SEO expert interview with Richard Lowe Jr
I was interviewed by an Australian SEO expert.
Comment from David James: “It was great watching your interview again. It was really amazing to see how high you set the bar when it comes to publishing content (especially books and guest blogs), as well as your approach to personal branding. I actually recommended my new writer to watch your interview and he told me that he got inspired by watching your interview. Thank you for participating in this interview.”
SEO Expert Interview Transcription
[Start:00:00:00]
Host: Hi guys, it’s David James from Business Growth Digital Marketing and in today’s show I’m graced with the presence of Richard Lowe Jr., who is the founder of the Writing King, best-selling author, ghost writer, blogger and copy writer, all the way from Florida in the US of A. I want to welcome him to the show. Welcome Richard.
Richard: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
Host: Excellent. So, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’ve been doing and how you got into the SEO space?
Richard: Well, it’s an interesting story and I’ll try and keep it as brief as I can. I started in 1981 and I started at a computer company direct from college. In fact, I was hired out of college to become VP of that company, Vice President of Consulting and at that point in time, there was no internet. There was the ARPANET.
Host: Okay.
Richard: And I actually worked on the ARPANET and actually worked on computers on the ARPANET and I did some work for the ARPANET, on the networking side.
Host: Okay.
Richard: And that company went under and I went to another company became VP of Consulting and then another one became…worked on the Las Vegas Valley Water District’s system to pump water and things like that and then wound up at the Trader Joe’s as their IT Director and finally, after 20 years of Trader Joe’s I said, “You know what? I can make a living. I’ve got some money in the bank. So, I’m going to just stop working at Trader Joe’s and become a writer, a professional writer. So, I left Trader Joe’s, moved to Florida because it was far away from California as I could get and decided to start writing and that was in October in 2013 and I haven’t looked back and, in that time, I’ve written and published 63 books and not all under my own name. I have ghostwritten 12 books and I’ve published several hundred blog articles and I realized very quickly that in order to sell books and in order to sell my products, which I’m a consultant so I sell products, my services, you have to learn SEO because if you don’t nobody’s going to find you and I’ve kind of likened it to if you’re out there on the internet advertising your products, it’s kind of like trying to make your snowflake in the middle of a blizzard. How are you going to be found? Well, you need to turn the snowflake like red or something like that so that it’s obvious.
Host: Yeah.
Richard: And that was how I got into SEO. That was a couple years ago and it changes very rapidly but there’s one…there’s a couple of constants to SEO, which we’ll get into in the interview, that are always true regardless of what the current algorithm is or whether it’s penguin or ice tea or vanilla toasts, whatever the update is there’s a couple constants that are always true and it’s good to focus on those constants and not worry about all of the technical stuff.
Host: Yeah.
Richard: Unless you have a lot of money to spend.
Host: Like, 63 books, like, that bedazzles me. I wrote and published my first SEO ebook this year and that one took me 3 months, yeah, about three months to write. My wife, she wrote and published her first book about afro hair maintenance and that one took 5 months. 63 books, how did you do it?
Richard: Well, first of all, I’m a very fast writer. I can write, sometimes when I’m motivated I can write 10,000 words a day.
Host: Wow.
Richard: And since most books that I write tend to go into the niche of short non-fiction, they tend to be between 15 and 25 thousand words.
Host: Okay.
Richard: So, I can actually write and produce a book in a week and have it published and online and ready to go. Of course, you know, there’s promotion and stuff that goes behind that, after that, or before that and so that’s…I write fast and I know a lot of subjects that I’m very knowledgeable about and I just decided to write things on it. Of course, I ran into some fads that we all run into. Some of those are coloring books, puzzle books, things like that because those were the hot item at the time and I learned that hot items are ice cold. Just don’t pay money for anything like that, ever, you know. Attend the webinar, learn what you can and get out. That’s my advice. Some of my affiliate friends will probably hate that but it’s true and most of…there’s some good affiliate stuff out there but it’s stuff that all says make, you know, 3d puzzle books and you’ll make a fortune.
Host: Yep.
Richard: No, you won’t because everybody else is doing it.
Host: Yeah.
Richard: There will be a hundred thousand of them. I got into coloring books and I have 15 of them and there are literally hundreds of thousands coloring books on Amazon that I’m competing with and it’s hard to compete but yeah, I publish a lot of books and of course, there’s blogs and articles and copy and all the freelance work I’ve done on top of that and LinkedIn profiles, I’ll start LinkedIn profiles. I’ve been busy.
Host: Yeah, so like something I’ve been talking a lot with my other SEOs and other clients is the importance of being able to write and being able to publish. So, if you want to get yourself out there and if you want to, like, attract links naturally, if you want to get exposure naturally and to build your online brand, you have to be able to publish and there’s a couple ways you can publish. One is video, one is through audio and then the other is through writing but at the essence of everything, it comes back to writing. Just wanted to get your thoughts on, like, the importance of writing or publishing, yeah, the importance of writing to try to develop a successful SEO campaign.
Richard: Well, writing is extremely important because, well actually, having good content is extremely important and it’s not just good content it is excellent content your content has to be above everybody else’s, as much as you can do. You need to have multimedia, and you already, SEO people already know this, Google owns YouTube. You’ve got to have some videos on your website. It’s got to be well done videos. Then you’ve got to have graphics with all of the appropriate tags things and you’ve got to have good writing and broken up into nice usable chunks, you know, long or short articles. People go back, SEO’s go back and forth. Do you want a 300-word articles, do you want a 2000-word article? I do both because I figure it’s good for my audience and I want my audience to stay, read my articles, decide I’m a good writer and then buy my services. So, I don’t put junk articles there just to fill space and attract search engines. That’s a side effect for me. I want people to read my articles and buy my stuff.
Host: Yeah exactly.
Richard: Or do whatever I want them to do from reading my articles. If you don’t have good quality writing out there or videos or whatever, well actually, it should be and videos, you should have both, then your SEO is most likely going to fail in the longer term. Sure, you can do all of the fad things in little black hat and grey hat. You can get some people coming to your site on the short term yeah but you’re going to be fighting Google or Bing or whatever the whole step of the way. Focus on good content, make sure your site is optimized for SEO, grab one of the good plugins. There’s a couple of them. I use Yoast but there’s a couple others to optimize your site and focus on the content and read about how to make a content SEO friendly and SEO attracting without going the wrong direction and being SEO what are you trying to do, you’re trying to scam me aren’t you and you’ll do fine and then it doesn’t matter what update it is because the content is the key and there used to saying, I don’t know if it’s still there, content is king and there’s nothing more true than that but you really should say excellent content is king. That’s the key to SEO is excellent, incredible content that is so good that people want to share it, come back again and again and again and that’s the way you do SEO.
Host: Yeah, actually, I just want to expand on that last point because, like, I deal with a lot of clients or ex-clients or previous projects and they just do content for the sake of doing content or they don’t want to invest everything wholeheartedly into it. So, like, what kind of difference do you find when you produce those excellent pieces of content? Like, how much easier you find it makes your campaigns run?
Richard: Well, what it means is that people stay on my page. So, if you’ve got mediocre content, you go to, and I love fiverr.com and I love that it is a great site for getting inexpensive thing sometimes. Let’s say you go to fiverr.com and you find somebody who writes you a 300-word blog article and you get it for $20 or even less, you get what you pay for and people, your normal person is going to come read that and say meh and they’re going to leave and they’re never coming back. They’re not going to share it, they’re not going to buy it, they’re not going to get into your list and your if your list contains similar content, they’re going to get off of your list and worse yet, report you for spamming. Now, compare that to good content. Good original content that you’ve put together or outsource to a reputable outsourcer, like me, then you will have people who go, “oh this is pretty good”, and they’ll keep reading and they’ll keep reading and they’ll say, “I wonder if Richard has any other content”. They’ll look at some other pages. So, you’re getting sticky now. I got little tweet things in there to tweet it out and post a LinkedIn and, you know, the usual stuff and you’ll start finding that they’re shared and then you’ll start finding the search engines noticing and you’re going, hmm, because, of course, you have Google Analytics there so Google knows exactly what you’re doing or what they’re doing and is going, “well people are staying here and they’re looking at pages and they’re reading the whole article, they’re reading all the way to the end or halfway through and they’re signing up for his newsletter. There must be something to this guy and they’ll send traffic your way. Now, of course, you got to pick the right keywords and phrases. There’s a whole art to that. I just call LSI keywords. I’m sure you know what that is. You go to make sure you’ve got related things, that’s all part of good content. You include those in there and you put it in there so they’re not obvious. If it’s obvious, your audience is going to go, “he’s trying to scan the search engines”, unconsciously at least, and they’re going to leave but that’s what the difference between bad content and good content is and mediocre content is bad content and good content is bad content. You need to have excellent content.
Host: I like what you said before. You said it’s important to keep your content sticky and this is something that I think a lot of people haven’t really grasped yet because there is, like you, can produce good content but a good content doesn’t always mean sticky content. That’s why you need excellent content.
Richard: Well, excellent content but you also need to understand who your audience is. So, if your audience is…my audience is small entrepreneur, you know, solopreneurs or small businesses that want to brand themselves, virtually or locally, in a certain way. So, by understanding that that’s my audience, I’m attracting solopreneurs, I’m attracting a small business who has some money to spend, to brand themselves with the book, write a book which I ghost write or get their LinkedIn profile looking good or having a good blog. Okay, now what kind of articles would they like? So, my content has to be tailored for that audience and that’s part of making excellent content. It’s not tailored for other audiences and it’s not general. It’s very specific and, of course, I have other content too because I have several audiences, that’s just one of them. So, excellent content doesn’t just mean well-written and it doesn’t just mean good keywords. It means it’s targeted toward your audience and reinforces your brand. If your brand is an SEO expert and that’s what you’re putting yourself out as, that’s great. Now, who’s your audience? Well, you’re probably selling it to small businesses for their websites, let’s just say. Well, how are you going to get it out there? How are you going to convince them that you’re the expert? So, your articles should be building your credibility.
Host: Yeah, exactly.
Richard: And when they do that, you start getting clients and sometimes, you know, I’ll get three or four contacts a day off my website and they’re actually qualified leads with they’re turning the money. I mean that’s three or four money-making content contacts every single day. I’m going to get dozens and dozens and dozens of content with three or four that are money-making contacts every single day that I look at…oh, this one, I don’t want this one. You know, and they’re targeted. They’re…What’s the cost to write a book? I get those kinds of questions, you know. How do I write a book? Can you help me with this, can you write a blog for me? I’ve succeeded. I’ve narrowed down my audience so I don’t get all the stupid stuff. I mean stuff that’s not related to what I want and they’re actually reading it. Back to you.
Host: Yea, like, that’s the real value that I find with content marketing and I’m not sure how it’s like in the States but I feel like in Australia, it’s still something that’s a bit behind, not everybody’s clocked onto it and in my experience, I’ve worked mainly with like us-based clients or European based clients. I feel like they’re a few steps ahead and with the exception of the affiliate marketers here and the people who are entrepreneurs. Like, the local business scene, they don’t quite grasp the value of content marketing at this stage because they’re also looking for the quick wins and, you know, patience is needed because I found…there was actually one blogger I stumbled across. I wanted to…I travel around Australia in a camp event. So, I was there, doing some research, stumbled upon this blog this guy and he’s not an internet marketing expert at all and I started reading this content and it had every detail about his family’s trip going around Australia for a year, right down, excellent detail down to what to carry, how much it would cost, what you needed to budget for day by day, what reads to take and I looked at his content and like man this is amazing like a book market and then I think I ended up signing up to his newsletter, even though I don’t think he shares a newsletter that often and I just thought to myself, man like this is the sticky content that we need in campaigns. So, then I started taking that model and then applying it to different websites and I did it on a trial website and the model worked and it just goes back to what you were saying about the sticky content before and the need to write excellent content and not mediocre content.
Richard: Exactly, exactly. It needs to be excellent content aimed at your niche or your genre or whatever you’re doing that reinforces your brand and gives you credibility. Those are all important things. So, I mean, one of the things I’ve been doing because my blog’s evolved over the years since I’ve been going through and deleting articles that don’t do that because, you know, I started out just like everybody did and I read some of them go, oh that needs to go, and I’ve deleted quite a few and deleted actually whole blogs. I had several blogs and just the whole blog’s gone because then it didn’t serve any purpose and it just dilutes my brand and it’s important also not to do anything that’s not white had. Stay white hat and you’ll be fine. If you even start venturing into gray or black, you’re going to run into trouble and you’re going to find yourself…I used to be a writer for Suite101, even got published in one of their books and they got hit by penguin. They were out of business within a month, I think, a month or two because everything was tailored around whatever the algorithms were at that time and as soon as it changed, they were done and you don’t do that. Just put out good content and it’ll work. Of course, you got to make sure you’re doing all the other stuff too.
Host: Yeah, yeah. I find that a lot of people try to take shortcuts, like, I even met another SEO buddy of mine who deals in one of the Fifty Shades of Grey initio and yeah, he yeah, so I was talking to him about, you know, producing good content, you know, and making that scalable but he would still try to find the shortcut. He’s like, “Yeah there’s this software that can actually just transcribe the videos, you know, that you just find on YouTube and then, yeah, you can kind of not get caught by the search engines.” I’m like, “Well, like, you could just write the content yourself or just hire and expert copywriter”.
Richard: Well, actually to just address that point. If you go to YouTube and you go edit the video, it transcribes it for you automatically. So, you don’t think that Google’s not comparing transcriptions to text? Yes, they are and that person will get caught. He will get caught and, of course, you can transcribe your own videos. You should do that because you want them in video and text that’s the right thing to do but don’t go stealing other people’s videos and transcribe them.
Host: Yeah, I know.
Richard: You’re going to get caught.
Host: Yea, exactly. So, another thing I wanted to ask you was what kind of impact have you seen with yourself publishing good content and being able to attract those, like, good quality natural links or even getting opportunities to, I guess, well, blog post on other sites or to share your content with other sites that might get you links and then research at zero presence?
Richard: Well, one of the things, it’s not really SEO, one of the things that helps is because I’m an author and I have so many books I’ll get contacted by somebody, say a reporter, because I’m on some reporter lists and help a reporter out is one of them, helpareporterout.com, I think it’s called, and they’ll asked what my credibility is and I’ll say well I wrote a book on that it like computer security. I’m a computer security expert. I wrote a book on computer security. oh really? Suddenly, they’ll have an article with my name in it and the link. Helpareporterout.com, by the way, is a great way to get natural backlinks and it’s a slow process. It takes a lot of work. It’s hard to outsource because it requires expertise but once you get started and you do a few of those a week, you’ll find, over time, you’re getting…I’m getting a good solid 20 to 20 backlinks a month in places like Ink.com and, you know, accuweather.com and things like that, real websites and sure, I’ve got a long way to go before my site gets high up in Alexa and ranks and things but I’m still getting traffic that I want because on those business websites they’re sending me people clicking on them who actually want to buy my product. So, actually the SEO becomes almost irrelevant. The links are sending me qualified clients.
Host: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, like, this is, like, 20, so you said 20 links a month from Haro?
Richard: It looks like I’m getting about 20 backlinks a month from Haro.
Host: That’s really impressive because we…
Richard: I don’t necessarily see them in reports. I just see…they send me where they put them and there they are. So I’m like, okay.
Host: Because we get probably between 4 to 10 per month through Haro and to there’s another one called Source Bottle and then we…we’re also looking for other opportunities as well but you’re the first person I’ve come across who’s been able to get it at that scale. So, like, one of the reasons you probably get that is because of your faucet profile and how you built up your and personal brand and persona and this is what I also try to relay to clients that if you want to get into those types of publications, you need to be able to give the journalist a story or help them out with their story, you know, and you have to have good credibility or the expertise to showcase that.
Richard: I’m actually going to write a blog post on how to succeed at Haro and Help A Reporter Out and when you do a pitch, it’s called a pitch when you send them to reporters, you have to, in just a couple paragraphs, you have to tell them why you’re credible and answer the question and that’s all you do and give them a link or an email address or whatever but why are you credible? Well, I wrote a book on computer security. Ok good. What’s the answer to my question? You know, talk about the ransomware that’s going around and then answer their question in a couple sentences. If they want more information, they’ll let me know. So, it’s quick, it’s fast it takes me two, three minutes, I mean, it’s maybe five minutes and the key point is the credibility and that’s important and then the other key point is specifically answer their question. That’s what they want. So, don’t just throw it out, you know, I’m an SEO expert and well, so everybody’s an SEO expert. Well, you know, what’s your credibility? I wrote a book on SEO, I write blog articles in SEO or you know my websites ranked high or whatever your credibility is. I have a podcast in Australia, whatever your credibility is. That’s what you cite in Haro and that gets their attention because, now you’re an influencer, now you have a name and it’s not that hard to make a name. You’ve made one with by having a podcast.
Host: Yeah, like, everybody starts from zero. This is another thing that a lot of people don’t understand so everybody starts from zero and then you have to build your audience. So all those people that you see who you have a hundred thousand million, you know, 10 million people following, they all started from zero and you need to be able to understand your audience, give your audience what they want and then scale that audience’s growth and, you know, there’s some niches where you can scale it a lot more and there’s others where it’s a lot slower. This stuff that myself and my wife are building, it varies. So, like in the SEO niche, it’s been slower to grow the audience but then we’ve done something that’s a bit in the human niche and then that one just, like, the audience just grows very quickly there, you know, and then my wife does something in afro hair and that one is just a very rapidly growing niche. Yes, she just, yeah. So everything comes down to the audience.
Richard: Yeah, the SEO niche is hard to sell because people…I’m an SEO expert. Yeah, so what? What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? The SEO experts go in saying they’re an SEO expert. They’re not focused on the problem that they’re trying to solve for customers. What I solve in my niche, which is branding, is to make these people credible so they build their business. So, you have to format that, that’s a benefit and then I have to target that into what problem am I trying to solve and focus my advertising on that. SEO, it’s hard to sell. First of all, it’s expensive. It’s very expensive. SEO, if it’s cheap, it’s probably a scam. Excuse me, it is a scam and you’re probably going to get blacklisted if you keep doing cheap stuff. It’s going to be expensive. You’re going to pay for it and even if you pay for it, you’re probably going to…if you don’t do your homework, you might get ripped off.
Host: Yeah, exactly.
Richard: You have to make note of that. You have to be careful and it’s gotten kind of a little bit of a bad rep for that sometimes.
Host: Yeah, or sometimes their generous but yeah.
Richard: Yeah, like any field. Any field can do that. I’m sure that bankers got a bad rap from the banking collapse in 2008, you know, in Canada and here in States, you know.
Host: I just wanted to go back to what you were saying with helping clients with books to gain visibility. There was a book I read a few years ago by an Australian guy his name’s Daniel Priestley and the book is called Becoming a Key Person of Influence. So, one of the, the first step was to write a book, get published. He said if you want to be a business or an influencer that gets 90% of the rewards in a field or in an industry or in a niche, you have to build up your persona to be able to be a part of that 10% who gets the 90% of the rewards and the main thing he was talking about was getting published and getting involved in networking but in order to get involved in networking, you had to get published first and a lot of people, they just want to get the reward and they don’t want to do the foundation work. So, like, with you saying that you’re helping companies with getting published through an e-book, I think that’s really important and that’s something I’ve been trying to get companies to do as well. We don’t have the resources in-house to dedicate someone to write a book but we know how important that. So, I just want to get a bit more insight from what you’ve been doing with helping companies improve their brand by publishing the book first and then allowing them to, you know, to grow.
Richard: Well, that’s one of my primary focuses is writing a book for somebody. I’m working on one now. Well, actually, I just…I’m about to get one published now. It’s actually not a ghost written book. I was the editor on the book and help in kind of like a writing consultant where I helped him write his book, he’s French, and it’s called Digitizer Dye and it’s about the Internet of Things and he is a big name in the Internet of Things space and where it’s going and how many Internet of Things they’re going to be. There’s going to be billions and billions and billions of these things on the Internet in years, in just a matter of a couple years, and it’s a fascinating book and he wrote it to brand himself as the expert in that space. He also wants to sell it, of course, and he hopes to sell a lot of copies but that’s secondary. The main thing is he wrote it to let, so that people know he’s the expert. Even though he hasn’t published it yet, he’s already getting phone calls from people asking him for advice, asking him to speak, asking him…it’s exactly what you want to happen.
Host: Yeah, exactly.
Richard: And as he promotes it more and more, he’s going to…he’s getting more and more people trying to communicate with him and that’s the whole point. He’s branded now. That’s what he is. He’s the Internet of the Things expert. We’ll work on a second book next. You want to follow on book. That’s the way it works. That’s what I help them do.
Host: Yeah and I found that there’s no like real shortcut. This is one of the challenges I find when I talk about this with clients that they want to, like, take their business to the next level and they might be doing say, they might be a hundred thousand dollar a year business or a million dollar a year business and then they want to try to become like the Apple in their industry and I say to them if you want to do that, you have to get published, yeah you have to publish your content and if you want to appear on things like television, if you want to get invited for interviews, if you want to be on radio, like, you have to be branded as that go-to expert, you know, whether it’s your company or yourself as an individual and the quickest way to do that is to publish a book. If you’re not publishing the book, at least publish a blog but you’re not going to get those opportunities if you just try to take what you’re doing just by working in your functional job every day and then go to someone and say, “Yeah, I want to be interviewed by you”. You might be lucky, you know, but more often than not, you know, it’s not really, yeah, the chances of…
Richard: If you want to brand yourself and you want to make yourself into a big name, you have to do three things, in my opinion. Number one, make sure you have the perfect LinkedIn profile. People look…if you’re professional and I’m hiring you or I want to find about you, I’m going to look on LinkedIn. Number two, make sure you have a blog and that it is as professional as you can make it. It portrays the image that you want it to portray, communicates well, good SEO, the whole thing but have a blog because that’s your home on the Internet and everything should center on your blog. Why a blog as opposed to say Facebook? You don’t own Facebook. Facebook can shut down your account at a moment’s notice if they don’t like you. I’ve had my account shut down for an hour or two because, you know, some hacker got in or some bot went crazy and it was scary because I’ve done a lot of work on Facebook and I’m just like but if you unless, for a blog, unless you don’t pay the bill or unless you’re doing something really weird, your blog’s not going to get shut down. The third thing you need is a book. If you do all three of those things you have put in the foundation to making yourself big. If you don’t have those three things and they don’t interconnect, you don’t have your foundation yet. You’re going on sand. I do all three of those things. It’s three of the things that I do and work them together. Now, once you have those and you’ve got them as good as you can get them, then you work on the social media and building up your name of social media, then you work on the press releases, then you work on these other things but you’ve got to have those three things, or at least in the works, to really be a complete brand.
Host: Yeah, I just wanted to ask you as well, just going back to the writing, I know how important it is to write and I know it’s very challenging for a lot of people to write. Like myself, it took me probably almost two years, no, let’s say about a year. I’m just writing articles constantly every day to be able to get the confidence to be able to start writing a book eh and then it took me let’s say three months to write a 20,000 word book. I was doing other things in between but yeah, it took me about three months. Now, a lot of people they’ll say, “Oh yeah but I’m not a writer. I can’t really write. I don’t know what to write about”. How do you think someone, whether they’ve got experience writing or if they don’t have any experience writing, can at least take some steps forward towards getting themselves published?
Richard: Well, if somebody doesn’t want to write, the first thing they should do is call somebody like me. I’m a ghostwriter and I’m also a book coach. Ghost writing can be fairly expensive. What ghost writing is is you hand me a pile of notes, we do some interviews and I write your book can hand it back to you. We do some revisions, we’re done. So, I do all the work but book coaching actually pushes most of the work back to you, if it’s going to be your book and you would say, write it as good as you can and it’s obviously not going to be perfect, maybe we do interviews and agree, whatever and I’m helping you write your book. That is much less expensive. I’m actually working on two of those now. It’s much less expensive because I’m really like a consultant that you’re using to help you get your book done. Give you good confidence, make sure the English is good, maybe rewrite some parts of it, maybe do some interviews and we’re working together as little or as much as you want and can afford and it can go as slow, as fast as you want but if you start on that, if you hired me as a book coach, say you, hired me a book coach now to start on your book, you could at least make progress every week. We would make sure you’re doing progress every single week, you’re writing something and your book would get done and you’d be very happy with it. That’s one way to do it.
Richard: The other way is say, “Richard, I want to write a book about SEO. Go for it. Here’s some…and it gets done and I’ve done that too.
Host: Yeah, all right. You’ve been able to go share a lot of amazing, amazing knowledge. Oh yeah, I did have one other last question which is, what kind of impact have you seen with your visibility after writing a book compared to doing other kind of things?
Richard: Well, basically before I wrote a book. Let me take one of the books I wrote, which is called Focused on LinkedIn and it’s the basic book. It goes over the basics of how to put together a LinkedIn profile to make it visible and useful. So, it’s not an advanced book. It would be for somebody who’s new to LinkedIn. That got me a job at a LinkedIn company, not related to LinkedIn but they do LinkedIn profiles. I’ve done over 150 of them now and I talk to people about LinkedIn profiles all the time and that basically made me a LinkedIn influencer and a LinkedIn expert. I can point to that book and say there it is. There’s the information on how to do it. I wrote it and I wrote it from my head and that’s stuff that I know that works. It’s the method that I use to make profiles and it’s got quite a few reviews on Amazon. Most of them are pretty good. It is actually a best-seller, sold almost 10,000 copies so far.
Host: Fantastic.
Richard: Yeah, that’s my bestseller. I was pretty proud of that. I’ve got another one, How to Sell one eBay that establishes my credibility on eBay and because I’ve made have quite a bit of money off eBay and, I mean, the books became a best-seller also.
Host: Congratulation.
Richard: Amazon best-seller, not New York Times. That’s a different story. I’d like to be in their 10 best-sellers but it made me a branding expert for LinkedIn and there’s no doubt about it. I wrote the book.
Host: Yes, it sounds like when you publish, it creates an opportunity for success and then it can create a snowball effect and it just keeps on making things get, like, bigger and more success and kind of makes you become a magnet for success.
Richard: Well, it’s like I said, those three things, a book, a blog and a LinkedIn profile are what I see as the foundation and if you’ve got a book, you’re well along your way of having that foundation and you have to use it, of course. If you just write a book and let it sit there, it’s not doing nothing for you. You have to use it to promote yourself, you send copies to people, you can send…I have in paperback, hardcover, audio and Kindle formats. So, you can get them in all the formats, which is even more credibility and I’m actually working on a course for LinkedIn so that people can take a LinkedIn course, which will just be the book but I’ll explain it all in detail. So, it’s a foundation. You do have to then, actually, build a house on top of that. So that would be your social media, that would be your press releases, that would be all your other promotional efforts, your products that go with it, etc., etc., but without the foundation, you don’t have the credibility. Then it becomes much harder because then…some people, their credibility is their bachelor’s degree, some people it’s their master’s degree, some people it’s that they have 20 years of experience in this industry. What a book does, is it can boil all that down into words and in a short concise way and say, this is my credibility, here’s why I’m the expert and people really use the expert.
Host: Yeah, actually I did have another quick question, just off the back of that, is what kind of impact have you also seen publishing a book have on the growth of your audience?
Richard: Dramatic. It’s dramatic, especially the LinkedIn books, the one I’ve been kind of promoting and the audience for that has increased, I have to say, dramatically. I don’t have any numbers off the top of my head but it’s definitely created a niche for me to go after because one of my problems has always been, as you can probably tell, I’ve got a lot of training in a lot of areas. I’m a computer guy, a LinkedIn guy, I’m an eBay guy and I could go on and on and on. I’m security person. So, it focused me on that one thing. I’m a LinkedIn expert and now I can sell that. I’m a blogging expert. I got a book on blogging, go figure and now I’m a blogging expert and I got a book on ghost writing, now I’m a ghostwriting expert and those are my three niches and I got a book on each one and it creates a natural, organic audience. It’s very interesting. That’s the best way to put it. It creates an inflow.
Host: Yeah, oh yeah, like you become a magnet and a magnet for success.
Richard: Yeah, like I’m doing public speaking in a local area. I’m speaking at dozens of places I’ve got scheduled for the next few months. I’m going to libraries and getting book signings. I’m going all over the place and the whole reason for that is I’m going to be talking about LinkedIn, ghostwriting or blogging and I’ll have my books there and give them to people and they go, “Oh, well let me go to your website. You wrote a book? I’ve been wanting to write a book my whole life”. “Great, I can help you with that”. Most of them never get back to me, some do and then LinkedIn, “What’s this LinkedIn thing? Will it help me?”, “Sure, here’s a book. I’ll even sign it for you $20 bucks, you know, I’ll sign it for you, you know, and then they have the book and then they’d read it and then they’ll go, “You know, this sounds good”, and they call me back. First of all, they try and do it themselves, which is what the book tells them how to do and then half the time, they go, “You know, this is a lot of work” and they call me. It is a lot of work.
Host: Yeah, it is a lot of work but look, I want to say thank you for, you know, participating and just everything that you shared today in terms of SEO, in terms of content writing, in terms of personal branding, branding for a company, the importance of publishing. It’s just been amazing and I know that we could go on for at least another hour but, you know, I really want to thank you for what you’ve been able to share with the audience today. Where’s the best place for people to find you?
Richard: They can go to thewritingking.com. So, t-h-e-writingking.com and that’s my blog and it has every way to get hold of me. It has all my services, books listed a couple, I think over 150 blog articles. That’s the best place to get hold of me and then the second thing is go to coolauthor, c-o-o-lauthor.com. That goes to my amazon book page and that has all my books listed.
Host: Awesome, well look guys you know where to find him. You know, I want to say thank you again, Richard, for being on the show. Make sure you follow…
Richard: My pleasure.
Host: Yea, make sure you’re follow him, you know, check out his books, the bestseller right here and if you need any of his services, definitely go and inquire and check him out. So, thank you again.
Richard: Thank You.
[End:00:42:02]
Richard is the Owner and Senior Writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author, and ghostwriter. He’s written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 40+ books, as well as hundreds of blog articles.
