Tolong buatkan artikel lengkap dari transkrip vidio berikut ini: why don't we just paint a picture of of what winning could look like well I think there's two big steps honestly I mean step one is just stop doing stupid [ __ ] it's always like this whole thing of like why are you becoming involved in government what do you want it's like I don't want anything I want the opposite of things right I I want whatever has been happening to not happen do the opposite of what Europe does this is the most spectacular unwind of what we refer to as as preference falsification that I've ever seen like every day literally is like a whole block of people basically coming out and saying the exact opposite from what they've been saying for the preceding 10 years I think it might be literally true that San Francisco is the cultural center of the universe San Francisco was first in on everything that we're talking about and I think San Francisco maybe is first out take any principle and just identify the date at which everybody in San Francisco decided that they believe that the prediction would be the unwind happens in the exact same form do you think open AI should be allowed to be a for-profit so this is one of those things where you kind of always wonder if you're there's sort of two Realties and you kind of wonder which Earth you're on it it turns out the road to Mars you know requires going through the US government it turns out the road to flying cars requires going through Twitter what do you think will Define the next era culturally it's not the most obvious thing in the world that kind of the technol libertarian faction would align with sort of a you know what you might call a nationalist populist faction and it actually turns out that that you know the alignment is not 100% but like it's shockingly close because what both of those perspectives have is basically yeah let's go [Music] win mark welcome back to the podcast thanks so much for joining hey Eric it's great to be back so first question mark are are you tired of all the winning you know all the appointments all the timeline splitting the preference falsification even the Democrats you talk to are secretly happy are you tired of winning I was told there would be so much winning that we would all get tired of winning and I have to say so far I am not in fact tired of winning amazing I mean if you compare it to I remember the days of 2020 when every day we would say this is the craziest thing you know that we've ever SE every day is the new craziest thing we've ever seen and uh just the constant blackpilling and now it's it's just white pill Central the unwind of this whole thing of this last four years is just spectacular and you know it's just getting started like okay so my favorite thing I'll just my favorite thing that happened today yeah okay so I like to say that every single day I see something that's just so crazy that I literally blank it out of my mind that I saw it and I forget about it yeah and then I'm scrolling Twitter you know I'm scrolling X like half an hour later and I see it and I'm like no that can't be right I forget about it again and then like three hours later I'm scrolling again I say there it is it's the third time that it sticks in my head the Commerce Secretary of the Biden Administration gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal published today in which she said she really believes that the key to beating China in the great geopolitical context of the 21st century um is to out innovate them okay wow this after four years of her Administration did everything possible to do the exact opposite yeah it's um a cynic would say that she's looking for work yeah I however am very idealistic and I think she's being genuine in her sentiments yeah it's um it's pretty funny I I met glacius was talking about sort of a a new agenda for the Democrats recently and I remember David saxs quote tweeted him and was like sounds like you're a republican these guys literally as I say you know this there's a set of these guys some of whom are friends of yours yes um who are all like o like we have to stand for building things after 50 years of standing for the exact opposite yeah yeah but only Democrats can do it it's some incredible it's really some incredible stuff no look I mean this is the you tell me what you think of this this is the most spectacular unwind of what we refer to as preference falsification that I've ever seen like it it just it feels like every day um in the last you know month now or coming on six weeks every day literally is like a whole block of people basically coming out and saying the exact OPP from what they've been saying for the preceding 10 years and I again let's be generous I I I genuinely believe they actually believe it they just feel like that they can say it now for the first time and by the way I think this process there there has been so much preference falsification in the last decade I I think this process the unwind is at the very beginning I think we're like 1% of the way there and I'm really really interested to see how far this thing rips yeah so let's flush this out a little bit what has there been preference falsification about So within tech there was a lot of sort of the the Dei stuff the activism stuff a lot of these sort of moral panics over the last few years that people had to sort of pay lip service to there's a lot of the covid stuff there's a lot of just hiding sort of uh incompetence or or or flesh out what was really the preference falsification that that is being sort of uh you know shifted now yeah well you know as you know so there are two components to preference falsification and for the people hearing this for the first time this is the work of a of a professor named Kuran who is really outstanding very sharp and wrote a book years ago called uh private truth public lies where he lays out basically this theory of preference falsification which is basically what happens in a society in which people basically have to lie in public but it actually this is the private truth public lies you know kind of part but it turns out there's two parts to the theory there's the part where you think something and you're not allowed to say it and then there's the part about how you don't think something but you must say it anyway yeah and and so you know the classic example of usav hav the great C Statesman anti-communist wrote a similar book 40 years ago called the power of the powerless before the fall of br wall and he talked about basically in in totalitarian Communist States the slogan was workers of the World Unite you have nothing to lose but your chains and he he writes this whole book about basically how everybody under a Communist Regime basically didn't believe any of that right like certainly by the 1970s 1980s they didn't believe any of the workers of the world are not going to unite they were not going to lose their chains right in fact the chains were coming from a completely different source which was the Communist dictatorship but Maran talks about he talks a lot about the need for everybody to profess this like everybody has to lie everybody knows that everybody's lying everybody knows that everybody knows is lying and yet everybody is still lying right and and actually what happens in the extreme is it becomes a what what you call a demoralization campaign right so it's a specific psychological method used by totalitarian societies to basically grind everybody's psychology into the ground like you what H talked about is you lose all of your self resect like you you lose your Humanity when you're put in a position like that now of course in our society we don't live under anything you know nearly as Extreme as like Soviet communism but nevertheless we have been living for the last decade under what I refer to as a soft authoritarian of this where the social dynamics are are as intense and then the penalty is not you get sent to the Goole the penalty is you get canel and when you get canceled you lose your you lose your livelihood you lose your employment opportunities in many cases that we both know people who have lost friends have lost family yeah and you know some people who literally have like vanished off the face of the Earth and not been her from him again and then every once in a while somebody commits suicide yeah and so it's it's a soft version of a hard dictatorship but it's nevertheless it's deeply authoritarian and then the nature of it is if you talk about it you get inou so this is the thing happing now which is like you know wait a minute like you know what do you mean like who got canel it's like well you know there was a decade of scalps nailed to the wall and now we're just going to pretend it didn't happen so that's the general thing I think at this point simply saying that this is the the regime that we've been living under I think makes it crystal clear I think everybody listening to this will have their own example again their own example either of something that they believed but couldn't say or there something that they didn't believe that that they were forced to say both sides of that are incredibly pernicious maybe it's a tribute to the flexibility of an actual Democratic Society that this kind of pressure campaign can only stay on so long but you know boy it certainly seems to be cracking now yeah and just one example you tweeted about how you regretted not speaking up publicly for the former I believe CEO of Milla Brandon Mike who made a personal donation um that was controversial at the time and got him fired but the the cost of speaking up and and standing up for him might have you know yielded some controversy as well and so it feels like a lot of people are sort of realizing hey there were these people sort of cancelled I should have spoke up for them now I can now that it's a different now that it's safe yeah so that was a really key moment we should talk about that just because it was so key and so this was one of the first you know kind of cancellation campaigns intact this was about 10 years ago and in retrospect this kind of was the firing of the starting gun for a lot of what followed but it was I would say just for myself it was deeply confusing at the time you know what was happening so basically what happened was this guy's name is Brendan Ike he's a longtime friend of mine he's a guy that we recruited to my my first company cape in like 1994 he actually this is true single-handedly created JavaScript like he literally sat down over the summer and like wrote it himself which is now you know the most popular programming language on the planet and so one of these incredible seminal figures in our industry and and also just like a wonderful human being super nice guy very Community oriented family oriented super warm always there for people you know every everybody loved this guy he was a key engineer at ncape in the 90s and then in in the 2000s after we sold Netscape to AOL they at that point spun off the Mozilla Foundation to turn what had been the Escape browser into open source which created ultimately Firefox and a lot of the a lot of the work that that that team has done since Brendan was one of two people who um you know really LED that spin-off and at the time I I was very happy to help them do that you know fast forward to I think it was you Eric you'll remember this like 203 2013 or 2014 um this there was all of a sudden this like massive blow up at the Mozilla Foundation at his workplace which he was the CEO at the time and basically there was this kind of rediscovery that in I think 2008 he had given a$ thousand donation to a California ballot proposition that was in opposition to legalizing gay marriage in California and just to set the stage for this I was Pro gay marriage way before then I actually supported Gavin Newsome in 2004 when he was mayor of San Francisco which because he was the early you know that was the first city in which gay marriage happened in the US and so you know this at the time was not my politics but Brenda did this in 2008 what's interesting about that is that the ballot proposition in 2008 that Brenda donated to was the exact same policy that every major Democrat at that time was also advocating for and so the people who were anti-gay marriage in 2008 at the same time br did this donation included included Barack Obama Barack Obama Bill Clinton a young woman soon to rise to promin as Hillary Clinton and even then Elder Statesman of Democratic party Joe Biden um right as well as like every major you know Democratic Congress person Senator like basically there there were effectively no Democrats other than Gavin who were pro proir at that time and so for the crime of making a thousand donation to a cause that exactly mirrored the Democratic party at the time it was made he was blown to Smither like just completely nuked right and it was one of these you know what the cir Rouge used to call year zero phenomena which is you know as as of 2014 everybody has all of a sudden green lit to pretend that morality started in 2014 yeah and that there was no history at any of these things and no backstory and and then therefore people everybody is to be judged by the present moment and nobody gets any Grace there's no hope of redemption there's no hope of forgiveness there's not even a chance to explain yourself you're just like vaporized and that happened BR now Brennan has since gone on to do many great things and has this incredible project grave and has you know continues to be very successful but he got blown right out of the organization that he had founded and was just like completely trashed at the time and at the time it was just like this weird it was this thing which is just like you know like in a movie where there's a sudden car crash and you're just like what the [ __ ] just happened yeah right and then and then your reaction afterwards is like well you know okay thank God that's over right you know that was weird like certainly that will never happen again and and that was the foreshadowing and that's you know and I I tweeted your many years later I said one one of the things I most actually regret in my life certainly my professional life is and my life of of being a friend is not standing up publicly at that point because in retrospect that was you know that was the very beginning of this wave that sort of metastasized throughout the industry and hypothetically if a bunch of us had stood up at that time maybe we could have held off a lot of what followed yeah and so but you're you're optimistic now that this is that this reign of soft authoritarianism AKA sort of sort of extreme wokeness is is over um because there's a question of hey will it just come back again in four years or you know now that Trump will take power will they sort of summon the resistance you know antibodies again or talk a little bit about your perspective on this yeah so I think that you know like wokness is over is a little bit too glib and the main reason why that's the case I think you know maybe is self-evident which is basically the bureaucracies of corporate America and of the government and of nonprofits foundations NOS schools universities the med media companies the Press you know basically the big bureaucracies what we refer to is sort of the managerial class that sort of Cathedral the cathedral the cathedral Curtis term Curtis Shin's term the cathedral or James Burnham's term the the managerial class the managers who sort of run everything and by everything being like basically all of the large incuman institutions like basically the you know wokeness has become standard policy right and and in like every large organization in the country like the Mandate number one is be compliant right like whatever whatever is requireed to be compliant is like holy right it's like the thing that cannot be you must be compliant like you must check off all the compliance boxes like whether you win or not in the market is kind of optional but you must be compliant whether you actually teach students anything is optional but you must be compliant and so you know wokeness has become part of the compliance regime also what what they refer to wonderfully is great orwellian terms the risk management regime incredible the trust and safety regime yeah you know just take all these words and reverse them so you know this stuff has gotten wired very deeply and then it's been well documented at this point that the foundation for a lot of what we call wokeness is actually baked deeply into the law right and a whole bunch of people have done Richard hanania and Genie grit Rider and Christopher Caldwell and Wesley I've all done great work in kind of documenting kind of how how deep this stuff is sort of embedded in the law which is a whole another topic and so there's an institutionalization that Tak in place that's going to take you know optimistically 30 years to get out or something like that and by the way maybe never having said that there's that but then there's what we've been dealing with for the last decade which is beyond that which is sort of the idea of wokness being like the cultural Vanguard yeah and basically being the thing that's like the coolest highest status highest fashion thing you can possibly be and the thing that you have to be if you want to Aspire to rise in the hierarchy and R among the managerial class and and run things and then if you want to get like really good press coverage and if you want people to think that you're a moral person so kind of that whole thing and then there's the power component of it and this I use the tolken metaphor here the ring of power which is the ability to call somebody a bad name under the winess regime and like instantly vaporize them and blow them out of their job and take their job like those second parts are like I think fading very fast and in in a lot of ways it's sort of inevitable that would happen because it's just like in fashion whatever is cool and trending now looks dated five or 10 years later and you wonder how people possibly could have worm bottoms or whatever like you know it's that kind of phenomenon and there's no question like the election basically punched a giant hole in the side of that balloon and it's deflating incredibly quickly and by the way you see it in the reaction you see it in the reaction to the election itself which is there you know this is like the polar opposite reaction to 2016 which is just like complete deflation taking place and I think wokeness is is losing altitude quickly but let's come back to the legal part because that that's also there very interesting things that might happened there that we could also talk about yeah so say more what do you have in mind well so if you wanted to pick like the most extreme possible like attorney to put in charge of the Civil Rights division of the justice department to sort of reverse Dei it would be this lawyer named harmit Dylan who's been a California lawyer who's been you know the scourge of w corporations for the last decade as it happens she has just been appointed to run the Civil Rights division of the justice justice department and for the the people don't track this the Civil Rights division of the justice department is the federal government basically prosecutorial arm that basically enforces basically wokeness they're the ones that basically have made sure for the last decade that that all these companies have all these crazy policies under Penal of being investigated subpoena ultimately prosecuted and and by the way there have been lots of prosecutions lots of court cases um the most well the most famous case that the current head of the Civil Rights division brought was the case against SpaceX for not hiring enough refugees right notwithstanding that SpaceX is a military contractor and is not permitted to hire non-american citizens under a separate law and so the person running that has been a true activist as you'd expect from this L Administration and then and then miss Dylan uh who by the way I don't know but I've been following for years and is clearly br you know she's the exact opposite of that and so every sort of signal is I don't want to speak for this new Administration but every signal is being sent that they're going to basically do a 180 and all these things and and they are going to begin Prosecuting companies for violations of civil rights laws in the form of reverse discrimination which is say discrimination against variously white people Asians Jews and many other the unprotected classes as they say um yeah right and so signals are being sent by the appointments that there is going going to be an assault that's going to be the reverse the assault that companies have been under and universities have been under and then of course the Supreme Court you know ruled not that long ago that the universities private universities are not allowed to uh do race-based Admissions and it's actually really funny because there's some question there's some question as to whe so you know the demographic shift of of of admissions in the last year was starkly different than the year before as these institutions claim that they're coming in and compliance Supreme Court there's some question as to whether Discovery would show that they're actually in compliance or whether they're still playing games so that's another thing we may find out here and then there's a a very open question as to basically whether ESS essentially de facto that decision already has been made or will be made for for private companies as well and there's a lot of private companies that have been trying to figure out quietly how to kind of Dismount from Dei for actually both reasons for legal reasons and for cultural reasons and now there's a another sort of very interesting thing that's kicking in which is that there I think are a lot of large companies where basically they were already basically done with Dei to start they were done with Dei for their own reasons which is you know it's backfired in many spectacular ways but now they have any large company that wants to Dismount from it now has the best reason in the world which is we need to be compliant we right illegal yeah because it's illegal because and by the way let me just stay for the record like I think every major corporation in the country is just in flagrant violation of actual Britain civil rights law like you just you cannot have these hard quotas and basically all these racially and ethnically and religiously biased you know hiring you just it's just it's just flat out illegal and these companies basically all went so extreme on this that they ended up in what I think is clearly Mass illegality and so as Miss Dylan kind of kicks in in her job was say I she she's not going to lack for a shortage of targets and so if you don't want to be a Target it it it is a great kind of you know get out of jail free card to to just voluntarily shut all this stuff down and I my guess is starting pretty quickly here I mean we're already starting to see it right so Boeing and a bunch of other you know companies have already put a bullet in their programs and even the University of Michigan which kind of went like completely bananas for this stuff you know actually shut their whole thing down so I think we're going to see my guess is we're going to see a run of companies that are going to take you know quite dramatic action here hey we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors whether you're starting or scaling your company's security program demonstrating top-notch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever vant automates compliance for ISO 271 sock 2 gdpr and leading AI Frameworks like ISO 4201 and 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like how do you end up thinking you're on the moral High ground and you do that and how do you end up thinking you're not breaking the law like again this is part of this sort of mass Insanity of the reference falsification and and look there are many many lawyers and HR people who have been implementing these policies who are fully aware that they've been breaking the law and so it's going to be very interesting to to see the unwind you know there's the great uh K Anan idea that we sometimes talk about the woke are more correct than the mainstream and sort of yeah an example of that is like yeah it turns out I guess we have been being systemically uh discriminatory or systemically racist just not to who uh not to the groups that we just Asians you know to groups that um we didn't you know particularly sort of think that we were yes syic racism has been rather widespread yes this true um the why do you think in in 2024 there isn't as big of a response as there was in 2016 to is it just the the movement is gone is it just that because it's the second time like because you know bunch of people were saying hey if Trump wins you're you're gonna you know resummon the old uh sort of you know spirits of the crazy Progressive left but that's not I don't I I hear actually the opposite it seems like they're retreating or don't even exist anymore or converting or I guess you know sort of uh on their you know their own gab and parlor you know social social networks ghettos um um no disrespect to Blue Sky yeah Blue Sky yeah exactly um so why do you think are are you surprised by by this or why do you think uh this is I by way I can't resist my friend Yan Lon has got exercised over Elon and X after the election that he bailed on X did this because he's one of the you know leaders and Geniuses super Geniuses in AI but um somebody at X today you know basically pulled up a slide you know goes with this open A3 release and pulled up a slide from Yan saying that this would never work and basically was like Yan you coward come back here and fight me you know on X Y literally y literally responded by screenshotting it and responding on LinkedIn I guess I guess I guess is now the other the other snowflake snowflake ghetto if blue sky is too intense uh for you you can R you can Retreat to LinkedIn so um the summoning the gods of the old left is is just gone or what does it turn into so I mean that you know the political analysis is just the scope of the Republican Victory this time right was not only winning but it was also winning the popular vote and winning both the Senate and the house and by the way also you know having the majority in the Supreme Court from before so you know sort of all four of the formal branches of government you know kind of being taken all at once and so I think it's a big shock and then obviously obviously just the Arc of Trump coming back is a giant blow to a lot of the old psychology and then I think so I have kind of two thoughts on this a surface level one and the Deep point so service level one is just like I think things just went too far and I think kind of everybody knows that things went too far a lot of people just know things went too far and so people ended up with basically indefensible positions like that basically there shouldn't be a border and the you know criminals should be allowed to run wild like it it's just not and people should be allowed to just you know be set fire to on the subway like it's just not a you know I think a lot of people are trying to Dismount from that so that's one and then the specific thing that's happened as a result of that is the Democratic party over the last six weeks has immediately starting after the loss has basically descended into what I think is accurately called a civil war where they themselves are trying to figure out basically what the path forward is and you have you know a lot of you have the current chair of the DNC saying we need to go even harder left you know you have uh people like Rah Emanuel and Richie Torres and others saying no quite the opposite we have to come back to the center and come back to Common Sense and so like I say I would be suspicious that it's a plot they're about to like jump out at the inauguration or something but I think in reality I think Democrats are having certainly all my friends are Democrats are telling me that there there's like a very sort of severe internal kind of fight that's happening and by the way this in American politics this has happened before in my lifetime this happened in 1980 which is when Jimmy Carter got beaten by Ronald Reagan and the Democratic party basically went into a paralyzed state where it tried to figure out whether to go you know even more extreme to the left than it had in the 60s and 70s that kind of come back to the center and by the way it took them 12 years to win another presidential election and which which require coming back to the center but it took them 12 years to do that and I think a lot of my Democratic friends are basically trying to say like how do we shortcut that process so I think that's part of what's happening but I think the other part of what's happening is it's actually I really believe this I think a lot of what's happening right now is basically the effects of all of the censorship and so you have basically that you know these sort of Elites that we're talking about this managerial class the sort of you know people who have been in power for the last four years in particular people have been running large institutions they got used to being on the side of censorship and they got used to wielding censorship as a tool against their enemies in the form of these sort of things like you know again orwellian things hate speech misinformation so forth you know there's basically there's a big obvious problem with sensorship which is it's a violation of literally the American way of life it's a violation of the principles of of Western civilization of everything that makes our society great this idea you're going to basically prevent other people from speaking so there's that but I think there's actually another problem with it which is it actually causes you the way I describe it is it causes you to mount and denial service attack on your own epistemic ability to understand reality right like if in other words basically if you have the ring of power that basically says you can Define anything contrary to your current beliefs as hate speech and misinformation then you will never receive valid counter arguments to your own views yeah and then sort of that's the sort of intellectual equivalent of taking a hose hooking up to the exhaust pipe of your car and jamming the other end straight into your mouth right which is just like you're just gonna breathe your own exhaust forever and if you're only breathing your own exhaust if you're only believing yourself right and people who are like you and you're never listening to contrary information right because it's hate speech or misinformation it's been censored then there is no limit to how crazy you can get because there's no Governor right you you are not required to stay in contact with reality and so I I think the censorship basically regime worked for these people for quite a while and then starting probably I don't know three or four years ago it actually stopped working and it's LED them into a set of policies that are just bananas and so a big thing that I think that they really have to do is rip off the Band-Aid and stop with all that and get back to being a you know be get back to being able to mark your beliefs to market right to you know to reality just like every business person has to they do that I don't know but I would say they're you know they're in the beginning stages that I certainly hope they do it it will be obviously much better for us as a country if they do it I know a bunch of Democrats who are I think very smart and very strong and who are you know working on this very hard and I hope they succeed well I I even see AOC doing some listening and learning to you know about what happened in the election and you know she's going to have a kid and maybe she moderates a bit at the same time the pro Luigi Mion faction you know the pro killer that sort of sentiment doesn't make one excited about the future of the party full socialism plus murder in the streets I'm just going to put it out there like it might not be the best electoral platform right for 26 and 28 I I don't know I don't know you know call me crazy maybe I'm out out out of step with the mood of plenty of people on X tell me I'm out of step with the mood of the people but like are the adults of any age going to step up and basically say no this is not who we are this is not what we're going to do and it's just it would in many ways it would be the easiest and most obvious thing in the world to do and then it's just this question of whether they can kind of reorient yeah well and I just want to point out just how quick this Vibe shift has happened I mean I remember a couple years ago there was this big debate in our circles about the Curtis yarvin View and the Chris rufo View and the Curtis yarvin view was hey you know the conditions are not present I'll let you edit the characterization but basically it's don't fight back you'll just lose and you'll Empower them you'll make them stronger um by sort of being the sort of counter opposition or controlled opposition position whereas the Chris rufo view was like you can just do things you can change laws as it relates to you know what's happening in schools as it relates to critical race Theory or as it relates to sort of the gender and and sex education Stu like you can have incremental gains and they will be meaningful and curs are saying no they won't be meaningful you'll just they'll change the terms but they'll still have the same people in power and thus have the same views and make you think you won but actually you're you know even further behind what why don't you sort of edit that or the characterization of that debate and then and you know talk about how that's evolved because my read you can edit is I thought you were more on the sort of Curtis side of that issue of of like more sort of skeptical of innovation but then at some point shifted to more of the roffo view of like wow things can actually change sooner than we think is is is that fair to say yeah so I think that's a great description I think to give the strongest possible version of Curtis's view which he calls the clear pill I think the the key kind of in there that you alluded to but let's draw it out is not just that if the conditions aren't right you will lose it's that if you are a if you step up to be an opponent in a situation where you can't win you're not just losing you're becoming what what I think he calls The Agonist in a chemical reaction you're becoming the fuel that the side you hate uses to burn even brighter yeah right um and so you're become you're becoming the bad you're making yourself into the bad guy right and the sports metaphor is the Harlem glob tters you know spent 40 years winning they W like you know 12,000 basketball games against their opposition team the Washington generals which W zero um actually the Wikipedia page is really fantastic because it turns out the Washington generals really they won one game and uh like just accidentally like a ball went in the basket the last minute that shouldn't have and like midle clemon who was the star of the Harlem G is like just apparently completely lost his [ __ ] it was just like insanely angry because right of course that's the thing that's like never supposed to happen it was like super mad and like threatening to fire all the all the Washington generals and so you know if you're up against the Harlem go Trotters and they have institutional control you don't want to be the the Washington generals like you're wasting your time you'll probably get vaporized and you're going to make the opponent stronger and so basically don't do that obviously the Chris rufo opposition to that is okay in that case you basically just are signing up to lose and what the hell right how how can you basically do that why don't you get out there and fight and figure out a way to win and you know they they you know these are both incredibly brilliant guys they fully articulated this I would just say this my partner and I went out a limb to get involved in the political process but a lot of that went well by the way including by the way candidates we supported in both parties people in the sensible Middle with the prot tech agenda Pro Innovation agenda which apparently now includes the former Commerce Secretary like who knew Miracles Miracles are happening every day I wonder where she's been okay exactly we can talk more about that we did that the thing though and and I'm not I'm gonna say this I'm gonna just describe what's happening I'm not going to claim that I'm some world hero here or whatever because I certainly don't think I am and I think there's a lot that I could have done better in the last decade a lot of ways I was it effective but I I will say like I have been in pitched arguments on some of the topics we're discussing tonight over the course of the last you know several years with in some cases with high degrees of intensity and basically I had become the Washington generals I I felt like the Washington in generals I was just like I got to the point even through this year where I just felt like I'm going to make the token argument but like it I'm just going to I'm just going to lose and I and I lost over and over and over and over and over again in these discussions and then basically after November 6th all of a sudden like a significant number of people basically are like oh okay let's do it that way instead I'm just like what like my arguments haven't gotten any better right like I'm not any more compelling um but you know people it's what we talked about earlier basically people are basically flipping they're flipping a lot of these issues really quickly of course I I give them credit for it not not not myself but it definitely feels like all of a sudden things are happening today and I think we're going to see announcements you know from various companies in the next three months that I think are going to be I think actually quite surprising and so things are happening that are I think you know put this under under the strict uh yarvin principle that would not be happening and so I think we we need some other model of change of which the preference falsification one is is certainly the best one that I know of hey we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors hey everyone Eric here in this environment Founders need to become profitable faster and do more with smaller teams especially when it comes to engineering that's why 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know he's a hard person to get to change his views or has a high standard for what FDR 2.0 looks like like he wasn't impressed when Elon took over Twitter he said oh it won't happen enough and obviously he's very brilliant but just yeah interesting to well he wants you know to to his credit like he wants real Victory and so anything short of real Victory is basically just give right giving your enemy a chance to retrench and come back at you and and let me say also like I at least I don't think I know how it's going to play out like I I have found political predictive skills not that great over the last decade so um look it's entirely possible that we're you know look as possible we're we're still the Washington generals and as possible that basically everything that we've been fighting against comes R back it's also possible that basically everything just moves on and there's some totally new set of issues it's also POS you know who knows right and then by the way if there's one thing that we've all learned I think in our lives and careers it's you know x-factors matter a lot over the last 20 years you know there's been at least three like really profound reality altering events that have taken place which is 911 the global financial crisis in Co and each of those was like a fundamental reset to a lot of assumptions and so I've also learned to have a healthy regard for the unpredictability of the world we're going into we do what we can and it would seemed like the x- factor for the vibe shift was Elon buying Twitter which almost didn't happen because he almost didn't go go through with it and if that didn't happen then we'd all be sort of you know just in the group chats complaining well it's even better it's actually you'll recall this but it's even better which is not only did he almost not buy Twitter they actually forced him to buy it yeah oh my God yeah I don't if you remember but how how angry basically everybody got that he was quote unquote trying to get out of the deal and how the judge basically a Delaware sort of activist judge basically you know demanded that he close the deal yeah uh right like that's the part of it that like doesn't get told is like they absolutely demanded that he Clos the deal so anyway yeah that's really funny the um so yeah Elon basically gave air cover to the vibe shift both in terms of buying Twitter but then also his own sort of evolution and I think I'm I'm I'm curious basically if you could briefly touch on the role of group chats and how they played a role in the vibe sh after over the past five years because I sometimes see Elon tweeting stuff whether it's about testosterone or crime or you Michael Brown you know like stuff that I I saw in the group chats like years ago he's sort of speedrun this education and I know he talks to you I know he talks to a bunch of other people as well and so I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the role of these group chats in kind of the in kind of the vibe shift because what we see in public is the you know the antagonism that Elon received from government officials but it seemed like he got help in getting up to speed and educated on a lot of these and opening his eyes to a lot of these issues what do you have to say there yeah so there's really interesting backstory to this so you know Elon for a long time was actually much like myself for a long time he's what you just call a normie Democrat um and in fact the origin of Tesla the sort of great mission of Tesla was carbon solve carbon emissions climate change right shift to a carbon freak economy and so any anyway he was not invol you know he was not involved in politics he was building his companies which were certainly plenty plenty hard to be a full-time Focus for him and so he wasn't really involved in politics but he had this he was always very curious about culture and then specifically he was always really curious about internet culture right and so he was always tweeting and meming I mean the two people who were like tweeting and meing like all the time basically 105 years ago when basically it didn't have any political salience at all were of course Elon Musk and Donald Trump like literally right like Trump's Twitter feed going back into the like you know if you go back before 2013 which is when everything kind of activated politically on the internet like Trump was tweeting away and Elon was tweeting away and so Elon got you know super into internet culture you know the the specific proximate event that caused him to actually pull the trigger on buying Twitter was actually not a partisan political thing it was literally The Babylon B which was his favorite you know satire site getting deplatformed right so the way he thought about at the time I think was it's striking at the thing that I love the thing that I love and he once said somebody finally figured this out and asked him in some interview and he said yeah he's like this is you know what do I do for fun like I work all the time I spend time with my you know my my family my kids and then basically I like when I have a spare 20 minutes I tweet memes and I remember thinking like okay wow like you know that's interesting I should spend more time tweeting memes and then I saw and I had known Elon for a long time but not we had never worked closely together and so I but I had always followed him and was watching what he said and he one one day it came out on Twitter he tweeted something to the effect that that he has meme dealers right that there are like some number of people out there basically who are like arming him with memes and that's how he's coming up with all these funny memes he has meme dealers who are like dealing them to him yeah and I was like wow that's interesting I wonder if I could become one of elon's meme dealers and so I started sending him memes and he started tweeting them and I was like this is freaking amazing this is just like absolutely outstanding because when he tweeted it it would get a thousand times to you know the likes that when I tweeted it and so I was like okay and so he's been immersed in this culture and as you said like it's sort of a back Channel culture right um right so basically for people who haven't tracked this basically what's happened is as the sort of censorship and cancellation machine kind of kicked in a decade ago BAS basically what happened was that we all organically you know across many actually walks of life many many different kinds of people created basically the modern equivalent of what in the Soviet era they called samat and for those of you who don't know the history of of Soviet totalitarianism sasat was basically underground newspapers and so there was harsh formal censorship from the central government and so there there were literally these basically these mimeographed at the m mograph is the copying technology before photocopiers uh they mograph basically newsletters and these dissident writers would basically write s distributed and if you got caught with sdot by the way it was a big problem right and you could get you know arrested or jailed or killed and so basically the modern version of sasot is oh and by the way here's how seriously they took that just to give you a sense of how totalitarian regimes think in the USSR through the 1980s it was a capital crime to possess a mograph machine right so if you had a machine in your basement that was capable of running off copies of a piece of paper you could get executed for it wow and so they knew how important it was to to maintain total control of content Communications and so the the modern version of that is is the what is basically the WhatsApp group of the signal group started out being the text chain but very quickly became the WhatsApp group or signal group and the reason it became the WhatsApp group signal group is disappearing messages right right you know God forbid you get caught with the mograph machine God forbid you get caught with a WhatsApp group right uh and in fact there are cases both in the US and and and and I know there's a bunch of cases in the UK where people have gotten really hung up legally for literally the contents of private WhatsApp groups right like this is not again it's the soft authoritarian version of what the Soviets had but it's you know they they do come at you if they find you have a secret WhatsApp group group and so that started developing but then the but then the running joke became basically therefore as a consequence of this Dynamic the theme of every WhatsApp group was to basically send memes that were as edgy as possible like right to the point where your friends literally would all like leave the group but like not one step further right yeah um as sort of a form of social Revolt right against against this increasing level of censoriousness in in the public sphere so what's happened is this s of archipelago of of whatsa groups is lit up and now this is a universal thing and in fact like we for example it turned we found out in the after you know they all these Co hearings afterwards and it turned out basically the UK government for years now has been been running WhatsApp groups like you know this has become like a standard thing that people do do a lot of business on by the way interestingly this Cuts directly into a key policy topic which is the war on encryption and you know the the authorities both in the US and in many other countries have been trying to prevent strong encryption from proliferating into the hands of normal people you know for basically my whole career for 30 years I've been fighting it various ways for 30 years but there was a you know say there was one Turning Point moment where signal implement true and an encryption and then in the context of of groups and with disappear messages and then there was another sort of seminal moment where actually WhatsApp which is actually built on the signal I think built on the signal encryption technology but WhatsApp Mark Zuckerberg made the policy decision to also Implement those same features in WhatsApp and this like I can tell you and it's been publicly reported that there's been intense pressure from governments to not do that right there there's like a tremendous aversion on the part of these centralized governments the centralized authorities to basically make sure that citizens don't have the ability communicate in private groups without being able to be without being being able to be surveilled um and and you know the signal folks deserve you know the medal of freedom for carving the the path on that and then quite frankly this is an area where I think Facebook has done you know 100% the right thing by by holding the line on that against you know tremendous pressure and so anyways it just so happens that we actually have these digital technologies that actually make this possible now I I to your point I think when the history of our time is written it's going to turn out that these groups were actually very important and then of course people are going to like whine and complain because it's like oh my God like all these terrible people are having all these private conversations it's like well no [ __ ] like they're having all the private conversations because they weren't allowed to have the public conversation right if it hadn't been for all the censorship all these conversations would have just been had in public which is which would have been like much better right but they weren't allowed and so they were all driven underground and what did you think would happen and and I think that's sort of been a key mechanism for the unwind of the preference falsification right yeah I remember when one of our groups started in 2020 June wait a minute wait wait wait wait I just want to be clear Eric I don't know what groups I'm not in any of these I'm not I just want to be clear I am not in any each other yeah have only heard about this from friends I myself only communicate one-on-one and barely even that so I just want to claim just to be totally clear I don't know you I don't know your name yeah exactly I certainly don't have your phone number okay go ahead me and other friends now you June 2020 I was basically you know having activist uprisings in my company I saw that 10,000 medical professionals said it was okay to for you know people to protest during George Floyd but weren't allowed to go to their you know grandparents funeral or whatever and I was you know had to say certain things on social media and I I could go to these group chats with maybe five or 10 people and just ask hey is this is it am I crazy you know is this is this crazy what what's happening here and not only could people tell me no you're not crazy this is a crazy time but also and we could sort of laugh at all the crazy times that that were to come but also there was like a education happen there were these antibodies being built and then gradually the support for pushing back I remember you know Mike salana and B is some of the earlier people that were able to push back and then this sort of preference falsification went from there yeah that's right and yeah it's a time monored thing it's basically you need groups of people to be able to get together and actually have open discussion you you always need every society You' always needed that it's always the Catalyst for change if change is ever going to happen it's how change happens it's absolutely crucial by by the way like I've read the Constitution like it's actually something we are allowed to do yes yes exactly we are we are allowed to freely speak and Associate and that's why right I mean that's the core fundamental reason why those rights are you know are the literally the First Amendment to our Constitution and so it it's been great yeah it's I think it's an incredible unalloyed positive good news aspect of this new technology and and now those same chats that were 10 people are now hundreds of people and now you know now you're you're tweeting again and now it's just glorious it's uh glory in America you know morning in America which going back to 2024 imagine there's a Twitter files for government or imagine Elon does a t file like what do we expect to find yeah so first of of all again I don't want to in any way speak for the new Administration but I would not be remotely surprised if that's exactly what happens and of course being the government it will be spectacular like if it happens it will be amazing right and and the reason is just and the and the reason the if it happens the reason will be the reason it'll be so spectacular is just the government just has so much power yeah it's actually been in a lot of ways like in a lot of way there's a lot of things that happened the last you know 10 years and people of course have lots of different opinions on but like one of the things I think people should think about I try to keep in mind is just like some sometimes you actually need a Civic like like sometimes you actually need an applied lesson at Civics you it's all the stuff you if you grew up in the US you have a certain generation you were in social studies class and they taught you how how all this stuff is supposed to work and then you go to the real world and you're like oh my God it doesn't work like that at all right like that's not even remotely what it works like um but you know that's what that's what we were told in school how a bill becomes a law and all these other things and every now and then you need an applied lesson in social studies like you need to see how these things actually work and I think what's happened is that the government you know for reasons that we could go talk about at length is just uh you know it aggregated just enormous amounts of power in particularly enormous amounts of power when it chooses to to implement this kind of soft authoritarianism and repression and that the two most you know well maybe three most Vivid ways well four that have played out over the last decade is you know just you take them right off it's censorship ACD Banking and then it's you know Dei and then it's the whole constellation of ESG and just this like application of just like incredible Force to mandate these things often in the face of you know actual federal law is amazing and then my other thing is like I don't know what exists inside you know inside the you know the government files but I do know what came out in the Twitter files and I do have a pretty good sense of the kinds of things that exist in other companies and I think the nature of these managerial organizations is people just can't help themselves but talk freely about these topics they Journal right they lull themselves I think into a false sense of safety that they can you know basically freely talk about censoring their political opponents debank their political opponents breaking civil rights law they they just start to think that these things are fine and then they need to implement the directives and so they need to actually do all the work and do that they need to communicate and they need to be compliant which means they need to like document their decisions and then they need to do you know document retention so they need to hold on to all the documents right and so what we learned in the Twitter files is that there's just there was just like extensive written records of all of the bad behavior like and and not like sophisticated like clever like oh my God I can't believe how smart they were and how they did all this you know instead of the opposite it's like the most cartoonishly malicious version of it that you could possibly imagine right just like the dumbest possible things of whatever was in the New York Times that day was just believed absolutely uncritically and applied with just the greatest just blunt for stupidity um over and over and over and over and over again and then documented and so I suspect that like for example the de banking files if we get this to Administration chooses to subpoena the banks and then also chooses to open up the files at the federal at the many different Federal Banking Regulators there's you know there's at least eight which is amazing in and of itself but there's at least eight involved regulating federal agencies involved regulating the banks I think if we get all those internal files relative to De banking I think we will be I think it'll shock our shoes off number one at the pervasiveness of the practice and then number two just the sheer like ham-handed idiocy of it like this is not going to be the sophisticated version this is going to be just like I cannot believe that these people like this crude in their own views were allowed to basically exercise their own personal biases with the full force of government power and banking cartel power behind them yeah let's paint more of a picture of what winning looks like over the next few years or like if if you could wave a wand and change and have the administration do anything what are some examples of things that might be that might look like one just example for inspiration is I I think at one point you said something like if a few hundred people we could wholesale replace them that would or get them out with generous retirement Packages Etc that might have a massive change why don't we just paint a picture of of what winning could look like well I think there's you know two big steps honestly I mean step one is just stop doing stupid [ __ ] right like just stop with the stupid stuff right um and so if there's just like flat out relief like like in a lot of way it's always like you know it's always like this whole thing of like why are you becoming involved in government what do you want it's like I don't want anything I like I want the I want the re I want the opposite of things right I I want I want the opposite of something happening I want whatever has been happening to not happen and like the default form right of change is like just simply stop like for God's sake just simply stop right um and so just stop this a whole bunch of these things this all these different you know kind of crazy things have been happening that we've been talking about and so that's one and then yeah look the other would be you know an actual proactive an actal you know positive productive proactive strategy which you know clearly they're developing and I think will put in place I think they'll do both of these but the simplest way to think about it is just what the president has always said and what he'll be saying a lot from here on in which is his line quot I just want America to win like I just want us to win I just like want us to be strong and I want our enemies to fear us and I want to not get like screwed with and like I don't want people like taking hostages of our people or our allies and I don't want Wars and I don't you know I just I don't want those things but then I want America to win I want America to be like the strongest economy to be the strongest technologically the strongest militarily I want maximum freedom I want people to be able to be able to you know live and succeed in their lives like all these things and so having a regime that is actually focused on the success and flourishing of the actual population of the country and not trying to solve you know every other problem in the world and not trying to manipulate and orchestrate every social outcome it is this amazing alignment I mean one of the really remarkable things is you know there were years ago one of the sort of unusual things about what what's happened politically in the last year is it's not the most obvious thing in the world that kind of the technol libertarian faction would align with sort of a you know what you might call a nationalist populist faction and it actually turns out that you know the alignment is not 100% but it's shockingly close because what those what both of those perspectives have is basically yeah you know let's go win yeah do you think politics is Downstream of culture or the other way around um I think it's a probably a little bit of both um you know the argument the Richard hanani and others argument that basically laws also Drive culture in particular like you know there's politics but then there's laws yeah and I think one of the things I've been trying to WRA my head around a lot as we've discussed is kind of what have been the roles of actual laws kind of every step of the way here so and I think maybe for those of us who aren't lawyers I think people like myself like I think maybe we just persistently underestimate the importance of the actual laws and so that's one but I mean look the argument for culture driving politics is I think very strong as we talked about earlier political views have a cultural social component like any other form of fashion and like any other cultural phenomena and you know they're just like music or anything else or clothing like you know things going out of fashion by the way patterns repeat I saw bell bottoms are coming back yeah U right but they repeat in a lag like they repeat when everybody forgets why they didn't like them right and then they kind of go through that same process of of rediscovery and then these politics seem to play out on a generational time frame in the same way the culture seems to play out in a generational time frame and you have this concept of eras that's never quite totally right but like has a lot of substance to it and so I think there's a lot to that and then you know maybe the sort of smartest thing you could say about it is politics and culture very clearly are kind of combined at the point of the media which means politics and culture very clear clearly are combining at the point of social media and social media spreads culture and politics equally and then in combination I'm really struck I'll give an example I'm really struck our friend uh Katherine D has this great she's an analyst she's an internet writer and thinker and she's an analyst of she started out being an analyst of what she calls fandoms so fandoms is like you know Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom right and I remember when he actually first started on the internet because they first started actually in news groups and so you'd have like alt. tv. like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans would get together and they'd have these flame Wars and these big arguments and they'd have you know their fan sites and their all all this stuff and if a character died they they'd all grieve and then they would be sending Furious email campaigns to get the show uncancelled and all this stuff and so this concept of a fandom and then basically Katherine's kind of big thing is like it turns out everything is everything else is also now a fandom right and so the way we now relate to politicians is as fandoms in basically the exact same way and we either like love that guy right and we cheer him on and we're part of his fan club or like we hate that guy like and our our fan club wants to take his down right right um and and look group formation group psychology group even you know battles in the street are you know that's been the case of politics forever as kind of group formation and then the group's fighting and so there there's some of that that's not new but her her point which I think is very valid which is on the internet the the similarity or the overlap with that and any idea of cultural formation basically they basically become the exact same thing right so I I think basically from here on out they they're absolutely like in inextricable inextricably connected and so for the people asking how do we transcend that Etc you know how do we get past that is is that just missing the point or not even wrong or or just naive or that just means losing I mean yeah like that just means losing it's like bip it's like bipartisanship like what does bipartisanship means it means that you're signing up for your side to lose like a bipartisan Republican is somebody who just does what Democrats want which is why the Press is constantly pushing for bipartisanship right you know in the eyes of the press the ideal Republican is somebody who just does what Democrats want that's bipartisanship it never never goes in the other direction and so yeah I don't want to be in that fight is equivalent to saying I'm fine with the outcome um you know and fair enough I don't know the politics I'm not certainly advocating politics should consume everybody's lives and I certainly hope it doesn't consume mine but opting like if there is a fight to be had opting out is this losing well too late for you correct the uh we're not interested in politics but politics is interested in us as it say um I mean to that point if if 2013 to 2024 was the sort of sort of wokeness era what's the next cultural Renaissance is it patriotism is it meritocracy is it normal see like what do you think will Define the the next era culturally yeah I mean clearly that's the the new the way I would describe it yeah so the culture you know for the first like half of my life the culture basically was the culture of the 50s kind of extending into the you know the 80s or 90s which was the cliche but the cliche of like you know it's kind of nixonian social conservatism traditional families all these aversion to social change you know all the all the things the sort of hippie movement and the new left and the social Revolutions of the 60s and 70s did their best to tear to the ground and so ever hair super short need or do we have our hair long and scraggly and you know that's a statement of our political beliefs and our what culture we belong in and so that was sort of the culture counterculture you know kind of thing that I grew up in and I of course just always assumed the counterculture was the correct one right because who would want to be part of the dominant thing you obviously want to be a rebel and then you know the the other kind of thing you can always see I think in this culture counterculture kind of thing is the side that is winning is the one that uses censorship um right and so when I was growing up it was the right that was using censorship right in the 80s right and so the all a censorship campaigns were right-wing and the left which was the counterculture at the time basically kept saying no censorship is anti-American right and we need to be able to have free speech and then the other you know kind of clue of like culture versus counterculture is who's funny right and and of course the culture is never funny right because the culture is totally serious right the culture is like absolutely the way things are and can never change and can never ever be the subject of a joke right which like the most threatening thing in the world to somebody in power is humor is a joke is being ridiculed and undermined so the counterculture is the funny one right so that therefore the phenomenon of a Saturday Night Live or something like that which was all you know which was irreverent it was irreverent and funny because it was challenging the the the dominant culture especially if you go back and watch the original Saturday Night lives from like the 1975 I watched the very first one a while ago just to see it I never seen it and literally it's like a it's like what they used to it's like what they used to call it what was it like a they had these terms like sit in and then I think they had like I don't know what was it like lovein but it was literally like it was like a it was like a it was like a circular thing it wasone it was just like all hippies it just like 100% goodies and then they're basically sitting it's a circular stage and they're literally all sitting around with their leg sitting with their legs crossed as these young kids come out with all these irreverent counterculture jokes of course in our time we could debate when the inversion happened but it certainly happened by by Obama and probably before that where you know it flipped and The Counter Culture became the culture yeah um when Steven coar stopped being funny or John Stewart stopped being funny yeah when that kind of Comedy went from what you know there's actually turn it went from laughter to what they call clapter right actually comedians talk about this there there's two responses there's two responses to comedian on staging from the audience one is you can get laughter and the other is you can get Applause and if you're a real comedian you always want laughter and you're horrified if you ever get Applause because if you say Applause it implies that you have said something that basically where you want approval from the audience Bas right where you're you're appealing to the dominant norms and the audience was rewarding you for your compliance to the dominant Norms yeah and so like a real comedian is horrified when he gets he just wants laughter and of course the thing that generates laughter is something true right the thing that generates laughter is something true the thing that generates Applause is something that everybody is required to agree with right those are like the opposite Concepts right and so yeah when late night comedy such as it is or what it is it used to be referred to went from laughter to clapter like the humor drained straight out of it it became basically State media it basically became state media right it became basically reinforcing every night the set of the preference falsification the set of things that you must believe the set of things you must say even if you don't believe them and then certainly attacking people who say things that that uh that should not be said and so this incredible they have become this incredible mechanism of cultural enforcement you know quite regime media and it's amazing by the way it's amazing because it happened to literally all of them yeah right it didn't happen to one of them it happened to all of them right at the exact same time that that's what all the newspapers turned into and all television news turned into right and every University right and every Foundation like they just all went like straight into this lock step anyway so long-winded way of saying now we're in a very interesting spot right which is okay what so like I I would think the question behind your question is like okay now for the next whatever period of time what's culture and what's counterculture I think it's going to be really interesting to see like if the left gets really funny again it's going to be a sign it's going to be a sign of a couple things one is this going to mean that the right is ascendant right so the right is becoming the culture again and then the left is going to respond with humor and so maybe maybe that's the thing to look for is when left and when when Saturday Night Live gets funny again like that will be a significant Turning Point moment you know so that's one is that gonna happen I don't know I think there's going to be a to your point I think there's going to be a big swing here for a while of a much more I mean there is now already obviously patriotism American flags pride in the country um uh you know by the way veneration of the military by the way veneration of the police pride and law enforcement pride and civil order yeah um and and then obviously you know coupling that with you know obviously pride in free speech free association yeah and and not having to lie and so that you know there there will be a lot of that what will that be balanced by I'm not sure by the way will that go too far you know are we going to be sitting here in you know out of five or 10 or 15 years saying oh my God we've you know we've reverted back to 1982 or something and it's it feels like this crippling monoculture in the other direction you're know kind of back to that I don't know I kind of doubt it I think maybe the inter yeah I kind of doubt it I mean number one is like we kind of had that you don't tend to get the exact same thing again and then the other thing is like look the form of media itself has changed and so you know this is like a classic like Marshall mclan which is you know the culture is shaped not just by the content but by the actual medium itself and what we think of as like 1960s through 2000s culture was very determined by the specific form factor of television and that's never going back in the box like ever actually somebody made an argument on X the other day that I thought was very striking forget who it was but it was very bright and said there's a case being made that 2020 may have been the all-time peak of top- down authorit message control for the rest of time right you mentioned like what that felt like right like how how it right how intense that felt and we all live through that but the argument this person made was that was the point when number one TV was actually still relevant like TV still mattered which clearly is like collapsing right now like but like TV was still hanging in there and then the other was the internet censorship regime was still fully intact right so this is pre Elon buying acts and it's when the government was just like doing their full scale censorship campaigns and forcing the social media companies to censor and so and basically the argument goes that in the last four years both of those basically preconditions for that level of sort of thought control have collapsed TV is never going to recover like it's on its way to zero right was you see that very clearly the ratings and then the internet is never going to get recentralized the way that it was before it's always going there it come under more pressure in the future than it's under now like there may be more censorship in the future but you know at least the theory goes certainly it's not going to get back to how crazy you know how ruthlessly effective the the sort of C censorship was in 2020 so I don't know maybe that's a white pill which is what whatever we're gonna get it won't be that I remember uh we've been laughing about this sort of I think it's a South Park clip maybe it's a with Netflix executive they sort of uh you know showing one of the shows that they're creating and then someone is saying you know put a gay woman in it or put a black woman in it just sort of a parody of kind of the sort of pandering that these networks have done and you know we've talked about sort of the Silicon Valley Vibe shift I'm curious if there is or might be a Vibe shift in Hollywood and I know you're obsessed with Hollywood and enjoy you know sort of movies that portray how messed up uh sort of sanctimonious but hypocritical Hollywood has been do you see any sort of self-awareness there or uh just you know spiraling yeah no I see a lot so should start by saying I actually have a lot of friends in that industry and I I say that because I'm refer to things that people have told me behind the scenes and I just don't want any specific person to get blamed for it yep um so these are I'll just give you the the gal view but I I do talk to people in that world a fair amount so one is I I think they went even more over the top on all this stuff than we did in Tech like I I think it got even more extreme and I I think that you you can see that in a whole bunch of ways but the clearest way is the quota system the Dei quotas got even more extreme and so the major Studios if that's even possible the the major Studios literally put out literally statements of literally like 50% quotas in all these jobs both in front of the camera behind the camera and again like I just you just a surface reading of that is those are all to completely illegal but uh they they didn't hesitate for a second when when the fashion became to put them out the quota systems and the all all that stuff became very extreme and then obviously the content you know changed radically and you know became very you know kind of ideological and politically loaded so you know that that went very over the top behind the scenes essentially at least in the last three years I think most of the people in positions of responsibility behind the scenes in private basically think it went like it just all went way too far and they were saying that a while back and I I think part of that is just you know they were kind of aware of what had happened and they didn't like it they didn't like the consequences on the product that they make and then also part of that is th things just started to fail it's like one thing to make you know a bad movie or something it's another thing to make a movie that loses money right in in that system legitimately so because these things are expensive to make and there have been there have been a long run now of high-profile projects that have tanked very badly for you know what certainly look like reasons related what we're talking about and then you've also had these like anomalous successes and the big one of course was the Top Gun sequel which was just this like stratospheric home run which is like basically as Direct in 1980s throwback as you could possibly get and just like a good oldfashioned unabashed pro-american patriotic pro-military Pro like you know America's a source of form of moral good in the world like competence Merit hyper aggressive people being incredibly ambitious and doing great things like it just to sort of Contra the current times since you can get and it was this giant hit and everybody loved it and so there's that and so about a year and a half ago the sort of word went out maybe two years ago now it's been a little bit but the word went out the code in Hollywood for the last couple years has been Dad shows or Dad movies and you've probably seen some of these and so it's like the reacher show on Amazon is like a an example or the or the other one is with the terminal list the really dark na seals show I think also on Amazon and so the Dad shows has been like a double meaning it's something that you can say because you're like well dads are a market segment and so we we you know we need to as we streaming services starty to PE all market segments and so we need to go get the dads but of course what it means underneath that is not woke right right because the dads don't want like you know they don't want the lectures they don't want the preaching what they want is like to see like a guy going around like killing bad guys like you know like good oldfashioned good old fashion rightwing entertainment so the call has been out for a while for that and so you know it's like amazing because you have these you have these projects where you're still seeing the trailers hit now for the projects that were like green lit over the course of the last five years where the projects are coming out now and you can just literally tell it's like up 2019 oh 2022 you could just tell like exactly when the thing was written and pitched um by the politics um but you're also going to see I think a lot more just you know Straight Up Entertainment uh B Bob iger's obviously grappling you know Disney's in crisis because of this and this is Bob's public statement since he came back which is you know we just need to be in the business of entertainment we just need to like make shows that people want to watch which is funny because like in Hollywood 2024 that's like a radical statement right that's like a heretical and every by the way and that's code right for non-woke and everybody knows that he can't actually say non-woke like he he can't admit that the term woke even exists as far as I can tell like these guys can't they can't actually talk about the thing but they can use the code right so you're two years behind us you we couldn't talk about it a few years ago but yeah yes exactly so yes the Doppler effect is Real by the way that's another thing that I think is you you mentioned cultural changes that's the other thing I've been thinking a lot about that the Hollywood thing is an example of which is I you know this is going to sound very hubristic but I I think it might be true and I I hear this a lot from my friends overseas which is I think it might be literally true that San Francisco is the cultural center of the universe H like I I think like San Francisco was first in on everything that we're talking about and I think San Francisco maybe is first out yeah right and then Hollywood immediately followed and hly was going to work their way out and then the rest of the East Coast it was then you know came in after that it's going to take them longer to get out and then whatever happened in the Southeast or whatever is going to be on a lag after that and then the UK is going to happen two years after after that when Canada and Australia right and then it's you know ultimately so you're bullish it's going to happen even there those places seem so hopeless and uh on a on a lag so the strong form of the theory the strong form of the theory is take any principal you know take any of these preference falsification things take any any that everybody was absolutely required to say despite uh knowing that it was not true and just identify the date at which everybody in San Francisco decided that they believe that and then establish that on a timeline and then the date when that same belief was taken up in all these other locations as sort of the wave spread okay and and then you've got like a stack rank of like places over time and so the prediction would be the unwind happens in the exact same form that's funny right and so there's gonna be like there's G to be like schools in like rural I don't know rural Louisiana like eight years from now yeah that are gonna like get the memo and all of a sudden nobody's gonna have purple hair anymore right right it's just going to be like this incredible Long Reach lag depending on your cultural proximity to San Francisco I don't know if this is all literally exactly right but I'm very suspicious that this is how it's going to play out fascinating well will you see Elon just today recently supporting some of the sort of similar movements in Europe like he's not just trying to change what's happening in America but also you know similar movements around the world which I guess was similar to what Bannon was doing maybe eight years ago or kind of yeah there's a similar sort of populism or whatever you want to call it and it'll be interesting to see if there's enough momentum and energy in Europe for it to happen yeah there's a lot of so talking to a lot of friends of mine in Europe there's a lot of similarities and so I do think like this Doppler effect I was talking to a friend in Sweden actually so a few years ago actually it's after yeah no it's after 2020 a friend in Sweden and he said yeah it's weird he's like all of a sudden in Sweden we only talk about American politics right it's like everybody's completely obsessed with the 2020 election and he said like literally never happened before like it was not what they did in 2016 or 2012 nobody had an opinion nobody in Sweden had an opinion on Mitt Romney right you know they probably thought he was a perfectly nice guy it just what they were focused on Swedish politics right right and he said something happened something changed around 2020 where basically the narrative throughout Europe became became became American politics and so this is going the theory of these sort of cultural bow waves and so yeah I think that there's a lot to that now the circumstances are different and there's a bunch of ways that we could talk about the differences that are important but I think there's some some similarities to it and then I would say like with respect to what Elon is doing or work that we might do as we get involved in policy issues outside the US the other just very practical thing is the US is not an island and many other countries actually I mean first of all many American companies are multinationals and so if you're an American company if you're an American car company you are selling cars in Germany and like what happens in Germany actually matters right for your business and they may do things that are very destructive that you have to try to INF uence having said that there is also something that has become I think an even more pricious pattern that is actually I think developed into a real problem which is that the other countries in this specifically is the UK and then the major countries in Europe and the EU they now fully think that they can regulate us companies direct directly right and so they now think that they can pass these laws and they can enforce these laws in a way that it will force Global change in the part of the US companies and they do that for you know a lot of tech policy these AI laws I mean it's almost impossible to believe but literally the people rule Europe came out a couple years ago and said we know we now recognize that Europe cannot become the Innovation leader in AI so we therefore are going to become the the regulation lead right right which which at first you're like okay that's clearly insane because like if you don't if you don't have any Ai and if you pass laws to drive it out of Europe which is what they've done anybody who's any good at AI with only a few exceptions people who are any good at AI in Europe are leaving and coming to the US um because it's just the AI act has made it impossible to function there on the one hand it's like okay that you might view that as self-destructive but they they do have a point which is they they do say Global leader which is like okay you if you're an American company and you want access to Europe like you have to enforce these policies and and and first of all companies are not necessarily going to enforce different policies by country they often end up just doing low lowest common denominator and then two is Europe increasingly just asserts that they have the ability to regulate for the world and and a great example that is uh antitrust mergers and Acquisitions which is to if you're trying to do a tech merger of any size right now in the US you also need sign off from the UK competition Regulators um and you need sign off from the EU competition regulators and so you have three primary Regulators by the way any one of them can veto an acquisition which is one of the reasons why Acquisitions have all all but stopped in Tech it's like even if the US regime doesn't do it one of the one of these other ones will and they are like fully activated to punish American te I mean they're extremely angry that the tech companies are all in the US and they've just you over the last several years just really been out for blood so anyway point being like because the critique elon's already getting is how in arrogant inappropriate for an American like Elon to get involved in German Poli it's like that's one way of looking at it the other is Germany and the EU chose to become involved in American politics and are and have chosen to do things that are relevant to all of Elon companies no question and if they don't want people like Elon showing up in Germany maybe they should reconsider that yeah just while we're on the AI topic was seg way back do you think open AI should be allowed to be a for-profit so this is one of those things where you kind of always wonder if you're there's sort of two realities there's Two Earths and you wonder which Earth you're on because like on Earth one there are very clear laws on this and this has to do with federal tax law and among other legal regimes and there are a lot of different ways in which somebody can inappropriately sort of cross the line with what they do with the economic value of of a nonprofit and you know historically uh in the US when you cross those lines you go to jail somebody who have Cons with or hijacks or misappropriates or inappropriately leverages uh nonprofit for personal wealth that's like a absolute like but way you or I do it we're going to jail yeah right like I hope our friends visit us we're going to be in jail then on Earth two it's like maybe you can do whatever you want right and like you know YOLO right and like you know why not and if you don't like your this or that or whatever you just go ahead and do it and who knows see what happens and like I think this is one of those um right so you know if I'll just give you the very specific thing and not just I'm trying not to get too specific on open but just in general to your question like the idea of a nonprofit becoming a for-profit there actually is a legal regime in the US through which that can happen it does occasionally happen the usual scenario by the way historically is hospitals where they start out as nonprofits then at some point they become for-profits and the way that happens is you have to create a new for-profit company denovo from scratch and then you have to raise money to buy the assets in the nonprofit at their fair market value right and so if the nonprofit owns a hospital that's worth $100 million then to take turn that hospital in for-profit you have to create a for-profit you have to raise $100 million and buy the hospital and then at least in theory that you're not clean when you do that by the way the people involved in the nonprofit very much cannot be the recipient of the money on the other side because that would be again sort ofing you know with corporate Resources with the resources of the nonprofit but you can do that so that those transitions can happen but you know hypothetically if you had a nonprofit that was worth $150 billion it raises this interesting question which is number one do you need to do any of this or can you just YOLO it but like if you're going to try to do it by the book do you basically create a new for-profit then do you go raise $150 billion in cash right to to to buy that thing out right or you know do you try to figure out some Theory under which it's actually not worth $150 billion even though you know dot dot dot like what's it worth and then again you're you're right back in tax law territory and then again you know the third rail is 100% that you can't you know none of that money can go to you and so this is a really good test it's going to be a good test for the IRS by the way the California State Attorney General has oversight over this there's a variety of this is a potent enough a topic area with enough just nonprofits there's government scrutiny on nonprofits because there's all kinds of ways that people try to siphon money out and they get the tax break and so they're actually quite sensitive to this and a bunch of different branches of state and federal government uh get focused on this then there's the other thing which is whatever happens here will be a precedent and the precedent is actually quite interesting because if let's just say hypothetically there's a YOLO and the YOLO works it will set a very interesting precedent because and again just think basic incentives if we could if Andre and herwitz could instead because we fund all of our companies it's actually really fun we call them unintentional nonprofits when they don't make profit yeah like they're Delaware SE corporations they just you know I mean they're not technically you understand they don't make money but anyway you get what I'm saying they are legally for-profits and we invest in them as a for-profit and you know we invest in them using taxable money and that the returns that come out of it are are taxable and so forth if in the alternate scenario if we live on earth to instead what we would do is we would not do that what we would do is all startups would start out as 501 c3s right and so You' basically and the reason for that is the the funding then would come in and it would be a tax deductible and so you would start a foundation that would basically make these things on on a tax deductible basis you get the TA the tax credit for it which would be much more Capital efficient and then if they don't work you just it's just a charitable deduction that you've gotten the tax credit on and if they do work you YOLO and you flip it into uh being a for-profit and often way you go the precedent that is going to be set here is going to determine like you know potentially a lot of how basically startup formation happens and a lot of what people like us do and you know I would just let me H hypothesize that I don't think there are very many El in the political system that want people like me to be able to just like nakedly evade federal tax law and so I I suspect that some of these things are not maybe going to be quite as easy as people might think and and and normally when you have an AG grieved funer who gave money to such a thing but didn't get upside you would just settle and you know give him a chunk of equity or something but when that person happens to be the wealthiest person in the world and also has started a a different company in in the space perhaps there's no there's no amount of of equity or you no nothing that could be given that would uh inspire such a settlement so it would be interesting to see what happens but again I think that's all right but again there might be an even deeper problem and I'm not a lawyer so don't take this you know for granted I would say double check this with Claude before you make any before you make any legal decisions but through Claude Esquire but like I'm not sure that in I'm not sure they can just I'm not sure that a nonprofit that has taken a non a tax deductible donation can turn around and settle with a chunk of equity and a for-profit right like I think that in and of itself might actually not I I I would be surprised if that were even permissible again unless we're in the YOLO world where it's h whom and you know just yeah yeah yeah maybe that's maybe that's a YOLO right maybe every time I donate to a nonprofit now I can hope that in the future some chunk of for-profit he comes back to me like yeah why not um so yeah my mental model of the IRS is that they'll never permit this to happen and the California AG will never permit this to happen but you know it's like I said maybe we need a good cfish lesson now and then and so we'll see uh we we'll see who's mining the store go going back to the vibe shift one group perhaps that's either had the biggest Vibe shift or perhaps even responsible for the vibe shift in some ways I'm thinking about Bill Amman and his work on universities is Jews post October 7th and a lot of Jews but not as many as I would have thought became you started to support Republican Administration for the positive work that they've done towards Israel when Trump was in office and also in opposition to some of the negative work that the Democrats had done empowering Iran and other things um but you we also had this ation a while ago I believe even before October 7th where it's not just about which part supporting but also there's this idea that some Jewish people are perhaps who who and Jews tend to skew I think more more leftwing at least in in America are perhaps confused because the very idea of Israel to the extent that they're pro-israel the idea of a Nation you know for people is perhaps antithetical to the left and I thought that was an interesting argument for Jews who are kind of wondering how to think of themselves politically do you want to comment on it sure so to start with just for clarification I am not myself Jewish yes I may be the least Jewish person in the world you're you're a jefile you're I am I am I have a great deal of affinity yes and many many friends I occasionally indulge in a little speculation and hope that my Jewish friends will be very forgiving and will will cross check me when I get things wrong so um there's just been this incredible pattern a lot of people have seen this but there's just been an incredible pattern among the Jewish people I know and just start by saying American Jewish people I know which is I think you know like significant number of Jewish people I know after October 7th were absolutely shocked and horrified obviously first by the attack in Israel but then after that shocked and horrified discovered the people they thought were their allies in the US actually were not and that played out maybe most visibly on the college campuses but it also played out inside a lot of companies and there was kind of this you know sudden discovery that you know kind of Dei as a movement is inherently anti-jewish in essence by definition it has to be for for reasons we can talk about and it turns out that that it is and it turns out lot of the kind of Dei proponents are not shy about expressing that and making that clear so basically if people haven't been tracking this whatever you saw what you know if you watch what happened to universities about a year ago just assume that's been happening in a lot of other a lot of other settings too and so that that's been a you know very I think rude awakening to to a lot of people we've talked about this is a debate that has actually happened inside kind of Jewish say intellectual and political Society for a very long time there's this famous Jewish intellectual policy guy really brilliant guy named Norman poitz and he actually wrote a book like 20 years ago with this incredible title Why are Jews liberal you know this you know PR predates all of everything we've been talking about and he kind of went he actually went through this question and this argument basically in that book and basically predicted that it was just a matter of time until American Jews but and and then also Israel discovered that basically the people who they thought were their friends were probably not and the people who they thought were their enemies might well be their best friends by the way the other chart that gets passed around in s WhatsApp groups is Pew research did this uh incredible Pew research did you know just normally kind of super woke but they every every once in a while they do a piece of research that's like really revealing and it's always never quite clear if they understand how revealing it is they did this incredible we should post a link to this they did this incredible survey that is a survey of religious groups in America about their opinions of other religious groups in America and so this is like I don't know whatever the ultimate Dave Chappel skit or something where it's just literally they segmented Americans by religion and then they ask them what they think of all the other religions right and it's just you know which is just like wow that would be amazing and so they did this and part of the humor of it what happened is they had to be very careful which religions they could include so like there's all these like weird gaps you know because there's all these like differences because I don't I'm not even going to speculate as to why they made the choices it's it's a subset of the of the choices because they they wanted to do a 2 by two grid and maybe there were some more inflammatory topics in there but they did the 2 by two grid and then they did they expressed it with a numerically as positive or negative sentiment you know basically what does group X think of group Y what does group y think of group X positive or negative you know zero is the Baseline and then you know positive 10 means favorable by 10 points negative 10 negative by 10 points and so it turns out that the one that's just like I just I cannot stop I laugh so hard I start crying is it's Jews and Evangelical Protestants um and well so there's two funny ones so one is the Mormons just love everybody the funniest one is the Mormons are literally positive on every other group and then the other groups are like not so sure but but it's just validation the Mormons are like the warmest hearted people in the world they're positive on every other group maybe so this why I love all my Mormon friends so much but the other thing is the XY comparison of Jews and Evangelical Christians and the funny thing is Jews and America according to this survey Jews and America have a negative 40 view of Evangelical Christians and Evangelical Christians have a positive 40 VI of [Laughter] juice so it's it's one wow that's hilarious it's like the most polar and it's by far these are like the most polarized numbers on the chart like it's like an 80 point spread right in the two directions and so literally and I'm just going to cliche I'm I'm I'm going to cliche here for a second you've literally got you know I don't know Woody Allen in New York imagining there's some redneck in Arkansas who just thinks like Jews are terrible and the red neck in Arkansas is like I freaking love juice there's no way there's no way like if you could get them all in a room together I mean you know I'm sure if you could get them all in a room together they would all love each other so much the numbers would all go to 100 but it's just this weird it's just this thing right and so anyway so this is this is one of I think great discoveries a lot of my Jewish friends have made which is like they're actually their best allies yeah American politics both for life in America and also to the extent that they care about it which many do the sort of future of Israel their main Ally is actually like straight up just a stereotypical Trump voter like by far right like if they drove through the Deep South everybody would love them yeah right m fente is in the Deep South there's maybe some online you know anti-semites but there like a tiny fraction of the PO none I was actually I mean I'll tell you another version of the story more serious version of the story I was at a and this again it breaks your brain in terms of what you've been told these years but I was actually at I was a guest speaker at the last Republican house offsite at the Green Brier North Carolina so this is all of the Republican house members to go off site and it's a closed thing there's no press and so it's literally Republican house members it's their spouses and then it's it it just happened to be I was a speaker so there were two speakers back toback there were only two nonous members in the room or or spouses which was me and then the other speaker which who turned out to be the Israeli ambassador to the us and we were because we were both speakers we sitting at the front table so I met him and talked to him for a bit and so I got to see him give his talk in front of the House Republicans and it was this is probably 9 months ago so this is you know obviously post October 7th but with and everything is still tense but you know everything was like super tense back then as well and he gave this incredible talk on what's happening in Israel and it was the most palpable display of like uniform unanimous love like I think I've ever been in a room like the congressman and their spouses and one after the other got up and spoke and they just like this this tremendous outpouring of like we love you all so much and we we're behind you and we support you and we'll do whatever you need and tell us what like it's just this incredible level of like love and support obviously it's not obviously there are a lot of Democrats who are also very pro Israel but like this actually happened at the same time the university stuff was happening and so it was it was such a stark kind of lustra of difference and so I don't know maybe this has always been the case I don't know maybe things are you know tectonic place are shifting maybe the whole Dei thing just got so intense that it kind of Knocked this stuff off kilter another theory is you know it's now been the last Holocaust Survivors are are passing away now you know they're they're like literally in their 90s and the last World War II veterans are are passing away and so you know maybe there's a generational thing here which is just the memory of World War II and the Holocaust is fading and and everybody's just naturally going to recalibrate what they think on things because they're not going to have that as sort of the foundational kind of memory of the creation of the state of Israel so like this all seems very open now you know you as you said like we have a lot of friends who you know like Jewish friends who are it's not like that all of a sudden they're like hardcore Trump supporters or something but um well and let me also say like this goes back to what we talked about earlier like there certainly some Jewish Americans who were not Trump supporters who are or something like that but also you know I think it'd be for the country I think it'd be great if you know if a fairly you know if a fairly large number of American Jews also stay in the Democratic party and help the Democratic party kind of get back back to sense and so may maybe that's the other thing that will happen right and by the way and and I don't want to speak for any of these guys but I think the you mentioned Bill Atman but also Mark Rowan yeah and these guys who became these sort of board members and major donors to these universities we started to see the amount you know we saw what it meant when guys who are that respected and are that significant to those institions have the real power of moral weight behind them right they can really start to change things and so we you know we'll see what happens maybe that continues yeah it's interesting another perhaps diagnosis of why this it was the way that it was is that you know sometimes the people who are your friends aren't the people who you want to be your friends so to use the Woody Allen example like yeah maybe the redneck likes him but he doesn't want his love he wants the love of Hollywood and you know even if they're uh sort of you know less Pro isra in that way so maybe as the cultural culture changes in the way that we were talking earlier about what's cool what's high status maybe that will influence things as well and make it easier to to to switch one thing I also just want to comment you know we talked about in our last interview a year ago how SBF in a famous Tyler Cowan interview talked about how because he's a utilitarian he would keep doubling taking the odds double or nothing of you know do you bet the world and even risk it all if there's a positive EV it feels like in his own way Elon has done his own version of of of going Allin multiple times of course when he started his companies going into debt and taking immense risk on all of his previous gains but also most recently in the election there was that interview with Tucker Carlson where he was joking if Trump doesn't win am I ever GNA see my kids again or what what's gonna happen what's gonna happen to me are they gonna try to take me in jail just was he taking a a massive risk and what do you make of this of his behavior to just keep going all in um and just keep betting yeah so you know the joke online has been that this is obviously not his first time through the Sim exactly right this is like Bill Murray and Groundhog Day having like you know there all these calculations online for how long Bill Murray was it was repeating days in gr Hog Day and and online and it's like the consens it's like if you add it all up it's like 30,000 years yeah and he's just been like running every experiment every day to kind of see what works best and so it looks like he's doing it effortlessly and El kind of the same thing which is just like at least for the last several years it's just like he just tou everything he touches works just been an extraordinary run you know how it started I mean he Peter teal talks about how who worked with them at PayPal talks about how when Peter said he was going to write a book at one point about the PayPal experience and he said the chapter about Elon would be called the man who knew no risk right he's just like flat out just like missing the wrist genan like I don't know though I really struggle with that because there's this real question around like taking risk you know because like you take risk every time you like step out into this across the street it's like take risk this a sort of conventional view is you roll the dice and maybe it goes one maybe it goes the other like what the great Founders tend to do and you're like that and I'm like that and I think everybody we know is like is like yeah when you start a company or try to do a new thing like there there is risk but what you spend all of your actual time doing is trying to take the risk out right right and so you are trying as hard as you possibly can to figure out all the different things that can go wrong and all the things that are inadequate you know for the challenge ahead and you're trying to like get in front of those things and fix those things before the risk kills you right you're trying to take the risk out out and and I often Andy R taught me years ago this idea that I call the Onion theory of risk this is his idea but I can't remember if you came up with the name but it's sort of the idea basically is you can think of a company as like on day one it has every possible risk right so it has team risk and product risk and Market risk and pricing risk and margin risk and competitive risk and Regulatory risk and then basically what you're trying to do as a Founder like one of the ways the conventional way of think about what you do as a Founder is you're trying to like get things down to hit Milestones but the other way of thinking about it is those things if you're doing it right they're peeling layers of risk of the onion and basically success in a startup one way to think about it is when you've eliminated all the risk right You' figured out something to do that solves every single one of those risks and so and we often you know we often analyze companies this way and so you know one of one of the things that Elon is really really good at is doing that you know he's really really good you know he identifies St for team risk okay I'm just going to go hire all the smartest people in the world it's like okay you know can we ship the product well I'm just gonna Hammer you know I'm just going to be involved every step of the way every week and make sure that we ship the product is the product going to be good well I'm going to be the guy who beta tests the self-driving thing and you know the news software patches are going to download to my Tesla first and write every single thing or you know the government is threatening to regulate me out of existence oh I know I'll go you know I'll go do what I'm doing you know with with the new government and so you know a way to think about it is it's the reverse is he he's actually reducing risk every step of the way and I think that a plausible telling of the Elon story in the fullness of time is that you know each of the things that he does over time with his companies and now more broadly is everything about it is taking away layers of risk from the ultimate goal and by the way The Arc there is particularly compelling since the ultimate goal is quite literally Mars yeah um right and so the way to think about it is what if you know think about the ark as basically the goals to get to Mars that to get to Mars is every I mean it's every possible risk in the world for doing anything right getting to Mars and so how do you strip away all those risks right and so how do you you know okay we're going to need to like build a lot of stuff on Mars how do you do that well we need robots Okay we're gonna do that how do you need like what's going to control the robots we need AI it's just step after step after step after step taking risk out so I I think ironically he might be one of the greatest risk reducers at this point in history I I love the the Tweet about how it would make more sense for John G to take over the government rather than just concede it and go to some other country so so Alish shrug which by the way so atas shrug is this incredible so atas shrug to start with I actually didn't read atas shrug until like four years ago it was weird when I was a kid this is the truth when I was a kid I read the Fountain Head and I was like all right it didn't resonate with me at all because it's all about like Artistic integrity and like get like basically pissy over artistic compromises and like burns down his own buildings or tears down his own buildings I'm like well that's absurd like no that's not so it didn't resonate and I always heard about outlas Shug I never read it and then my friends kept telling me no no no no you you like you need to read it because we're literally living in it right now I was like all right fine and so I started the audiobook and I was like I literally would just sit for hours just I it's just like it's so incredibly Vivid you know the story that it tells and now I understand the negative reaction that it gets right which is it is just absolutely unabashedly Pro it's to start with it's pro-america right which is of course enough to you enough to get it critically condemned forever but it's unabashedly Pro capitalism it's Pro Enterprise it's pro- industrialism it's Pro energy it's Pro building things it's Pro it's like Pro all it's Pro Merit it's pro trade you know it's Pro all the things that the you know modern Academy literary establishment is against and it's just an incredible painting of that and then the other thing that's just like utterly shocking is the degree to which the villains are all real yeah right and you I'm sure you've done this like you you can just go down the Wikipedia entry of like the villains and you're like oh yeah I know that I know I know Ellsworth I know Elsworth tuy and by the way I know you know Ellsworth tuy also we don't have to say who it is but we both have the same name in our in our heads exactly um and so I know these people and then the two most amazing you know the sort of equipo of the whole thing the two characters ultimately you know one is John G who's the for people hav he's the great industrial genius who basically essentially goes on strike he goes on strike he literally goes on strike and creates a whole separate I'm going to spoil it he creates his whole separate you know World isolated out from the rest of the world called G gch and you sort of takes all the world's Geniuses and pulls them out of society and then but so that's one character but the other character is that do you remember this Eric the other character is the character of the United States president and the character United stat I might get the name wrong is it was a deliberately vague name but it's like Mr Johnson yeah and the thing with the character of Mr Johnson because all of the characters in that novel are like incredibly vividly drawn all the good ones and all the bad ones like they have these incredible personalities they're Larger than Life they're like these superhero like figures the one exception is the president of the United States is Mr Johnson who's deliberately painted basically as a non-entity like he barely even exists and like he's basically just a figurehead of this just like totally screwed up system you know this government that's completely out of control that's like crushing private Enterprise just you know trying to impose socialism doing all the worst things it could possibly do but the guy in charge is like the the exact opposite of like Alex Luther he's just like a complete nobody completely interchangeable and anybody else could be in that job Mr Smith could be in that job it wouldn't matter at all and every time he's in the novel it's like he's not even a character he's just like this complete zero right now I don't know just like hypothetic this would never happen of course in our world for real but just hypothetically imagine that someday we had a president where literally it's like he doesn't even exist like is he awake is he asleep is he alive is he wandering around the West Wing in his bunny slippers like who knows now that would never happen in real life no don't know of course not no but if it ever did it would be this character in this novel right um and so like her novels are so unrealistic right that would never Happ exactly um and so can't even finish a sentence um and everybody just lies about it oh my God so anyway both of those characters like you know maybe those characters you know like okay but like that's not like the president character might be real but like the actual John G would not do it John G did the as John G would do what elon's doing right the exact opposite of the John G plan and for I'm gonna spoil the novel like in the end of the novel I'm G to spoil and it's actually very poignant which is basically all the Geniuses basically just go to G Gulch and they basically go into seclusion and they basically wait for industrial civilization to collapse and for the rotten system that rules it to basically cave in under the theory that then they'll be able to like come back out and fix it properly and basically you know basically prove to the normal man that he actually needs you know these sort of industrial super Geniuses And So It Ends very poly with like literally the lights going out right like literally the lights of New York like start to Blink out right yeah and again it's like okay like you could say like that's like really unrealistic of course except that's like literally what's happening in Europe yeah right like the prices of energy and your price of energy what is it in the it price of energy in Scandinavia is like up like 20x this week it's like you get these crazy things and then the price of energy is so high in the UK and in Germany now that they're both in literally Germany is deindustrializing right the the price of energy in Germany is so high that literally they're shutting they're literally shutting down the factories right and if this keeps going if the trends continue they they will end up en rolling blackouts and by the way California we have our version of that we've been through you know phases we have our own rolling blackouts which is remarkable but it's like okay that's one option if you're John G but the other option is no you just go do what needs to be done and the there's actually a character in Atlas Shrug that actually does that or tries to do that which is the Dy tager character and in the end she's ultimately convinced by John G that she should actually also give up um but elon's like the John G character that decided the opposite of of giving up he just decided to take on the bigger and bigger challenge to make sure the problem gets fixed and I don't know it's like the old line used to be like the thing with ir Ran's novels is the the heroes are fake but the villains are real and you know that might be wrong like we might actually every once in a while get a randan hero and and that point maybe a couple points let or a couple more questions let you get out of here but this idea of some people have said something like oh you know the Sila Valley Vibe shift is so hypocritical because a few years ago they were saying you know get out of politics and now everybody's you know in politics and I think the easy response to that is well a few years ago sort of all this activism in our companies were destroying our companies and now or this past administration all these sort of crazy capricious arbit overbearing regulations we're killing our companies and so we're doing this sort of self from the company's perspective company best interest thing of hey it was let's get that get rid of politics in our a few years ago but let's get more involved in the political system as a way to protect our companies yeah so look I think you mentioned earlier I've been quoting there's an old Russian joke proverb Soviet era which is you may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you and so look I was in and out of politics in sort of the traditional light fashion mostly as a Democrat from 1994 through to whatever 2016 I won't do the long version I just kind of assume you just have you're just a you're just kind of a good person you're a good Democrat you make money you give it away it's everything's great you know so I was around it but like never really centrally involved and and frankly it didn't really matter like it didn't your point like it didn't really impinge on our companies that much like no no there was never a government policy about the router like or the database right Oracle never had there were never hearings on Capitol Hill at Oracle saying what data is being stored in your database Mr Ellison like that it wasn't politically Salient in that way you know it just we all or at Le I just thought you could take it for granted that you could kind of be tangentially involved if you wanted to be or wanted to argue about immigration or something but you didn't you certainly didn't have to and you could spend your entire life being blissfully removed from it and it was totally fine and then yeah like to your two points like basically like no it turns out politics is interested in us and and yeah that that took two forms one is it took the form of this very specific kind of activism inside these companies this started to really wreak havoc and then it took the form of an Administration that just decided to be like extremely destructive like they just woke up one morning and they just decided to be destructive and they just decided to do everything they could to try to wreck American Tech and American startups and I understand like I try to channel the other guys thought process and I understand the sort of this sort of extreme kind of anti- markets anti-tech anti Free Speech kind of ideology that got all consumed all these people but like they really acted on it they ended up a lot of power and they caused a lot of damage um and so this very much is like a war that was brought to us and I I don't want to speak for Elon but I'm certain he you know feels the exact same way I'm certain this is the last thing that he ever wanted to do he'd be much happier if he could spend all of his time working on Mars but it turns out the road to Mars requires yeah well and actually it's actually really interesting the Mars thing is actually really funny very interesting which is it it turns out to actually get to Mars there's only specific Windows because because of the rotation the planets have to be in alignment they have to be close enough where you can actually get there and there's only a launch according to Elon there's only a launch window like every two years and so a bad Administration with bad policy can basically set Mars back four years very easily by just preventing those you know two launch Windows and so it turns out the road to Mars you know requires going through the US government it turns out the road to flying cars requires going through Twitter yeah right like you know flying cars this last Administration you know basically outlawed the American drone industry um and guaranteed that China would win right this kind of administration that we've been living with is certainly never going to legalize flying cars I mean not a chance in the world and so it turns out if you want flying cars you also need an Administration that's actually also prot Tech and so it turns out yes it turns out they promised us flying cars and we needed to get 140 characters before we could get the flying cars it just is what it is yeah or to quote you from you know 15 years ago or so you know software ate the world it started with all the parts that we could do digitally in the world of bits but then once we approach the world of atoms and of course in fintech too we faced you know regulatory headwinds that we weren't used to and so in order to actually build our companies we we had to to to get much more involved yeah what shocked me so much over the last four years which is I you know Peter and I Peter teal and I've had this long running debate about you know his thesis on Innovation and we actually kind of agree for the most part or I would say I've come around to his point of view on most things but I think what he would say that I would agree with is innovation in Adams has basically been made illegal over the last 60 years innovation in Bits good news it was allowed to continue but that's not enough like just just bits is not enough I always tried to make the argument you could get more done with bits than he thought and thinking in the future about things like AI but then you know and then I just sort of assumed and again this is based on everything I had seen over 25 years or whatever of exposure to the government I just assumed that the status quo of all right Adams are illegal but at least bits are legal would just continue and then these people decided to try to make bits illegal and like you know and again they just like voluntarily one one one morning woke up and decided to do that and they came at bits in the form of crypto and in the form of fintech and in the form of AI and then they were coming for the very Foundation of even the software business model in the form of unrealized capital gug taxes yeah and so yeah and at that point if they're able to eliminate having eliminated Innovation at ads if they were able to also eliminate Innovation and bits like we're done like we're done economic growth stops right Society goes into decline economy certainly stagnant growth will lead to negative growth all politics for the rest of our lives are zero sum the country becomes an incredibly impoverished bitter place and the lights start going out you like you just like you step by step by step you can just project this forward it's just Crystal Clear what'll happen and it's literally happening in Europe you can actually see it happening in Europe and like so like the like policy development for the United States has become very simple it's do the opposite of what Europe does right it's just shocking it's like Europe is like a giant Jim Kramer right it's just like it's like Scott Galloway yeah Scott Gallow Paul Krugman just do the opposite just do the opposite and so anyway maybe I missed all the drama of the last year maybe just that Central fact is becoming clear maybe that's the Turning Point well maybe the last point I leave so one is a question which is first reflection which is in the Barry Weiss interview with Peter teal she says hey there's a lot of people who think that Trump has exhausted The A Team from the last Administration what's left is sort of the C team and the D team is that true and then Peter says not at all which is both a reflection of the of what he thinks of the past administration but also the type of talent that that's that's coming into office right now and also add a question to that which is FDR 2.0 the best analogy for what's possible or or what is the best uh analogy of of of what's possible yeah this has been a giant upside surprise I assume that the appointments would be good but like in the last like six weeks I've just been shocked at how good they are like absolutely shocked including by the way today a whole run of appointments today that were just like fantastically good um the group chat yes yes yes exactly and a bunch of people we wish were in the group chat yeah so look I I think a couple things I think one is to the credit of the Trump team there were actually a there were a lot of young people in the first term between first Trump term second 16 to 20 second term starting now in the first term there were a lot of young people in there who kind of got educated maybe the Hard Way like under enormous pressure and many of those people are now maybe they were in their early 30s now they're in their 40s they're very spun up you know they know what to do they've been through the process they understand how to get things done they understand the kinds of ways people are going to try to stop them and then they have 10 years of maturity and they're ready to go and many of those people people are in there and they're really good um and then by the way there's another set of young people there's another set of young people in their 20s and 30s volunteers who've come in who I've met who are just extremely good very sharp then there's Eric what you were alluding to which is the people from the outside who are coming in I are pound-for-pound like it's the best it's the best Staffing I've ever seen it's like light years I mean number one it's like a million times better than the last four years right but it's like better it's clearly better than the administrations that you know my first exposure was in the beginning of the Clinton Administration I've kind of been exposed sense and this is clearly the best team by by by Leaps and Bounds I think you have to go back to 1930s FDR when you know FDR put out the bat signal and all these incredibly talented young people showed up and created and ran all these departments or maybe you have to go back and I mean this seriously maybe you have to go back to Lincoln with the Team of Rivals with these incredibly capable people but even you know just today two of my partners who you know Shri R Krishna and Cooper who are both amazing and then um who else was the Michael Kos is amazing yeah oh Emil Michael into defense Steve fineberg by the way one of the Legends of private equity and an incredibly capable person going in to be deput deputy secretary of defense I forget who there was like three other just incredible people today um and then over the course of the last like month you know the people Jay bataria going in run NIH and Marty Macker for FDA and Jim Jacob hellberg Jacob hellberg you see God I'm so excited Ken so Ken Harry um Ken Harry is the new ambassador to Denmark I think and his specific assignment is to buy Greenland so so so the joke online Trump you know variously has said we should buy Greenland we should reclaim the Panama Canal and then we should make Canada the 51st state and the joke online today was no no people are misinterpreting it he doesn't actually mean that this is just the art of the deal this is just his this is his Roba doe because what he actually just wants us to buy England so good which by the way he just appointed this is another thing I think this is a genius moovie he appointed a guy I actually know Mark brunette who is literally the creator of reality television and literally the producer of the of The Apprentice is going to be the US Special Envoy to the UK wow Mark being a Brit by by background long sense long sense American eyes but you know one of the great think and whatever people think about reality like one of the great thinkers of business and media and it's just like an incredibly brilliant polymath incredibly capable guy just like like a mark Bernett is just at a level of Firepower just like Way Beyond the the kinds of people who normally get pulled into these things and then even people in the prior Administration who in these some special roles Rick grenell I think is the special special Envoy I think to Ukraine I believe or maybe like to like the trouble spots he's amazing who else is in there it's just like it's just this it's just this list and then there's a bunch more that are in process and if they land they're equally good and so it's yeah Michael Anton into the state department David saaks into the White House and then who else into the state department oh this guy Bridge Colby into the state department today who's one of the best foreign policy thinkers of our time incredibly brilliant guy yeah and so it's just like pound-for-pound these people are just off the charts so yeah I no longer believe I can predict politics but I cannot imagine a better team than this and it's extremely exciting yeah well they not of optim is a great one to end on Mark as always it's been a fantastic conversation thanks so much for coming on the podcast good awesome fantastic thank you [Music] Eric hey everyone Eric here at turpentine we're building the First Media outlet for tech people by tech people we're the network behind the show you're listening to right now we have a slate of hit shows across a range of Topics in Industries from our Ai and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in Tech with the most interesting thinkers Founders investors and influencers like econ 102 with Noah Smith we're launching new shows every week and we're looking for industry leading sponsors if you think that might be you and your company email me at Eric turpentine doco that's e ik turpentine doco and let's partner together [Music]

Tolong buatkan artikel lengkap dari transkrip video berikut: Hey everyone, my name is Sam, oh, and welcome to the SEO Fundamentals course by Ahrefs. In this course, I'll be teaching you the fundamentals of SEO with a heavy focus on execution. While it's a beginner's SEO course, I don't want you to be fooled by the word "beginner." Even for an eight-figure business like ours, we don't do anything crazy technical or complicated right from the start. We've stuck with the fundamentals of SEO that led to compounded growth, and today our site gets over a million monthly visits from Google Search alone, making SEO one of our most effective strategies to get traffic to our site. So, the course is broken down into four modules, plus this video, which is more of an introduction to the course as well as an SEO 101. In this video, we'll go over the basics of SEO and cover things like what it is, why it's important, and how it works. You'll then move on to Module One, which is on keyword research. Throughout these lessons, I'll show you how to find keywords to target that can benefit your business. It'll also set the foundation for the next module, which is on-page SEO. In this module, we'll talk about optimizing your pages to rank for those keywords. The next module will be on link building. This is one of Google's most prominent ranking signals, which has proven to contribute to higher rankings in search. Finally, we'll finish off the course with the basics of technical SEO, which will mostly be about best practices and website maintenance. All right, let's kick things off with the SEO basics. We'll talk about what search engine optimization is, why it's important, and how Google works. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it's the process of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engine's organic search results. Now, let's talk a bit about how they work. If you're completely new to SEO, then it's easiest to think of search engines as libraries. But instead of storing books, they store copies of websites and web pages. So, when you search for a query, the search engine will then look through all pages in its index and try to return the most relevant results, and SEO helps demonstrate to search engines that your page is that result. Now, you might be thinking, "Why should I focus on SEO when there are so many other marketing mediums?" Well, there are three major things that attract marketers to search engine optimization, and in my opinion, these three things make SEO the best traffic source. Number one, unlike paying for ads, search traffic is free. Number two, organic traffic is typically consistent once you're ranking high, whereas other mediums like social media and email marketing often result in traffic spikes that usually end up fading to nothing. And it makes sense because social media networks are designed to surface fresh content. Emails often get marked as read, forgotten, or land in the spam box, whereas search traffic is a result of users actively searching for information, and the number of searches for a given topic is typically consistent month to month. And number three, you have the opportunity to reach massive audiences you wouldn't have access to otherwise. In fact, as of October 2019, there were nearly 4.39 billion internet users around the world, and almost 4 billion of those people are Google users. This is why search engine optimization is an $80 billion industry and why marketers from all walks of life are adopting and pursuing it today. Everyone wants their business to get discovered, and SEO is the perfect way to do that. Now, let's briefly talk about how Google works, and there are two parts to this. The first is crawling and indexation, and these two things are what actually allow Google to discover web pages and create their search index. So, to actually attain information, Google uses crawlers, also known as spiders, which gather publicly available information from all over the web. The spiders will start crawling from a list of known URLs called seeds, then they follow the hyperlinks on those pages and crawl those newly discovered pages. This process goes on and on, allowing them to collect a ton of information. They then take all of this data back to Google servers to be added to their search index, and that's what people like you and I are searching through when we key in a query in Google. Now, if you were to search for something and Google returned every result that mentioned your words on the page, then you’d end up with really bad results. This brings us to the second part, which is Google's ranking algorithm. Google has hundreds of ranking signals, and they make tweaks to their algorithm 500 to 600 times per year. So, to be frank, no one knows exactly how their algorithm works, but they've given us clues and some guidelines. It’s all just speculation at best, but I do want to cover a few of the most important factors that you'll need to understand from a fundamental standpoint. First are backlinks. Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another, and Google has said on their "How Search Works" page that if other prominent websites link to a page, that’s a good sign that the information is well trusted. The easiest way to understand the value of a backlink is to think of them as votes. When a page receives a backlink, it's essentially another website vouching for the content on the page, and the more votes you get from credible sources, the higher the trust. We also studied the effect of backlinks on search traffic and found a clear positive correlation between backlinks from unique websites and a page's organic traffic. Second is search intent, which represents the reason behind a search query. And if you... Think of Google's goal for search: their job is to return the most relevant results for any given query. So, with that said, you can discover search intent simply by looking at the top-ranking pages for the query you want to rank for. For example, if you search for "slow cooker recipes," you'll see that the search results are mostly blog posts with a list of slow cooker recipes. So, if you try to rank a product page where you're selling a slow cooker, you won't be matching search intent, and therefore, you won't rank. Now, if we change the query to just "slow cooker," you'll see that the dominant types of pages are eCommerce category pages. So, if you try to rank your blog post of slow cooker recipes, then you probably won't rank because you're not matching search intent. This is a critical concept to understand, and I'll share a simple three-point checklist you can use to determine search intent for any query in the next module. Third is content depth. Search engines are made up of computer programs, so they can't actually read and understand text like you and I would. Nevertheless, Google has poured billions of dollars into creating sophisticated technology that understands content to a certain degree. But it's your job as a content creator to provide context about the subject. For example, if you look at the top ranking pages for the query "how to drive a car," you'll find that they talk about things like fastening your seatbelt, familiarizing yourself with the gas and brake pedals, adjusting your seat and mirrors, and other things that a first-time driver may not know. Basically, you want to be able to answer the searcher's query the best that you possibly can, and naturally, it should lead to content that has depth. Now, it's important to note that depth doesn't always translate to length. For example, a topic like "how to turn off iPhone 12" doesn't need to—and shouldn't be—long. In fact, the top-ranking page is only 185 words, but the content itself solves the user's query from start to finish. Alright, so the basics are in the book, and it's time to move on to the keyword research module. Hey, it's Amo, and welcome to the first module, which is on keyword research. In this first lesson, we're going to talk about what keywords are and how to choose them using a simple four-point checklist. Let's get started! So, what are keywords? In the context of SEO, they're simply just words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they're looking for. For example, if you are shopping for running shoes, you might search for keywords like "men's running shoes" or simply just "running shoes." Now, keywords are actually super important in SEO because they set the entire foundation for search engine optimization. The basic goal of SEO is to rank your pages for keywords that your target audience or customers are searching for. If you're not ranking for keywords that actually get searched, then your SEO efforts are kind of meaningless. For example, we rank number one for the query "SEO checklist," and this keyword is responsible for driving around 1,500 monthly visitors from Google, and that's just in the US. So keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people are inputting into search engines, and we'll get into this process in the upcoming lessons. So, how do you actually choose keywords that are worth targeting? Let's run through a checklist that should help you choose keywords effectively. The first thing to check is if your keyword has search demand. Search demand represents the volume of monthly searches made for a keyword, and this is measurable with a keyword metric that we call search volume. You can find the search volume for a keyword by using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. For example, the query "kilometers to miles" gets searched around 478,000 times per month in the US alone. But as you can see here in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, 80% of searches go without a click to a page, and that's because Google has a handy calculator right here that'll solve the searcher's problem. So, search volume alone can actually be a bit misleading, which is why it's worth looking at the second checkpoint, which is to check the traffic potential of the topic. Traffic potential represents the total search traffic you could get if you were to rank at the top of Google for your keyword. Let's look at the stats for our "SEO checklist" page in Ahrefs Site Explorer. So, again, we rank number one for the query "SEO checklist," and it sends us approximately 1,500 monthly search visits from the US. But if we look at the total global organic traffic to the page, you'll see that we get approximately 3,000 monthly visits from Google every single month. That's because this page ranks for over 200 keywords. And this page isn't an outlier. In our study of three million keywords, we found that on average, the top-ranking page ranks for nearly a thousand other keywords in the top ten. So while you may be optimizing your pages for a main keyword, your page will likely rank for hundreds or even thousands of other relevant keywords. Because of that, the monthly search traffic potential of the topic "SEO checklist" is actually higher than its monthly search volume. This is what makes traffic potential a much more reliable metric than search volume. The way you determine traffic potential is by looking at how much traffic the top-ranking pages are getting. For example, if we go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and search for "submit website to search engines," you'll see that it has a search volume of 1,100 monthly searches in the US. Now, if I scroll to the bottom of the... Page, you'll see a SERP overview, which shows you the top 10 ranking pages for that keyword. SERP just stands for Search Engine Results Page, and as you can see, our page gets an estimated 5,300 monthly search visits from the U.S. alone. We rank for over 1,300 keywords, making the traffic potential of this keyword higher than its search volume. Now, it doesn't always work out this way. For example, the query "keyword cannibalization" has a search volume of 150 monthly searches, but the traffic potential is well under 100, so it becomes more of a business decision whether you want to tackle the topic or not. Now, choosing keywords based on metrics alone is not a good idea, which is why the rest of the checkpoints are meant to ground you. The next point on our checklist is to assess the business potential of the keyword or topic. Business potential simply represents the value a keyword has to your business, and value really comes down to your niche as well as your business model. An easy way to do this is by assigning scores between one to three to keywords you're researching. The higher the number, the more important the topic is to your business. So let's say you have a site about golf, and the way you make money is by selling used golf clubs. Bringing this back to business potential, that means topics where you can organically recommend products to visitors would hold the highest business value. For example, people searching for something like "buy used golf clubs" are likely ready to make a purchase here and now, so in my books, this would have a business value of three. Now, a keyword like "best golf clubs" would also be relevant to your site. People are likely ready to make a purchase soon but just don't know which clubs to buy. But it's actually quite easy to plug your products because, for the golf clubs you recommend, you can easily link back to your product pages, leading visitors closer to making a purchase. So I'd give this a business value of two. Now, a keyword like "what is a handicap in golf" would be really tough to organically recommend your products, but nevertheless, it's a way to attract relevant traffic to your site, so I'd give this a business value of one. These would hold the lowest priority, and anything that has a score of zero is probably worth ignoring because it's not going to impact your bottom line. Something like "Happy Gilmore review" would have a business value of zero because it has nothing to do with your business other than the fact that it's a fantastic movie about golf. Alright, the next point on this checklist is to see if you can match searcher intent. This is a concept that we covered in the first lesson of this course, but it's something that I'm going to keep talking about because it's super important. So again, search intent represents the reason behind a searcher's query, and the way we determine that is by looking at the top-ranking pages for the keyword we want to rank for. For example, let's say you have a recipes blog and you want to rank for "toaster oven." Looking at the top-ranking pages, you'll see that almost all of the pages are e-commerce category pages. This tells us that the intent of the searcher is likely to buy or at least to shop around for different toaster ovens. So unless you can actually satisfy the intent of the searcher, it's unlikely that you'll be able to rank high for this query, and we'll dig deeper into search intent in the next lesson. The final point on this checklist is to determine whether you can rank for your keyword. Search volume, traffic potential, and business potential mean absolutely nothing if you can't rank for your keyword in the not-so-distant future. Understanding the level of difficulty to rank for a given keyword takes a bit of analysis and practice. This is why I've created an entire lesson on assessing ranking difficulty because mastering this process will help you get predictable results in SEO, so I'll save that for a later lesson. Now actually choosing keywords comes down to finding a balance in this checklist. You have to ask yourself: does the topic drive enough traffic and have business value to make it worth the effort? This is the question you should ask yourself before you create pages with the intent to rank in search. These five points in the checklist are exactly what we're going to dive deeper into throughout the rest of this module. Hey, it's Sam, and welcome to the second lesson, which is on search intent. I touched on this in the first lesson on SEO basics, but I really want to take some time to unpack what it is and how to use it in keyword research. The reason being, if you can't match searcher intent, then you probably aren't going to rank for your target keywords. So again, search intent represents the reason behind a searcher's query, and matching search intent is one of those must-do things to show search engines that your page will fulfill their goal to deliver the most relevant results for any given query. While it might sound like you're trying to satisfy Google, what you're actually doing is learning what you need to do to satisfy the searcher's intent. Identifying search intent is usually quite easy. All you have to do is search for the keyword you want to rank for and then analyze the top-ranking results. The top-ranking results are a great proxy to understand search intent because Google understands what searchers want probably more than anyone else. Now, analyzing is kind of a jargony word, but I have a simple three-prong... Formula you can use: it’s called the Three C’s of Search Intent. The first C is Content Type. Content type can usually be categorized into blog posts, videos, product category pages, and landing pages. For example, the dominant type of pages for the query "best golf shoes" are blog posts. The second C is Content Format, and this applies more to blog posts and landing pages. A few common blog formats you'll see are how-to’s, step-by-step tutorials, list posts, and opinion editorials. For a landing page, that might be something like a tool or calculator. Again, for the query "best golf shoes," you'll see that all of the top results are listicles, which makes sense because the word "best" implies that a comparison needs to be made. The third C is Content Angle, which often depicts the benefit. It’s basically your hook as to why someone should click and visit your page. For "best golf shoes," you'll see that every post has gone with a freshness angle, which is evident based on the current year being in the titles. In my opinion, this is the least important and often least consistent among top-ranking pages. Now, this is just one example of search intent for a keyword. Let’s go through a few more examples to really drill in this concept. The first example is for the query "how to swing a golf club." The dominant content type is clearly blog posts, but you'll also notice that a YouTube video is ranking ahead of the blog post. So, this tells us that it may be worth creating both a blog post and video to potentially get two different spots in the search results. As for Content Format, they’re clearly all how-to’s, and seeing as the nature of the topic would require a step-by-step procedure, that’s probably the route you’d want to go. You can confirm this by actually visiting some of the top-ranking pages. Now, with Content Angle, it appears as though "for beginners" or "basic" seems to be the right way to approach the topic. The second example is for the query "golf clubs." Looking at the SERP, you'll see that they're all e-commerce category pages, which tells us that when people search for this query, they're likely in shopping mode. Now, seeing as Content Format applies mostly to blog posts and landing pages, it wouldn't be applicable here since we're looking at e-commerce category pages. As for Content Angle, it seems to be mostly about deals, so saving money on golf clubs. Alright, the final example is for something like "golf bags." Looking at the SERP, you'll see something a bit different. We have a mixed SERP: the top-ranking page is an e-commerce category page, then we have a couple of blog posts on the best golf bags, and we also have an outlier on how to buy golf bags. Towards the bottom half of the results, we have more e-commerce category pages. So, what do you do? Well, in order to make an educated decision, we still need to lay some foundation work, so we'll revisit this example in a later lesson. Hey, it’s Ammo, and welcome to the third lesson in our keyword research module. In this lesson, I’m going to show you how to find keywords for your website based on the things you learned in lessons one and two of this module. Let's get started. So, keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people are searching for in search engines, and the general process can be divided into two macro steps. Step one is to generate keyword ideas, and step two is to validate whether those keywords are worth going after. Now, this lesson is mostly about step one: generating keyword ideas for your website. In order to do that, you need a keyword research tool. Keyword research tools show you information on keywords like their search volume, keyword difficulty scores, and other SEO metrics. Plus, they should help you discover potential topics worth going after. There are a lot of tools out there, and you're free to use whichever ones you want, but for this course, I’ll be using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. Now, I also understand that some people may not be in a place to purchase SEO software right now. If that’s you, then we also have a free tool called Ahrefs Keyword Generator, which is a good place to start. I’ll leave links to both tools in the description. Alright, so we're going to be doing some keyword research for the rest of this lesson. So, let’s say that the website we’re doing keyword research for is a golf blog, and the way this blog generates revenue is through affiliate commissions, meaning they promote other people's products, and when someone clicks on one of the links and makes a purchase, you're compensated with a commission. So, the first step is to come up with a list of seed keywords, and a seed keyword is just a broad keyword related to your niche. So, I’ll go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and add a few seeds for our golf site, so that might be "golf balls," "golf clubs," and "golf hats," to name a few. Next, I’ll go to the Phrase Match report, which will show us keywords that include any of these phrases, and just like that, we have around 125,000 keyword ideas with search volumes and a ton of other helpful metrics, some of which we’ll touch on later. Now, 125,000 keywords is just way too much to filter through, so before we continue, let's take a second and revisit the five-point checklist from the first lesson in this module. Again, the five things we’re looking for when it comes to choosing keywords are: 1. We want keywords that have search demand. 2. Keywords with traffic potential. 3. Keywords with business potential. 4. We need... To be able to match search intent, and five, we want to know how hard it will be to rank at the top of Google for that keyword. So, when we're generating keyword ideas, we'll be able to check off the first four points. As for the fifth, we'll tackle that in the next lesson. Alright, let's look back at our list of keyword ideas and start checking off some of these boxes. So, first we need to find keywords that have search demand. To do that, you can set a search volume filter to show keywords with a minimum volume of at least 300 monthly searches. Now that list has just shrunk to 351 keyword ideas, which will be easy to manually filter through. The next point on this checklist is to see if they have traffic potential. Again, traffic potential is a more reliable metric than search volume because not all searches result in clicks. At the end of the day, we want traffic, not searches. To check the traffic potential of a topic, you need to look at the top-ranking pages and see how much traffic they're getting. To do that, you can click on the surf button beside any of these keywords. So, if we do that for the query "golf clubs," you'll see that the top page gets around 16,000 monthly search visits from the U.S. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can get a free version of the SERP using the HF SERP Checker tool. Next up is business potential. Again, business potential is simply the value a keyword has to your business. While 16,000 monthly search visits seem great, you need to consider the fourth point on the checklist, which is to ask yourself if you can match search intent. As you can see, almost all of the top-ranking pages are eCommerce category pages. So, searchers are probably in shopping mode, but we have a golf affiliate blog. Therefore, the site probably isn't selling golf clubs, meaning we can't create an eCommerce category page, and we won't be able to match search intent. So, seeing as this query doesn't fulfill the points on our checklist, we wouldn't go after this keyword. Now, looking further down the list, you'll see the query "best golf balls." It has a high search volume, and if I click on the search button, you'll see that the traffic potential is around 5,000 monthly visits from the U.S. Pretty good! Now, in terms of business potential, this keyword would have a value of 3 because our site makes money by reviewing and recommending products. So, it would be super easy to organically recommend products in a "best of" post, which I assume would lead to a fair amount of affiliate commissions. As for search intent, these are blog posts in the listicle format with the freshness content angle, as you can see from the titles of the top-ranking pages. So, this query checks all boxes and passed our initial sniff test. So, I'll click on the checkbox and add it to my golf keyword list. Now, checking the SERP for all of these keywords would be pretty time-consuming. So, there's a quick technique you can use to find relevant keywords, and that's to use keyword modifiers. A modifier is an add-on to a base keyword. For example, if our base keyword is "golf hats," we can modify this keyword by adding "best," "top," or the current year. Modifiers tell us a lot about search intent. A word like "best" again tells us that a comparison needs to be made, so searchers are probably looking for listicle blog posts with various different product recommendations. Now, if a word like "how" or "what" is in the keyword, then it tells us that the top pages will likely be blog posts or videos with step-by-step tutorials or some other informational content. So, with this knowledge, we can actually filter this keyword list down to: a) keywords that likely have business potential, and b) keywords where we can match searcher intent. For example, since we're doing keyword research for an affiliate site, modifiers like "best," "top," "versus," and "review" would likely bring up topics where we can organically recommend products. So, if we go back to the keyword list, we can click on the include filter and paste this list there. Next, I'll hit the "any word" tab since we want to find keywords that include any of these modifiers as well as one of our seed keywords. Hit apply, and we now have a list of around 30 keywords that are most likely going to have high business potential. Plus, we know that 99% of the time, the results for any "best" type keyword will be listicle blog posts, and we know that we can match searcher intent with our affiliate blog. Now, if we switch the modifiers in the include filter to words like "how," "what," "who," "where," "why," "guide," and "tutorial," then we can apply the list to find informational topics that we could write about on our blog, and pretty much all of these keywords will be fair game for our hypothetical golf blog. Now, if you plan to use a list of modifiers, then it's worth noting that you should probably do it with much broader seeds. For example, you'll see that we only have 10 keywords when using the search volume filter paired with our list of informational modifiers. Now, if I change the seed to just "golf," set the volume filter to a minimum of 300 monthly searches, and then paste in my list of informational modifiers, hit the "any" tab, and click apply, then you'll see we have a lot more topics that we could potentially create content around. So, if this is a method you want to try, then take a screenshot of this list of modifiers and feel free. To use them in your keyword research now, after doing keyword research for exactly 33 minutes and 14 seconds, I was able to compile a list of over 190 keyword ideas in my golf keyword list. Now, one downside to using keyword research tools is that the list of keyword ideas will usually be limited to words and phrases that include your seeds. But there are other great keywords that won't necessarily include your seeds. So, how do you find them? Well, the best way to find these keywords is to look at pages that drive the most search traffic to your competitor sites. Because if your competitors are ranking for keywords that are sending them a ton of search traffic, then I’m sure you’d want to get in on the action, right? Now, by competitor, I'm not necessarily talking about your direct business competitors. I'm referring to your organic search competitors, which are websites that rank for keywords that you'd want to rank for. So, to find these competitors, I'll go back to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, but this time I'll click on my golf keyword list. Next, I'll go to the traffic share by domains report, which will show you the websites that get the most search traffic based on your keyword input—in this case, our golf keyword list. So, as you can see, sites like Golf Digest, Golf.com, and Golf WRX are getting the most search traffic from the keywords that I want to hypothetically rank for. But we already know these keywords since we created the list. So, what you can do is click on the caret beside a domain you want to research further, and then click "Top Pages," which will show you the pages that send the most search traffic to a website. And check this out: Golf Digest's page on game improvement irons gets around 5,400 monthly search visits from the US. This page that ranks for "What degree is a sand wedge?" gets around 4,700 monthly search visits. And we wouldn't have seen these in the keyword ideas report because they don't contain our seeds. So, you can just skim through this list, look for potential topics, then go through those four points in the checklist for keywords that are interesting to you. Add them to your keyword list, and once you've exhausted a website's top pages, rinse and repeat for the other organic search competitors until you're satisfied with your list. And if you're still unhappy with your list, you can try and find other seeds within this report. The two that stand out to me right away are "sand wedge" and "fairway woods." So, I'll go back to Keywords Explorer and type those into the search box. And seeing as both of these are different types of golf clubs, you can add "pitching wedge," "putter," "putting," and so on and so forth. Bottom line: there should be no shortage of keyword ideas, and you should be able to use these two methods to build a solid list of topics to keep you busy for years. But here's the thing: even if you've checked off these four boxes on the checklist, there's still one left, and it won't matter if you don't rank for your keywords. Hey, it's Ammo, and welcome to the fourth lesson in our keyword research module. Today, I'm going to show you how to determine ranking difficulty for a keyword. This will help you understand how hard it'll be to rank high in Google for your target keywords. Let's get started. So, when it comes to ranking in Google, you need to understand who you'll be up against before you target a keyword. Otherwise, you could be entering a battle you won't be able to win. From an SEO perspective, competitors are pages and websites that rank at the top of Google for your target keywords. So, that means your competitors can be different for every single keyword you target. There are three main things you'll want to consider before you decide to pick a fight, and those are search intent, metrics of the top-ranking pages and websites, and topical authority of the top-ranking websites. Now, as we go through these points, we're going to create a list of self-check questions, which should help you make informed decisions in your keyword targeting. Also, in order to see things like metrics of top-ranking pages, you need an SEO tool since Google won't show you data on other pages. So, I'll be using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer throughout this lesson. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can use our free SERP checker tool, which will give you data on the top three pages. All right, let's start with search intent. The first thing you need to do is look at the SERP and ask yourself: Do some of the top-ranking pages fail to closely match search intent? To find this out, you can go through the three C's of search intent, as we discussed in lesson two of this module. And by the looks of it, they're all listicle blog posts using the freshness angle, so they do match. Also, pay close attention to the titles and URLs of the ranking pages. In general, if the top pages include the primary keyword or a variation of it in the title and/or URL, they're likely targeting that keyword. For example, all of the top-ranking pages for the query "how to save money" are exactly about that, whereas a query like "best convertible car seats for small cars" is a bit mixed. As you can see, some pages have gone specifically with the angle for small cars; as a result, it's probably matching searcher intent better than the more broad posts about the best convertible car seats for any car. This is a sign of weakness in the SERP because it means there's probably a lack of rank-worthy content. Out there about the best convertible car seats for small cars. Now, I don't want you to take this as advice that you must include the exact keyword phrase in your titles and/or URLs. With this example, finding convertible car seats for small cars is actually a very specific need for a specific person. All right, let's talk about the metrics. The first metric to look at is the number of websites that are linking to the page. At Ahrefs, we call this referring domains. As I mentioned in Module 1, backlinks are one of Google’s most prominent ranking signals. So, if a page has a lot of quality links pointing at it, then it'll be more competitive to rank. Therefore, before choosing a keyword, you need to ask yourself: "Can I get more quality backlinks than the top-ranking pages?" The second metric is website authority. At Ahrefs, we call this domain rating, which represents the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile. Very generally speaking, you should be going after keywords where your website's DR is in a similar ballpark range as the top-ranking pages, or at the very least, one of the top-ranking pages should be in the same range as your website. For example, if all of the websites that rank in the top 10 have high DRs and you have a DR of, let's say, 10, then you may want to consider competing when you're at a similar level. So, let's add that question to our checklist: "Is my website in a similar DR range or higher than the top-ranking websites?" Again, this is a very general recommendation, but still a decent one to follow if you're a beginner to SEO. To see the domain rating of your own site, you can enter your domain in Site Explorer and see it here on the overview page, or you can enter your domain in our free website authority checker. I’ll be leaving links to all of these tools in the description. All right, let's move on to the third part, which is the topical authority of the top-ranking websites. Google wants to rank pages from authoritative sources, and this goes beyond backlinks. For example, if we look at the SERP for "how to unclog a toilet," you’ll see that this DR 42 site is outranking much more powerful websites with significantly more referring domains. Well, this page comes from a website that’s just about plumbing, so it’s likely more authoritative on the topic. So, the question you need to ask yourself is: "Is my website equally or more topically authoritative than the top-ranking websites?" If the answer is yes, then that’s a positive thing for you. The easiest and quickest way to find out is to just look at the domain names and use some common sense. For example, looking at the SERP for "best convertible car seat for small cars," you’ll see sites like Experienced Mommy, Baby Center, Parenting Pod, Baby List, and other relevant sites that talk about products for children. And for domains that aren’t as easily distinguishable, like 800buckleup.org, you can just visit the site, hit the About page, and get a general idea of what the site is about. In this case, you’ll see that they talk about car seat recalls and review car seat brands, so yes, it is topically authoritative on car seats. All right, let’s look at our full list of yes or no questions. As a very general rule of thumb, the more yeses you can check off, the better your chances of ranking. Again, very general, because SEO is quite nuanced. With that said, let’s go through a couple of hypothetical examples for our golf site. To set the scene, let’s say you have a website that’s about golf instruction and you also review golf equipment, and your website’s domain rating is low, at around 15. All right, so the first example is for the query "best golf grips." Let’s start with the first question: "Do some of the top-ranking pages fail to closely match search intent?" From the looks of it, they all look decent, so I’ll check the no box. Next up, "Can I get more quality backlinks than the top-ranking pages?" Again, we haven’t covered anything about quality backlinks yet, so for now, let’s just look at quantity. Most of the sites have very few referring domains, so I’d say this is a yes. Next question: "Is my website in a similar DR range or higher than the top-ranking websites?" Based on the SERP, there are a few sites with similar website authority, so let’s give this a yes as well. And finally: "Is my website equally or more topically authoritative than the top-ranking websites?" Well, all of the top pages are from golf sites, and so is mine, so let’s give this a yes as well. So, based on our analysis, it looks like this would be a topic worth going after. All right, the next analysis is for the keyword "best putters." Looking at search intent, overall it looks like the majority of pages are good, so I’ll check the no box. But I do want to touch on this page on the best blade putters. This is more of a focused post, and they’re likely ranking high for this because of all of the other factors like high website authority, lots of referring domains, and topical authority, so I would actually exclude them from the rest of this analysis. All right, next up: "Can I get more quality backlinks than the top-ranking pages?" Again, just looking at the quantity of links to these pages, the answer would likely be a yes, seeing as we’re still looking at about a dozen referring domains. But it’s important to realize that getting more links than the number one page probably won’t happen in the near future, meaning getting the top ranking spot will be tough. Next is my website. In a similar DR range or higher than the top-ranking websites, the answer is no. And finally, my website is topically authoritative, so I'll give this a yes. Now, it looks like we're at a tie between yeses and noes, and this is exactly why I said, as a very general rule of thumb, the more yeses you can check off, the better your chances of ranking. Again, SEO is nuanced, plus you need to weigh out some of the other principles we discussed, like traffic potential and business value. The best way to make sound judgment calls is through experience, so it will take time to hone your skills and gain a better grasp of keyword analysis. So, as you can see, understanding how hard it will be to rank in Google will be a key skill to your success in search. Why? Because it's the first step to getting predictable results. After all, if you know what it'll take to rank ahead of your competition, then it all comes down to execution, and that's what the next two modules are all about. Hey, it's Ammo, and welcome to the second module, which is about on-page SEO. If you haven't seen the introduction to SEO video and the module on keyword research, then I highly recommend watching those first. They'll help you get the foundational knowledge you'll need to get the most out of this module. I'll leave links in the description. All right, so what is on-page SEO? It's simply the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines, and it revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent. But on-page optimizations also involve creating and optimizing HTML tags, like titles and meta descriptions. Now, if you've been exposed to the practice of on-page SEO, then it's quite likely that you've heard conflicting advice. And for that reason, we're going to discuss both what on-page SEO is and what it is not. Let's talk about common advice you might see on on-page SEO best practices, which just aren't true today. While there are many old-school tactics that are still being recommended, I want to focus on just three points to help you navigate the noise. Number one: On-page SEO is not about stuffing exact match keywords. It used to be common practice to include the exact keyword you wanted to rank for in your title, URL, and content. For example, if you wanted to rank for "car dealer San Diego," you would stuff that keyword throughout your page, despite the fact it doesn't make sense grammatically speaking. Google is smart enough to understand things like connecting words, synonyms, and closely related words and phrases. In fact, for all of these queries, the top 10 pages are nearly identical. Unfortunately, stuffing exact match keywords is still being practiced today, which can lead to poor user experience and poor readability— all things that on-page SEO should not do. The second thing is that on-page SEO is not about using your keyword a specific number of times on the page. In our study of three million search queries, we found that on average the top ranking page ranks for around a thousand other relevant keywords in the top ten. Now, can you imagine what it would be like if a top-ranking page had to mention all 1000 of those keywords at least three times? It makes no sense. The content would be unnecessarily lengthy and create an awful user experience for visitors. Here's an example: look at the SERP for the Quarry diet plan. You'll see that Healthline's article on how to lose weight ranks number one, and there's no mention of a diet plan in their title or URL. In fact, there's only one fleeting mention of it on the page—not even a subheading. Here's another example: GQ ranks in the top spot for "classiest watch," but if we look at the page, you'll see that the word "classiest" isn't there, and neither is the word "classy." The third point is that on-page SEO isn't about meeting a minimum word count. Some studies have shown that the average content length of the top 10 results is over 2000 words. As a result, many SEOs have recommended that you create pages that are at least that length, but that isn't exactly sound advice. For example, our backlink checker is 628 words, yet we rank number one for our target keyword, and the page generates around 130,000 monthly visits from Google search alone. Here's another example: this page only has 76 words on it. The majority of the content are images. According to Ahrefs Site Explorer, the page gets over 170,000 monthly search visits. Now, let's talk about what on-page SEO is today in 2021 and beyond. Looking at the definition again, on-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines. As I mentioned, this revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent. The key word here is "search intent." Translation: the goal of your pages should be to satisfy the searcher's intent. How well? We talked about the three C's of search intent, which should help you get the basic stuff down, like the content type, format, and angle. In addition to this, your content needs to address the things people expect to see. You'll also want to nail the more tangible items like titles, subheadings, internal linking, readability, and of course, the actual content itself. These are the things we'll be answering in Part Two of our on-page SEO module, where we'll get more tactical and talk about how you can create content that's optimized for search. Hey, it's Ammo, and welcome to the second lesson in the on-page SEO module. Today, I'm going to show you how to create a page that's optimized for search. Let's get started! So, as I showed you in the last... Lesson on average, the top-ranking page ranks for nearly a thousand keywords. For example, Healthline's page is clearly targeting the query "how to lose weight fast," and sure enough, they're ranking in the top spot. Now, the traffic to this page doesn't come from just their target keyword; it comes from the combined effect of ranking for thousands of queries. When we sum up the traffic from all keywords, it makes up well over a hundred thousand monthly search visits just from the U.S. In fact, if we look at the page's keyword rankings, you'll see that the target query "how to lose weight fast" only sends them a small percentage of the total monthly search traffic. Now, in order to rank for a ton of keywords and get a ton of search traffic, you need two things: the first is a page that's optimized to rank, and the second is backlinks. In this lesson, we'll cover how to create an optimized page, and we'll tackle links in the next module. Okay, so with on-page SEO, there are two main things we need to cover. The first is arguably the most important, and that's to ensure your page satisfies searcher intent. We've already covered the three Cs of search intent, which again will give you very basic guidance on the type of content to create, the format to use, and the angle to go with. But the actual content itself is what will leave your visitors satisfied or dissatisfied. So, you might be wondering: what exactly do I write about in order to satisfy searchers? The short answer is to learn from your competitors. The top-ranking pages are ranking at the top for a reason; Google and other search engines deem them as the best candidates to satisfy a search's query, so they're clearly doing something right, at least from the perspective of a search engine. Now, while the content will vary from topic to topic, the way you research a competitor's content will be more or less the same. Let's go through an example. So, let's say that we want to create content that targets the query "best golf club sets." To start, I'll go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and search for the query. Then I'll scroll down to the SERP overview to see the top-ranking pages. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can use our free SERP checker tool to do everything I'm about to do. All right, so looking at the SERP, we want to pick out the top three or so relevant ranking results, and by relevant, I'm talking about pages that match the dominant search intent based on the three Cs we've discussed so many times. Now, in this case, the majority of pages are blog posts in the listicle format, with freshness as the content angle. So that means we wouldn't look at pages from Amazon or Golf Galaxy because these pages are clearly eCommerce category pages and are therefore outliers to the dominant search intent. We'll also exclude the pages from Golf Digest and Business Insider since it doesn't look like they're intentionally targeting our query. So, I'll open up these three pages in new tabs, and what we're going to look for are similarities in their content, specifically in the subtopics. We'll also look to deepen our understanding of content format and content angle. Looking at the first page, you'll see that they've created a list of categories for the best golf club sets, so there's "best-selling," "best game improving," "irons," and so on. Looking further down, they have a subheading which is the make and model of the golf club set, followed by a brief review of the clubs. The next page also has a summary based on more broad categories, like "best value," "premium pick," and "best choice." Based on the table of contents, you'll see that they followed a similar structure where the make and model of the clubs are used as subheadings. They also add a brief description of the clubs as well as some skimmable bullet points. The final page does pretty much the same thing; they use subheadings as the make and model, followed by a short review. Now, unless you're a golfer, you may not have caught this minor but perhaps important detail: all the pages talk about sets that would appeal more to beginners. For example, they all talk about the Callaway Strata set, and they all include sets from Wilson's Staff. In my opinion, these wouldn't appeal to an intermediate or advanced level golfer. All right, so at this point, we know that we should create a holistic blog post with freshness as the angle. We also know that the content should likely be targeted at beginners. A couple of common sets that were mentioned in all posts were the Callaway Stratas as well as a set from Wilson's Staff. Now, it's important to note that you don't have to include these in your post, but it's simply an observation I've made. We also saw that the top two out of three pages had top picks for categories like "best game improvement clubs" as well as "best clubs for the money." Finally, we know that the subheading should be the name of the club set. Another thing I recommend before you start writing is to do a content gap analysis at the page level. A content gap analysis at the page level will show you common keywords that the top pages are ranking for where your page isn't. But since we don't have a page, we can still find common keyword rankings among a few top-ranking pages using Ahrefs' content gap tool. To get started, go to Ahrefs Site Explorer and paste in any one of the URLs. Next, head on over to the content gap tool. Now I'm going to take the three URLs we analyzed and put them all in the... Top section of this tool. So, what this is saying is show us keywords that any of these targets rank for, where at least one of them ranks in the top 10. Now, if I run the search, you'll be able to see the keywords that these pages rank for, in the position that they're ranking. As a general rule of thumb, the more URLs that rank high for the keywords, the more relevant it'll be to your content. So, to narrow our search down a bit, I'll click on the intersections drop-down and select both two and three intersections, meaning only show me keywords where at least two of our targets are ranking in Google, and at least one of those targets is ranking in the top 10. From here, just skim through the list and look for interesting subtopics that might be worth adding to your post. In addition, you may be able to learn some interesting things about the audience, as well as the language they use. So, as you can see, people who search for this quarry are mostly looking for men's clubs. People want to know the best clubs for the money; they want to see cheaper options, and others are looking specifically for a set of irons. These are all things you should consider as you craft your content. Alright, so armed with this information, you should be able to create a great post with a searcher in mind. While the content is the most important part, there are also a few more technical on-page optimizations you should do. Let's go through a few of the most important ones. First, it is to include your target keyword in your title when it makes sense. Adding your target keyword to your title should come naturally. For example, our title for this post is "45 Best Free SEO Tools: Tried and Tested," and "free SEO tools" is our target keyword. Now, there will be times when it makes more sense to use a close variant of your target keyword. For example, this post is targeting the query "how to get YouTube subscribers," but our title is "9 Ways to Get More YouTube Subscribers" because we went for the listicle angle. The next thing you can do is to use a short and descriptive URL slug. Short and descriptive URLs help people immediately understand what the page is about before even visiting them. Just look at these two URLs; they're on the exact same topic, but one is much more descriptive than the other. This part of the URL is called the slug, and the easiest way to choose your slug is to use your target keyword, where spaces will be replaced with hyphens. Again, you should only do this when it makes sense, so you don't need to worry about forcing it. Now, if you're wondering if you should use subfolders to describe categories, that's entirely up to you. Alright, next is the meta description. The meta description is HTML code that's meant to briefly summarize your page, and search engines often use this text right within the SERP. To my best knowledge, meta descriptions aren't used as a ranking signal, but they can influence click-through rates, and for that reason, I think it's important to add them to your pages. Now, it's important to note that according to our study of 192,000 pages, we found that Google rewrote meta descriptions nearly 63 percent of the time, so I wouldn't spend a ton of time on them, but you should still include them. Alright, next up is to add internal links to and from your pages. Internal links are links from one page on the same domain to another, and they're super powerful because they can pass link authority to other relevant pages, and they also help search engines better understand a page's contents. For example, if I had a site in the careers niche and I was writing a post about how to write a cover letter, then I definitely want to add internal links from other relevant pages, like one on how to write a resume. More importantly, visitors who want to learn how to write a resume would probably want to know how to write a cover letter and vice versa. To find opportunities, you can go to Google and search for "site:yourdomain.com" and then add the topic you're writing about. Then visit relevant pages and see if there's an opportunity to add an internal link to your new post. Alternatively, you can use Ahrefs' site audit tool completely free. Just sign up for an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, verify your site, and then run a crawl. Then you can head over to Link Explorer to find internal linking opportunities. We have a short but helpful video on how to do this on Ahrefs' Product Updates YouTube channel, so I'll link that video up in the description. Alright, next up is to optimize your images. In the last 28 days, we've had over 4,000 visits to our blog from Google Image Search. While that pales in comparison to our 500,000 monthly organic blog visits, it's still 4,000 visits. Now, optimizing your images for SEO is three-fold. Number one, name your image files appropriately. For example, this is a picture of a puppy. If you took the photo yourself, then chances are your smartphone or camera named it something like "img_" followed by a million numbers. Instead, change the file name to something like "puppy." Not exactly rocket science, but according to Google, file names can give clues about the subject matter of the image. Number two, use descriptive alt text. Alt text, short for alternative text, is an HTML attribute that goes in your image tag. So, the syntax would look something like this, where the alt value should describe the image. Alt text helps improve accessibility for those who are using screen readers. Readers, or if the image fails to load, visitors will be shown the alt text instead. Now, Google recommends creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page. Yes, Google explicitly says to use keywords, but they also say to avoid stuffing keywords, as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam. Meaning, don't do something like this. Now, looking back at the syntax, our alt text isn't exactly descriptive, so let's change that to something like "puppy sitting on a couch." If you use WordPress, just add your alt text here when inserting your images, and the CMS should do the rest. Alright, the third thing you'll want to do is compress your images. Compressing images makes your image file sizes smaller, leading to faster load times, and page speed is a Google ranking signal. There's a free tool for compressing images called ShortPixel, which has both a web interface as well as a WordPress plugin. The last thing I highly recommend is to optimize for readability. Here are five simple but effective tips you can use to improve readability: 1. Write in short sentences and short paragraphs, because no one wants to land on a page with a huge wall of text. 2. Use descriptive subheadings, so people who are skimming the article can easily find the things that are important to them. 3. Use a large enough font that's easily readable on both desktop and mobile. 4. Avoid using big words; it's more important that people understand your content. 5. Write as you speak; your content will be more conversational and entertaining to read. A free tool I recommend using is called Hemingway App. It'll give you some writing tips as well as a readability grade. I'd recommend trying to keep things at or below a sixth-grade level. Now, there are other on-page optimizations you can do, like adding Open Graph meta tags, or OG tags for short. These will allow you to customize the titles, descriptions, images, and other information when your pages are shared on social media networks. There's also schema markup, which is code that helps search engines understand your content and better represent it in the search results. For example, these pages use the recipe schema type, so Google is able to show things like the recipe's rating, the number of votes, the total time to make the food, as well as nutritional information. If you have a WordPress site, then you can add OG tags and schema with plugins like Rank Math or Yoast. Now, again, the most important part of your content is that you're striving to satisfy searcher intent. Yes, the technical things are important too, but they're more like the icing on the cake. So here's a full on-page SEO checklist. Take a screenshot, and let's move on to the next module, which is on an SEO strategy called link building. Hey, it's Ammo, and welcome to the third module in our SEO course for beginners. Throughout the next five lessons, we'll be talking about arguably the most important and most challenging SEO strategy. It's called link building, and to kick things off, we're going to talk about what it is, why it's important, and the mindset you'll need to have to be successful at it. Let's get started. So what is link building? By definition, link building is the process of getting other websites to link to a page on your website, and these hyperlinks are called backlinks. Now, while the end result might make sense conceptually and seem simple, the part that most people don't understand and can't seem to get right is this: the process. This ultimately boils down to emailing complete strangers and asking them to link to you. Now, let's take a quick second to talk about how strange and kind of awkward this might sound. So let's go through a few scenarios, and then we'll revisit this definition of link building. Let's say that you have a marketing blog and you write about SEO and digital marketing. Now, if some random person—let's call her Sally—sent you an email and said, "Hey, can you link to my post on Facebook ads? It's really good!" would you link to her? Probably not. In fact, you probably wouldn't even reply or click the link in her email to actually check and see if her content is as good as she claims. Now, let's flip the script a bit. Let's say that you've been following Ahrefs' YouTube channel and blog for some time, you've implemented some of the strategies we've shared, and you've gotten some great results for your site. On top of that, you've been using our SEO tools for three years now. An email pops up in your inbox from me, Samo—a name and face you might recognize because you've been following our channel—and in that email, I've asked you to link to our free backlink checker from your page that lists the 15 best free SEO tools. Would you link to me? Maybe. Now, the final scenario: let's say your mentor, who helped you get started in digital marketing, sends you an email and she asks you to link to a page on her site from a relevant page on yours. Would you link to her? Definitely! She helped you get started in digital marketing; you obviously trust and respect her, and you'd be willing to bend over backwards for her. The point of these scenarios is to show you that the process of link building is actually very relational and can sometimes take more time than you might like. With Sally, you don't know her; you don't owe her anything; you don't trust her. She's blindly coming in, almost invading your inbox, and asking you for a favor without offering any kind of value. Return in the second scenario: when I hypothetically emailed you, you knew who I was. I had indirectly helped you, and you were a user of a product for years. So, while we may not have a real-life relationship, we're still connected in some way; thus, the chances of linking to me are probably higher than linking to Sally. Now, when your mentor asked you for a link, there's a real relationship there—there's a sense of trust, respect, and gratitude. So, of course, you would link to her. Now, while you can't and shouldn't try to become friends with everyone just to get links, you'll find that your best links will usually come from relationships that are sparked from email outreach. So, let's redefine link building and set the tone for the rest of this module: link building is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want and will link to your content because it enhances theirs. This definition isn't just about you getting something; it includes relationships, relevance, and a value exchange—three things we'll touch on later in this module. Now, since effective link building is tough, you need to understand why it's worth the effort. In short, backlinks are used by search engines like Google to help rank web pages, and it's been this way since 1998, when Google created PageRank. PageRank is a mathematical formula that judges the value of a page by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it. Google confirms the importance of backlinks on their "How Search Works" page under their "Ranking Useful Pages" heading. They state, "If other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that's a good sign that the information is of high quality." We also found a clear correlation between organic traffic and backlinks from unique websites in our study of over 1 billion web pages. So, while getting backlinks may be harder than, let's say, creating a blog post, they're absolutely critical if you want to rank for competitive phrases. Competitive phrases are usually the ones that will drive the most traffic and revenue for your business. Now, we briefly touched on the main way of getting backlinks, but not all links can or will be obtained through outreach. So, in the next lesson, we'll talk about three methods to get backlinks, as well as the level of difficulty and effectiveness. Hey, it's Ammo, and welcome to the second lesson in our link building module. In this lesson, we'll talk about three link building strategies to get backlinks. Now, before we get started, it's important to set the expectations right for this lesson and talk about the difference between a strategy and a tactic. To me, strategies are higher level in the sense that they outline the scope of the plans, whereas tactics are more micro and often focused around smaller steps. So, the strategy sets you in the right direction, and the tactics kind of define how you get there. We'll get into a few link building tactics later on in this module. Alright, so when it comes to link building, there are three main strategies to get backlinks: you can create them, buy them, or earn them. Let's talk about what each method looks like, their level of difficulty, and effectiveness. The first method is to create backlinks. Creating backlinks means to manually add links on one domain back to yours. This can be done by adding your website to directories, leaving comments on blog posts, or adding your website's URL to your social media profile. Anyone can do this with minimal effort, so like almost all easy things in life, they're generally not that effective from an SEO and ranking perspective. Now, buying backlinks is exactly as it sounds: you pay webmasters or authors a fee, and in return, they'll link back to a page on your site. Now, this is against Google's webmaster guidelines and can potentially result in a penalty that might be anything from losing ranking positions to, even worse, getting your pages removed from Google's search index. Also, buying links isn't exactly cheap. We contacted 250 websites to ask if they sell links, and we found that the average cost of buying one was nearly $353. Of course, we didn't buy any. In terms of level of ease, if you have the money, it's super easy to do because it's just a transaction. Now, in terms of the effectiveness, I would think that they're highly effective unless, or until, you get caught, and in my opinion, the risk isn't worth the reward, especially if you want to build a business that'll stand the test of time. The final way to get backlinks is to earn them, and there are three common ways you can do this. The first and most common are links that are earned through email outreach. This is when you email other website owners and editors and ask them to link to you. Another way to earn backlinks is by becoming a source for an online publication or media outlet. For example, if a journalist references you in an article, they'll often link to you and/or your social media profiles. The final way is to earn backlinks organically. For example, if someone visits your page from a link on social media, organic search, word-of-mouth, or wherever, and decides to link to you, then that's an earned link. Now, even though 100 organic links may sound like the best way to get them, I don't want you to bank on that. These kinds of links are typically less consistent unless you're an extremely well-known brand with extremely well-crafted content and you're already getting significant exposure. It takes time to build a reputation that's well trusted and for those organic links to come in on a regular basis. And if you're just hoping and waiting... You'll likely fall behind because your competitors will actually be busy building links by reaching out to other website owners. Generally speaking, the harder it is to obtain a link, the more valuable it'll be, and for that reason, we'll be focusing on streamlined tactics so that you can build a steady stream of backlinks to your page and get more traffic from SEO. Now, not all links are created equal; some will propel your pages to the top of Google, while others can actually hurt your site. So, what makes a link actually good? That's what we'll be talking about in the next lesson. Hey, it's Samo, and welcome to the third lesson in the link-building module. Today, we're going to talk about the attributes that make a backlink good or high quality. As I said in the last lesson, not all backlinks are created equal. For example, if you spammed forums with links to your site, those wouldn't—and shouldn't—hold more weight than, let's say, a link from The New York Times. Otherwise, backlinks would just be a game of quantity, and Google search results would reward the biggest spammers. Fortunately, ranking on Google doesn't work that way, and quality backlinks are still a prominent ranking signal. So, with that said, let's talk about the five attributes that make a backlink good. The first attribute is relevance. Imagine this for a second: you're going to visit Greece for the first time next month, and you need recommendations for places worth going to. Now, you have a friend who lived in Greece their entire life and obviously knows every nook and cranny. You also have a friend in the U.S. who hates traveling and has never been outside of the States. Whose opinion would you hold higher? Obviously, your Greek friend. In the same way, links from a website about travel or Greece would hold more weight than links from sites about technology or marketing because they're more topically relevant and authoritative. For example, you'll see that this page is ranking number one for the query "how to devein shrimp." If we look at their backlinks and also filter by one link per domain, we can see their backlinks from different websites. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, then you can still see backlinks pointing at pages using our free backlink checker tool, which I'll leave a link to in the description. Going back to the backlinks report, you'll see this page from WikiHow, which is called "Three Ways to Peel and Devein Shrimp." So the link is on a very relevant page. Scrolling down a bit, you'll see this link from a page called "Shrimp with Garlic Sauce," which again is relevant at the page level, but you can also see that it's relevant at the domain level too, just by looking at the domain name, slimpalette.com. Both of these links are great from a relevance standpoint, whereas a link like this one isn't very relevant at all: the page is about Firefox 3.5, which is a web browser. It comes from a site about video games and computer hardware. So an ideal link would be contextually placed within the body of the content where someone is quite literally recommending or referencing you. Alright, the next quality of good quality links is authoritativeness. If you're unfamiliar with authority in the context of backlinks, it basically represents the so-called link power a web page has, and this relates to how Google PageRank works. As we discussed before, both the quantity and quality of links matter. So, the more quality links a page gets, the more PageRank it earns; and the more PageRank it has, the more authority it can pass to other pages through hyperlinks. For example, let's say that Page C has two links: one from Page A and one from Page B. Page A is stronger than Page B and also has fewer outgoing links. Feed this information into the PageRank algorithm, and you get the PageRank of Page C. Now, this is obviously a simplified version of how PageRank works, but the key point here is that getting links from high-authority pages will likely have the greatest impact on your rankings. Now, while Google doesn't provide PageRank or website authority scores, we have two metrics at Ahrefs that try to quantify it. Domain Rating is our website authority metric, and it represents the overall strength of a website's backlink profile. URL Rating is our page-level authority metric, which represents the overall strength of a page's backlink profile, and you'll find both of these metrics throughout most of our tools, giving you insights on referring pages. Now we've covered two very important parts of good quality backlinks, but what we haven't talked about yet is the actual link itself. So let's break down the anatomy of a hyperlink and talk about how the different parts relate to SEO. Here's what a link looks like to your website visitors, and if we look at the HTML code, then it would look like this. Now, there are three basic parts to a link that matter in SEO: the destination URL, anchor text, and the rel attribute or lack of one. The destination URL is simply the URL the person will visit when the link is clicked. The second part of a link is the anchor text. The anchor text is the clickable word, phrase, or image attached to the link. So in our example, "Site Explorer" is the anchor text, which is the name of our competitor analysis tool. Google uses anchor text to better understand what a page is about and what terms it should rank for. But building lots of links with keyword-rich anchors is an example of a link scheme and may result in a Google penalty, as it looks unnatural. For example, if you had a post on the best golf... balls and had 100 links pointing to it where the anchor texts were all "best golf balls," then it would look and be quite unnatural. People often use anchors such as the company's brand name, the title of the page, the URL, or phrases like "click here." Here's some proof: if we look at the anchors of backlinks pointing to our data study on featured snippets, you'll see varying anchor texts like "Ahrefs," "old studies," "HR study," "research," and even specific stats like "12.3 percent of search queries" and "99.58 percent," and so on. In fact, there are only 16 websites that have linked to us using the anchor text "featured snippet." With most earned links, you have very little or no control over the anchor text, so over-optimization isn't something you really need to worry about. The last part of the link we'll talk about is the rel attribute. Some links contain a rel attribute, which is intended to tell crawlers about the relationship between the linking page and the linked page. The three rel values that you should know about when it comes to link building are nofollow, UGC, and sponsored. Historically, nofollow links told Google that the linking page would rather not associate themselves with the linked page, and for that reason, Google didn't transfer authority through those links. But then Google added a couple of other rel values: UGC, which stands for user-generated content, and sponsored, which signifies an ethical paid link. They also announced that going forward, they would look at these link attributes as hints, meaning they may pass value through them at their discretion. Now, if a link doesn't have any of these rel values, then it will be called a followed link, meaning the link can pass page rank and help boost your rankings. Seeing as this is still relatively new, I'd recommend focusing on building followed links, although that's only partially within your control. Now, it's important to note that nofollow and UGC links aren't bad; it's just that followed links are proven to pass authority. One final thing I want to touch on is link placement. Prominent links are more likely to be clicked, and it's believed that Google takes this into account when determining how much authority a link transfers. For instance, an editorial link is more likely to be clicked than a link in the footer. So all else being equal, the former will be better than the latter. To summarize, an ideal link would come from a relevant and authoritative page where the link is followed. It would have a descriptive anchor and be placed contextually within editorial content. But the truth is, a lot of this is out of your control. What is in your control is how you spend your time building links. By using these five attributes to help qualify prospects or people that are worth contacting, you'll spend your time building links that will actually move the needle. Now, the easiest way for a beginner to start building links is to use tried and tested tactics, and we'll be covering a few of them in the next lesson. Hey, it's Ammo, and welcome to the fourth lesson in the link building module. Today, we're going to talk about the step-by-step process to build backlinks, as well as three cookie-cutter link-building tactics that are tried, tested, and completely beginner-friendly. Let's get started with the general process of link building. There are three general stages in link building: prospecting, vetting, and email outreach. When prospecting, you're searching for relevant pages and websites that might link to you. These might be people who are linking to a similar page as the one you're going to create, those who have influence in your industry, or people who are passionate about the topic. The main goal isn't to find a perfect list of people; this stage is about finding as many people as possible that fit a specific set of criteria, and this criteria is usually dictated by link authority metrics as well as relevance. As a result, you'll usually be working with large and very imperfect sets of data. The vetting stage is where you start to refine your list of prospects. These are the people that you'll be contacting, so you'll need to visit their websites and validate that they are indeed people worth contacting. Finally, the email outreach stage is when you finalize your pitches and start emailing your vetted prospects. Now, depending on the link building tactic you use, the way you prospect, vet, and craft your email pitches will differ, and this is actually quite difficult when you're new to link building. Fortunately, there are a few dead-simple but super effective link-building tactics that are completely newbie-friendly. But before we can get tactical, let's revisit our definition of link building because there are three main parts in it that will help you with prospecting, vetting, and email outreach. Again, link building is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want and will link to your content because it enhances theirs. Now, I want to highlight the three main parts from this definition: relationships, relevance, and a value exchange. We already talked about the relevance part in the last lesson; now we're talking mainly about the value exchange and what that looks like in some common link-building tactics. So, let's dig into a few easy link-building tactics, and I'll show you what each stage of the link building process looks like in detail. Plus, I'll outline the value exchange for each tactic to give you a better idea of what I mean. Alright, the first link-building tactic is to get free PR. Using Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a free service that connects journalists with sources and sources with journalists. Just sign up as a source and select the categories where... You're qualified to answer questions. You'll then get emails from journalists from various media outlets looking for sources on specific topics. And these aren't just your run-of-the-mill publications. In just a single email, you'll see publications like Parents.com, PopSugar, and the Houston Chronicle, to name a few. Just skim through the topics, and if you find something where you can add value, respond to the journalist with your expert opinion. If they use you as a source, they'll usually link back to your site and social media profiles. Now, the value exchange here is simple: you're exchanging your expert knowledge for a mention and usually a link from an authoritative site. From my personal experience, I've gotten links from places like Reader's Digest, Inc. Magazine, Forbes, and The Huffington Post, to name a few. Now, looking at the three stages of link building, the prospecting part is as easy as it gets. You sign up for a free service, and journalists are actually looking for your help, not the other way around, which makes HARO super beginner-friendly. As for vetting, you can simply scan through the results on a daily basis, but that can be time-consuming. A simple tip you can use is to create a Gmail filter so only relevant emails will surface in your inbox. Just log into Gmail and click on the caret to bring down the search options. Next, set the "From" field to [email protected]. Then, you'll want to set the subject to "HARO" within square brackets since all of their emails include that in the subject line. Finally, set the "Has the words" field to any keywords you want to monitor, and you can also use the "OR" search operator to include multiple keywords or phrases. Click "Search" to see the results your search filters would include, and check out some of the emails to ensure you're getting relevant results. If everything looks good, click on the caret again and then click "Create filter." You'll then have the options to apply labels, mark it as important, or forward it to another team member to take care of. Now, as for the email outreach part, HARO gives you an email address which will then be forwarded to the journalist. So just respond to the given email address and write your response. Now, obviously, you're not going to be the only person emailing the journalist, so here are a few tips you can use to improve your hit rate: Number one: Keep your emails as short as needed. Journalists get tons of emails, and if they see a huge wall of text, they probably won't even give your response a chance. Number two: Go after topics where journalists are likely looking for multiple sources. For example, this query from Best Life is seeking medical experts, as in the plural form of "expert." These kinds of requests will usually be your typical listicle-styled posts, so the more responses they accept, the higher your chances of getting mentioned and linked to. Number three: Respond as quickly as possible. Journalists on HARO will often give a tighter deadline to give themselves time to actually put together a good story. Plus, some journalists believe that people who respond faster are better sources. Don't believe me? Here's what a journalist from Reader's Digest said to me: "The deadline was just to make sure I get people to respond in a timely manner. I actually have the rest of the month to put the story together, which is nice. I find the tighter the deadline I attach, the better the response is because the only people who go to the effort are the ones who really have something relevant to offer." Obviously, this doesn't apply to every journalist, but it kind of makes sense. All right, tip four is to prioritize questions where you are an expert and use it as the first line in your pitch. There will be days where you can't respond to every relevant request, so prioritize the ones where you have the highest probability of getting sourced. For example, PopSugar is looking for experts who can talk about why cats scratch furniture and how to stop them from doing it. If you're a vet, then you might start your email with something like, "Hi Jenna, my name is Sam O, and I'm a veterinarian with 12 years of experience and a board member of the Cat Alliance." Clearly, I'm not a vet, but you get my point. When you immediately qualify yourself as the right person to answer the question, you'll likely get their attention. Of course, you should be 100% honest, so I wouldn't claim to be a vet when I'm not. Finally, follow all directions in their query. For example, this one says, "Please be sure to include your full name, pronouns, title, and credentials, and the website you'd like linked with your name." All right, the next link building tactic is guest posting, or guest blogging—same thing. Guest blogging is when you create content for another website, and the reason why this strategy works is because there's a clear value exchange. They get great content for free, and almost always, they allow you to link back to your site, whether that be within the content or in the author bio. Now, guest blogging also provides another great benefit. Aside from a potential backlink, you get the opportunity to get exposure to someone else's audience. They've already done the hard work of building that audience; you just have to write something that'll impress their readers. Now, when you're prospecting, you'll need to get a list of websites, and there are a few ways you can do that. The first way is to use Google search operators. Just go to Google and search for something like "in title: 'write for us'" wrapped in quotes, and then a keyword that's related to your niche. In this case, this search query will show us... Pages that include the phrase "write for us" in the title and have the word "golf balls" somewhere on the page. This is a common footprint that websites use to attract guest writers. Now, because you'll want to write for sites with some kind of link authority, you can use Ahrefs SEO Toolbar to see link authority metrics right within Google search results. If you don't have an Ahrefs account, you can use our free website authority checker to see the domain ratings for these sites. Another way to find a list of sites fast is to use Ahrefs Content Explorer. Content Explorer is a searchable database where you can find pages on any topic, along with both social and SEO metrics. To get started, just enter a topic that's related to your niche and run the search. Next, you'll want to set some filters to ensure that a) you're getting relevant results and b) that you're reaching out to websites that have some kind of link authority. So first, I’ll set the language filter to English, since that's the only language I'll be able to write in. Then, I’ll set a domain rating filter and set it to a range like 30 to 60. Now, if this is your first time guest blogging, then you may want to set a lower range, like 10 to 30, to get practice before pitching more authoritative sites. Or, if you’re a seasoned guest blogger, then you can try something like 40 to 70. Alright, so next, I’ll enable this filter: one page per domain. This will narrow our results to one page per website, and this is almost a must-do kind of thing because there's no point in pitching the same website numerous times. Now, with around two hundred thousand domains, you might be wondering which ones allow guest posts. The truth is, you won't know until you ask, but there's a way to improve your hit rate, and that's to look at websites that have previously accepted guest authors. To find those sites, just click on the websites tab and make sure that your results are sorted by the number of authors. Basically, the more authors you see, the more probable it is that they accept guest posts; either that or they have a big staff of writers. From here, you can export the results and then move on to the vetting stage. At this point, you'll want to do a quick check to make sure that the websites don't look spammy and that they're actually relevant to your site. For example, golfballs.com is clearly going to be relevant, and it's not spammy at all, seeing as it's just a regular e-commerce site. As for metricscat.com, the domain doesn't look like it's about golf, and if you visit the site, you'll see that it looks like a software company, so we'd exclude this domain from our outreach list. Now, another thing worth checking is the domain's site-wide organic traffic. To do that, go to Site Explorer and search for the domain. Next, click on the organic search tab. If the site is getting consistent search traffic like this, then it's a good sign that the domain is in good standing with Google. Domains that have a decline in organic traffic like this are probably something you'd want to exclude when vetting sites. The reason is that this huge decline in search traffic is telling us that Google may have penalized the website, so you probably wouldn't want to associate your domain with theirs. Now, when you're vetting, you'll likely want to find around 10 times the number of posts you can write in a week. For example, if you can write two posts per week, then try to find 20 vetted sites. The reason being, most people won't accept your post, let alone respond to you. Alright, let's move on to the next stage, which is email outreach. Now, when you're pitching websites for a guest post, ideally, you want to come up with a good reason as to why they should accept your post. Free content is great, but it's not necessarily so convincing that everyone will accept it. So take some time to do your research on the site and see how your expertise can be helpful for their audience or business. For example, if we look at the blog for golfballs.com, you'll see that they have content on the best golf balls for kids. After searching through their site, I found that they have another guide on the best golf balls for the longest distance. Now they're missing out on a lot of these "best golf balls for [blank]," and seeing as they're in the business of selling golf balls, I could easily pitch them topics on something like "best golf balls for high handicappers," which, according to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, gets searched around 800 times per month globally. So I might send them an email and say something like, "Hey [whatever the editor's name is], I was digging through your site and saw that you have a couple of posts on the best golf balls for kids and for distance, but I was pretty surprised to see that you don't have one for other types of players, i.e., seniors. Being a high handicapper myself, I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on balls and countless hours on launch monitors to find the best ball for me. If you're open, I'd love to write a post for you about how to find the best golf balls for hacky golfers like myself. I'm happy to share all the data and stats, which I think will help people make an informed decision as they shop through your store. Is that something you'd be open to? Cheers, Sam" Now, with this outreach email, I'm showing them that I've done my research on their site, I'm a golfer myself, I have some unique data which I spent time and money to get, and I'm... Also, showing them how my posts could help them get more sales, we'll talk quite a bit about outreach in the next lesson. So, let's move on to the final tactic, which is the skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a link-building tactic where you find content that has a lot of links, create your own version on the topic but improve on it, and then reach out to those linking to the popular post and ask them to link to yours. Now, if we were to go through the prospecting, vetting, and outreach stages, this lesson would be extended another seven to eight minutes. So instead, I'll link up a video which will take you through the entire process step by step. In fact, we have an entire playlist dedicated to link-building tactics, strategies, and processes, so I highly recommend watching that too. Now, prospecting and vetting are pretty straightforward, but the hardest part of link-building—and the part that makes link-building challenging—is outreach. So, the next lesson is dedicated to crafting highly effective outreach emails. Hey, it's Ammo, and welcome to the final lesson in our link-building module. Today, we're going to cover how to do blogger outreach that leads to backlinks, and this may very well be the most important lesson in this entire module because nearly all link-building tactics require some sort of email exchange. So today, we'll cover the primary objectives of blogger outreach, two common approaches, and I'll break down the anatomy of a good quality outreach email. Let's get started! So, the primary objective of blogger outreach is to convince those with large, targeted audiences to talk about you. From the perspective of an SEO, you want them to link to your website. Now, outreach doesn't mean broadcasting, meaning you shouldn't be sending every single person the exact same email, like you would through email marketing. For example, this outreach email that I got is what typical blogger outreach looks like today. First of all, I can see that they didn't even take a second to check what my name is, when literally two-thirds of all pages on my personal site have my full name on them. Instead, they stuck with the generic “there,” used it in the mass mailing software, and broadcasted it out to hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. But the name thing isn't that big of a deal. Second, this is clearly a generic, templated email with zero consideration for the recipients. The person says, "I'm writing because I saw your post here," then they didn't even take a second to proofread the email, and their justification for me to link to them is because it fits well in my post. On top of that, the person followed up with me three more times with nearly the exact same email, all sent within the same 30-minute period. This, ladies and gentlemen, is called spam, and the results of these kinds of emails lead to nothing. The page the person wanted me to link to got a total of two backlinks, and both of them are irrelevant and look like they've been paid for. Those backlinks aren't moving the needle since the page gets zero organic search visits. These kinds of emails, along with hundreds of others in my inbox, are prime examples of why you need to write good quality emails; otherwise, you'll just blend in with the rest of the spam people get on a daily basis. After all, these are unsolicited emails. Now, to be clear, it doesn't mean that you can't use some sort of template to send a lot of emails efficiently. For example, I literally just got this email in my inbox, and it says, "Hey, Sam! I just published a roundup post about the best personal blogs to read, and I featured you in it" (and there's a link to his post). Then he explicitly says, "But I'm not looking for a share or anything like that; I just wanted to say thank you for all the inspiration you've brought to the blogosphere and digital marketing world. Best of luck in your endeavors, and keep up the good work on Ahrefs' YouTube channel." This email didn't come to my Ahrefs email account; it came to the one on my personal site, so he clearly did a bit of digging before sending the email, and I'm sure he sent a similar message to all 117 people he featured. So, you might be thinking, “What's the point of this email if he's not asking for anything?” We'll get to that later in this lesson. Now, the first email that I just showed you is one of the common approaches to blogger outreach. It's called the shotgun approach, where you build a broad list of targets, load them up into an outreach tool, and then blast out emails to anyone and everyone. The opposite approach to this is the sniper method. This is when you choose targets carefully based on a tight set of criteria and then send personalized emails. Of the two methods, we recommend going with a sniper approach because shotgunning emails to anyone and everyone is a surefire way to burn bridges. Plus, no one likes spam, and for that reason, the rest of this lesson will be centered around the sniper approach. So, before we get into actually crafting your outreach emails, let's quickly talk about who you should be contacting and how to find their email addresses. In general, you'll want to contact the author of the post if they work for the website. For example, this is a post written by Joshua Hardwick on the Ahrefs blog. Seeing as his profile states "Head of Content at Ahrefs," you know he works there and controls what gets published on the Ahrefs blog. Now, for this post by Josh, there wouldn't be any use in contacting him because he doesn't work for... SitePoint, in this case, you'd want to contact the editor of the blog to find out who that person is. You can check places like the "About Our Team" page, their "Write For Us" page if they have one, or their company's LinkedIn profile. Now, to actually find the person's email address, the easiest way is to check contact and "About" pages. This works best for websites with one author. For websites that have multiple people involved, like SitePoint or Ahrefs, you usually won't find individuals' email addresses on their site. So, to find these emails, you can use a tool like Hunter.io. Go to their email finder tool and just search for their first and last name, as well as the domain. Hunter will then give you their best guess. In this case, they might be wrong, but the success rate is generally quite high. Alright, so if you've done the work for the lessons in this module to this point, then you should have chosen one of the three tactics I outlined, created a list of prospects, vetted your list, and found some email addresses. So, it's time to actually write the pitch. Now, while there isn't exactly a streamlined formula for every outreach email you send, I want to talk about the anatomy of a simple outreach email that has been effective for me for many years now, and there are five main parts to a typical outreach email. First is the subject line. The goal of the subject line is simply to get them to open the email; otherwise, there's no chance at getting a response. But you don't want to clickbait them because that'll only leave a bad impression. So, when you're writing a subject line, you want to briefly and accurately describe why you're emailing them and ideally evoke curiosity. If we look back at my guest blogging outreach email from the previous lesson, I showed you a hypothetical pitch where I asked if I could write a post for a golf site and share data I have on the best golf balls for high handicappers. So I might use a subject line like "New Data: Best Balls for High Handicappers." In my opinion, the "New Data" part evokes curiosity, and the rest of the subject line explains the topic of the email. The next part is the introduction, and while there are numerous ways to write an intro, I think it's best to start by telling them why you're emailing them. The goal of this part is to get them to read the next part of the email. For example, with our guest posting sample email, I said, "I was digging through your site and saw that you have a couple of posts on the best golf balls for kids and for distance, but I was pretty surprised to see that you don't have one for other types of players, i.e., seniors." Now, I will admit that the first sentence could definitely be stronger, but I'm basically saying that you've done this and this, but it looks like you're missing out on an opportunity here. The next part of the email is qualification and justification. Simply asking someone for a favor and expecting them to see a mutual benefit is naive. You need to show them why you're qualified and justify the pitch that we'll get to in a second. For example, if you're contacting someone to guest post, then explain why they should accept your post over potentially hundreds of other submissions. If you're asking them to add your link to a page on their site, give them an actual, good reason why they should. In our guest posting sample, you'll see that I said, "Being a high handicapper myself, I spent hundreds of dollars on balls and countless hours on launch monitors to find the best ball for me." So the fact that a) I mentioned I'm a high handicapper, and b) I've tested numerous balls and gotten factual data from launch monitors, qualifies and justifies what I'm about to pitch, which again is a guest post about the best golf balls for high handicappers. Now, to really drill in on the concept of qualification and justification, let's look at an example email for the skyscraper technique. A little while back, we did some outreach to get links to our blog post on SEO statistics, so we emailed people with an email that looks something like this: “Hi [Name], I saw you mentioned how 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine on your page about how to do keyword research. That's our reason for contact.” We then went on to say, "That stat is actually 14 years old. More recent research suggests that this number has gone down to 68%. I think it's lower because social and other sources now account for around one-third of traffic." That's our qualification and justification for what we're about to pitch. And obviously, the next part of the email is the pitch. The pitch essentially includes your ask as well as your value proposition. Generally speaking, the stronger your value proposition, the higher the chance of getting a link. So for a guest posting example, I said, "If you're open, I'd love to write a post for you about how to find the best golf balls for hacky golfers like myself, and here's my value proposition: I'm happy to share all of the data and stats, which I think will help people make an informed decision as they shop through your store." So not only are they getting data for free, but I'm showing them how that can bring value to their bottom line. Now, it's not always easy to think of a solid value proposition. For example, in our SEO stats email, our pitch was, "We published this and a few other fresh SEO stats here. Not sure if you're actively editing posts, but it might be worth an update if..." You are under no pressure, so what exactly is the value proposition? We're helping bloggers keep their content up to date. In fact, we didn't even directly ask for a link, yet we were still able to pick up 27 backlinks. We actually have a full three-part video series on this exact case study, so I'll link that up in the description, and I highly recommend checking it out. Alright, the last part of the email is a simple one-liner to keep the conversation rolling. Simply put, you don't want to end your email with a cold, hard pitch. The purpose of your first email should be to start a conversation, so you might say something like, "Is that something you'd be open to? Is there anything I missed? What do you think? Do you agree with our conclusion?" or whatever. Now, this is just a basic template you can use as you start blogger outreach, but I don't want you to limit yourself within this box. All you're really doing is talking to people and starting to build some kind of relationship. Just think about it like an in-person encounter; you wouldn't go to a party and ask a complete stranger to buy you a drink. You might strike up a conversation, connect with them on a common interest, and maybe buy the first round of drinks expecting nothing in return, and as a result, they might want to reciprocate by returning an act of kindness. Again, the goal of the very first email you send is simple: start a conversation. This brings us back to the outreach email that I received. The person who mentioned me on their site specifically told me that he’s not looking for a share or anything like that; he literally just wants to say thank you. So what did that accomplish? Number one, I actually read his email. Number two, I responded to him and said thanks for the mention. Number three, should he email me again, I'll probably open it because I'll recognize his name. So, while there will be times when it makes sense to ask for the link or guest posting opportunity right away, there are a lot of times when it makes more sense to just start that conversation and see where it leads. The final tip I want to leave you with is to only use your best work when sending email pitches. You don’t want to email anyone and everyone for every single piece of content you create. For example, if you had a golf site and you created a post on a topic like "What is a handicap?" there’s nothing interesting or unique about it, yet it’s still a topic you would probably want to cover. Coming up with a good reason for them to link to you on this topic will be tough, plus time is finite, so it’s worth doing outreach for your best content because there’s a higher probability that it’ll result in backlinks. Alright, so with everything you’ve learned up to this point, you should be able to create content for your website that’ll get traffic from search engines. But there's still one piece to the fundamentals of SEO that we haven’t covered, and that's technical SEO. Hey, it's Ammo, and welcome to the final module in Ahrefs' SEO course for beginners. Throughout the next two lessons, we’re going to be talking about technical SEO. Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines find, understand, and index your pages. Now, for beginners, technical SEO doesn't need to be all that technical, and for that reason, this module will be focused on the basics so you can perform regular maintenance on your site and ensure that your pages can be discovered and indexed by search engines. Let's get started. Alright, so let's talk about why technical SEO is important. At the core, basically, if search engines can't properly access, read, understand, or index your pages, then you won't rank or even be found for that matter. So to avoid innocent mistakes like removing yourself from Google’s index or diluting a page’s backlinks, I want to discuss four things that should help you avoid that. First is the noindex meta tag. By adding this piece of code to your page, you’re telling search engines not to add it to their index, and you probably don’t want to do that. This actually happens more often than you might think. For example, let's say you hire Design Inc to create or redesign a website for you. During the development phase, they may create it on a subdomain on their own site, so it actually makes sense for them to noindex the site they're working on. But what often happens is, after you've approved the design, they'll migrate it over to your domain, and often forget to remove the noindex tag. As a result, your pages end up getting removed from Google’s search index or never making it in. Now, there are times when it actually makes sense to noindex certain pages. For example, our authors' pages are noindexed because, from an SEO perspective, these pages provide very little value to search engines, but from a user experience standpoint, it can be argued that it makes sense for them to be there. Some people may have their favorite authors on a blog and want to read just their content. Generally speaking, for small sites, you won't need to worry about noindexing specific pages; just keep your eye out for noindex tags on your pages, especially after a redesign. The second point of discussion is robots.txt. Robots.txt is a file that usually lives on your root domain, and you should be able to access it at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Now, the file itself includes a set of rules for search engine crawlers and tells them where they can... And cannot go on your site. It’s important to note that a website can have multiple robots files. If you're using subdomains, for example, if you have a blog on domain.com, then you'd have a robots.txt file for just the root domain. But you might also have an eCommerce store that lives on store.domain.com, so you could have a separate robots file for your online store. That means that crawlers could be given two different sets of rules depending on the domain they're trying to crawl. Now, the rules are created using something called directives. While you probably don't need to know what all of them are or what they do, there are two that you should know about from an indexing standpoint. The first is "User-Agent," which defines the crawler that the rules apply to, and the value for this directive will be the name of the crawler. For example, Google's user agent is named "Googlebot." The second directive is "Disallow." This is a page or directory on your domain that you don't want the user agent to crawl. For example, if you set the user agent to Googlebot and the disallow value to a slash, you're telling Google not to crawl any pages on your site—not good. Now, if you were to set the user agent to an asterisk, that means your rules should apply to all crawlers. So, if your robots file looks something like this, then it's telling all crawlers, "Please don't crawl any pages on my site." While this might sound like something you would never use, there are times when it makes sense to block certain parts of your site or to block certain crawlers. For example, if you have a WordPress website and you don't want your wp-admin folder to be crawled, then you can simply set the user agent to all crawlers and set the disallow value to "/wp-admin." Now, if you're a beginner, I wouldn't worry too much about your robots file, but if you run into any indexing issues that need to be troubleshooted, robots.txt is one of the first places I check. Alright, the next thing to discuss are sitemaps. Sitemaps are usually XML files, and they list the important URLs on your website. These can be pages, images, videos, and other files. Sitemaps help search engines like Google to more intelligently crawl your site. Now, creating an XML file can be complicated if you don't know how to code, and it's almost impossible to maintain manually. But if you're using a CMS like WordPress, there are plugins like Yoast and Rank Math, which will automatically generate sitemaps for you. To help search engines find your sitemaps, you can use the sitemap directive in your robots file and also submit it in Google Search Console. Next up are redirects. A redirect takes visitors and bots from one URL to another, and their purpose is to consolidate signals. For example, let's say you have two pages on your website on the best golf balls—an old one at domain.com/bestgolfballs2018 and another at domain.com/best-golf-balls. Seeing as these are highly relevant to one another, it would make sense to redirect the 2018 version to the current version. By consolidating these pages, you're telling search engines to pass the signals from the redirected URL to the destination URL. The last point I want to talk about is the canonical tag. A canonical tag is a snippet of HTML code that looks like this. Its purpose is to tell search engines what the preferred URL is for a page, and this helps to solve duplicate content issues. For example, let's say your website is accessible at both http://yourdomain.com and https://yourdomain.com, and for whatever reason, you weren't able to use a redirect. These would be exact duplicates, but by setting a canonical URL, you're telling search engines that there's a preferred version of the page. As a result, they'll pass signals, such as links, to the canonical URL, so they're not diluted across two different pages. Now, it's important to note that Google may choose to ignore your canonical tag. Looking back at the previous example, if we set the canonical tag to the unsecure HTTP page, Google would probably choose the secure HTTPS version instead. Now, if you're running a simple WordPress site, you shouldn't have to worry about this too much. CMSs are pretty good out of the box and will handle a lot of these basic technical issues for you. So, these are some of the foundational things that are good to know when it comes to indexing, which is arguably the most important part of SEO because, again, if your pages aren't getting indexed, nothing else really matters. Now, we won't really dig deeper into this because you'll probably only have to worry about indexing issues if and when you run into problems. Instead, we'll be focusing on technical SEO best practices to keep your website in good health. Hey, it's Ammo, and welcome to the final lesson in this module. Actually, it's the last lesson in Ahrefs' SEO course for beginners. In this lesson, we're going to go through some technical SEO best practices so you can keep your site in good health. Let's get started. So, the first thing you should do is ensure that your site structure follows a logical hierarchy. Site structure is simply the way you organize content on your website. You can think of it like a mind map. At the top, you'd have your homepage; then you'd probably have main topics that branch out from your homepage, like your services page, your blog, and about page. Then, from these main topics, you'd probably have even more branches to other pages. These branches represent internal links, which are just links from one page on your site to another. And they help search engines understand the relationship between these pages. Site structure also helps search engines to crawl your pages more efficiently, which is why having a logical hierarchy is important. Now, what we've talked about is pretty basic stuff, and you may already be doing this, but it can get more complex as you add more pages to your site, like blog posts, category pages, or product pages. We have a full video on how to use internal links to rank higher on Google, so I'll link that up for you in the description. Alright, the second thing is to ensure your pages don't load slowly. As you may know, page speed has been a confirmed ranking factor for desktop search since 2010, and in 2018, Google announced that they'd be using page speed in mobile search rankings. Now, you don't need to obsess over every millisecond it takes for your page to load. Google says the speed update, as we're calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. So, bottom line, you don't want your pages to load slowly, and there are two very basic things that I think every website should do. The first is to cache your website's content. Caching is basically a way to temporarily store copies of files so they can be delivered to visitors in a more efficient way, and most web hosting companies that I've come across have caching features. The second thing you can do is compress your images. Compressing images makes your file sizes smaller, and smaller files load faster. You can use a tool like ShortPixel, which has both a web interface and a WordPress plugin. Now, if you want to take page speed a step further, then it can get quite technical and complex, so we actually created a full tutorial on how to speed up a WordPress website using Cloudflare and a WordPress plugin, so I'll leave a link to that in the description. And the final thing I want to talk about is to do your best to stay on top of around 50 potential SEO errors. Trust me, it's not as bad as it sounds. There are potentially hundreds of technical SEO issues that can—and some will definitely—happen to your site. Some of these things include pages becoming broken that still have internal links pointing at them, orphan pages (which are pages on your site that have no incoming internal links), and these are great because it can make it tough for search engines to actually discover them. Duplicate content issues and redirect chains, to name a few. Now, there's no point in me going through 50 different potential issues because it'll only matter to you if you run into them. So, what I recommend you do is run scheduled website audits on your site. A website audit will give you a full analysis of potential issues that could be harming your website's SEO performance. If you're an Ahrefs user, you can do that using our Site Audit tool, and even if you don't have an Ahrefs paid plan, you can sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, which will let you crawl up to 10,000 pages on each website you own. To get started, go to ahrefs.com/awt and sign up for your free Webmaster Tools account. Then, you'll need to verify your website, meaning prove that you actually own it. You can do that using Google Search Console, which is the easiest method, or if you don't have a Search Console account, you can do it manually. Just enter your domain and click continue, then verify your website using one of these three methods. I'll actually just go back and use the Google Search Console method. Next, you'll need to import your sites, and I'll choose to run the first audit now. Schedule weekly audits, and I'll also enable the "crawl external links" option to ensure that we catch any broken or redirected outgoing links. Hit import, and the crawl should start running. Now, after the crawl has completed, go to the overview report in your site audit project, and you'll immediately see things like your health score (which is a percentage of URLs on your site that don't have errors). You'll also see the top issues we found on your site, as well as the number of URLs that had the issue. So, when you run into an issue, you can click on the caret to see a description of what it means, and also a short snippet of how to fix it. And once you have an idea of what the issue is and how to fix it, just click on the number under the crawled column to see the affected URLs. Then it's just a matter of fixing them one by one or hiring someone to help. And since you set up weekly scheduled audits, you can revisit the overview report to see if there's any SEO maintenance you can do. And that wraps up Ahrefs SEO Course for Beginners. Everything you've learned in this course should be enough to get you indexed, ranking, and to keep your site in good technical health. I've linked up a playlist in the description to the entire course with all 14 videos, which will be free forever. Thank you for joining me, and I hope you were able to get a ton of value from the course. Make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. Feel free to browse around our channel, and if you have any questions, leave them in the comments, and we'll do our best to get to each one. I'll see you in the next tutorial!

What's up? My name is Simon, and in this video, I'm going to show you everything you need to know to successfully start running Google Ads. This is probably one of my most valuable videos so far because what I'm going to be teaching you in this video is something that I paid a lot of money for to learn through courses from people who are making over a hundred thousand dollars per month in profit using Google Ads. Now I'm giving it all away for free in this video. This is a complete A to Z guide, a step-by-step course on Google Ads. So, if you're looking for a video showing you exactly how to set up your Google Ads correctly so you pay as little as possible for the most amount of customers, then keep watching. This is the perfect video for you. If this is the first time you're watching one of my videos, then welcome to my channel! My name is Simon, and I create videos about how to grow your business using real strategies. In my videos, you always get the best information; I'm never holding anything back. So, if you want to see more videos just like this one, then subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any upcoming videos. Now, I know that setting up your first Google Ads can be quite intimidating because, eventually, you're spending money on advertising. If you don't set it up correctly, you might end up losing a lot of money. Therefore, I highly recommend watching this video all the way through so you really understand how Google Ads actually work and how to set them up correctly. I know this is a bit of a longer video, but I promise you that by the end of it, you will know more than 90% of everybody who's actually running Google Ads, and you'll be saving a lot of time, money, and energy in the long run. Also, at the end of this video, I'll share with you some pro tips on how to lower your cost per click and increase your conversion rates so you make more money. So let's not waste any more time and get started right away. All right, welcome to my computer! Before I get started with the actual tutorial, I want to get a couple of things out of the way. The first thing is that if I talk too slow or too fast, you can always change the speed of the video. Just go to the bottom right of your video screen to the video settings, where you can change the speed to 1.25 if I talk too slow or to 0.75 if I talk too fast, for example. Also, I'm leaving timestamps to all the topics I'm covering in this video in the video description below. You can also hover over the progress bar of the video, and you will see the topic that I'm talking about at that specific part of the video. So, if it's something you already know, or if you want to skip or come back to a certain part, just hover over the progress bar and click on the part that you're looking for. And also, if you have any questions throughout the video, make sure you leave them down below in the comment section. I really try to go into the comment section and answer your questions there, so make sure that if you have any questions, just leave them down below. Maybe some other people who know Google Ads will come and help you out. This can be like a community section below in the comment section, so we can help each other out. Also, if you find this video helpful at any point, feel free to give this video a like because it really helps out the video so more people can find it, and it also helps my channel so I can create more videos for you guys. With that being said, let's get into the tutorial. All right, so the first thing I want to talk about is how Google Ads actually work and why they are so powerful. I know many of you already know this, but I want us to all start on the same page, and I want us to talk about the same things later on in the tutorial. Let's say I'm in the market for a new wooden watch because my friend likes wooden watches. I want to get one for him for his birthday, so I go to Google and I type in "wooden watch." "Wooden watch" is my keyword. People type in keywords into the Google search bar, and then Google gives me search results based on what I type in the search bar. These are the search results that come up for me personally when I type in "wooden watch." When we take a closer look at those search results, we notice that here at the front of the URL that comes up is "Ad." It says "Ad" in front of the URL, which means that somebody paid to appear here on the first page of Google when somebody types in "wooden watch." The same thing goes for the second search result; it also says "Ad." When we take a look at the third search result, you see that it doesn't say "Ad" in front of the URL, which means that this one is an organic search result. No one paid to appear here in the search results. The person who owns this website is just— or this website is what Google thinks is the most relevant to my search, to the keyword that I typed into Google. So, for this specific keyword, we have two ads, and then we have the first organic... Search results: when you go to the second page of Google or when you scroll all the way down on the first page, you might see even more ads. On some pages, you may also see shopping ads, where you see specific products at the top of Google. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you exactly how to set up one of these ads and how you can pay to appear in front of people when they type in specific keywords that are related to what you are offering or to your specific product. Now, what happens when somebody clicks on your ad? What happens when I click on this specific website? For me, as someone who's just looking for a wooden watch, I don't really notice that this is an ad because I will just land on the online shop of this specific website, which is true, and then I can go and buy my watch. However, for the advertiser who put this ad here, they will have to pay for my click. With every click that this ad gets, they might pay 50 cents, they might pay a dollar, they might pay two dollars, or even four dollars, depending on what they are bidding and what Google says they should pay. But more on how this works and how much you have to pay per click later in the tutorial. So, let's say he pays one dollar for every click that he gets on this ad. For 50 clicks, he will pay 50 dollars. But let's say, for every 50 clicks, one of those people who click this ad buys a new watch. For every watch that this store sells, they make a profit of, let's say, eighty dollars. So, with every 50 clicks, they have to pay fifty dollars to Google, but they make eighty dollars back because they sell a watch. Therefore, they have a profit margin of thirty dollars. That's how you can do good paid advertising on Google and profitable advertising. You just have to make sure that you get more back from the customers you gain from your clicks than what you have to pay for your clicks. Throughout the tutorial, I will show you how to get the lowest cost possible for your clicks and the highest conversion rates. So, why are Google Ads so powerful? The reason is that there is buyer intent behind specific keywords. When we compare, for example, Facebook Ads with Google Ads, it’s an entirely different thing. On Facebook, let's say I'm bored; I go to Facebook, I scroll, maybe I want to see what my friends are doing, or maybe I want to see some funny cat videos. I'm not very likely to go ahead and buy something. So, when I see an ad for a leather watch, I'm not very inclined to actually buy it. But with Google, when I type in "modern leather watch," I'm ready to purchase; I'm actually interested in the modern leather watch and probably in the market for it. If I type in "modern leather watch store," I am likely to be looking for a store, and then I want to spend money there. These keywords are very valuable because you can effectively put your offer, your service, or your product in front of the people that are actually searching for what you're offering. That's why Google Ads are so powerful. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to set up a Google Ad for those specific keywords that are related to the product or service that you are selling. All right, now that we understand how Google Ads work, let's get ourselves a new Google Ads account. I highly recommend that for each business or store you have, you set up a new Google Ads account to avoid messing things up with your other products if you have multiple businesses. What you can also do is type in something like "Google Ads 100 credit." You might find some kind of Google Ads voucher where you can get some free money when you spend like 150 dollars; Google gives you another 150 to spend on ads. Basically, you’d get free traffic. This isn’t available in all countries, so you can see that it is only available in the United States. Personally, I live in Switzerland and I didn't find anything like that for me. The only thing I found is that sometimes I get ads from Google, and then they offer me like 100 Swiss francs. So, make sure you check if this is available in your country, but personally, I'm just going to sign up for a new Google Ads account without any of these benefits. I'm going to click on "Start Now," and you need to have a Google account, so you must have a Gmail account in order to sign up for Google Ads. If you don't have a Gmail account yet, don't worry; you can just create a new one right here. All right, this is what you see when you first log into your Google Ads account. As you can see, Google immediately wants us to set up our first campaign and create our first ads. Before we do that, we’re going to quickly look at how our Google Ads account is set up, because this is something it took me a long time to understand. But once I understood how my... Google Ads account is set up, and how everything is actually structured has made life so much easier. I really want you to understand this, and I'm going to keep referring back to this graphic right here to help you grasp how your account is set up and how to structure your ads correctly. What we have done just now is set up our Google Ads account, and the next layer is campaigns. Your Google Ads account can have multiple campaigns; you can have search campaigns, shopping campaigns, and different types of ads for different products as well. So, this is the first layer of how you can structure your ads. Before we go further into ad groups and actual ads, we're going to quickly create our first campaign, and then I'm going to come back to this to explain further how ad groups work and how different ads and keywords function. For the purpose of this tutorial, I'm going to create ads for an online store selling oximeters. An oximeter is something I sold last year; it’s a product that you can put on your finger, and it will tell you your oxygen saturation in your bloodstream and your pulse. This is something I sold through Google Ads last year, and since I closed down the store, I'm going to use this Google Ads account later to show you some more strategies and tactics. I'm also going to use this as an example to start a new Google Ads account. So, let's go back to our Google Ads account. What you see right here is Google trying to guide you through setting up your first campaign. This is really for people who don't know what they're doing. What we're going to do is scroll down and click on “Switch to Expert Mode” because this will give us full control over our campaign. Click on “Switch to Expert Mode,” and then we get to the next page where again, Google tries to guide us through setting up our campaign. They ask us if we want to have sales, leads, website traffic—what's the goal of our campaign? But here again, we're going to click on the bottom right where it says “Create a campaign without the goals guidance” because this will again give us full control over our campaign. After clicking there, we can decide what type of ads we want to set up. We have already seen this search ad right here; if you type in the keyword in Google and see these text ads with “Ad” in front of them, that's a search ad, and this is exactly what we're going to set up. We also have other possibilities. For example, these ads right here are shopping ads that go directly to a specific product. This is a bit more complex to set up, and I'm not going to cover it in this video. So, these are shopping ads that require setting up a Merchant Center and other details, so we won't be doing that. Additionally, display ads are not really buyer's intent traffic, similar to Facebook ads, where people just scroll through a content page, consuming content, and then your ad pops up. There is a lot less buyer intent behind people seeing your ads. You also have video ads to put on YouTube, app ads if you’re selling an app, and so on. But again, we’re going to focus on search ads; they are the easiest and most straightforward to set up, and they are also one of the most powerful ads. So, click on search ads, and then what's the result we want to get? We want to get traffic to our website—we want to get clicks that go to a landing page, maybe to a page with your contact information if you’re a lawyer’s office looking to gain new clients. Whatever you want to send people to, click on “Website Visits,” and then you can type in your website. For example, let’s say my website is oximeterstore.com/fingertip-oximeter. I'm going to send them directly to the product page. As you can see, this website doesn't exist; I don’t know if someone owns this website, as it’s just an example. Then you can click on continue, and now we can give our campaign a name. We're going to name the campaign “Search Campaign” because this is a search ad campaign. I'm also going to add “SKAG,” which is short for Single Keyword Ad Group, as we're going to target specific keywords with our ad groups, but more on that later. This is version one because eventually, we will have multiple versions. The next step is networks. Here, I would recommend that if you're starting out, just untick both of these options. If you don't get enough traffic later on, you can come back here and enable the search network. This includes other websites that also offer search network ads, but in the beginning, I only want to show up on Google search traffic, so I'm going to untick this option and also the display network. I would always untick the display network because, again, this is not really search intent or buyer's intent traffic. So, untick both of these options. You can go to "Shore More Settings." You can also give your ads a start and an end date. So maybe you want to set up ads for next month, and you're not going to come back into your ads account. But in my opinion, that's really unrealistic because when you set up paid ads, you're probably going to come back to your ad account at least once a week. Um, so in my opinion, I'm just going to always start it from now. I'm going to do everything manually; I'm going to start it manually and end it manually. So the start date is today, and then the end date is none. If the ads don't work, I'm just going to turn them off manually, and I would highly recommend doing that as well. Don't just leave your ads running for weeks without checking them because your credit card will just be charged, and you won't even know if your ads actually convert. So, um, yeah, then for the campaign options, we're going to skip that. Dynamic search ads? We're also going to skip it. Schedule: If you only want to have your ads show at a specific time, you can enter the time frame right here, but I don't really care when people buy from my store, so I'm just going to leave it as it is right here. Then targeting an audience: This is important. So depending on where your customers are, if you are selling to the United States, then obviously you want to change it because I live in Switzerland, and by default, it says Switzerland. But, for example, I sold these oximeters to the United States, so what I would do is click on "Enter another location," and then I type in "United States." Then it will only show my ads to people in the United States. You can also, if you're selling to Canada, add Canada right here, but make sure that you only target your best customers. Like, if you can't ship to the UK, then you don't want to have your ads shown to people who live in the UK. So let's say I only want to advertise to the United States, so I'm going to choose this, and then I always go to location options as well. Here, I make sure that I choose “Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations” because by default, it’s set to "Presence or Interest." If you take this option right here, which is recommended by default, it will also show your ads to people who are interested in your country or who are interested in the United States. I only want people who are living in the United States because I need to ship my product there, so I'm going to choose "Presence" right here, and then "Exclude" is correct by default for people in your excluded locations. So everything that is not the United States, the ads will not be shown to those people. Then Language: This should be the language of your customers, obviously, so this is English; this is fine for me. Then Audiences: This is only if you already have audiences, so we're going to skip that; we're not going to need that. Then Budget: This is how you will pay Google for showing your ads for the clicks that you're getting from your ads. Now, I would choose the currency that you intend to pay Google with. In my case, I live in Switzerland, so I pay with Swiss francs, so I'm going to leave this as Swiss francs. If you live in the United States, choose United States dollars, but for this tutorial, because it makes it easier, I'm going to choose United States dollars. But make sure you choose the currency that you intend to pay in. Then we can also define our budget. So how much are we willing to spend? This is an upper limit. Let's say we are not willing to spend more at the beginning—maybe like ten dollars. So I don't want to spend more than ten dollars per day on average, so I'm going to set my budget to ten dollars per day. Now, this doesn't mean that Google will only spend ten dollars per day; sometimes Google will spend more than ten dollars, sometimes Google will spend fifteen. But overall, on average, Google will not spend more than ten dollars per day, which totals to not more than three hundred dollars over thirty days in a month (30 times 10). So don't be surprised if it spends more than ten dollars because sometimes Google thinks, "Okay, the conversions are better on Monday," so I'm going to spend more on Monday. Um, so I would start with at least ten dollars because you need to get some traffic; you need to get some clicks in the beginning to be able to optimize. When you only do one, two, three, or five dollars, then it will take a long time until you get enough data so you can optimize your ads. Because in the beginning, you will probably not be profitable with your first ads because you have to optimize. You have to find the audience that will convert the best; you have to find the best ads; you have to find the best keywords. And that's why I would even go to twenty dollars to start out. So let's do twenty and then let's move on to bidding. Now this is also a big topic; this is the way that Google will charge you for the clicks that you're getting on your ads. So you can have different bidding strategies. For example, at the beginning, it makes sense to keep this on... Clicks, because we, in the beginning, want to get data. We want to get clicks so we can see what clicks will convert into customers and what clicks will convert into sales. So, normally, you can just keep this on clicks in the beginning, and then you also want to set up conversion tracking. I'm going to leave a tutorial down below in the video description that will show you exactly how to set up conversion tracking using Google Analytics, so you can see exactly what clicks actually result in a sale or a new customer. Then, when you have set up conversion tracking, you can change this to conversions, and then Google will optimize your clicks so that you get as many conversions as possible, because eventually, that's what makes you money. You can also set a maximum cost-per-click bid limit. Now, before we set this, I want to explain to you how the bidding system works, because this is something a lot of people don't understand, but it's something that is quite important to understand, in my opinion. So, we have now set up our campaign. Let's move on here. The price that you pay for each click is a formula. It's the ad rank of the person below you divided by your quality score plus one cent. Now, I know this sounds very complicated and you're not understanding this right now, but bear with me here; I'm going to explain everything. Let's say we have four advertisers. They all advertise on the same keyword. So, let's say "fingertip oximeter." They all advertise on that specific keyword. Now, every advertiser can define a max bid, so this is what we can define here. So, let's say our max bid, the highest price we're willing to pay for a click on our ad, is two dollars. We'd never want to pay more than two dollars for a single click. Let's say we are advertiser number one here; then advertiser number two sets this to four dollars, advertiser number three to six dollars, and advertiser number four to eight dollars. These are our max bids for our clicks. Now, another thing that you should become familiar with is the so-called quality score. This is very, very, very important for Google Ads. Google gives your ad a quality score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest and the best, and 1 being very poor. While Google is showing your ads, they will track what happens afterwards and then develop a quality score for your ad. The quality score depends on your landing page experience. One sec, let me drag myself to the left side here. The quality score depends on your landing page experience. Are people actually staying on the page that you're sending them to? How long are they staying on the page? Are they scrolling? Are they clicking on things? This is the landing page experience. This shows Google that people are actually finding what they're looking for. Google cares about relevancy; they want to keep their users on their search platform, and they will do that by giving people what they want. So, the landing page experience is very important. Then, there’s ad relevancy. If in your ad you have the exact keyword that people are looking for, you will get a high-quality score because you have high ad relevancy. For example, if I type in "wooden watch" right here, and then it says "wooden watch" right here, I don’t know if you can see it, but I will get high relevancy because I'm crafting the ad for the exact keyword that people are searching for. So, that's also very important. Then there’s the expected click-through rate. When Google shows your ads to a hundred people, and let's say three of those hundred people click on your ads, you have a three percent click-through rate. Now, you want to get the highest click-through rate possible because Google wants to make as much money as possible. They want people to actually click on the ad because they only make money when they click on it. We, as advertisers, only have to pay when people click. So, you want to increase your expected CTR, which is click-through rate, and you do that by making your ad as relevant as possible. Use the exact same keywords as people search and also make it as big as possible; take up the most amount of real estate on Google so that people are much more likely to click on your ad. But I'm going to show you everything in this tutorial on how you would actually do that. So, this is the quality score, and now, there’s ad rank. The ad rank will decide where your ad will show up. The advertiser with the highest ad rank is the one that will get the best placement on Google. For example, let me drag myself to the right side again. This person right here has a higher ad rank than this person right here, so this person is in a better position on Google. This is exactly how Google defines where your ad will be placed. The person with the highest ad rank will get the best placement. Now, how does Google define your ad rank? It's actually a formula: max bid times quality score. For advertiser number one, the max bid is two dollars, and the quality score is 10 because they have very good ads, very high relevancy, and a very high expected CTR. They get an ad rank of 20, which is higher than other advertisers, so they get the... First place on Google advertises. Number two is Max Bit; four dollars only has a four out of ten quality score. So, 4 times 4 is 16, so they get an ad rank of 16. Thus, they are below this first advertiser now, and this is all Google needs to define how much you have to pay. So again, let's look at the formula. On the top, your price, so the actual CPC (cost per click) is the ad rank of the person below you. For advertiser number one, it would be 16 because this is the ad rank of the person below advertiser number one. So, 16 divided by the quality score of you—of advertiser number one—16 divided by 20, plus one cent. Um, so then this will be the price. As you can see, 16 divided by 10, which is the quality score—the ad rank of the person below you—divided by your quality score, which is 10, and then plus one cent, and that will be 1.61. So, every click, you will pay 1.61. Now, advertiser number two will have to pay, um, 12, which is the ad rank of a person below, 12 divided by 4, plus one cent, which is three dollars and one cent. So, you can see, even though advertiser number one has the better ad—the better ad placement, the more prominent place on Google—they have to pay a lot less than person number two, and person number three pays even more. They pay four dollars and one cent, even though they have a worse place on Google, and the reason is because they have such a bad quality score. So, the thing you should get out of this is to increase your quality score as much as possible. You want to have the highest quality score possible. So, um, when we go back here, you want to have the best landing page out of all advertisers, you want to have the best ad relevance, and you want to have the highest expected CTR. That's how you get in front of the Google search results, and also, you pay a lot less than other advertisers, which will increase your profitability by a lot. It can mean the difference between being profitable and being unprofitable. So, quality score is extremely important. So, let's say if I covered everything here perfectly. Now, let's move on to our Google Ads account. So, now that you understand how bidding works, let's set our bid. Let's say our bid is—I would start out with like a dollar. This is a pretty good bid depending also on kind of what you're selling, but I'm going to start with one dollar. It doesn't mean it's going to spend one dollar, but it's just what you are willing to pay as a maximum. Now, um, let's move on. Let's go to show more settings. Conversions, obviously, you want to set up conversion tracking. Really important! I'm going to leave a tutorial down below in the video description. After this video, you can set up conversion tracking—really important. Ad rotation, I'm not going to bother with that now. Ad extensions are also very important. I see a lot of tutorials on YouTube just skipping ad extensions, but ad extensions are what can boost your—like Google says it itself—get you up to 15% higher click-through rate using Google extensions. So, what are ad extensions? These here are ad extensions. So, this ad, as you can see, is quite large because they use ad extensions. This one right here, for example, is a cycling extension. This is just a deep link going directly to shop men's best sellers. They have a page where they have their best sellers, and they have a specific link that goes directly to that page. Then they have women’s watches, watches under 100, shop wood and rubber. So, um, they have added those extensions, which gives them more real estate here on the first page of Google, and tests show that the larger your ad is, the more likely people will be to click on your ad, which will increase your CTR (click-through rate), which will increase your quality score, which will decrease your cost per click and increase your profitability. So, you have to use um, ad extensions. Now, which ones should you use? You have those structured snippets, which are just more words right here. By the way, don’t worry—people are not going to read this right here. People are just going to glance over what they're seeing, and if they're seeing like some keywords that they are looking for, they will click on their ad. If you’re, um, like you don’t have to be grammatically perfect right here, or if the sentence isn't really perfectly structured, don't really worry. It's just about getting the most real estate and kind of the most clickable ad, okay? So, adding extensions is very important to get more real estate on your ad. So, what extensions should you actually add? There are a lot of possibilities. The cycling extension, like I said, are like links that go to different places on your website. So, what you can do is add a new sideline extension, and then maybe if you have a lawyer’s office, you can say like, “Get a free consultation,” or you can do “See our services,” something like that, and then give a description. Then also, find the URL. It should be the URL that goes directly to this specific page. If you only have one landing page—which is what I had—you can also just, let’s say for this store I had… Something like "best oximeter on sale," "uh oximeter on sale," or let's say "number one oximeter," um, something like that. And then I put the same landing page right here as I have as a main landing page for the main ad. If you get an error because it's the same URL, then just finish your ad without extensions and then come back later inside of your ad and next, and then add those extensions with your landing page. Somehow it works; that was the case for me. So, these are cycling extensions, which again are these ones right here. Sometimes they're not as prominent; sometimes they look like this right here—so very small—but still, it makes your ad larger, which gets you a higher click-through rate. Okay, um, then call-out extensions. You can also add a couple of these. Now, I would add maybe, um, four to eight different cycling extensions and like ten call-out extensions, like "50% off today," all that kind of stuff. Also, try to include some numbers in your ad and maybe like "free shipping," because all these kinds of things, people like to click on numbers; they kind of gravitate towards numbers, for example. So this is just a little tip on the side. Callout extensions you can also do, and call extensions only if you want to. If you have a phone number and you want people to call you, you can also add your phone number right here. You can also add more structured snippets, app extensions, price extensions if you want to tell them the price. Basically, in my opinion, put as many as possible. Google will not show every extension that you put there, but you have the possibility that Google shows it, and then you get more real estate. Okay, so we’ve talked enough about extensions, so let's actually move on. Now we have just finished setting up our campaign settings, and now we are one layer deeper, which is ad groups. So, let me go back to our overview right here; we see we have just set up our search campaign, single keyword ad groups version one. Inside of that campaign, we will set up our first ad group. Here is where we're going to use a strategy that will make sure we get the lowest cost per click and the best conversions, and we're going to do that by achieving the highest quality score and by creating the most relevant ads for the keywords that we are targeting. For example, let's look at this ad group right here; we are targeting with this ad group "finger pulse oximeter." For each ad group—so each ad group is dedicated to one keyword—each keyword that I want to target, I'm going to create a separate ad group. The reason why is because for each ad group, I'm going to create specific ads that are designed so that they are as relevant as possible to that specific keyword. So, let me just show you right here. When somebody types in "finger pulse oximeter," I want my ads to show "finger pulse oximeter." Your ad can't be better than actually giving your visitors exactly what they are searching for. If I search "finger positioner" and I see an ad for "fingerprint simulator," well, that's what I want to do; that's the one I would click on. That's why we do dedicated ad groups for our targeted keywords. So, for the first ad group, we're going to name this ad group "finger pulse oximeter," because that's the keyword we want to target with this specific ad group. Then here, this is automatically put in because this is the website we want to send people to—the landing page. Then we have to type in our keywords. Now, let's type in "finger pulse oximeter," because that's the keyword we want to target. Now, um, when I only want my ad to show up when people type in this exact keyword "finger pulse oximeter," then I have to put these brackets around my keyword. This is a so-called exact match. There are different match types in Google, and I'm going to show you exactly what these match types look like. So, here we have an overview of match types: there is the exact match, there is the phrase match, the broad match, the broad match modifier, and the modified broad match. So, here is what we have just done: we have put brackets around our keyword, and then people will only see my ad when they type in exactly what is in that bracket—exactly or a close variant. Google also shows it when people type in maybe a plural version or maybe they misspell the word a little bit. That's something Google just does; you can't really turn that off, but it doesn't really matter. It doesn’t really hurt your conversions. So, only this exact word or a close variant of that word. As an example, when somebody types in "women's hats" and I do the exact match of "women's hats," then people only see it when people type in "women's hats" or "women's hat," for example, because that's the singular version of "hat." Then there is the phrase match. When you put quotation marks around your keyword, then the keyword has to be part of the phrase that people type in the search bar. So, when people type in "buy women's hats," then my ad will also show. Up, and then we have the broad match modifier: the modified broad match. You can put a plus in front of your keywords, which means that each keyword that has a plus in front of it has to be in the search bar—what people type in. So here, for example, "hats for women" will show up because "hats" is in there and "women" is also in there. "Women" is kind of a synonym or a close variant of "women's." If, um, it would just be, um, let's say "women," let's say, um, I don't know, "pants for women," then it wouldn't show up because "hats" isn't in the phrase. And then we have a broad match, which, um, Google also includes misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations. So you get a lot more traffic, but maybe not the traffic you want. So I recommend to only use these three in the beginning: only the modified broad match, the phrase match, and the exact match. Um, so that's what we're gonna do; we're gonna use the exact match right here, then we're going to use the phrase match "finger pulse oximeter," and we're also going to use the modified broad match, so "finger pulse oximeter." By the way, here on the right side, Google kind of tries to give you an estimate of how many clicks you can expect: what's the average cost per click and the cost per day. My experience isn't really that accurate, so don't worry if it says only two clicks per day. It's not really that accurate, and also, you're gonna use multiple keywords anyway, so you're gonna have more clicks than that per day. Um, so let's move on and maybe create another ad group for another keyword. We can scroll down and click on "add new ad group," and now let's go for the keyword "oxygen monitor," because that's also something people are searching for when they are interested in buying a pulse oximeter. So now we're going to have a dedicated ad group specifically for "oxygen monitor," and we're going to do the same thing: we're going to do our website URL and put it right here, and then we're going to do an exact match "oxygen monitor," like this can type, and also a phrase match "oxygen monitor." You get the idea. And then, um, once you have all your ad groups, once you have all your keywords in different dedicated ad groups, then you can click on "save and continue." So let me just delete this second ad group right here, and then we're gonna move on with this first ad group as an example. So save and continue. And now we are one level deeper; we are at the actual ads. So when we go here, and this is our ad group right here, "finger pulse oximeter," we have to find our keywords that we want to have our ads show up for. Now we can create our different ads, which will show up when people type in these keywords. So let's go ahead and create our first ad. What we are creating now is what people will see when they type in our keyword. So again, our strategy is to be as relevant as possible. Right now we are creating an ad for the ad group "finger pulse oximeter," so we want to have our ad be as relevant as possible for that specific keyword. Let's start with the headline. I'm just going to use the one that I've used on the store when I was running it. For example, here I used "finger pulse oximeter on sale." As you can see, "finger pulse" is similar to our keyword, and, um, so that is relevant. Then headline number two will be "best finger pulse oximeter." Headline number three will be, um, "limited time 50% off," because again, people like numbers, and 50% off. So I'm also gonna put that here. Um, Google shows a maximum of three headlines here; you can always see how your ad currently looks like, and sometimes it will only show two headlines; sometimes it will show three. So always make sure you put in three headlines; otherwise, you will lose out on real estate for your ad. Then, with the display path, this is kind of a URL that is displayed to people, but it's not necessarily the URL that your ad will go to when people click on it. So again, the same strategy here: I'm just going to type in "finger pulse oximeter," because again it's most relevant. Google sees this as a very relevant ad. I get a high quality score, I get a better ad rank, and overall I will have to pay less money for my clicks. Then, with the description as well, I'm just going to put the one that I have used here for this specific store. Make sure you use all the characters here; so 90 characters is a maximum. Here, I only used 81, which is also okay, but make sure to use as much as possible as Google gives you here, because again you want to make your ad as large as possible. And again, you can always go here on the right side and see how your ad currently looks. Um, when you have more ad extensions that we've talked before, you should also see them right here. And here again, add things like, um, numbers—add things like free shipping. Those are all words that people gravitate towards and that people like to click on. All right, so now we just finished setting up our first ad, which looks like this on desktop and like this on mobile. As you can see here, text ads—we have one ad, and what I've... Would recommend is to set up at least two more ads, or I would always kind of set up three ads per ad group because then Google has the possibility to rotate your ads. Sometimes it will show the first one, sometimes it'll show the second one, and sometimes it will show the third one. Then you'll get data inside of your account, and you can see which ad performs the best, and Google will then use the best ad that's getting you the most conversions. If you only have one ad right here, then Google can't really test your ads. So make sure to go down, click on "Done", and create the next text ad, and then just vary around, use some different words, maybe change around the headlines a little bit, maybe the description also, and so you can really see what actually works the best. But for time reasons, I'm not going to do this here in the tutorial. Once you have created three ads for your ad group, move on to the next ad group, and so on, until you have finished all your ads for all your keywords and all your ad groups. Once you are finished, click on "Save and Continue". Then here on the next page, Google will ask for your payment information if you haven't set it up already, obviously, because it's paid advertising, and they will need a credit card right here so they can charge for the clicks that you're getting through Google Ads. Another tip here: also, because they have to approve your ads after you've set them up, they will not run immediately. They have to take a look at them and make sure you don't violate any of their guidelines, and then they will approve your ads, and then they will start running. For me, the first time I did this, it took a couple of days and nothing happened. So what I did was contact a Google representative. I contacted the staff of Google, and that kind of moved things on a lot quicker. So if you have the same problem, make sure you just contact them, and they are actually very helpful in my opinion. I also had a one-hour call with one of the representatives; he kind of took a look at my Google Ads account, and he told me, "Okay, you have to add more ads, ad extensions, you have to add more ads, you have to test this and stuff." So they have some good people there, and they really kind of take the time to go into your account and help you optimize your ads specifically for your business. So it can't hurt; you just contact them and ask for maybe a call. It's all for free. So, yeah, that's just a tip by the side. All right, so I have now switched into the Google Ads account that I was using when I launched my oximeter store last year. I wasn't really profitable, so I closed down the store again, but this Google Ads account will kind of serve as an example here, and I'm going to use it to show you a couple of things. So we have now set up our first ads, and we're waiting for Google to approve our ads. Meanwhile, there is something very important that we need to do so we don't waste money on useless clicks. For example, when somebody types in "oximeter Amazon," then that person who types that in will probably look for an oximeter from Amazon. They probably want to buy from Amazon. Or when they type in specific brands of what you're selling that aren't you, then you don't want to show your ads to those people because they already know where they want to buy from. They don't want to buy from you; they want to buy from Amazon or Walmart or something like that. So, what we want to do is set up a list of keywords that we want to apply to our campaigns so that whenever somebody types in one of those keywords, our ads will not show up, and we won't waste money on those clicks. So what you have to do is go to "Tools" on the top here and then click on "Negative Keyword List" under "Shared Library." As you can see here, I have a general list and a specific list for my product. The general list is a list that I will always use, no matter what product I'm selling, because these are stuff like, if you go in here, you see this is stuff like "Amazon," "cheap," "China," "contact," "coupon," "discount," "drop shipping." All those keywords aren't really good; they're not converting to customers for me, so I'm putting them in a negative keyword list. If you want to add keywords, just click on the plus sign here, add your keywords. So you have to do a plus, and then let's say "Walmart," for example, because those people that want to buy from Walmart and not from you. So click on "Save," and then this keyword will be added right here in the negative keyword list. Then when you have set up your keyword list, you can go down and click on "Apply to Campaigns" and then choose your campaign right here. I already chose all of my campaigns, so make sure you choose your campaign; otherwise, it won't be active. Make sure to choose it, click "Done," and then this will be active. Now, I have these standard ones right here; I can go through them real quick so you can see them—maybe copy them. All right, so these are the keywords. Of course, this is for a physical... Product store: if you have, like, a service business or something, you might want to use other keywords. But another thing I want to show you, because, as you've seen, I have two lists. I have a general list, and then—oh, sorry—I then have a dedicated list for my specific product. So, oximeter list: these are words that I learned by gathering data from my ads. I noticed that people who click on my ads type in "bluetooth," or "choicemat," or "cms50f," which are brands that aren't mine. So, people who type in "contact," for example, are looking for an oximeter from this brand, so I don't want to show my ad here. What I did was I went back here, went into my campaign, then I went to—um, sorry—then you go to "keywords," "search terms," and then you see what people are actually typing in that gives you clicks. As you can see here: "oxygen level tester," "oximeter," and then you find words like "oximeter CVS," "oximeter reading chart." We have "Omron oximeter," which is probably also a brand, so I paid for a click right here, and it's obvious that this probably won't convert into a sale for me. So, what I would do is copy this word right here, copy, and then I would go back into "tools," "negative keyword list," "oximeter list," and then I would click the plus sign and type in plus, and then "Omron," and then I'm just going to click on save. Now this is added to my negative keyword list, so whenever somebody types in this word, my ads won't show up. So, especially in the beginning, make sure to check out your search terms on the keywords right here and see what keywords you're showing up for. Then, keep building out your negative keyword list, which, again, will avoid you paying for useless clicks, which will save you a lot of money. Now, another thing I want to show you that is very useful inside of Google Ads is the Keyword Planner, especially if you need to find new keywords. Then, you can use the Keyword Planner to put in the keywords that you already know, and then it will give you more keywords that might be very relevant for what you are advertising. So, if you go to "tools" on the top here, and then click on "Keyword Planner," then you get to this page right here. You can click on "discover new keywords," and then you maybe type in something like, um, "pulse oximeter," "oximeter," and maybe something like "oxygen monitor," and also—um—okay, so you can click on "get results." Make sure your location settings up top here are what you are targeting. So, for me, I would have to change this to "United States." So, let's change this to "United States," "United States," country, and deselect "Switzerland." Save. Then, language: also make sure it's the right language, so this would be "English," and search networks: "Google." Also, the time frame—let's say I want to have the last month—and then Google gives me some more ideas. So, "SpO2 oximeter," "SpO2 sensor," "pulse oximeter price," "finger pulse oximeter,"—all that kind of stuff. So, maybe I didn't know that I could target "SpO2," so maybe this would be very profitable for me. So, what I could do is just copy this keyword right here, copy, and then go back to Google Ads, go back to my search campaign, and then go to "ad groups." Then, I’d create a new ad group right here with the plus sign, and I can create a new ad group for this specific keyword. Again, I can use the exact match, "SpO2 sensor." Then, I could use the phrase match "SpO2 sensor," and also the modified broad match. Then I could click "save and continue," and also for the bid, let's say we do 75 cents. Save and continue. Then, again, I would create a specific ad for this specific keyword, like "Best SpO2 sensor," "Number one SpO2 sensor," "SpO2 sensor 50% off," "SpO2 sensor on sale," and just like we did before. So, let's now talk about how to optimize your ads once they are actually running. The first thing you have to do before your ads are actually running is to install Google Analytics, meaning to install conversion tracking so that with each click that your ads are getting, you know exactly how many people added something to the cart, how many people actually bought something from you, how many people gave their information, how many people actually called your number—whatever you are advertising. So, that's very important because otherwise you don't really know what keywords, what clicks, what demographics give you the best conversions. So, make sure you install Google Analytics, and there’s a tutorial down below in the video description that will show you step by step how to install Google Analytics with your Google Ads account. So watch that, and once you have done that, get some data. You have to get data in order to be able to optimize—let it spend like fifty dollars, one hundred dollars, two hundred dollars, and depending on your budget obviously—until you will optimize your ads. So, you have to get some data first, and then you can start optimizing from there. And then how do you optimize? So basically, what you want to do is you want to get more traffic from the keywords that are working really well. So, let's say for "fingertip pulse oximeter," this keyword gives me a very high conversion rate. That means that I will increase the bid, my maximum cost per... Click. I will increase that so I get a better ad rank, and more people will see my ad for this specific keyword because I know that these people will be more likely to convert. The same thing applies to ads or keywords that don't really work well; I want to decrease my bid because if I'm not profitable, then maybe if I pay less per click, that will get me into the profitability zone. You see that some keywords don't work at all, or some demographics don't work at all, and you want to turn them off. Okay, so now how do we actually do this inside of our Google Ads account? What you can do is go to your campaigns, then your search campaign, and then go to ad groups. You can do this ad group by ad group, so let's open up the first ad group, "Oxygen Oximeter," right here. We have set up three different keyword match types for this specific ad group, and eventually, you're probably going to have a lot more. What you want to do is find out the exact match type that is the most profitable for you. So let's sort by conversions. As you can see here, we made one conversion with the broad modified match "Oxygen Oximeter." This is probably not enough data to really optimize, but if you had more data in here—more conversions—you could really start to optimize. What you can focus on is search impression share, which means that, by the way, if you don't see all these columns that I see, you can go to "Columns," then "Modify Columns," and choose everything here that you want to see. Obviously, if you want to see conversion tracking or conversions, you want to set up conversion tracking. Again, a tutorial is in the description below. So, again, let’s say this is highly profitable for me. Here, the cost per conversion, 48 Swiss francs, is actually not profitable, but let's say this is like five dollars, which would be good. Now, what I want to do is get more traffic from this specific keyword. As you can see here, I'm only showing up for less than 10 percent of the people who actually type in this specific search term, and my traffic lost or my search lost due to rank is 47.38, which means that I need to increase my rank so that my ad will be shown to more people. I know that when my ad is shown to more people who type that in, I will make more sales. When we go back to this graphic right here, we see that we can increase our rank by increasing our bid because rank is bid times quality score. I can increase my bid, which will increase my rank, and I will get more search impression share. I will get more eyes on my ad, so what I would do here is go to my max CPC, my max bid, and increase that by like 20 to 30 percent. So let's say I'm going to do one dollar and then let it run for another week, after which I'm going to come back in here. Now, this is how you can optimize for terms that work very well for you and that are very profitable. For other terms that aren’t profitable, you can either decrease your max CPC a bit, like by 20 percent, or you can set it to the average CPC and maybe that will increase your profitability. If terms don’t work at all, you can also turn them off. You can go here and click on "Pause," and then you have turned this specific term off. Another very cool thing you can do is go to demographics and optimize by demographics. So let's say let's go to age, and a lot of people who are buying are aged 45 to 54 years old. Here, I would increase the bid by maybe 20 percent so I get more people in this age frame. Let’s say everybody who’s over 65 years old is clicking a lot of my ads, but they are not buying. What I would do is just go here and click on "Exclude from Ad Group," and then my ads won’t be shown anymore to those people. You can really see here that this is only possible when you get some data in your account. So, you really have to start spending and then work with the data you have. In the beginning, you want to optimize a bit more; you want to continue to update your negative keyword list, and then eventually, when everything is kind of running, you want to do it week by week. So don’t try to optimize every day because you have to give it time to get new data so you can make decisions. Wait a week, make a decision, optimize, and wait another week, and so on. You can also optimize by devices. If you click on devices and see mobile phones, computers, and so on, if you notice that you don't get any conversions from, let’s say, tablets, what you can do is just turn off tablets, or you can go to bids and decrease by, let’s say, 70 percent. Probably then your ads won’t be shown anymore to people using a tablet, so you can exclude those people from your ads. That's really how you can continue to optimize your ads. You want to keep the keywords that give you a lot of conversions. You have a good conversion ratio, and you want to throw away the keywords that don't work. But it's not really as easy as just guessing what the best keywords are; you really have to find them by buying data. So, you have to buy clicks, then look at the data and decide from there which are the profitable keywords. Increase the bids for those keywords and turn off the others that aren't working for you. All right, so congratulations on making it all the way through to the end of this tutorial! Before you click off, I want to ask you for a very quick favor. That is to help me out with my conversion rates on my thumbs-up button below this video. All I need you to do to increase my conversion rate on that button is to just click that button below because it really helps out my YouTube channel, allowing me to make more in-depth tutorials for you. Also, you can leave me a comment down below letting me know what you’re advertising on Google, so maybe I can do another tutorial specific to what you are selling. If you want to see more videos just like this one, then make sure you hit the subscribe button below this video so you don't miss any upcoming videos. With that being said, thank you very much for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video!