Mastering LinkedIn for Growth with Social SEO

Ryan Brock: I plan on turning this into a therapy session for me, somebody who does not like social media, but I have to use it. So I'm excited to talk a bunch of crap about myself and let you look really smart, Mandy.

Mandy McEwen: Good. I'm here for this.

Announcer: Welcome to Page One Or Bust, your ultimate guide to getting on page one of search engines. This interview features Mandy McEwen, the founder and CEO of Mod Girl Marketing and Luminetics, an award- winning social media consultancy and LinkedIn training company. Mandy's been hailed as a top marketer by LinkedIn and DigitalMarketer, and in this episode reveals her strategies to dominate LinkedIn and get leads rolling in. You'll also learn how to level up your cold outreach skills and even make meaningful relationships along the way. Real leads, real connections, and real results just ahead. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Page One Or Bust is brought to you by DemandJump. Get insights, drive outcomes with DemandJump. Get started, creating content that ranks for free at demandjump. com today. And now, here are your co- hosts, Drew Detzler and Ryan Brock.

Drew Detzler: Welcome to Page One Or Bust. I'm Drew Detzler, your host, and as always, I'm joined by my co- host, Ryan Brock. Ryan, how we doing?

Ryan Brock: Yo, I'm living the dream. I'm breathing fresh air today. How are you doing, drew?

Drew Detzler: Fantastic. Especially today, because joining us is Mandy McEwen. Mandy, welcome to the show.

Mandy McEwen: Thanks for having me.

Ryan Brock: We just got done hearing that Mandy's been on a world tour and now she's back in stateside just to talk to us. I think that's my interpretation of...

Mandy McEwen: That's exactly right. Nailed it. Nailed it.

Drew Detzler: All right. Well, before we dive in to today's topic, Mandy, why don't you give us a little bit of your SEO background and how SEO came on your radar professionally?

Mandy McEwen: Yeah, for sure. So 2007, long time ago, is when I first got into online marketing and I worked a sales job after college and have always been a computer nerd and was Googling ways to make money online. Literally, I googled that. Yeah, your typical, everyone and their mom googling how to make money online. And this was, again, circa 2007, and I found SEO, I found affiliate marketing. I bought a bunch of courses and I fell in love with the content side of things. I've always been a pretty good writer my whole life, and so I was like, " Okay, I think I like this." So I started building HTML websites before I knew that WordPress existed, like an idiot. So I was like, learn how to make HTML websites from scratch. And I had these dating affiliate websites and dog training websites, like the crazy stuff. And then I was like, " Oh, there's something called WordPress. What do you know?" So what I would do is I would blog myself and I learned SEO just from literally taking a bunch of random courses, YouTube videos, Googling. I just am self- taught SEO just from a bunch of different sources. And I fell in love with it. And then I started ranking in Google affiliate sites. Then once I found WordPress, I started building brands, right, because I'm creative also, so I love building brands from scratch. So I would build these random brands. I'd get a logo, made a name, I'd get a domain... Expired domains, that was my jam. So I'd use expireddomains. net, and I would find the expired domains that had decent domain authority, decent amount of back links. I would buy those. I would create a brand out of them. I'd get them ranked in Google and I would start making money. Then I realized I can't quit my job making$ 10 commissions off of a dog product. I got to be doing something more here because it was just affiliate marketing at the time. So then I discovered Flippa. Do you guys know what flippa. com is?

Ryan Brock: No, but I want to.

Drew Detzler: No. Yeah.

Mandy McEwen: Okay.

Drew Detzler: School us.

Mandy McEwen: flippa.com is basically when you flip houses, it's the same concept, but you flip websites. If you could go to it right now, flippa.com-

Drew Detzler: Looking it up now.

Mandy McEwen: ... andthis was my start. This was actually what got me into the agency world, so I'm pretty sure it's still in existence. I'm pretty sure it was on there not long ago.

Drew Detzler: Yeah.

Mandy McEwen: Yep. Buy and sell online businesses. I'm sure they've changed a lot. At the time you just would go on and you would list a website for sale. What I would do, once I discovered this, I would get these websites ranked in Google, top three rankings, for lots of different terms. I would have affiliate offers on them. Then I would go to flippa. com, once I got them ranked, and again, I would buy expired domains, so they already had domain authority and some backlink juice to them, and then I would sell them, I would flip them, and then people would start buying them and they would bid on them. And then those people would hire me to do their own SEO and their own websites. So I became a freelancer from my customers that would buy my websites on Flippa. I was like, " Huh! Okay, I think I have something here." My first client from that was a Canadian guy. And then at the time I was in sales-

Ryan Brock: Canadian-

Mandy McEwen: ... home improvementsales in Kansas City. I know, I love Canadians, I love them. He was so great. He had all these businesses. He was an entrepreneur with lots of money, and he was just throwing it at me. He's like, " Okay, make me this brand. I love horses. Can we do a horse brand?" I was like, " Of course. We can do whatever you want, homie. Let's do it. Let's do it." That inspired me to be like, " I think I can do this for businesses and make way more money than I am at flipping these websites and these( censored) commissions I'm getting, right?

Drew Detzler: Mandy McEwen, horse brand expert.

Ryan Brock: That should be your byline on LinkedIn.

Mandy McEwen: Oh, my God. You should hear some of the other random ones that were not safe for, uh...

Ryan Brock: Oh, sure.

Mandy McEwen: We can talk about them after. You have no idea. It was an interesting time. Let's just say that. Then I started talking to business owners in my sales job and they were complaining about their SEO guys and website guys. What I did was I started offering SEO for free as a test. I was like, " Okay, you pay me after I get your website ranked, so I'm going to get you ranked, for local keywords, at the top five results in Google, and then you pay me 500 bucks when I get you ranked." That's how I started my company. And then once I got two of them, they started referring their clients and they had me redo their websites. At this point, I was a WordPress pro, and so I was writing all their copy, I was doing their websites all by myself, and I was like, " I think I have a business here." Then I started hiring freelancers from Fiverr, good old Fiverr, whack in the day, when Fiverr was legit, and... Well, it's still legit, but you have to really sift through them now.

Ryan Brock: And it was truly fiver at the time.

Mandy McEwen: And it was five, exactly. It really was$5. And that's literally how my business was born. And then I started doing this for local businesses in Kansas City, which is where I moved after college. 2010 is when I started Mod Girl Marketing. And so that's my start in SEO and it's evolved into a lot of different things. Now we're more focused on the social media sides of things, but SEO is very infused in everything I do. I can't get it out of me. So even on the social media side, everything we do has an SEO focus and emphasis because my first online marketing love is SEO. So that's the story.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, I want to talk about that.

Drew Detzler: I love it.

Ryan Brock: But first I've, I've got to say how incredible, first of all, you're a self- taught SEO. Like who the hell isn't self- taught? It's this industry that attracts the scrappy. And I think that's something that makes a lot of us relate to each other so well, because back in 2010, when I graduated from college, I had already been dabbling in computer stuff, just like you, for a long time, computer stuff. Remember that was a thing, when you could be, " I like computers." That was part of your identity.

Mandy McEwen: Exactly. Yes.

Ryan Brock: Man, it's so crazy.

Mandy McEwen: Oh, my God.

Ryan Brock: But it's just funny to me hearing stories like this where almost every beat of your story... Not exactly the same, but I can relate on so many levels. I got my start in this whole industry by trying to start a publishing company actually with some friends, a digital publishing company, back when that was an original idea. Let's make our own tech to publish unknown authors using HTML5. So device- agnostic at a time where that meant something. But it's amazing how quickly I went from, " Okay, how are other creatives..." Literally googling the same thing you said. How do photographers make money online? How do musicians make money online? How did visual artists make money online? And arrived at this industry where if you can actually meld the right brain creativity with the left brain data analytics and understand how numbers and all these things can come together to support your creative efforts, you can make a really good living with it. So I see you, Mandy, is what I'm saying.

Mandy McEwen: I love it. I am seen. Yes.

Drew Detzler: We are going to dive into some of the social media aspects that you're doing more recently, Mandy, but before we do, Mod Girl Marketing started in 2010. From 2010 to now, how has your SEO philosophy changed?

Mandy McEwen: A lot. I mean, it's not a focus anymore, to be honest. The traditional SEO, let's rank in Google, isn't even on our radar. We do everything with SEO emphasis still, but we don't even attempt to rank anything in Google because it's changed so much. There's such an opportunity on LinkedIn and social media in general. And we have sponsored blogs and stuff. So we do a little bit of that still, but it's not even for our own SEO, because at the end of the day, some of these words that I'm trying to rank for, I'm never going to rank for. It's all linkedin.com, you know what I mean? Like with my LinkedIn services. And so I have evolved because what we're doing with LinkedIn training, and I will always be a fan of SEO and organic traffic, but how it's evolved, it's just not a huge focus anymore. Traditional SEO, right? Because social media sites are being used as search engines too.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, that's fair.

Drew Detzler: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Mandy McEwen: You know what I mean? There's social SEO and then there is Google SEO, but they're similar too, right?

Ryan Brock: Well, yeah, we had to kick SEO out the door. I mean, we literally said what we're doing now with DemandJump is it's not even traditional SEO anymore. We literally wrote the book Pillar- Based Marketing to define a new methodology for creating content driven by search behavior data. So you're using search behavior data, not something you'd find in Semrush, for example. But it's the same idea. It's like if we want to understand what people actually care about, we should look at their honest selves in the moment they're searching online. And that insight can be used so many different platforms and channels to drive a message home. And a happy side effect is that we can get on page one for virtually any term. So by the way, that's a challenge to you, whether we keep this in the show or cut it, I'll guarantee you, we could get you over linkedin.com on LinkedIn topics. We've done it a thousand times.

Mandy McEwen: Yeah?

Ryan Brock: Neither here nor there. The point is

Mandy McEwen: We can keep it.

Ryan Brock: It's required to shift from thinking about keywords to target instead thinking about entire topics. What does it mean to quantify authority? I'm consistently interested. Maybe it's because there's this meta quality to my LinkedIn presence is about that. What do we know about authority? How do we measure authority? How do we create authority in the eyes of a search engine or an audience, wherever they happen to be? There's a lot that lines up there. I'm interested in talking more about this intersection between understanding how people look for information, because that's really what we're talking about at the end of the day. And then understanding how to provide that information in a way that is unique, that is visible, that's audible or whatever your platform is, especially if it's LinkedIn. Because I personally feel like I have to pull teeth out of my head every single day when I get up. I'm like, " What the hell am I going to put on LinkedIn now?" Yet I know that's where my people are. So I need to be there. And I don't know, I see it as a necessary evil, but I think you've done a good job of seeing it as a true opportunity, which is where I need to get.

Mandy McEwen: I just clicked on your LinkedIn, by the way, and I'm checking you out now. I'm going to send you a connection request.

Drew Detzler: So we will challenge you, whether it's in this episode or outside of it, we'll challenge you and on getting you ranking for some of those LinkedIn topics above LinkedIn. Now, I want you to challenge us-

Mandy McEwen: And I'll challenge you all, yes.

Drew Detzler: ...on the social aspect like Ryan just mentioned.

Mandy McEwen: Yes, yes, yes.

Drew Detzler: So let's just jump right into it. SEO for social, that actually works. That actually drives results. Talk to us a little bit about how you've transitioned to social and how you've taken your SEO knowledge and applied it to search on social networks.

Mandy McEwen: Everything is shifting. The Gen Zers and younger, they're not going to Google as much anymore to type things in. They're going to TikTok, they're going to Instagram. They don't even really use Google that much. That's not my market at all. My market is corporate. But with that said, there's a general shift in social anyway in just the social networking aspects of people don't trust websites as much as they do people. So we've been going through this human shift since COVID really, but it was already shifting that way, and then the pandemic really forced it to shift where we have a trust issue. We have a very big trust issue right now. And people don't trust brands. They don't trust businesses, they don't trust media, they don't trust governments. Who do they trust? They trust people. They trust their peers. They trust their neighbors, they trust their colleagues. This is why social media is a no- brainer. You have to be capitalizing on this because people aren't going to Google like they used to, five plus years ago. It's completely changing. I mean, they still go to Google, don't get me wrong, obviously, but they're using it in different ways. We saw an opportunity here, with LinkedIn specifically, on training, consulting and helping professionals and teams leverage it, because this is where B2B professionals are hanging out more than anything, more than any website. They're on LinkedIn. So what we did is we took our SEO knowledge and our content marketing knowledge, and then we combined them all. So how can we come up with a killer content strategy that is very similar to when we did SEO content strategies? We still use the same type of Google research when we're making stuff. We use Google SEO research in our content strategies, and we combine them with the LinkedIn as well, which is a little bit more difficult to do. And then we take those and we create content strategies for people. Just like you mentioned, Ryan, what people are actually wanting. You have to do the research and figure out what's resonating, what do people actually want to know? There's a huge social aspect of this. So back links for traditional SEO. Well, the back links for social is called engagement. If you want to get back links to your post on social, you have to engage with people, you have to leave comments before you post, leave comments after you post. You have to have this whole strategy of actually connecting with people. You can't just post great content that's SEO- friendly that you think people will want, and then be like, " Okay, this is it." You got to put it in the work. This is no joke.

Ryan Brock: So what do you say to somebody like me? It's maybe 50% " I can't be bothered, I don't want to just shout into the room." The other 50% of it's just" I'm just busy. I have a lot of ideas and goals and OKRs that are tied to me having a presence and a voice in the marketplace." How do you get someone like me to think differently about the effort and energy it takes to do that and to say, " You know what? I can do this thing for my job." That is, I could feel like I could check something off the box and get a project accomplished, or I could spend an hour on LinkedIn and I'm always going to pick the work. But how do you start shifting my stupid brain to think less stupidly?

Mandy McEwen: Valid question, valid question. First of all, you need a plan of action. And so I'm looking at your profile now, Ryan, and you have 1300 followers. So if your plan needs to increase your connections, what I would do with you is I would be, " Okay, here's the plan of action. Who are you trying to focus on?" So let's take content out of it completely. Who is your target market? Who do you want to get in front of? And let's go build a list of those people. And if you don't have Sales Navigator, that's fine. You could do it on the free version of LinkedIn. But I would say to you first, you can keep posting your content, but don't even think about it. You need to focus on engaging with people and sending connection requests. You can send up to a hundred week. So you need to be sending at least 50 a week, and this is to get you going. Because you're going to notice that if you just keep posting content and you're not doing this, then you're going to be frustrated because it's going to be minimal engagement. The same people over and over again are liking it. So that needs to be a focus is convince you that it's worth it. I would say get an assistant that can help you is my answer.

Ryan Brock: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the sheer hours calculation. But what's the etiquette? What's the etiquette on that? Sometimes I feel like if I send a friend request or... God, it's not even that, connection request on LinkedIn-

Mandy McEwen: Connection request.

Ryan Brock: I'm not even on Facebook, so I don't know why I use that language still and I don't specifically know that person. Maybe I just found them interesting or something. Am I breaking some kind of etiquette by doing that? I always feel like I shouldn't do that if I don't actually know somebody.

Mandy McEwen: That's a good question. And that is the traditional way of thinking with LinkedIn: " I don't know them. We shouldn't connect." So I have something that I train on. It's called my Friendly Leader Method. It's just this phrase I coined. And what that is basically you go and you find something personal about them, either on their profile or if they're posting content, you go when you like their post, you leave a comment on their post, you wait till they see it so that it could be one day, it could be an hour if they like your comment or respond to it, whatever. If they don't, then just wait a couple of days. Then you send them a connection request that is highly customized and personal: " Hey Ryan, I really enjoyed your post about X, Y, Z. Would you be up for connecting?" Or" Hey Ryan, I saw that you also went to whatever the university is, or you worked here, or whatever." Find something to where they see that you're not spam, you're not a robot, and you're not just trying to sell them something. The general community in LinkedIn is already used to this and they're doing it. But if you send me a message that lets you know that you did even a little bit of research on me or you're complimenting me on something, then I'm most likely going to accept it if you don't look like a complete weirdo.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, well.

Mandy McEwen: Yeah, well, that's subjective.

Ryan Brock: Well, I mean, have you seen my LinkedIn line?

Mandy McEwen: I did. " Bald, Okay With It."

Ryan Brock: I am a complete weirdo. I'm good with that.

Mandy McEwen: I love that though.

Ryan Brock: Drew, that sounds to me just a hyper focused, granular version of what we're preaching all the time. And that's what we already talked about, which is know who you're talking to, and know that you're saying something that is going to be of value.

Mandy McEwen: 100%. And the crazy thing with LinkedIn is my best relationships have started off having nothing to do with business whatsoever. Could be they were on a hike with their dog at somewhere that I was to or something, but it's the human- to- human connection that is the best relationship. Let's just connect on a human level first and then see where it goes. That's how you actually succeed on LinkedIn. It's the people that are using it strictly for lead generation, lead generation. They're just constantly cranking it out, cranking out, sending tons of messages, sending tons of InMails, and it's not an intentional, value- based first approach. And they're, quite frankly, making people jaded with the LinkedIn platform because that's how they use it.

Drew Detzler: Yeah, it's disingenuous.

Mandy McEwen: Correct.

Drew Detzler: Ah, that's what I feel, constantly. I get on, I see that have five connection requests and 10 messages, and they're all SDRs, BDRs telling me how they can save us. It's painful. So we've talked about that aspect of just being genuine, and that ties back to our SEO strategy of just answer the questions they're asking for, be genuine, create those connections. How do you monetize it? What's a successful LinkedIn SEO campaign look like, and how do you monetize those connections?

Mandy McEwen: Yeah, that's a loaded question, because it depends on what your business is, right?

Drew Detzler: Boom!

Ryan Brock: Loaded question.

Mandy McEwen: Loaded question.

Ryan Brock: Deal with it.

Mandy McEwen: Oh, I am, I got you. So strategy number one is how you monetize following up with people. Number two and number three is just being present, being top of mind, and that's where the content comes into play. You have to do your research. What are the biggest pain points? Sales and marketing need to talk. What are the most frequently common questions you're getting? What are people also talking about? Look at the hashtags in LinkedIn. We do hashtag research in LinkedIn, just like SEO research. You can see the most popular ones. You can see which ones people are using. You need to be using them in all of your posts. And this is where the whole strategy comes in with the engagement, et cetera. But I'm telling people to post at least twice a week, at least, if you can do more awesome. Then come up with ways to where you can also help boost the company's page. If we're sharing company content, how do we do that? Well, we need to have our own little 2 cents in there that we're sharing. There's all these little tiny things that you need to do in order to get the algorithm to like you for one, and to get people to stop the scroll. It's a matter of testing things out all the time and being super active in the communities, building relationships, constantly engaging with the people, because when you engage with other people, they're likely to engage with you. This whole strategy needs to come together from sending connection requests, engaging on a consistent basis and posting consistent contents.

Ryan Brock: You touched on something that I was going to ask a clarifying question around, because I think for a lot of marketers out there, someone in Drew's role as a CMO, they're thinking about how do we leverage LinkedIn as a business? And they're thinking about company pages and brand pages, but that's not what you're talking about here. And you made that abundantly clear that thinking about LinkedIn as a strategy, even for a business, even if you are in Drew's shoes, that's going to require somebody in the organization to be a human being and take the strategy on with their own personal name. Is that right?

Mandy McEwen: Yes, 100%. Every company needs at least one face evangelist that can be the thought leader, at least one. And those are small companies. For the companies I train, I try to get their entire sales team to be thought leaders. That's what I do. I'm training sales teams on how they can become their own little mini thought leaders. So the marketing team is responsible for the LinkedIn company page. It's still very important. They still need to post humanized content, they still need to talk about their culture, they need to tag their people in it. It's a whole other thing. But if companies truly want to succeed with this platform, they have got to get their employees involved and they have to elevate them and give them what they need to succeed and become industry leaders on the platform.

Drew Detzler: I love that.

Ryan Brock: That makes sense. Yeah, it's just super helpful to think about. Because like you said, people don't trust brands, and that's certainly true on LinkedIn. I couldn't be bothered. It's people not brands that I want to hear from on that platform.

Mandy McEwen: Yeah, exactly.

Drew Detzler: Well, like you and I have talked about, Ryan, we've talked about just literally shutting it down.

Mandy McEwen: Really?

Drew Detzler: Not shutting it down, but just not feeling like we need to post something every week just because we're supposed to be doing it.

Mandy McEwen: And I'm with you. I've just posted a video the other day and it was like, don't post more content, post less content and be intentional about it. And it's so funny that you mentioned that. Someone not long ago literally was like, " What would happen if we stopped posting content?" And they did. They stopped posting on their business pages and nothing happened. They didn't lose any revenue, nothing at all, right? With that said, when you're wanting to focus on LinkedIn and get your employees up, you have to have some sort of presence on your company page or it's pointless, because they're going to be looking at the company page. It's more of a branding thing. I want to see that this company is legit and that they keep their socials updated. But if you don't focus on anything on LinkedIn, then it would be like, yeah, quit posting. But if you're having people that are like you believe in the" people do business with people" and you are using LinkedIn for that reason, then your company needs to be updated. The company page.

Drew Detzler: That said, we're a small team and a lot of our listeners are small teams. Everyone's doing two and a half people's worth of jobs at larger companies, so they're already underwater. Time is an issue. How do I convince team members to take time away from these quick revenue- driving actions to start building up this LinkedIn presence to help the company?

Ryan Brock: This is a question of priorities, and maybe even putting it in terms of money rather than someone's time is an easier way of talking about it. We're like, we do plenty of paid advertising because you have to. We take money away from paid advertising and give it to other channels at every given opportunity because all the time, if we can put money into something that converts better, converts faster, brings us leads who are more informed, whatever, that's a better use of time and money. So if I'm going to take money or resources away from any one channel and put it into something like building an actual thoughtful LinkedIn strategy, that's where I'm going to do it. But the flip side of that is I'm giving up that instant gratification that comes with paid ads, so-

Drew Detzler: Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at. Convince me that I'm leaving revenue on the table.

Mandy McEwen: Okay. So if y'all are using cold outbound in any capacity, cold calling, cold emails, when you use LinkedIn, your conversions go through the roof because you're starting with the LinkedIn platform. Or you could do it the other way around. You could email, send LinkedIn connection request. " Hey Ryan, you probably saw my name in your inbox the last couple of days, et cetera, et cetera. Wanted to send you a note here, whatever." But I like starting with LinkedIn at the top. So you engage with them, you send the custom connection request. If they answer, cool. If not, well then you take it to email and then the email and even the cold calling, you mention LinkedIn, and then you have LinkedIn to add those personal messages and have personal conversations with people because people are way more likely to talk to you on LinkedIn, when you do it right, versus cold email. But when you combine all of them together, it doesn't become so cold anymore because it's like, " I already reached out to you on LinkedIn, I already saw you. I already know what you're about. Now I'm going to email you and then maybe I'm going to pick up the phone too." It adds a less cold element to cold outreach when you do LinkedIn, and what we've noticed with everyone, including our company and everyone that we work with, their conversions are much higher when they utilize LinkedIn in this capacity because again, they're coming from a place of value. They're being normal, they're not being weirdos, they're not spamming people on LinkedIn, and they're using all of those outbound methods. And then what you do is you keep in touch with those people. You post content, they see you, they're in your network now. All those people that your peeps are sending emails to, if they added them to their LinkedIn network, I mean, they're not going to keep emailing them for 12 plus months. They just don't do that. But on LinkedIn, they can constantly see their posts, they can check in. " Hey, it's been a few months since we've talked to you. I saw this article that reminded me of you. What do you think of it?" They can consistently engage. And so that's the humanized element of outbound is LinkedIn. That's my answer.

Drew Detzler: You've driven me closer to... Yeah, yeah.

Mandy McEwen: Okay, good. I was like, "How did I do?"

Ryan Brock: Yeah, and even talking through that, you have, because a big part of our strategy this year, coming back to what you said about COVID and its effects on our collective psyche and the way we do business and whatnot. Last year, we started to dabble in live events like conferences and things like that again, and if you have a good story to tell on stage and you can follow that up with that kind of real world interaction that happens at a booth in a conference, showroom floor, it works so well. But I could see the exact approach you're describing working even better for what I consider to be an inbound function of something like that where the connections we're making with people on showroom floors on LinkedIn and being quick to engage and get into conversations. So that's definitely food for thought.

Mandy McEwen: Yeah, no, that's a good point. I absolutely love using LinkedIn for events because it's like you get all these people in and you add them to your network. And same with inbound leads in general. Okay, we have the sales team working all of these white paper downloads, whatever it is, and it's like intent- based marketing, essentially. Look at who is visiting the website, who's filling out forms. You can use it from so many different angles and approaches to just build real relationships with people. But the thing is, this is a long- term play. So going back to what you said about instant gratification with ads. So the mindset has to be clear that if we're shifting budget from ads to this, this is a long- term play that's going to pay off, but it requires consistency, time, and patience because it doesn't happen overnight. I think the best of all worlds is just combining it all in a way that portrays your company as a value add, with real genuine human beings who want to help people. And that's that's what everyone wants to work for. People want to work for companies like that. People want to do business with companies like that. So it's not only a benefit, everything I'm saying, to increase conversions and get more revenue, but it's also a benefit for the company culture in general, because these are the types of companies that people gravitate towards and actually want to do business with and have in their circle.

Ryan Brock: That's super, super smart stuff. I want to go back to the start of the conversation. People don't trust brands, they don't trust companies, they trust each other. One of the crises that our audience is facing right now is the AI revolution.

Drew Detzler: You thought about how that's going to change the way people engage and look for information?

Mandy McEwen: From a social aspect of how we are using social media networks, I don't think that we're going to rely less on human opinion and choose that over AI, but I do think AI is going to change a lot of social media aspects when it comes to posting content, et cetera, et cetera, if that makes sense.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, I completely agree. But I do have to say, Mandy, you've come on and you've told me that I can't just sit back and wait for people to come to me, that I actually have to be social if I want an audience. And you've told me I can't rely on the robots to do my job for me either, so I'm not feeling great.

Mandy McEwen: Sorry, I know. Ballbuster over here. Sorry about it.

Ryan Brock: I'll get over it.

Drew Detzler: No, that's good stuff. I love it. This is very helpful. Again, you convinced me. All right, Mandy, before we let you go, we're going to do a quick thing that we call our lightning round. It's just a few quick questions. First thing that pops into your mind. You good?

Mandy McEwen: Yep. Let's do it.

Drew Detzler: Mandy, what was the last thing you searched?

Mandy McEwen: It was probably last night when I'm booking the trip to London before I go to Greece in September. So it was something to do with London Airbnbs, if it was cheaper for me to get a London hotel. That's what I was Googling. London hotels versus London Airbnbs. So.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, whenever I go to Europe, Airbnbs are just the way to go. I've stayed in some crazy places, too.

Mandy McEwen: Oh yeah, for sure.

Ryan Brock: I was in Munich once and stayed in this spa that was closed down for the season. It was like a sauna spa for the winter. We were there in the spring and we just had this entire spa to ourselves and they put beds in the sauna-

Mandy McEwen: What?!

Ryan Brock: ... pits. Itwas so bizarre. There were four of us and we had this entire spa that we could just use.

Drew Detzler: And it ended up costing like 50 bucks a night. It was crazy.

Ryan Brock: Yeah.

Mandy McEwen: That's amazing. I love it. I love it. Yeah, I always do Airbnbs, but I was like, good Lord, London is really expensive. And then I was like, I'm still doing Airbnb.

Drew Detzler: That's a good one. Okay, Mandy, are there any marketing myths as it relates to social media or SEO that you've busted during your career?

Mandy McEwen: Yeah, I would say what I said earlier with posting a lot of content is how you succeed on social media. I don't think that's right at all. So that's like a myth that I have originally going into this umpteen years ago, I was like, " Yeah, you just have to be posting a ton of content. You just got to keep posting and posting and posting," and that is not true. You need all the other elements. Post less, but just be more intentional, like quality over quantity.

Drew Detzler: All right. Last question, Mandy. Your best prediction for SEO trends on LinkedIn or otherwise.

Mandy McEwen: AI is going to change things. That's all. Like what Ryan was asking me about earlier, I just think that people are going to be leveraging it more to help with strategy, planning, and content in general. So that's where I think... and I've already seen it.

Drew Detzler: All right. This was a great conversation. Mandy, thanks again for being a guest. Before we let you go, is there anything you would like to plug or mention about what's up next for Luminetics or Mod Girl Marketing?

Mandy McEwen: Hit me up on LinkedIn. Happy to connect. We've got a lot of cool things happening on the personal branding, thought leadership, LinkedIn front, plus short form social media content that we're helping companies with too. So I'm huge on video right now, too. And that's another thing. I guess I can mention that in a trend too, although it's already happening. Short form video is crushing it on every platform, including LinkedIn, and it's only going to get better and better. So we're helping a lot of people with their short form video content strategy across every platform.

Ryan Brock: We'll put her link down in the show notes, and I already accepted your request while we were in this chat. Not that it wasn't an engaging conversation, it very much was, but I was intrigued to see and yeah, I saw your video profile picture and I was like, " Okay, yeah, she knows what she's doing. She's far more advanced than I am at this." So yeah, everybody go check her out. It's like you're going to get some good quality engagement, some tips along the way. Thanks, Mandy. Thanks for showing up and changing a couple of cold old cynics' minds and hearts about social media.

Mandy McEwen: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Ryan Brock: Drew, we've had so many conversations about our general disdain for social media, not so much for itself. I can respect it for what it is and understand it, but for the energy it requires to find value in it. And it sounds to me like today you've got yourself looking at your budget and thinking about how do we get more serious about this? I don't know.

Drew Detzler: Yeah. Mandy's helped me turn a corner. The reason that I have always steered away from it, and I've had disdain for it is, well, as you mentioned, it takes a lot of time. And traditionally I have always seen so much of it is being disingenuous and trying to force your own sales pitch, force your own view and sound bigger than you are. Where the conversation we had with Mandy today was just be genuine. Use it for good. And if you use it for good, you can cut through the noise and you can actually be genuine, helpful, and it can work for your business. Be a part of the solution. Right?

Ryan Brock: Right.

Drew Detzler: I don't just want to avoid it because of the problems. I can actually be a part of the solution and make it better and actually use it for business.

Ryan Brock: Right? I mean, I hate SEO too, you know what I mean? For the same reasons exactly. But what Pillar- Based Marketing and what we're trying to do with SEO is find the good in it, and make it a positive force in marketing. I tell people who don't know anything about marketing, about what I do, I want to convince businesses to stop interrupting your day with ads you didn't ask for, and instead, focus on providing value in the moment you're asking for it. If you think about it from that perspective, there's a common DNA with what Mandy talked about today and it's cool to hear. It's got me a little bit more excited about social media.

Drew Detzler: Oh, very much so. Great conversation. Well, with that, that's a wrap. Another great episode of Page One Or Bust. We'll talk to you next time.

Ryan Brock: Later.

Announcer: Are you ready to dive even deeper into Pillar- Based Marketing? Here's your chance, the brand new book, Pillar- Based Marketing: A Data- Driven Methodology for SEO and Content That Actually Works, by co- host Ryan Brock and Christopher Day is now available in paperback, hard cover, and e- book editions. Find it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or look for the link in the show notes.