Episode 100!  From Podcast Listener To Podcast Contributor – Interview With Sue Ginsburg

Transcript for Episode 100!  From Podcast Listener To Podcast Contributor – Interview With Sue Ginsburg;

Caleb Baumgartner: Welcome to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I am producer Caleb Baumgartner, here today to bring you our landmark 100th episode of the show. On this special episode, we help our listeners get to know our team a bit better with an interview with resident rock-star, client success specialist, Sue Ginsburg. This episode is packed with insights and perspectives you won’t want to miss. Thank you for listening and enjoy the show.

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online, and I’m your host, Jesse Dolan, joined with Mr. Bob Brennan.

Bob Brennan: Howdy.

Jesse Dolan: And our special guest should be familiar to everybody at this point, but Sue Ginsburg is joining us here.

Sue Ginsburg: Hi.

Jesse Dolan: And this is not, for those of you that have been tuning in for a while, this is not going to be a question and answer, or a listener or a client question, which is kind of the usual format when Sue’s joining us to get into that customer mode and voice of customer. But we’re going to actually be interviewing Sue. And we got some stories to kind of fill before we get to that part where we actually ask Sue a few questions and get to learn more about her. The big kind of overarching concept for this episode here is this is, Bob, our 100th podcast episode, which is kind of a pretty big milestone.

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: We’ve been doing this for, pulling up the stats here. When was the first one? I should’ve had this ready ahead of time, of course, but let’s play a game. Any guesses? Who can guess when we launched our first episode?

Bob Brennan: It would’ve been about this time of the year. It would’ve been in the spring. My guess would be in March. Or was it in the fall? God, it stinks getting old. I’d say three years ago in March.

Jesse Dolan: January 31st, 2018, so pretty close, pretty close.

Bob Brennan: Not even close. Thanks, Jess.

Jesse Dolan: Within quarters. No, I think that’s pretty dang impressive. So I know we’ve gone through some ebbs and some flows for the frequency. And we had a stretch there with the business where we didn’t have any new episodes for quite some time. And I think one of the coolest things along this journey of the past few years and 100 episodes is when we did rerelease and really got back into the swing of things again after having a period of downtime, some of the users that reached out to us like, “So glad to hear you guys’ voices again and putting out content.” And it’s like, “What?” Okay, I guess people really are paying attention and finding value in this, which a lot of the feedback I know that we get through reviews or even talking with listeners that ultimately turn into clients. As they say we’ve always loved the attitude about just straight to the point advice and helpful stuff, and not a lot of self promotion or sideways agendas with sponsors and other stuff. It’s just helping people out. Right?

So to know, and that’s always been our point, we really took a big page out of Pat Flynn’s playbook. It was a huge inspiration for us, and really, Bob, the catalyst. You started this as the initiative, to be clear for everybody, like, “Hey, we’ve got to throw a podcast out there. We’ve got to start helping people more and getting information out.” We’d both been listening to Pat Flynn at the time, and he came up with his Power Up Podcasting course, which was really the template on how to launch this thing. I think it took us a year to actually even launch it to begin with.

But his whole MO, if nobody’s familiar with him that’s listening is help. Right? Just help, just put stuff out there, and karma’s going to bring it back to you really at the end of the day, for lack of a better way to phrase it. And I think for me, that became tangible when we did have that rerelease or re-engagement after a period of downtime that people were reaching out, just kind of giving thanks and leaving more reviews, and kind of like, “We’re happy you’re back. What do you want me to do to give you praise?”

And that was super cool. Throughout the way, I just want to touch on a few highlights. We’ve interviewed some pretty awesome people. We’re talking about Sue. We’re going to be interviewing you here in a little bit with some questions and whatnot. But we’ve been able to talk to some pretty cool people. We had, looking here, episode 70, Kyle Roof of High Voltage SEO/Page Optimizer Pro/SEO Fight Club/SEO Guru. That was awesome. I don’t think we would’ve been able to talk to him in that way otherwise. We’ve had Terry Samuels on now for a number of interviews, and going to do more with him, schema expert extraordinaire.
We had one of the earlier interviews here, Joe Anderson, who is one of our partners in crime at Intrycks, even still today, was on talking about plug ins and WordPress stuff, multi part episode there, interview. Who else? We were talking about the dark web with Scott and Michael. Interviewed Bob, which was a great one, early on. That might’ve been the first, if I remember right, the first actually interview.

Bob Brennan: TMZ is still at my house over that one.

Jesse Dolan: Some things really just catapult a career. Don’t they?

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: Nathan Hirsch from freeup.com, which we still use to this day for some freelancer/VA help. Matt Addington, neighbor/friend/photographer extraordinaire there as well, helping people. How do you take your own pictures? And kind of using pictures as a visual through your website. So yeah, there’s some other ones here. But in addition to just doing our tips and tricks type stuff, being able to interview people and have them share their stories and things like that, I think has been one of the other cool parts about the podcast.

I’ll flip it to you, Bob, in a second. I didn’t tell you this, but I don’t know if you have anything that you think has kind of been born out of it or some revelations.

Bob Brennan: No. I think if I could give advice to people who are considering doing a podcast, I’d say go ahead and do it. I know a lot of people are doing podcasts today. But if you look at the history of our podcast, it had fits and starts and everything else. But then once we got going, we really got to settle in and hear the voice of the customer through the questions they were asking, the comments they were making. And not really quite sure what to do with that, and that’s where really, Sue came in. She was one of our listeners, and got her attention. And we huddled with her, and it’s been nothing but great things as far as going upwards in terms of that’s what she does.

She understands. She actually listens to people, I suppose to us males that are too busy scratching ourselves or whatever the deal is. So and to that end, I just can’t speak enough to what Sue has done to our family in terms of completing us. So I’m excited to get on with our interview and talk with her about listening to some of her stories and some of her experiences.

Jesse Dolan: Let’s set the stage on that because I think for me, again, with 100th episode here, that is a pretty cool arc. We were scrapping and figuring out how to launch a podcast, how to do it, how to quite frankly take that step to put yourself out there. And then we did it, and then I think it was probably a year and a half later, Sue had reached out. Right? Sue, we had a few conversations. But basically, and maybe you can expand on it, Sue, you were started listening to the podcast to learn more about SEO. We’ll talk a little bit more about your marketing chops and where you came from and how you got to that point. But basically, you came to us as a listener of the show, started engaging, and we quickly discovered that there’s a bigger synergy here than just learning about SEO and things like that, and that we needed to team up and do some stuff.

So I don’t know if you can remember it, I’m probably putting you on the spot, but maybe just start off with: Why did you start looking for SEO things, whether it be podcasts, or YouTube, or just learning? And then why this show? Why did you feel that there was a fit and compelled enough to actually reach out and be one of these people that doesn’t just listen and consume, but took that step to interact? What’s your thoughts on that?

Sue Ginsburg: My background is much broader than just online marketing. I’ve been doing marketing a lot of different ways for a lot of different types of business. And I am always interested in learning the latest and the greatest. And as online marketing has evolved, I’ve found different ways to keep up. And somebody had just shown me Google My Business sites, and I was just learning about that. And I’m an avid listener of podcasts to learn, and started looking up local SEO, Google My Business sites, local SEO, SEO, and listened to a couple different ones and came upon this one, and I really liked it. It was educational, but it wasn’t dry and boring. Somehow or other, you made it interesting to me, and also doable. And that was great.

And then there was something that you said, so I was learning more and more, and I started to dabble in this. And in one episode, you said something about, we’ve been off air for a while now because after launching the podcast, we got so busy with clients wanting us to help them with SEO, that we needed to take a break. And that’s when I reached out to you and said, “Listen to your podcast, I’m learning this, a newbie to it, not nearly at your level. And I heard that you’re overwhelmed and swamped with the business you’re trying to take care of. Is there anything I can do to help?” And that’s how it all started.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. And that is how we kicked it off. And you are our client success specialist, which I think we probably spend more energy than usual trying to come up with the perfect title for that to really encapsulate it. But I think those three words, chosen specifically, really do set the stage for all of our clients that engage with you, what you do. Right? In one sense, it’s broad. In the other sense, I think it’s kind of specific in that you’re really all about the client.

We have people on our team that are SEO experts, which is great. And maybe you can build a big organization doing that. But if you’re not in tune with what the client wants, and what they need, and what their results are, and how to translate all that, you’re just not going to serve the clients in the best way. And I think that’s where Bob and I have talked, and feel fortunate that you’ve, A, came to us through this awesome way, which I think is super organic and just really fun. But then B, you brought that skill and that mindset and that empathy in a lot of ways for the clients that didn’t exist within our organization previous.

And over the last year, year and a half or so, I think has really transformed us inside and out. On the outside, you’ve been on now as a regular segment within our podcast. We’ve added a second episode every week. We’ve been regularly producing even before that, an episode a week consistently, which behind the scenes, you are a big part of with content suggestions, format, and things like that, and then the introduction of that second episode featuring you.

And then behind the scenes, at least from the podcast perspective, on working with clients. Again, the people that reach out to us through this show that had similar sentiment as you, like, “Hey, I like what’s being talked about here, and the style.” These are professionals that can help. I need help. And they reach out. And you just wrap your arms around them, discover what they’re looking for and kind of where can all this meet. And we’ve had some great success as a company. But then I think our clients have also been raving fans, quite frankly, which is awesome. Right? We’re all in this to make money, of course. That’s what we all do business for.

But there’s a real cool part of it when you’re just helping people in growing their business, and they’re happy about it. And then you’re getting paid to do it. Yeah, like I said, 100 episodes in, all this has really kind of come around and had a lot of benefits. And we’re just thankful, speaking for you, Bob, too, that you are here as part of this, and this has just kind of just been a really cool journey. So let’s dive into learning more about Sue and see if we can put you on the spot in a few things here, and dig in.

So we’ve talked before that you really have an expertise in dealing with clients, and parsing out what’s important for them, what they’re looking for, whether that be in a product development sense, voice of customer surveys, just for general research, things like that. My first question for you is: Why does that drive you? Right? I like SEO. There’s a gamification to it. You’re always learning and there’s tangible things there. What drives you to be in this industry and then serving clients and having that be something you’re passionate about?

Sue Ginsburg: Okay. I love helping businesses grow and seeing the potential, and helping them put the Tetris pieces together so that the spaceship can go forth into space, and have always really, really enjoyed being a cheerleader and helping other businesses succeed. It has always really bothered me to see businesses wasting money on marketing tools that are not appropriate for them because they don’t know the behind the scenes. And granted, there are a lot of different marketing tools out there online, offline, every other thing, digital, non digital. And even for people who are doing this every day, you need to keep learning, whether it’s listening to podcasts, or staying up on it, and staying current with what’s working, why it’s working, or how it’s working, and what will work best, and what will help it grow the most, get the best ROI of the marketing tools.

Especially when the online world started becoming so much of a bigger part of the marketing mix, pre COVID, but we can say especially COVID, it’s just so confusing to people who aren’t doing it every day, and who I would have clients saying to me, “Hey, I listened to the radio on the way in this morning, and I heard a radio ad. I think we should do radio ads.” I’m like, “Your clients are children who don’t even drive. Why would you be doing radio ads? That does not make any sense.” And I just have always wanted to help businesses find the best way to grow with the right tools and the best ROI, and not waste money on what I call random acts of marketing, which would be, hey, heard a really good radio ad, let’s do that for my business.

Well, let’s look at the standpoint of your customer. Do they listen to the radio? And it’s just become the way that I filter everything I hear or see, and it’s not the way that business owners think, nor should they think that way, and I like partnering with them and collaborating with them and helping them choose the tools that will work best. In today’s day and age, online is such a big part of people’s businesses. And I also from working in the website world in the past, have always been shocked, disappointed, and reality check that businesses spend a lot of money on building a website, most likely their biggest marketing investment, at least at the time. And then they don’t do anything with it.

And trying to say to them, “No, once you launch doesn’t mean now you can check that off your list. It doesn’t work that way. And do you realize the power that a website that’s working for you has and what it can do for you, and how it can be your best salesperson? And for the now, it’s much more mainstream. I mean, you hardly can be in business without having a website. And business owners are realizing that your website is and can be a powerful tool, yet they don’t have the time, want to take the time, that’s not the best use of their time to figure out how to do that. And I love being part of that service that can help them understand that and put a pathway in front of them that they only have to know what they need to know, and the rest of it is done by experts who do this day in and day out, so that their website and their online presence really, truly is impacting their business and growing it.

Jesse Dolan: I can tell you too, I’ve seen a lot of that firsthand in sitting in with you on client meetings at various stages of consultation and onboarding processes. And some of this may sound a little negative to start with, but follow with me, everybody. It’s not going to be. I just have to set the stage. So the first few times that we had done that, Bob, you weren’t on some of these, but Sue would be asking some questions. And I’m just sitting there, I’ll be on a Zoom call or something, and she’s really prodding about broader topics.

And I’m a problem solver, you can ask my wife. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s super annoying where I hear something, I’m like, “All right. Let’s just start talking about solutions.” And it’s like, “I just wanted to vent. Please don’t solve this.” And so we’ll be in these meetings or even were, I should say more past tense, and I’m just waiting to talk about where SEO is going to solve this problem for you or something. Right? And Sue’s asking more of these broader prodding questions about: Where are you going to go? Or who’s your client? Who are you going after? And all this stuff.

And I’m just thinking, “Oh, man. She’s really going to be distracted. We’re going to lose. We’re going to lose the focus here,” or whatever. And then all of a sudden, it comes together. Okay, now that I have this context, here’s where I think maybe this is the route you should go, or this order of things, whatever. And the clients are just like, “Oh, wow. You got it. This all kind of makes sense now.” And just it all comes together in a way that it wouldn’t have if some of those questions about: Really, what’s the client’s intent? How are they trying to grow their business? What are their goals? What are they trying to serve? What makes them happy or successful and things like that? And it’s really taught me a lot, Sue. You’ve taught me a lot about how to engage with people in general, not just clients, and to listen and to try to parse those things out and bring it all in together.

And I’m sure if some of our clients are still listening to the show here that this has happened with, they’ll probably be sitting in their cars or on the treadmills nodding their head like, “Yeah.” Some of those questions were maybe a little bit challenging sometimes, or maybe even sometimes seem a little tangential. But that’s how you peel away some of these layers to really understand. Well, what’s going to work for you? Because what hasn’t worked before, what’s been your intent, and where do you want to go with this? And I know we’ve had conversations with some clients where they like, “Well, yeah, I need a website and things to look good, whatever. But I don’t get business online, so I’m not interested in maybe pursuing this particular SEO campaign or this directive.”

And you’ll challenge them like, “Okay. That’s cool. But just what if you were found suddenly at the top of Google? What would it be like if people started calling you and asking if they could do business with you? Would you be able to take that business? And would that be a good thing for you?” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah. For sure.” It’s like, “Well, your website can be used in this way. Right? It can be your top sales person,” as you always say. And those challenging questions I think have been fun for me to hear, slightly painful on the front side when I didn’t grasp this coming from the voice of customer angle.

But it really truly does I think make for better relationship between a vendor and a client, like we are to them, and then the results that we can then have because I know when we engage with a client, we try to be as turnkey as possible. Kind of like you’re saying, it’s good to have these tools and everything else, but as a business owner or marketing manager, I mean, sometimes they shouldn’t be mired in those details. Let a professional or an expert do that and run with it. We can run with it on their behalf more when we truly understand where they’re going, to kind of use that metaphor and things like that. And for me, that’s been a big takeaway that I’ve got working with you.

And I know, Bob, you haven’t worked with Sue in that capacity as much in that exact role, so you really probably can’t speak to that in that way as directly through those Zoom meetings and things like that. But yeah, I guess just looking back, that’s been a fun journey with you, Sue, to kind of learn that stuff and see that. So I think it really does come from your heart and shows through with what you do.

Sue Ginsburg: I will say, my kids will tell you that I could get a rock into a conversation with me, and sometimes I do. No. And I mean, it really is interesting to me to find out people’s stories, and then to hear the business story and understand what they want out of it. And I think, Jesse, this morning, the client we talked to, as you well know, they had many products, but there’s one that they want us to focus on. There’s one that they want us to get found for, get more business on, get more clients on and blow the roof off with that one.

If you don’t ask the questions, that question must’ve been asked long ago. We’ve been working with them for a long time. And sometimes it’s also the exercise of having the business think about and answer the question because as business owners, you’re going so fast. You have this many things to do, and do this, do this, do this. And going through the exercise, even our onboarding form, we have clients telling us, “It took me a little time, but it was a great exercise in going back to thinking. What do I want my business to do? Do I want it to grow, become a franchise and become global? Or do I want it to be the best in my hometown?” Or whatever it is they want. Whatever they want it to do is doable, the tools may or may not be the same.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. And that kind of insight is how you have success with a team or a third party like us and get everybody on the same page. If you can’t identify what success looks like, to distill it down to that, how are you going to know if it’s working on either side of that fence?

Bob Brennan: So Sue, you’ve got a lot of Fortune 100 experience. And I’ve dealt with, I’ve been in business for over 20 years, and I’ve dealt with a lot of consultants that come in, and they used to work for a major Fortune 100 company. They got let go, decided to start their own consultancy. But they couldn’t translate. They couldn’t make that transition, so to speak. And what I notice about you is you were different in that, yes, you had that Fortune 100 experience. But you were able to take some of those best practices and bring it down to a small business level. And I was wondering if you could speak to that. I mean, how do you feel about that, or that skillset?

Sue Ginsburg: It’s a great question, and I think it all comes down to you need to talk to your audience. And sure, I’ve been in lots of meetings where some 400 page document was presented, dropped on the table, or whatever. And who has time to read that? And I just think what’s going to move the needle on a need to know basis, maybe I have pages and pages and pages of notes that got me to this, a couple page document. But to the business owner, to the client, to them, they’re on a need to know basis. And Jesse and I shared a marketing plan that was one page to a client earlier this year, and that was enough to be the trusted advisor that can take the best practices from the marketing sophisticated companies and distill it down into what’s in it for me for the client.

That’s what this is all about, the voice of the customer, dealing with your audience, knowing who your audience is, and customizing the solution to that business, that client. That’s what really gets me excited. I love doing that. I’ve been there, done all this. That means you don’t have to. Let me take that and learn about you, your issues, your challenges, your competitive advantages, and now I’ll distill that all into a straightforward, here’s what you need to know. This is what we need to do. Here’s why. Where do you want to start?

Bob Brennan: Right, right. And that’s really, I mean, that’s the message I want to hear as a business owner. I want to hear, I know there’s no silver bullet, but I know when somebody comes in and over-complicates things, and it seems like all my life, that’s what we’ve been dealing with because people over-complicated things. I mean, just a distinct client that I can follow, and then more importantly, that I know these are the results we should be seeing on every step along the way, versus, no, no, no, you need to do this for at least six months before we even begin to see results. And it’s like, “No, I don’t have the money. I don’t have the patience for that.” And that’s one thing I think you understand.

Sue Ginsburg: I also think that when I’m working with a business, I want them to … I want to be a trusted advisor to them. I want to be a partner collaborating in their growth. And I want them to know that the most important thing to me is knowing what success means to them and helping them find that. That’s much more important to me than them thinking I’m smart. I don’t need to make things complicated so they think I’m smart. They’ll think I know what I’m doing when we both see the results in their business. And that’s the best win of all.

Jesse Dolan: That’s what they want, transform the business, help it grow, get results. Right?

Sue Ginsburg: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. Well, I’d say if anybody listening out there, if that sounds good to you, get ahold of us, talk to this lady, Sue Ginsburg, right here. Get a plan, consult. Just kind of see what she’s all about. I think you’re going to be impressed, as we are, again, just circling back. As soon as we started talking and we both identified that there’s some kind of fit here, it’s like, “Yeah, let’s run with this on a team.” And you’ve been an awesome part of our team really ever since, so happy to have you on for this 100th episode. Big milestone for us. I thought this was just a great fitting way for the three of us to kind of talk about that journey and really, you wouldn’t be part of this team and our trajectory wouldn’t be where it’s going without this podcast, and the without you on it. So it just feels like it really does, has come full circle.

That being said, let me jump into our five star review of the episode here. And this one here, we got from Lisa Weber. This is from our Facebook page. Thanks for submitting that, Lisa. It says, “This awesome … ” I’m sorry. Let me restart, “The awesome podcast, Local SEO Tactics by Intrycks is by far one of my top favorite podcasts. New episodes now.” So I saved this one because if you can tell from that, this has been sitting in our Facebook feed for a while. Lisa left us this review when we did reengage, like we were saying earlier in the episode. And this is one of the types of feedback that we got once we did kind of reengage it. There’s exclamation marks pretty much on each sentence here that Lisa put on there too. And it’s just a few words of text, but we read that after we relaunch, and it says, “You know what, yeah, we’re doing the good thing. We’re doing the right thing here.”

So hopefully, we continue to elicit that response with all you out there listening, and you’re enjoying the show like Lisa. If you are, we’d love to get a review from you. Go on out to localseotactics.com. Go down to the bottom, click the button for reviews, whether it be on Facebook, or Google My Business, or Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, wherever you’re so inclined and have the ability. We’d love to get a review from you. If you do, we’ll give you a shout out on the show eventually, like Lisa, a year later maybe in some cases. But no, we’d love to get that feedback and we’d love to give you a shout out on the show, so check it out and leave us a review.

Thanks for tuning in, everybody, and sticking with us for 100 episodes. And we’ve got a lot more to come with Bob and Sue and myself and a cast of others that will be joining eventually here and there with interviews and snippets and things like that. So it’s been fun, thanks for coming on, Sue, for the interview, and Bob, as always, love talking with you and hanging out on the show too. So thanks for checking it out, everybody. We’ll catch you on the next episode.

Bob Brennan: Thanks, guys.

Sue Ginsburg: See you.