slightly move some of the stuff around to make it easier. So let’s talk about first what the configuration is and what the grid is. And then I’m going to talk a little bit about keyword lists, how those work in the averages. So the grid? Ok, let me load this up. We’ll pull up my favorite one awesome roofing company here. So this whole area over here on the left side, this is what makes up a configuration. If I click on Save, I have the option to save the configuration or the grid. I can do this at the same time. So what the difference is is the configuration kind of includes everything. It includes the GMB, it includes the keyword and the grid. This is the grid over here on the right side. Ok, so let’s make this look a little bit prettier. We’ll just choose this company here. Maybe that will give us a little bit. Whatever. All right. So this is the grid and what the grid consists of is like the position, the size, the shape. In the location. Ok, so if I set up a grid, let’s say that I have like 15 different clients in Austin and I’m always searching the same area, then I can save that grid and then I can load it right. So if I were to go back here and choose new and I choose load. Let’s choose this one, so this is going to be Austin, right? Well, it’s going to do nothing. I don’t know what’s going on here.
[00:50:27] John, again, my biggest issue with that we’ve got in a big bay was a great big bay like that, so I don’t want to take a square grid or even the other one, but it takes a bit of work to get it to fit the grid and the coastline around. I don’t want to be having bridge in the middle of the ocean, so if I can get one that suits our whole region or district like that, that’s what I’m really aiming for. Yeah, that’s
[00:50:55] Exactly what this is meant to be for. So you don’t have to define it every time.
[00:50:59] If I can do it, but it just takes time every time, and I just haven’t been how to work that out. Sorry.
[00:51:03] Seems like that pop up is is having issues right now. I’ll have one of the guys on our team. Take a look at that. Let’s try going over here. So this one, I think this one of these, I drew a custom shape on. So that’s kind of what this is for, is it we’ll save. See how that’s a custom shape that’s not square and that just kind of loaded up, right? So that’s what that’s the piece right there for you, Marcus. Joel, draw it out. Run the heat map after you run it, then save it. So if I go back and I look at one of these, this is a different city. If I look at one of these, I can save it. And if I save that grid, it’s going to save the shape and the location and all the different parts of like, whatever you drew over here independent of the GMB name and the word, it’s just the grid. So if we just call this map area over here with all these dots, this is the grid and saving that will save all the details of everything you created over here. The configuration will save everything, right? So a configuration is not only the grid, it’s also the keyword, and it’s also the GMB that’s associated with the search. Ok. So does that make sense, mark? Do you understand how that works?
[00:52:22] Yep. Excellent. That’s exactly what I want to do, and I’ve found I can see so many more potential clients by looking down the information underneath. And of course, I can just get them straight away with one GMB, one heat map. But when I want to go to a different niche, I just want to block the same grid to be able to use that just whack in my different keywords for that niche and then go and do the same thing again because I had all different shapes and sizes on my selection of heat maps in the minute. And it’s a pain in the ass, and some of them are not very efficient. I just want to get it set out, sort it out and then redo what I’ve got to be more consistent.
[00:53:05] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that’s going to be the key for you, and it’s kind of like a one two punch with with this. So this is the keyword list. So so basically how this works is you make a list and then you can add in as many keywords as you want. And then if you were to go back over here to this again, like this user interface is going to be improved, in my opinion, tomorrow or probably the next day, probably tomorrow. But you make a list and then you can select your list. So I had five or six different keywords on my roofing list because ranking for one word you can choose. Choose your top word in the word that you’re going to go after, and that’s great if you start to rank for that, but you’re not really going to blow it up for this business, and it’s not going to most likely. I mean, the exceptions exist, right? But most likely, it’s not going to be a huge dominating presence until you start to rank for a bunch of different keywords, right? So this keyword list put in your top keywords and then run the heat map for all of those. So this is kind of moving us over to like, I don’t like I care how I rank for like my top keyword, but I care more about how I rank for my top 10 keywords or my top five or seven keywords, right? I know if I’m ranking for all the seven, that’s where the big money is. That’s where my client is going to start to get a lot of business because he’s got a lot of phone calls.
[00:54:26] So like usually even if it’s just the best keyword only like you’re probably better off ranking for the second, third and fourth than you are for just one. Right. So but you so it’s I think it’s important for us to look at these across, you know, across several different keywords, and that’s why we set up this keyword list. So let’s talk about the averages real quick. So let’s look at. This is important. The average is important for due diligence. It’s important for research so we can see. It’s pretty obvious that I think sometimes they’ll be hiding in there. The average of this one would be a 20. Right, because everything on here is a 20, right, so. This is what it’s doing when you ask how the averages work is it’s it’s going through and it’s taking the total number of spots on here. So this looks like it was a 13 by 13 grid. So there’s one hundred and sixty nine spots and it’s going to take like the average score and then divide it by the total number of points. And it’s going to tell you like your average ranking is this. So if we were to look at this and I were to click this searchable thing, we can see that the company that has the best average is this affordable Austin roofing solutions. So their average is at thirteen point eighty four. So sometimes these averages might be one point zero. Sometimes we’ll be like this. I’ve noticed that in more competitive niches, these these averages are higher, right? So. Because it’s hard for one person to take over a whole like a whole area, right, like if you were to look at Austin Roofing.
[00:56:06] So the city with the surrounding areas, there’s like two million people. Roofing is a competitive niche by default. So, you know. That’s one thing that that that one pattern that I’ve noticed in difficult niches is like these numbers will generally be higher when you see one that is like a one point zero. That doesn’t mean that’s a tough niche, and it doesn’t mean that this person imagine this number was 1.0 so that every single spot on here is one. Right? That doesn’t mean that this person is a tough competitor. This is their average relative to the rest of the people that are in the market. If they if they’re a one and they’ve got, you know, they’ve just done, they’ve done a little bit more than everybody else in the market who’s done nothing. It doesn’t mean that they’re tough. It just means that like no one else did anything. So it’s a relative number. It’s important to keep that in mind. These numbers here the northwest, northeast, southwest, southeast, these are the quadrants so that this is the northwest, so I’ll take the top twenty five percent. We’ll take the top right. Twenty five percent is the northeast. Southwest will be the bottom twenty five percent. So that’s kind of how that’s working. You start drawing weird shapes, then it’s it’s still going to be accurate, but it’s just like, you know, it’s it’s it’s going to be subject to some, some small changes in the differences there of how that’s divided up.
[00:57:28] But that’s just a way of showing you where your strengths and weaknesses are in the current grid. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Twenty nine, 90 out of 160.
[00:57:39] Yeah. What do you think that means, Mark?
[00:57:41] Well, it looks like there’s sixty nine squares there, and they featured in 90 of them, but I don’t know how well it features.
[00:57:50] That’s right. So let’s look at them. You see that these ones that say 20. We put 20 when there are no 20 or there are over 20. I would say it’s safe to assume that they’re probably not 20. It could be 30 or 50 or one hundred. Yes. So you can see that all these ones that are 20. There’s like it looks like there’s going to be seventy nine spots on here that are better. 20. Based on that right there in 90 of them and some of them will still be orange or red, like you can see, that’s 17. So that one counts. So that’s kind of what the averaging is. So one of our next updates for the heat map that I was mentioning earlier is the group averaging. So we added this advanced search stuff in here where you can search by GMP’s or tags and stuff like this. So now the next step that we have that in places like Let’s. Give you averaging based on these groupings, right? Ok, like what’s my average for these games? So that way, if you run these like six or seven keywords, you can see how many like what’s the average for those six or seven keywords? Not just one at a time. What we really want to know is how we’re what we’re doing for all of them, right? Yep. Is that all clear?
[00:59:04] Yeah, that’s good. It just seems to be so much information there that all from the one heat map operation that I can do due diligence from that and say, Okay, well, this guy here, he’s got a bit of potential. He’d be a really good person to approach to take this legend.
[00:59:26] That’s right. That’s right. And also, when you’re going to do your due diligence mark, you know that this is the top person in the market, right? This person that’s got this thirteen point eight four. Yep. So this is probably who you want to spend some of your time doing your due diligence on. If you’re going to go into a market, you want to evaluate the top dog, right? Not some random person. So whenever like, we don’t if you’re going to if I were in the spot, we’re going to go into a new market and I was doing my niche research. This would one hundred percent be part of my process to figure out who do I need to do my due diligence on and make sure that I’m evaluating the person who is the best in the market and not just like who happens to come up first and like this random spot, right? Because it can be very different. Like this person could rank in only one spot in one hundred and sixty nine spots, and you could think that they’re the best in town. And then you do your due diligence, build out your site. It’s hard to rank someday. You realize that this is a tough market and you evaluated somebody who just happened to rank in the spot where the Google search came up. So this averaging is a really good piece for the due diligence to make sure that you’re choosing the right markets and you’re choosing the right person to kind of evaluate on this,
[01:00:41] But also found by looking at that there’s companies in there that I didn’t even know existed doing that, that thing there. So that’s interesting from a business point of view, whether that one of those guys might be an up and coming, you know, go get it. And he might be the person that that you want to sell this to because he wants to take out of the world.
[01:01:01] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s the type of person that I want to. That I want to know, too. That’s not who I want to work with. I view part of our job when when we go in, there is like, you know, I was talking to my my two buddies that I’m on on this ski trip and they’re not in the marketing industry, they’re poker players. And you know, we’re talking about how when we come in and you dominate a market, you’re taking business away from somebody else. Right. It’s like a zero sum game. It’s not necessarily that we’re creating more leads. Those leads are out there and now we’re capturing it and we’re delivering. So I think it’s important. If we’re doing that, we need to make sure that these leads are going to a good person who’s going to perform their service really well and take care of these customers and take care of their clients and that they want to go after it, right? So you like I almost look at it as an obligation on our end to kind of vet out these contractors and choose the ones that are the best that are going to take care of these people because you’re the one that you’re the one that’s going to get the bad review if, if not right. So I’m going to hire back here in a second, but I want to see before I go, is there anything else, anybody struggling with any, any questions, any the software is not working, how we want it to in this way or that? I would love to hear it. And you know, it’s my goal, obviously every week to hear from you guys and try to make this stuff better, as well as help you guys grow your businesses. Is there is there anybody before we hop off here? Anything I can answer for anyone.
[01:02:37] Hey, Patrick, real quick, since we do have you here just to confirm this encore. You said that it is working at the moment in like a limited capacity. Is that correct so we can upload the photos at the moment or is that? Yes, you can. Ok, so we can upload the photos, which is great. That’s mostly what I’ve been using it for. And then and this is kind of premature, but I’m actually not geotagging at the moment. But you said that you might have some sort of capability where you actually enter the coordinates in eventually or you would have it built in sorry, internally generated because I know that some of the other geotagging programs, not that you can’t get the free version, but it’s a little bit more limited unless you buy like, hey, a couple of dollars a month or whatever. So just wondering if that is something that you do plan on rolling out or you’re not really sure?
[01:03:36] Yeah. So we actually talked about this at the beginning of the call. Maybe, maybe it’s just before you jumped on. So basically, like we had the geotag, it is something we’re going to be adding in. I just kind of moved it on the priority list because it seems that the Google has devalued this and it’s almost we’re almost unsure as to what level they continue to value it. With that in mind, I moved it down. I would say watch the watch the first like 10 minutes of this video and I kind of go into it a little bit deeper.
[01:04:10] Yeah, OK. Yeah, no. Sounds good. I’m sorry. I think I missed that part. I was. Yeah, no worries, man. All right, thanks.
[01:04:18] Anything else, anybody else before we hop off here? Ok. Right on well, hey, you guys have an awesome week. Let me know if you guys are struggling with anything. I’ll be. I’ll be adding in a value kind of a value video that I have one that I put into the group a little while ago. So I’m going to start moving over to some of the stuff that I produced over the last couple of years and throwing it in here for you guys because I know that stuff gets buried quick in the JK group. So I’ve got one on content that I’m going to be loading in here for you guys. But I would love to hear like from the user role stuff. And then also,
[01:04:58] You know,
[01:05:00] We can if you guys can give me more direction on on the things that you would like, like, let’s hear the stuff you’re struggling with. Maybe, maybe somebody can make a push in the group or I’ll make a push in the group. What are we struggling with? And I’ll start shifting some of the content on these weekly calls to handle that stuff so that we can try to move forward as a group and attack some of these things that you guys are stuck with. Ok. So I appreciate you guys. Thank you for your patience on the GMB module. That was a really stressful thing for us on our end, and it was awesome to see that our user base was so cool about just being patient with it and with us. So appreciate that from you guys. I hope you guys have a great week. Everybody stays safe and I’ll see you guys in the group. Let me know if there’s anything else you guys need from me. Take care, guys.
[01:05:45] Thank you, Patrick. Bye bye bye.