Episode 112: How to revive your DEAD content AUTOMATICALLY to drive traffic to your website – with Sean Donahoe

Episode 112: How to Revive Your DEAD Content AUTOMATICALLY to Drive Traffic to Your Website – with Sean Donahoe

Mike: Hi there everyone! Welcome to Episode 112 of The Mike from Maine Show, the place where we do daily interviews with successful online entrepreneurs. This is your host, Mike Thomas. And today on the show, I’ve got Sean Donahoe. This is his third time on the show. We — he’s putting up a lot of stuff and what can I say. And he’s got this product that he’s putting out. It’s called Ping Fresh. And what it does is it’s supposed to take your older content that you have on your websites and freshen them up a little bit. And we’re gonna get into how it does that. He’s had suiting set of use as plug-in, whether you started using it and they’ve gone more traffic and it just makes a search engines think that the content is either newer than it actually is or it thinks there’s been a change to it. But I’ll let Sean explain that a little more in the interview. But it’s definitely something that I wanted to take a look at coz Sean is always putting out great stuff. He’s one of the big marketers out there. So yeah, let’s get into it with Sean Donahoe.

Mike: We are here today with Sean Donahoe. Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean: Hey, how are you doing? It’s not been too long since we’ve done this but I just wanna make sure you’re doing good. Now, how has is everthing going on with you?

Mike: Actually, it’s good. I was showing my girlfriend that I was doing an interview with you today and she was like, “Has he not been on the show before? I’ve seen this guy before.” I was like, yeah, yeah, he’s a busy man.

Sean: That’s it. You know what, Mike, everywhere — I basically got four interviews lined up today, two radio interviews and you know, outside of what we’re doing with our recent launch. So yeah, I’m everywhere. You know, the more I speak in interviews like this with great people like yourself and with the radio stuff. I was feeling I’ve got television interviews for some marketing consultant and see some marketing stuff that I’m doing. Hey, you know, it’s all going great. It’s just taking off like crazy.

Mike: And I like your style too.
Sean: Absolutely. You know, I think we must have to see fashion consultant before we started with this. Mike: Let’s get right into it. You just launched a product called Ping Fresh. Tell us about it.

Sean: Well, it’s a — basically, it’s to address a very large public that the most people don’t even know they suffer from. I’ll give you an example, I have over 500 websites in different niches. Now, I do sort of affiliate marketing, adsense income, CPA offers. I mean, basically any form of monetization out there. And I realized that a lot, you know, going through the numbers. I’m a numbers guy. And I realized that a lot of our sites whom have hundreds and hundreds of posts but only the most recent ones are getting the attention they deserve. And we have all those of automatic promotion things. But I realized, you know, there’s a big potential hold here for many other people who got websites as well. And that is that their old content is not top of mine. It’s maybe not ranking, it’s not getting any attention it deserves and it’s stuck there stagnant. Now, again we do a lot of automatic promotion and SEO and I have a script that basically keeps things going. Now, my thought was, okay say for example Joe Blow, he has a great website. He’s got 50, 100, 200, 300 posts. But his old content out is not getting seen. It’s just dead, it’s not making any money and basically, that could be thousands of dollars in potential revenue lost every single month. So my thought was okay, teach him the strategies I use and then I’ll put this into a plug-in that will literally invigorate the entire website. All across the board and basically keep re- announcing all of their content. Not just the new stuff but the old content as well. And we also do a thing where we track bot activity, in another words all the search engines that actually come in to look at our pages. And if they’re not, there’s probably coz your site has no posts, in another words, is dead. So, what we do is by letting them know about the old content and letting the viral networks — the viral social networks, RSS Blog, Blog Directories and other sites where people are actively on there looking for new stuff, we let them know about hey, here’s your post and I don’t forget this post here and all the rest of this kind of stuff. It literally just keeps everything fresh. And that’s very, very powerful. For example, another scenario — another thing we do is say for example, you’ve got a page about say attitude, I just take these niches on random one. You’ve got a post on there that shows some great valuable information and it leads to a lead capture page and everything else, so it’s all very cool. If people see that page, it converts very well. However, if the search engine bots haven’t been on that site for say 45 days, you can pretty much guarantee that they don’t care about that or that site is completely invisible. So, what we do is if that page has not been visited for quite a while, we’ll also change the date on that and bring it back up to current. We kinda take it from the bottom of the pile right back up to the top, so that it gets more internal authority, more internal links if you’ve got like widgets like recent posts and all the rest of that kind of stuff. But as that goes up, now it’s treated like this is brand new content and off it goes. And it makes everything just look a hundred percent fresh. So, that really does take everything you’ve done in the past and make it as if it was bright, new, shiny, dusted off, polished, here you go on a silver platter to everyone, including your potential traffic, your potential market, as well as by effect, the

search engines as well. So, it literally just invigorates everything and kicks it into over drop. And that’s what really what we’re doing here.

Mike: Okay, from what I’m understanding is you’ve — okay, you’ve got your blog, you’ve got your website and you’ve got all this content on it. This plug-in essentially is going to — I mean, it’s called Ping Fresh, so I’m assuming it’s gonna ping the content to the different — like every time, what I know about pinging is usually when I publish a new post, like when I publish this interview that we’re doing right now, a ping will be sent out to the search engines, letting them know that hey, I’ve got new content on my site, come here and take a look and index it. Is that kind of the same kind of thing going on?

Sean: It’s a good interpretation of what pinging does. What pinging actually does is it notifies some blog directories and some outsource directories as well. The thing is though, that it’s very limited. What WordPress does natively is very, very limited. For example, when you install WordPress, you only have one ping site called Ping-o-Matic!. We have a list of over 300 all over the world. And they tie in to also to different sites and networks and everything else. But that’s just one pattern. We also tap into viral networks. We create, for example, an RSS feed of your recent promotions. Well now, you can take the RSS feed, now you can put that over to social bookmarking sites. You can put that into and have it syndicate to web 2.0 sites using something like LinksAlpha. You can put that feed right into OnlyWire Free for sample and now have it all go out to Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, all of the — LinkedIn, Google Plus, literally hundreds and hundreds of different ways you can take this new information, this new ping and this — we use the misnomer, it’s a little bit of a kind of play on words here because the original idea of pinging was sonar parts. Submarines just put out sonar parts signals out there. What’s we kind of doing, we call it a social sonar parts. So, part of it is traditional pinging but what we do is if you got posts, there’s also a thing called ping backs and track backs and things like that. We don’t just do the pinging, we also re-process the track backs and the ping backs. And we put it out to many, many more different sites. We also then, again, do the social side of things, Facebook, Twitter. If you have for example a site, like a Tumblr site that accepts post by email, guess what, not only will we do all the stuff we just mentioned, but we’ll send an email out to those accounts so that your content is now published there and pushed out there. So, basically it just creates a massive web of places where you can get exposure, get valuable backlinks which are socially relevant to everything you’re doing, increasing your social footprint and drawing all those people back in and giving yourself massive authority at the same time. So, it’s like an all-in-one solution, like I set this up, with some of the stuff we do with, like I have — if you get the developer version, you can also directly post out to some different services as well. For example, we use like LinkPipeline Pro, we post directly to OnlyWire and stuff like that. So, we’re always adding to this system. That’s one of the beautiful things because I use this myself. I’ve been using it for over two years. And with all the panda changes, penguins, zebras, marmosets, elephants, whatever else Google is gonna throw at us, this system has gone from strength to strength, then with all the changes that they are doing again, this just made it that much more powerful. While everyone else is dropping off the face of the earth, our sites are shooting up and ranking. And that’s really what this is all about.

Mike: I remember hearing somewhere that if you ping too much to these places, if you ping too much, that you can get actually banned or disregarded from that. Is that true and is there a danger of that happening?

Sean: With our plug-in, no. Here’s the thing, there’s a lot of our people that back in the day, they uses to try ping their sites several times a day. That is bad, bad, juju. You don’t do that. What we have is a delay system. So, basically if you do it say — well, we got a slide that allows you to re-ping say after 20 days or 45 days, or something like that. Because you don’t wanna be doing it every day. Yes, that will absolutely get you slapped. You don’t ever want to do that. And there’s some people like I say, they would just ping it five times a day and then wonder why they’re getting slapped. You know, that is silly. So, what we’re doing is we aren’t throttling it. We’re doing it in a very reasonable fashion to make sure that yeah, absolutely I’m playing within the rules. And if you do it after 30 days, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Because here’s one thing that a lot of people don’t realize. WordPress, when you save a post, automatically pings it out or it used to, but they’ve eventually changed it since then. But the idea was every time you save a post, it would then ping out. And that if you save a post, back in the old days like for say 2 years ago, if you were making changes to a post and you save it and then you went back, oh you know I forgot to make this, now you made it again. You do that 4 or 5 times, basically every time that suddenly re-pinged the search engine five times. Yeah, that’s causing a problem. So, we stopped what – well basically, WordPress doesn’t do that anymore. But we also make double sure that WordPress doesn’t do that to cause you a problem.

Mike: Okay.

Sean: And then again, with our queuing system and our throttle system, you can only do it at every so many days so that again, you’re staying 100% safe with that. So, not only do we give you all that extra power, we also make sure it’s 100% safe as well. You’re not doing anything black cat.

Mike: I like to hear that. And I’ve got two — I’ve got over a hundred interviews now on mikefrommaine.com and like you said, I’ve got some great content that’s just sitting back there, not getting that many views now because it’s buried within my site, the search

engine’s not seeing it as being new content, so it’s still ranking for different keywords but it’s not getting the ranking that I’ve liked it to have. Now, let’s think about it. Let’s — we’ve got our two interviews that we’ve done before, how is that gonna affect it? What’s gonna happen with that?

Sean: That’s a great, great question. Here’s what you can do. I’ve got to say that I’ve got lots of interviews, lots of videos I’ve done. So, I wanted to make sure that they’re able to be seen. Now, before I answer the question, let me ask you another one, do you have them on Youtube as an example –?

Mike: Yes, I do.

Sean: Okay. Two things you can do here that are in the developer version. First of all, you can promote external links. Now, you can also promote external RSS feeds. So, with the developer version, you can actually take in your Youtube ID with your channel RSS feed and put that in the external links. Now, what this will do is it will extract individual items from that RSS feed and throw that into the promotion queue. So, with your Youtube channel, coz I have my own Youtube channel, the IMSCTV and everything else. So, I can take that and push that out there as well. What are the things we actually do with what we have gotten on here. So then, that will take it out and push it out as if it’s new. So again, we’re getting some attention back. Or you can take individual links, maybe you’ve got a you know, self-hosted page somewhere else or maybe you just wanna directly promote one specific thing. Again, you can take a direct link and put that in another blogs as well. So, that’s one method. The second thing is you obviously embed this inside posts or pages on another of your website as well, correct? And now you’ve got the double whammy. First of all, you’ve got your external links, your RSS feeds and everything else. But then, on the other side of that, you’ve obviously got your posts and I’m sure you’ve put a little summary about what the interview is about. So, you’ve got text on there and everything else. So, this system will automatically promote those pages, as well as your videos. So, basically you’re getting a double effect, a double whammy of all of that exposure, the ability to push those out there. And again, because it’s randomized, because it’s acceptable, again you’re not overdoing it but you are getting the eyeballs. So, for example if you hook Ping Fresh in with your Facebook account, with Twitter and if you’ve got a following in either one of those. Again, people are seeing that, people are seeing that — all the time. Continuous eyeballs on to everything. So yes, in terms of promotion, it’s very, very, powerful indeed.

Mike: Is it gonna increase the rankings in the search engines? I mean, I understand if it’s — if we’re gonna be posting it out to my Facebook and my Twitter ocassionally, then of course I can see that okay, people are gonna see it and perhaps click on and come back through. But is — in regards to the search engines, how is that gonna work?

Sean: Well, here’s the thing. One thing that most people don’t realize is that your social footprint is now a critical SEO factor. And that — the bigger social footprint you have, then the more authority you have. Now, people are talking about your stuff. For example, if people are re-tweeting if, if you put it on a Facebook page which is publicly indexable by the search engines, then people are gonna see that. They’re gonna see those social backlinks and then your authority and your rankings are gonna increase. Also, every single one of them is a link back to you. So again, the more you push us out there, the more the search engines are gonna take attention then. One thing that we do in a demo video that we had on imscpingfresh.com is we show how suddenly after just using this for a couple of days that the — there was a massive spike in search engine bot activity. Now, it’s one thing we also have here which is very cool. We have what’s called bot spy and literally, in real-time, to the minute tracking of everything that the search engine bots are doing. And we saw activity go from — first say for example Bing was one of the things we saw, with a big, big spike in activity, went from approximately 5 search engine calls today to almost 500 because suddenly the search engines are going, oh what is this? This is great. So, we saw that activity, so we know that the search engines are more active, thus their indexing, taking more attention to everything. They’re running and know exactly what’s going on. And then again, they’ll link those out rankings accordingly. So yeah, everything here courses a neck effect of more exposure and with that more exposure, the search engines pay more attention and will rank you better as well.

Mike: Well, there’s probably some people listening right now that have bought some of your previous products, for example Syndication Rockstar and — are you using, I would wanna be careful, like about using too much stuff on my websites. Do you recommend using all of your plug-ins on your website or is that overkill?

Sean: You know, that’s a very, very good question. We build these with complementary services in mind. We want everything to be complementary. So, for example Syndication Rockstar was about syndicating your content out there to create authority. What we’re doing now is we’re also creating massive exposure in different areas as well. So, while in some ways, you’re getting more eyeballs for example, Syndication Rockstar will post it to Twitter, it will post to Facebook and everything else, this one’s like microreminders in those areas that it does on a whole different stuff in different arenas. So, by — there’s a lot of power between these two but they are complementary, not competitive in many regards and we design them to work together because again, all of these things that I put in plug-ins are stuff that I used on my website and they are thoroughly tested in the wild before I wrap them up into a plug in and present it to everyone out there. And my goal here is obviously, I got 500 sites and I’m building that all the time. When in actual

fact, we have over 3,000 websites built. That’s the main money ones are 500 individual microsites. So, what we do there, we obviously got to make sure whatever we’re doing is time-tested and it’s not gonna hurt us, because if it hurts us, obviously that’s gonna be a problem. So, it’s only after a long period of time of testing before I put something actually into a plug-in and then, let the public have it. And honestly, we got this many, many strategies I use that I haven’t even discussed that are you know, still being tested right now that I will put into plug-ins in the future if I determined that it’s gonna be good enough and it has to pass a lot of testing and a lot of kind of let’s just say breakproofing so shall we say and search engine, what the heck are they gonna do next before I even wrap this up in a plug-in and even offer it to the general public.

Mike: And that’s one of the things — that’s one of the thing that I like about what you do and why I keep inviting you back on is that you don’t just create something and throw it out to the public, you test it on your own sites and the reason why — one of the reasons why I think you’re so successful is that you don’t just create something that you think another person would like. You create something that you would like and normally, if you have a demand for it, then there’s gonna someone else with the demand for it as well.

Sean: Yeah, that’s exactly. There’s so many people out there with common problems, like traffic generation, conversion, one of the search engines doing okay, what have they done that’s really screwed everyone up, to be quite honest. So, I look at that problems and I try to address them because if I’m having those problems or if I’m anticipating something like that, then I know there’s gonna be demand for it. So I try and help as many people as possible. That’s what we build our business on is that we want to help as many people as possible. That’s why we have things like the Inner Circle which is a membership site coz we gather as many people who need help as possible. And then we do things like the Ask Sean Sessions where — we just had one last night actually, where we had two hours of me talking about how to increase your social signals, how to do traffic generation and we have like an hour of literally people asking me live any question and any roadblock they’re having. So, we do that as well. So, there’s all sort of things like that that we do that really help people in the long run overcome their problems, overcome their obstacles and hit success coz there’s so much BS out there. I mean, there’s so many people releasing plug-ins that they just have an idea, ask a team to build it for them for $200 and then throw it out there and hope to make some money with it and they have no idea whether it’s gonna work, they have no social proof that it’s working. I mean, you see on our site, we actually — I didn’t show my stats with it, I showed my students’ results. We have one student who went from almost 0 to 7,000 visitors a day. Another one who just launched a site went from 0 to 17,000 visitors a day. And that’s their results. I mean, that’s not mine. I can show you my result but why would you believe me. There’s so much BS out there and we’ve built in skepticism now, especially in the IM industry. There’s so much skepticism out there, I don’t usually —

Mike: You have to be skeptical, though. I mean — Sean: Absolutely.
Mike: Yeah.

Sean: Absolutely. If you don’t have skepticism, there’s something wrong. Don’t ever take my word for something or anyone else’s. Do your research. Look at the strategy. Look at the results that’s showing from other people. See what, you know, are they verifiable stats and everything else. You know, there’s so much crap out there and so many, so much hype and everything else that it really is a shame that yeah, but that’s how these people are making money. So being able to distinguish yourself from those people — that’s what I’ve tried to do to the best of my ability is you know, here’s what I do, it works for me, here it is on a silver platter. If you like it, great. If you don’t, no problem. And that’s what, you know, that’s what we do. So I think that’s one of the main reasons I like to day that we are very much different from everyone else and we try to make sure that we deliver, we over-deliver on what we do. I mean, if you see the functions in this, when you look through the demo and you say, this guys is only selling me this for $27 — that’s the price by the way on the front-end of this. I actually had a JV partner and I did a live demo. So yeah, this is what we’re doing here, here and here. And he goes, yeah and what are you selling this for, $97? Because can see it can be worth $297 and you’re doing it on a webinar. I said, no. We’re just putting it on the website for $27. He thought I was crazy. But when you see what this does and the power it can create and you know, the results it can generate. Actually yeah, it’s a no brainer price. It really is. And people are saying they think I’m crazy but the bottom line is, I wanna help as many people as possible. Now, there are — I’m gonna be honest, a full disclosure here, what we’re all about, there is a developer license as a one-time offer which is $47. Again, full disclosure here, this is my time, you know, this is my tea here, we gotta go — you know, gotta go to that here. So there is a some extras that you can unlock, some extrapower. If you want it, I will also throw in a bonus plug-in as well. So, it’s like a full pack. So, you can that for $47 and that literally unchains some of the restrictions that are in the base version and you could take that higher if you want to and get all the maximum power. Now, if you just decide front-end version for you, perfect. It will be great, you can use it on up to 10 of your own sites. With the developer version, you get unlimited sites — your own, your clients’ if you’re doing like a, if you’re providing services to your clients, you’re building their website. So, local marketing then again, you can also put this on their sites as well and

charge for it. So, there’s all sorts of things you can do with this that’s really, you know, everything under the silver platter. You can pick what you want and you’re good to go.

Mike: Thanks again, Sean. It’s always a pleasure having you on the show. I’m sure that you’ll be coming out with tons of new stuff in the future and we’ll have you on again.

Sean: Always.

Mike: And good luck with your other interviews, we really appreciate it.

Sean: No problem. It’s glad to be here and I’m glad that we have a chance to chat again and hope everyone who has watched this, kind of get a little you know, insider look at some of the stuff we do, why we do it and again, if you wanna check that out, I’m sure there’ll be a link right below this here.

Mike: There will be.
Sean: If you wanna look at it to get some more information. Mike: Thank you, Sean.
Sean: Take care.

Mike: I hope you enjoyed the interview with Sean today. If you’re interested in checking out Ping Fresh, you can go to mikefrommaine.com/pingfresh or as always, it’s in the show notes on mikefrommaine.com, you can that out. I hope you all have a great weekend and I will see you all on Monday.