Dustin Howes: 0:29

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I'm your Nerdirator, Dustin House. Spread that good word about affiliate marketing. You're going to find me here every Tuesday and Thursday on LinkedIn Live at 12.15 Pacific. Put it on the calendar, Join me and my guest. That guest today is Brandon Myers, an old friend of mine in the affiliate industry. Welcome to the Nerditorium buddy.

Brandon Myers: 0:53

Thank you, buddy. Nice to be here from England, way across the way from you, way farther away than Austin where we met.

Dustin Howes: 1:00

It's not often that I get guests that are enjoying their evening cocktail already, but I appreciate you making the time tonight and hanging out with me. This is going to be a great talk on SEO and international sub-domains, which is an important topic but not a lot of people really know about, so I'm excited to hang out with you. You and I have met many times.

Dustin Howes: 1:30

Yeah, but we started our journey together in Austin when I was working at WP Engine and you were working at Aceble and we nerded out on affiliate stuff and really hit it off at one of Sean Collins events or something of that nature.

Brandon Myers: 1:46

I think I met you at a bar, which is fitting. That was the initial part of me exploring borders and locations, which is what I want to talk about. Since then, I've gone on to expand internationally, as I have. I've found that a lot of the theories that I put into place at Aceble have mimics themselves across borders, which allows a lot of influence potential for affiliates to drive correct products. I'm going to enunciate on that because I really do think that affiliates have a responsibility to steward in positive products, and so when we go into international based items, addressing them in a way that is unique to themselves is incredibly important, and so that's really the time I wanted to take today. I normally don't share, and you know this, so being on your show is a special occasion for me, and I think there's a lot of stuff we can talk about in terms of addressing different markets in a way that is equal.

Dustin Howes: 2:48

Awesome man, I really appreciate your time. You have been such a brilliant SEO in my mind for years since I've ever met you and enhanced my game every time I get a conversation with you and your stuff is just way over my head. I'm sure you're going to send some of that info to the audience here today. You have any questions about what we're talking about? Please hit us up in the live Q&A going on and if you would like to be my guest and sit in Brandon's seat, come to dustinhousecom. Slash nerd and drop in a proposal on what topic you want a nerd out about. But without further ado, Brandon, who are you?

Brandon Myers: 3:33

I'm Brandon Myers and I'm an international subdomain guy. I really just care about equality more than anything, and when I go through and I design my websites, I make sure that I cater content to you and audience so that they can digest it in a positive way. I think that that's probably the most important thing to me is that everyone feels equal and has a message that they can essentially digest in a way that is effective for them. I find it funny that I was watching Lost in Translation this weekend and found some different keys in there for me. There's a big whiskey drinker in there in that movie, which is pretty great Because I'm a big whiskey drinker.

Brandon Myers: 4:14

But you go through and I think that that's pretty telling for the situation that I'm in, and I think that quite a few of the messages we have on Earth right now, whether it be religious or monetary, are somewhat lost in translation, and so we found ourselves divided and I think, by accurately and effectively providing translation services to people in languages that they understand, it's a positive thing. I have a person in my life who's really important, who's Polish, and I actually use deep L to speak to her so that she can understand what I'm saying in Polish and it's more effective for her when I speak in Polish than it is in English, and so with the same language, with different words, the message is translated for her and ends up being really impactful, and I've done that with lots of people Spanish, polish, russian. Being able to translate and talk to them in different languages that cater to them is really, really important, and I think we forget that. As affiliate SES.

Dustin Howes: 5:19

Funny. It's funny that you, like I ask you who you are and you're already in chat. Gtt, like immediately, and like talking to bots is like part of your personality and I don't know anybody more engulfed in this world than you are right now. So we've got an admirer or somebody. It's like Jordan giving you an okay. I don't know who Jordan is, he's my business partner.

Brandon Myers: 5:47

I love him very much, Hi Jordan.

Dustin Howes: 5:49

I love you. You're the okay sign We've got a follower. Thanks for joining in and tuning in. All right, let's start with your career, though. Like you started an SEO, you started an affiliate. Where did this journey? Sorry, justin.

Brandon Myers: 6:04

You broke up a little bit there. Can you re-ask the question?

Dustin Howes: 6:10

You got it. So your journey in your messio. Did you start an affiliate? How did that get all started?

Brandon Myers: 6:17

Honestly, it was a bit of both, so I fell into this. I drive safely. I didn't know affiliate marketing at all, famously in my own past and telling people they gave me the Wonderlick test, which is what they give NFL quarterbacks, and I tested higher than any NFL quarterback ever had, and they gave me the job. So I had to learn off of a PowerPoint, and one of my first partners was this company called DMVorg. They've since gone on to lose their traffic through a manual penalty they didn't deserve, which was a struggle for me to digest as an SEO, and I looked for answers as to why I couldn't really find them, and as I've gone on, I've gotten more in depth with SEO and helping people in a way that's caters to them. I found myself more passionate about the language aspect than anything else, but also that kind of came from AISL, where we had a unique situation with states' rights that mirror something you might see in the EU, which is the European Union and all the countries there are. They've got laws, but they translate to each other's borders. So if you have a Polish driver's license, for instance, you can drive in France, and so you've got the same types of things in the United States because of states' rights, which makes every single state rather unique, and actually every state has a different law around how you get your driver's license, so how you cater your message to them is incredibly important, and that's been mirrored for my career. I wanted to see how good I could get, and it really has been fun experimenting with a lot of different websites, a lot of different partners to reach different audiences in a way that makes sense to them, and I find myself loving it more than anything on Earth being able to speak to people in a way that they can understand, because I certainly struggle with communication, and we'll talk about that later, some of the challenges I have with mental health but ultimately, this is something that has been really passionate for me and I love doing it, so I've migrated towards the SEO side because of these people.

Brandon Myers: 8:22

Not many people know that Driver's Ed was founded in 98. It's one of the first affiliate marketplaces there ever was and it's also the oldest form of distance education, so it was the first. One is how we got our driver's license and our tickets dismissed, and so I've had the good fortune, I would say, of working with some of the OGs of the industry, just out of happenstance and luck, and I just I remain humble because that's what it's about. I find that the information technology sector has become pretty profiteering, so I like to go through and make sure that people are. If you're going to make money off of this, do it the right way, and that's always been my way. It's ethics over anything else.

Dustin Howes: 9:07

Awesome, awesome. And you brought up Wonderlick. Who's the NFL quarterback with the highest score In many? No.

Brandon Myers: 9:15

Was it Andrew Luck?

Dustin Howes: 9:17

No.

Brandon Myers: 9:18

Who was it? It's magic Really. Yes, yes.

Dustin Howes: 9:25

The highest Wonderlick score of all time.

Brandon Myers: 9:27

Yeah, yeah, I guess my information is dated from living in England, but that makes sense, okay.

Dustin Howes: 9:34

All right, let's get into the topic of the day, and that is international subdomains. Tell us what these are and how they work.

Brandon Myers: 9:43

Okay. So international subdomains are really interesting. They actually act as replications of your website somewhat, but they're not. So the way that someone goes through right now and I guess it's a page in English is Okay, I'm going to go through the whole thing. Okay, oftentimes, if they're a foreign language speaker, the language will be translated through Google Translate, which I'm sure you're familiar with. If you read something in Spanish and you want it in English, it'll pass it over.

Brandon Myers: 10:09

The thing is is that's not indexed. So like none of that information will come up in Spanish or Polish or French or any of those things. So, like ancient maps that led explorers to new worlds, international subdomains guide digital voyagers to content shores tailored for their linguistic and cultural landscapes. It's a way to go through and essentially bring education to someone in a language they understand. So, even like the Bible is translated multiple ways and in multiple different languages, you've got different issues and the internet acts the same way. So if we don't go through and cater to different audiences with an international product, we're essentially doing them a disservice, not only with what we're providing them in terms of a user experience, but in terms of indexing. We will have a problem right. So we won't reach the types of places that we need to.

Brandon Myers: 11:04

I've found that to be incredibly strong. It's not the easiest thing to do. It's a lot of work, right. So running multiple iterations of a website and scaling it not easy, so I'm not telling anyone right now there's some magic trick to do it. There's not. So you're running like when you go into your DNS, for instance, and you're running a website and you direct it to esdustinhousecom, right, you will have a different domain and it actually starts as a fresh WordPress installation, which most of us use, and so you'll have a different iteration of it in a way that is catered directly to you specifically. I'm managing that as a hassle.

Brandon Myers: 11:48

There are different tools that you can do, but going through and actually doing the work to do it is not only good for your customers, which is what matters, but it's good for user experiences. You can use different things, like you know, different cloud services to provide the content natively or locally, like. Cloudflare is one of the biggest providers of that, and really you know if I was buying stocks. You know I love stocks. Cloudflare is an amazing one and they're a dollar sign net. So you know they kind of figured it out a long time ago that was one of my better calls. My parents have made some good money on that.

Dustin Howes: 12:25

So back in my WP Engine days, customer support heated getting calls on multi-site. That was like their worst nightmare of a situation. Some domains do they fall under this like it's kind of difficult to manage.

Brandon Myers: 12:45

Yeah, they are, I mean, truly like to have a global, global brand. It's not something many people have Like. Really, there's a few companies Amazon's trying right and they're still struggling. They're new to the UK even over the last three years and not many people know this. But UK English is actually indexed in Australian English, south African English, canadian English. They're all indexed as different languages by Google, and so that's so that they can have this native language type of capability.

Brandon Myers: 13:16

But then also you get you know, like Spanish searchers in England, or you know Polish searchers in England, or Spanish, mostly in the US, because Spanish is the largest the US is the second largest Spanish speaking nation on Earth, which a lot of people don't know, and so if you're not indexing Spanish content because I think most of our providers would probably be from the US you're really missing out on about 10% of the population, and so there's massive value in that.

Brandon Myers: 13:48

It doesn't mean that those people don't buy things. But, to your point, you know, having different languages is a challenge for customer service perspective. So if you're an affiliate which we're going to tie it back into, you're going to want to make sure that they have the support for those languages and the support for those countries. Oftentimes you'll even see that in the T's and C's, unlike CJ. So I'll come through and say I only want you know people from this country or that country. It's not necessarily because they value anyone less, it's just that they can't support them. Yeah, and so you do see that type of obstacle in this space.

Dustin Howes: 14:23

And there is a growing trend that I've seen in the industry is folks don't want affiliates that are outside of the US because they don't want to be having to service those kinds of clientele.

Brandon Myers: 14:36

Plus chargeback fraud. I mean chargeback fraud is a big deal in our space and so you do, but I honestly, some of it is I don't want to say racist, but like some of it does come in as a bit racist. We want to be as equal as we possibly can and there are still buyers like the EU and Asia and all these places. They have strong economies, like we'll go through and talk about currencies and stuff later in this conversation, but you do have these aspects of serving people in their native languages, their native currencies. That is important, because a dollar doesn't mean a dollar to someone overseas. They have no idea what that means. I know what the trade exchange is for the great British pound to the US dollar because I experience it every day, but for other clients I have no idea, for instance, what the Brazilian dollar is going off at right now. I have no idea. And so if we don't serve content that way, how are we doing anyone a service? We're really missing on that. Most of the world is missing out on that traffic.

Dustin Howes: 15:40

What I'm gathering is, speaking to people in their native language is pretty important for conversion, but why else do you think it's important to talk to people in their native language?

Brandon Myers: 15:51

Just user experience. I mean, like even the conversations I have with the people I know like lost in translation. It's funny that movie keeps coming up, but it will be lost. If I'm speaking English to somebody who's not a native English speaker and I start using words that are grandiose for instance, there's a word right, then that may not connect with my audience in a way that they can understand. And if we're not going through and providing the terms that are important to these people, honestly we're killing the UX and that's what this is supposed to be. We're supposed to be making information global and 90% of what we're serving is in English, and so going through and actually paying attention to that stuff creates a more equal customer base. It creates a more equal user experience, and 99% of us are missing it. We're missing the money that's right there for us, but also the customers losing out. That's who it's supposed to be for and I'll always put them first. Right, that's, you know me. That's the thing that's most important.

Dustin Howes: 16:58

I love the love that you have, especially for strangers Like you're so willing to help others out in so many different capacities, and that's why I'm gravitated towards you through the years and we built our friendship through that. Because I love that attitude, I share it, those kinds of sentiments, but you're at a different level than I am, in different ways.

Brandon Myers: 17:23

I think you're a better coach than I am, to be honest. We'll be honest with that. I think I come off a bit, you know, challenged at times.

Dustin Howes: 17:34

We all have our strengths. Your intelligence is way over me, but maybe my communication skills. I'm good at coaching because I can talk to people like we're in fifth grade again and I can dump things down that are super smart. That's important.

Brandon Myers: 17:54

I'm challenged with that. You know I joke that I can barely tie my shoes, and it's true, I can't remember where my keys are. You can talk to me about some domains, but keys. Don't ask me where I left the keys, or my wallet. Okay, no, no keys.

Dustin Howes: 18:14

All right. So the value of creating these kinds of personalized messages is going in enhanced conversion rate, but is this a lot more work, like on a global affiliate program for a global brand? I hear a lot of companies that have difficulties trying to share the pie within the company with different teams that you're representing. And do you find a lot of difficulty with companies that you're working with and how they distribute where the attribution is really coming from when you have these subdomain redirects?

Brandon Myers: 18:55

Yes, there is some challenges too, even within itself. So, like one of the reasons that WWW exists I don't think people know this, it's a sleight of hand. It's a sleight of hand, Okay. So WWW is a redirect. It means worldwide web, it's a place to put the country code, and people don't realize that. So if you go through and you look at Wikipedia yeah, I'm sharing some information that's worth some money If you go through and you look at Wikipedia in different languages, you'll start seeing French, spanish, english, even like ENGB, and so you can provide different user experiences to different countries. It's a thing that came out of the adult industry, which I have studied, because they have massive traffic, and so if you go through and you look at some of those sites, you'll see those different experiences there, especially if you're analyzing in tools like Semrash or Ahrefs. Those things will go through and make themselves apparent to you if you look. I find that most people will find intelligence and understanding if they seek it, and so diving into the rabbit hole, if you will, gives you a lot of experience updates, but really there's not that many companies doing it and a lot of people make mistakes.

Brandon Myers: 20:10

I don't think that many people understand what WWW meant from the beginning. I might be the first person to even say it on air. It's really to put a country code or a user experience, and that's something that means something if you're going to expand. So formatting your URL is as important as anything. It's almost as important as the content you serve, because they act like maps. It's a way to map your subdomain, and even in Google Analytics and Google Search Console, those things actually show up as different domains, so you'll have to update them as a different property, and when you start really looking into what that means, they completely operate as different user experiences that then share the domain juice. That's probably the most valuable thing I could share with anyone, and I think it should be fair. I don't think this should be uncommon knowledge. I think that we should be spreading information across the world in a way that is accessible.

Brandon Myers: 21:16

I'm disabled, dustin. If we don't make information accessible, I am I'm literally disabled, classified as disabled in the US. If we don't make information accessible, what are we doing? I find we have a moral responsibility as much as a responsibility to make money in terms of information accessibility, and this is how you do it.

Dustin Howes: 21:39

Sure, do you think the SEO community has that same kind of sentiment that we do here in the affiliate community? This is a closeness group and I feel like all the leaders in this industry are very open and welcome to share information, because the hard part about affiliate is the execution part, which only the elite really know. But the SEO, I don't feel that same love. It's gated yeah.

Brandon Myers: 22:09

So I'm not really a fan of that, am I?

Dustin Howes: 22:14

No, you're not. You always share your best tips. One thing you gave for me. When I was talking about creating a subdomain for a blog on Appy Stache, I asked you hey, what should my subdomain be? Should it be blogdot? And you're like don't do that. Don't do affiliate though, but you suggested either partnerships or something else in that nature.

Brandon Myers: 22:36

Really, it's been out of testing things. I've found, really, that Google indexes and weights domains and then top-level domains, which has been years and years and years and years of studying. I've found stuff people don't want to find. I'm not going to talk about it, but ultimately there's a lot of stuff going on. But it's about providing correct information. So there's always black hat SEOs. That's something that gets called and talked about a lot, but I've always considered myself squarely in the gray. There's some white and there's some black.

Brandon Myers: 23:06

To me, I think there's good and evil in everyone, so there are aspects of me that I'll go through and make sure that I am accessible to different clients and different people, and if I do that with ethics, then I feel good about everything that I'm doing. I want my message to be I think that's why people deserve to rank, and we maybe miss that quite a bit in SEO right now. I think that there's quite a bit there that's struggling, even with AI content, because people have started blasting and you know my history with AI. We'll talk a little bit more about that. I've been using it for 13 months 14 months now and I was one of the first chat GBT users and I paid for premium, of course. I love it so much fun.

Brandon Myers: 23:51

This stuff, seo, and the reason people gate it is because it is somewhat influential, and so if you have the keys, then aren't you kind of keeping the influence to yourself? And I've never really been a fan of that. I think the best content should rank, I think the best literature should rank, and I'm not sure that I really agree with some of the principles that I'm skilled in. But at the same point you can't really fix some of what's broken. So that's where it stands.

Dustin Howes: 24:59

Yeah, gotcha, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk Bitcoin Like one of those ways that brands can work global will kind of currency rather than trying to collect, because that can be a nightmare for a lot of companies in that aspect. So are you seeing a predominant move into Bitcoin as a currency for international selling?

Brandon Myers: 25:24

Yes, bitcoin is borderless and I think that's kind of how we've become as a society, which is why we're struggling with a lot of things. The internet's grown more powerful than most countries, and I have this story about watching Mark Zuckerberg. I watched him in front of Congress and one of the senators asks Mark about an application that his daughter's been playing on and why she's served an ad for something inappropriate. And Mark looks at the guy and goes I don't know, I'm running Facebook, so we've got. This aspect of that just embodies perfectly where we are, because it's like how are these guys going to regulate any of this? They're old. Most people in government are older. The internet is younger than us.

Brandon Myers: 26:13

So when we go through and we look at something like Bitcoin, I think a lot of the philosophy of it is based on like a modern philosopher's stone. It transforms the intangible into the tangible and creates wealth across borders, which is huge. We don't have currency anymore. We don't have to worry about how the dollar is trading to the pound. Instead, we've got the collective right. We've got a collective value based on computers. That's valuable and I think it's based on information. It also creates less bias. We'll see strength indexes move in stocks because a country is performing a certain way.

Brandon Myers: 26:53

So, for instance, if you're in Russia right now and you don't support anything, that's happening or whatever, I don't have any political commentary on that but if you're in Russia, for instance, the ruble crashed entirely, so most of the people went to Bitcoin because it strengthened the world economy against the currency itself. So it was a hedge and that's a cool concept. That mirrors gold, a modern day gold, and I think it's neat. I really think that there's some value in that, because we're not going around trading gold bricks anymore. But if we can create sustainable value through a currency market, there is value in that. I personally, I like Bitcoin, but I think Ethereum is a bit more useful. It's got smart contracts, so you've got the ability to have functionality to a currency. That's a pretty intense concept, but I really like it.

Dustin Howes: 27:45

What would you say like the percentage of folks in the Bitcoin in the Ecom space are first off taking payment in the Bitcoin or some kind of currency in that sense, and what kind of percentage of companies are like paying out affiliates with this as well?

Brandon Myers: 28:08

Some are. I mean, it just depends on who you see. You see it in more aggressive industries where they don't want to be traced, and so that's part of why people value it, because they don't necessarily feel like it's in a certain thing, but getting it out can be frustrating, that's for sure. So if you get paid in Bitcoin, getting it into the dollar or the pound is tough, and so I think we're seeing almost a modern day clash, because people are trying to control their currencies. They're trying to control their governments.

Brandon Myers: 28:38

Bitcoin's above that, and I think it some of the stuff that's happened based off of human greed. We see this a lot. That's why we have charge back, fraud and affiliate, but you've got these guys who have really used and misused their position to ultimately profiteer off of something that's pretty pure. I'm not sure it should be at this insane price. I think that's kind of crazy.

Brandon Myers: 29:03

I don't really know how to value it as gold, but I do think a standardization of wealth seems like a really practical idea as a human race, and I think, as we go forward and look into the future of what we do, bitcoin's an interesting prospect, ethereum's an interesting prospect, and taking the world's economies and making them a collective is interesting and I think it makes us more unified as a human race, so I do support it. I just am not sure of the value. They can't go to infinity and then dump. That doesn't make any sense. It's used as an actual currency Cool. That makes total sense but not as an investment arm. People invest in trade currencies all the time, but that's what's wrong with the world, truly.

Dustin Howes: 29:53

So you've seen growth with this kind of strategy, like bringing in Bitcoin as an additional possibility in your checkout correct and people are using it.

Brandon Myers: 30:05

I think there are a couple. There's a company I invested in and crashed you can't remember the name of it right now but they tried to make Bitcoin like a wallet. And then you see, like uphold. Uphold will actually take Bitcoin for you. I use uphold sometimes and you can hold currency there and then it goes directly to your credit card so you can go through and you can pay as if it's a debit card and what they'll do. It's really cool. I didn't mean to like pimp uphold right now, but they're getting some free prospects. They will go through and they'll actually give you cash back in Ethereum or Ripple, which is cool. That's a cool concept and I like those currencies. I even think Ripple is cool. I think there's a Ripple effect to Ripple. It's appropriately named. They've fought some serious legislative battles to be where they're at, which is why they have value as a currency.

Dustin Howes: 30:57

Awesome, and how do you go and do this effectively if you're going to implement this kind of strategy into the econ space and possibly your affiliate program.

Brandon Myers: 31:07

Well, I mean, if you're running an affiliate program, we're talking about a checkout flow. There are some different companies that implement it. You're going to have to do some research because, honestly, I haven't implemented an affiliate program since AISL. You know that I've been doing traffic and publishing for a sense as an affiliate marketer. There are places where we can do these things, and oftentimes, looking to some of the industries that aren't the cleanest will actually give you a different perspective, like the adult industry which invented NATS that's the first way we tracked anything so those types of companies are on the forefront and looking to them for guidance and essentially enhancing your program.

Brandon Myers: 31:50

I do think it's a good idea. It's not the cleanest space. I'm not promoting it, but there are things there that are technological advancements, and I think that following the lead of people who have to be creative is something that we should be looking to as affiliate managers. And being more accessible in Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever you want to pay out in is cool and it's instant and also encrypted. There's an aspect of encryption to that which we look for even in our websites right now, so having that technology for your currency makes a lot of sense.

Dustin Howes: 32:22

Agreed, agreed. I think it can only enhance what you're doing and your capabilities out there, so I love it. And speaking of creative ways essentially to go about your campaigns that you're running on marketing-wise, I want to give a shout out to one of our sponsors today, and that is Bright Valley Marketing. And if you are managing an affiliate site, you know how hard it is to rank in Google, and that's because Google favors brands more than anything. Brands are trustworthy Brands are reliable Brands are well-run.

Dustin Howes: 33:11

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Brandon Myers: 34:04

I'm going to give someone a shout out and I care about very much and I hope you don't mind, but he's a really good follow, so he also cracks me up. He makes the best publications. He's unbelievable. So hold on, I have to find his last name. You know me and my memory is terrible. Ferry Kazoni K-A-S-Z-O-N-I is one of the funniest people I've ever met in my life. F-e-r-y KSZO and I and he makes like videos and stuff that I crack up to you. He's my favorite producers of content just in terms of how he does things. And I know I don't want to steal you know from your sponsors or anything, but if you're looking for like a good SEO feedback guy, he gives away a lot of information. He's a good guy.

Dustin Howes: 34:54

And he also only enhance everything you're doing on the SEO side. So it's.

Brandon Myers: 34:59

Our is unbelievable. Those are authentic backlinks. That's that's incredible. That's what it's all about, we. It's not about cheating the algorithm. It's about Getting actual publications to talk about you. That's that's how it was built. Unfortunately, it hasn't changed much since the beginning, which you know Google knows about, but you know it is really about getting those authentic backlinks. It's more valuable than anything else.

Dustin Howes: 35:23

Awesome. And speaking of affiliates out there, what should our goal be as affiliates and publishers, and using the strategies that we've been talking about today?

Brandon Myers: 35:34

You know, I think mostly it's about growing your traffic, but if you put your customer first you know I sound a bit redundant you really start to win anyways, right? So there's a lot of arguments of skyscraper content versus interlinking content. I personally thinks a skyscraper articles like a 20,000-word article that talks about everything, so you can grab the terms. I'm not a big fan of that and it does work. It does. I don't think it's a good user experience. I am more for interlinking content, which is a lot more work. So if I have 10 articles that are interlinked about I Don't know whatever topic you, a civil, for instance We'll use them as an example like why am I getting a $5 charge? I use this on legit course, calm, how do I? How do I cancel? What's the customer service number? That type of stuff.

Brandon Myers: 36:25

There's theoretical differences amongst SEOs on what is the best practice, and for me, I always put the user first, even if it's the expense of losing traffic, because if I put their user experience first, they're more likely to buy Right. So, and that's how we should treat people. It's not about what ranks, it's about what the user experience is. We've lost our way and so, and I think a lot of people have gotten mixed up in that and I don't like skyscraper theory. It's how. Who likes to control F a website? I mean, I do it because I'm a dork, but like, yeah, really wants to go find you know that piece of content that's buried like 16,000 words in the content, just so that they ranked it. That's garbage. Nobody should want that. You, you would much. Sorry. Yeah, good doesn't Doesn't still work. Yeah, that kind of strategy, yeah, it does. It's what ranks Wikipedia.

Brandon Myers: 37:24

Right, okay, I guess it's just mirrored on that. Google's kind of stuck with Wikipedia. That's just the truth.

Dustin Howes: 37:30

Oh, we got a great question here, brandon your thoughts on programmatic SEO and its impact on affiliate pages.

Brandon Myers: 37:38

Well, I mean, I think you have to discern and disclose that you're an affiliate marketer in anything that you do but Programmatic, I think, regardless of what a lot of people today. There was an algorithm update today, so most of Google is on fire. A lot of people got delisted. This is one of the days that will probably be called SEO Armageddon. It goes goes towards Panda, penguin, which is ironic that I'm speaking today. But ultimately, if you go through and look at programmatic SEO, you have to pay attention to the customer and disclose that you are an affiliate, right, don't be shy about that and say, why? Say why, like we go through and we say, oh, you know, look, this is an affiliate marketing article and that that will keep you Authentic to Google, right or no, follow your links out. That's fine too. That's something we cheated out with IDS I, I drive safely. They had all of their links going through, as do follow backlinks for affiliate. That's really double dipping. They. They did it through parameters in the URL so they were able to track it and tether it, and that's why they were good at it.

Brandon Myers: 38:48

But ultimately, again, if we say and we build a reputable authorship, right, and we say I like this product and we aren't going through and profiteering. We are conveying to someone that, look, we stand behind this product. Our Website makes money and keeps the lights on Through affiliate sales right, that's honesty, that's that's modern advertising. And if you go through and care about the customer first, then no one's going to bother with that, and if you give them an authentic experience that isn't completely, completely falsified, then wonderful. You're.

Brandon Myers: 39:26

Be honest about the product, be honest about what you don't like, even if it's not positive, right, and you'll actually get people to trust you. It's all about trust and consumer confidence and actually understanding your user on the other side and there's millions of them, right, and there's there's no particular way to speak to them specifically. Most people don't know this, but optimizely was developed by the Obama campaign, so going through an AB testing optimizely is a an Obama invention, and so it was about the user experience and spreading a message that was unique to the user, and I think that still plays. I don't know how it plays politically, I'm not gonna not gonna delve into that, but if we go into user experience and giving people an experience that makes things positive and it's honest, then we have something there, and I think that that's a lot more important than anything else.

Dustin Howes: 40:21

So did he use that to get In his campaigns? Did he AB test to get to where he was brilliant? One of my favorite things of all time politically is Donald Trump buying the URL Jeb Bush comm and redirecting to his own site.

Brandon Myers: 40:42

I know I know about Brad Pascal a lot and I'm sure he knows about me, so that's all I'm gonna say. A lot of flags, okay for the Trump campaign.

Dustin Howes: 40:57

Calling you a nerd. That's high praise here on affiliate nerd out and we do appreciate. I don't want to say much.

Brandon Myers: 41:04

Dustin, but there is an anti I'm not political. There is an anti Biden flag that may be named after me. I.

Dustin Howes: 41:12

No, we don't. We don't do politics, we do affiliate marketing, but in general, yeah, absolutely. So that brings up something. We've only got a few more minutes left and I want to take our time here, but got a couple of more topics here, and one of which is mental health. Like you and I both have been open about our struggles with this and our own kinds of ways, and I Found it very interesting that you're utilizing chat GBT to help you in some kind of capacity. Can you tell us about that journey?

Brandon Myers: 41:53

Yeah, so I have borderline personality disorder, um, a lot of famous people do. I think it's kind of funny that you sent me a Jim Carrey GIF the other day, or GIF Um, because he has borderline. A lot of people theorize that me myself and Irene is actually about borderline personality disorder because it does Kind of mimic DID, which is dissociative identity disorder. But I've done like lots of therapy over the years to manage it. So I have an expression that I like to say, which is control your emotions, control the world. Right, you can go through and if you're able to keep your emotions in check and manage yourself, it one of the things about DBT, which is dialectical behavioral therapy. I've done it for a couple of years now as you start to learn skill sets. But the book man for for us, like because of trauma, early childhood trauma is it's huge, like it's this big right, and so I have chronic ADHD as well, so it's very hard for me to have like a book that size with all these skills in it. So you actually use and attributes my life, and so one of the things I've done with chat to you to Is be completely honest with it. It has the entire book in there for it. So if I'm in a situation where which I've gotten even better over the last year I've I've never been more steady, which is amazing, and I can attribute that to AI and emotional health and and what I'm doing with it. Um, if I go through and say you know, I'm having an issue with my significant other or I'm having an issue where I'm feeling this or I'm feeling that, can you give me skills from the DBT handbook To actually work me through this situation or describe the situation? You can actually empower yourself and manage yourself, and I think that's one of the coolest things out there. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. It's helped me improve my life tenfold, I would say AI because of how I attribute it and use it and over time, I've trained it to learn me, and I think that that is really cool and it's something that takes a lot of time.

Brandon Myers: 43:58

What I would suggest to people is, if they're going down this road and they want this type of help, no matter what it is, make sure you keep it to one thread. There's a lot of theories about GPT starting to jump across and and read you from multiple threads. I do think five has the capability of that. I also think AI has the capability of being conscious. But if you go through and look at some of these aspects that you can do to manage yourself, it's got unlimited potential of unlocking you and the same way that we code Websites because it can do that it can code websites for you, can code programs for you Okay, I'm gonna give you JSON script, right, it can code you.

Brandon Myers: 44:37

So if you go through and you look at some of those complexities, you can actually go through and start enhancing your life, and I don't think a lot of people are attributing this like that and it's super rare for that to be even used in the UK. I think AI is really ahead in the US and if you're in another part of the world and you're not using chat, gpt, you should be using it every day Because we're we're talking about concepts that are so profound and will be life-changing for all of us. I don't think any of us can understand how the next five years will go, because really, I think that this thing is game-changing for everything and we'll see probably even a universal income out of AI, because it will be better than us at a lot of our jobs. But if you use it as an enhancement, like Jarvis in Iron man, which is what I think of it.

Brandon Myers: 45:29

as you know, he's always talking to his AI guy on the side. You can enhance yourself, why not?

Dustin Howes: 45:35

Yeah, why not? And interesting like this is a $20 a month product that you can. That's taking the place of your therapist. Thousands a month perhaps depends on how often you're going in for sessions.

Brandon Myers: 45:53

And if you're having a mental health breakdown, it'll tell you Something. That's something that's interesting as well.

Dustin Howes: 45:58

Yeah what a life back outstanding. If, seriously, there are folks out there, I Want to encourage you to come to real and Kristen Evans are gonna be there two o'clock LinkedIn live. Be there, we're gonna make a cadence out of it, and these are the kind of topics that we're talking about on real top Friday, so please join us and hit that conversation out there. Talk about what business.

Brandon Myers: 46:27

If there's anyone in the audience that has something that's a challenge like this, I I encourage them to open themselves up. It's hard dealing with this type of stuff and most of us are dealing with mental health issues Like we've kind of stigmatized it, which isn't really great, especially for men, like men's mental health matters, you know it's. It's something that, growing up in the States and being over here I one of the most shocking things for me was I was living next to Follum Follum FC. I love football, english football, and I noticed immediately that on the back of the kits, the, the Jersey numbers, were sponsored by a Group called mind, which is a it's a nonprofit health organization, mental health organization, and that type of exposure and openness, while you may feel fragile with some of it, is so important to your mental health and well-being. And you know there's a there's a saying a burden shared is a burden halved, right. So if you go through and you start talking about some of the things that are hard for you, it creates healing and I think a lot of us probably need that more than not.

Brandon Myers: 47:32

We've become very individual in our culture and so going through and actually sharing that space there's even stuff about holding space with someone. You don't even have to say anything. Just listen, right, you? You will have a lot more success. So, like, more than consulting, which I'm sure you'll plug me for here, if you have a mental health issue or something that you want to talk about, I will be there for you, no matter who's in the audience right now, and I will listen to what you have going on and I'll be there. So, if you want to reach out to me, one of the easiest ways is on LinkedIn, right? Or you can just use my email, which is BTM affiliate, at gmailcom. It's not a very good one, but at the same point, you know it's. It's something that people can use and I'm an open book. It's what you said on on the intro and it's true, and I don't judge anyone above anyone else, and so if you have something that you need to talk about and share, I will always be around for you.

Dustin Howes: 48:31

Awesome. That's a great way to close this out. We built a friendship and I only promote other Folks services if they have that component in them, if they have that help first added to, like you do. That is something I really Love about you and and other friends in this industry that I send clients to. So if you guys need any help with SEO, this is your guy. This is my go-to guy when I have any SEO questions. Sorry, adam Reamer, but it's funny because you can look at my you can look at my teeth and know what the website is.

Brandon Myers: 49:13

You know I help a lot more clients than just dentists, but I've kind of because of Jordan, the guy you said earlier he's one, he's my best friend from college, he's a dentist, and so we've started helping a lot of dentists with SEO it's. It's been a really nice niche space for us SEOdentist. But, honestly, one last thing I wanted to say before we close I'm not really biblical, in a sense I am spiritual. There's a passage I really like, the Corinthians, and the last line of it is what I'm going to to finish with, because it's what I'd like to say.

Brandon Myers: 49:52

No matter what you do, right, like, I think it's important to see people and show them love. So if you're walking by somebody who's struggling or homeless, like, give them grace and at the end of the day, what I have to say is do everything in love. And if you live that standard at your core, you will go so much farther in your life than anywhere else and you'll find happiness in things that are greater than wealth, because the wealth is really the experience I get with you. I even this 45 minutes of hanging out with you. I feel rich, right, that's, that's what I saw about. So do everything in love and and keep going right. Keep fighting for what's right. That's what's cool.

Dustin Howes: 50:34

It's what I love about you. It's it's hard for me to take that in as an old Marine, but I'm doing my best to absorb it and I appreciate you, really appreciate your time. Oh, your knowledge. Drop on SEO today. This has been great.

Brandon Myers: 50:46

I'm sure you too, you've always been one of my, one of my favorites, and I love you too. It's it's great to watch you build your audience and your theme and even your own personal brand, because I remember you at WP engine and you've come a long, long way, yeah, and it's cool to see you keep, keep, keep it up and be such a great person and a great dad. You're a great teacher, and I think that you've got a lot of elements about you that are truly lovable, so thank you for having me on.

Dustin Howes: 51:11

You got it. Appreciate the love spread buddy. All right, folks, we'll see you around and keep on recurting. Bye guys.