In an interview with John Kremer of the Book Marketing Success Podcast, Jason Barnard, The Brand SERP Guy, talks about search engine result pages and knowledge panels.
Jason Barnard is the author of The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business: Google Is Your New Business Card and It Is Up to You to Optimize Yours.
Brand SERPs are search engine result pages generated by Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo when users type a set of words into a search engine to discover more details for the information they seek.
Jason Barnard, The Brand SERP Guy, teaches people how to convince search engines to showcase the optimal details about themselves, their companies, or their brand names.
As Jason notes, Think of the Google search results for your brand name as a digital business card—the single most important online representation of your brand message.
Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on The Definition of SERP and Its Focus
[00:00:00] John Kremer: Hello, everybody. I want to welcome you to this episode of the Book Marketing Success podcast. Today, I have a great guest. He’s a book author and he’s called the Brand SERP Guy. And it’s Jason Barnard. And he’s coming to us right now from France early in the morning, late at night for me here in Taos, New Mexico. And let’s say the time, 2:00 AM.
[00:00:33] John Kremer: And anyway, I met Jason on matchmaker.fm, which I encourage you if you want to be a guest on podcast, to join that because it’s a great place to meet people that are interesting people. And Jason is very interesting. And he made a video showcasing how interesting he is. So, I’ll link to that video again in this episode. But I wanted to bring Jason on because he’s just I think a brilliant guy from what I’ve seen so far and I really want to learn more from him. So, that’s why I have him on. So, Jason, tell me more about Brand SERP.
[00:01:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Thank you for having me, John. That’s some incredible introduction and I’m terribly flattered, blushing a little bit now, the same color as my shirt. I tend to forget that people don’t know what a SERP is. It’s SERP Search Engine Results Page. So, it’s what you see on Google when you search for something or on Bing for that matter. And it’s obviously some people talk about SEO Search Engine Optimisation. My niche in that world is very, very small and at the same time very, very big because I only focus on what your audience sees when they Google your name, your brand name, or in this case, your book name. And so, it’s niche in the sense that I only focus on one little part, but it’s a niche that everybody needs and I love it.
What Can a Brand Do to Show Up at the Top of Their SERP?
[00:02:10] John Kremer: I actually I really caught it when I saw what you were doing because SEO can be very, very complicated. It can be time-consuming and all that. But what you’re talking about is just improving the results of your Search Engine Result Page and the Knowledge Panel that goes with it. And I think, from what you’ve just told me when we were conversing just before this, is that they’re not that hard. It doesn’t take as much work as SEO per se. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do SEO, but I really want to know what can an author who considers their name to be a brand name, but also book titles are often brand names like Chicken Soup for the Soul, the dummy series, and things like that, what can they do to make sure that they show up at the top of the Search Engine Results Page?
[00:03:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Yeah. SEO can be complicated and I use some SEO techniques because I come from the SEO world. But what I’ve brought into this world is the very simple SEO techniques that anybody can do. So, what I’m doing is applying simple marketing to influencing, maybe even controlling what Google shows, when your audience google’s your brand name or your book name or your book series name.
[00:03:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I think what changes here, it’s a little bit like Online Reputation Management, but when you don’t have a problem and you’re simply saying, I want my let’s call it a Google Business Card, or it could even be called your little mini Google site. Because you want to make sure that on this Google mini site, this Google Business Card, Google is showing you in the light that you want to your audience and people, a lot of people who aren’t in the SEO world, immediately, oh, think it’s going to be terribly technical. I’m going to have to learn code, oh, dear me. And in fact, it isn’t. It’s marketing and it’s presenting yourself in a way that Google can understand.
Google is a child. Google wants to learn. And we, as the responsible adults in the room, need to educate the child that is Google about ourselves.
jason barnard (the brand serp guy)
[00:04:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if we take a little bit of a step back, Google’s scary, but I don’t think it is. Google is a child. Google wants to learn. And we, as the responsible adults in the room, need to educate Google about us. So, we’re educating this child about who we are, what we do, who our audience is, and what that audience wants to see, because Google wants to show our audience what is valuable, helpful, and relevant to them when they’re looking for us.
[00:04:50] John Kremer: It’s not really. It’s much of a dictatorship, but some people think of it because Google at the very basic is trying to give the best information out there on something. They’ve made mistakes with some of their misinformation and disinformation stuff. But for the most part, they’re trying to help people to actually find the things that they really want to find and find the best stuff within that category.
[00:05:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yep. Exactly. You said it a hundred percent. Google say we want to get our users to the answer to that question or the solution to their problem as efficiently as possible. And obviously, they want the best answer and the best solution. And if we want to look at how we as authors, I’m an author, I’ve written the book. We’ll talk about that later. I actually wrote the book as an experiment. I do masses of experiments to see how I can educate this child that is Google, how I can help it to understand, how I can help it to help me, or help it to help my audience, which helps me which is a nice way of looking at it.
[00:05:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the first step is incredibly simple. Google is looking for the website that represents you, that you control. And it seems strange that Google would be looking to you to describe yourself, but it is. I call that an Entity Home. It’s a page on the web that represents you, the person, the author, where you explain clearly who you are, what you do, and who your audience is. And from that perspective, Google is looking for that because if you imagine this child, it’s got a broken plate in its hand, and it’s trying to put that plate together as a puzzle, because it’s found lots of bits of information about you all around the web, and it can’t really fit it together. And if it can fit it together, it’s not a hundred percent sure even if you’ve got Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn’t necessarily a hundred percent true and Google knows that.
[00:06:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it doesn’t need corroboration from other sources. So, it’s got this broken plate and it’s fitting it together. And what it’s looking for is you, the person to present to it, the completed puzzle. And that’s what you do on that webpage. You present it with a completed puzzle. And then the little child says I have got it right. And that’s when it starts to allow you to control what your audience sees when they Google your name. And that Entity Home, and this is really important. Some authors are going to say my publisher has got a website for me or a web page, sorry, or my website for me. And that’s fine. Problem there is you do not own that webpage. Your publisher owns the webpage. So, you’re giving control of your own Entity Identity to your publisher. I saw, I think it was Stephen King, one of his books. It’s a Facebook Page that Google sees as the Entity Home, the place that wraps that. Facebook is not a place to allow Google, to be looking at as a child, to understand who you are, what you’re doing, who your audience is, because Facebook is full of very strange things from time to time.
[00:08:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You’re looking for a website that you are in. So, my Entity Home is jasonbarnard.com. And it’s as simple as that and all my Entity Home, jasonbarnard.com. What I have done is educated the child to understand that belongs to me and it represents me and it can trust me when I talk about myself.
[00:08:26] John Kremer: Right.
[00:08:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then I can educate it. And the education process is long and it’s slow, but if you get it right, it gives you incredible power. And I invite you to search my name, Jason space Barnard, obviously two names, and see what comes up. And it gets really interesting really quickly. And it’s a massive rabbit hole. Once you start, believe me, you’re not going to get out of this rabbit hole. And it’s a lot of fun. It’s incredibly interesting. And it does bring results.
Setting Up an Alert to Track When Somebody Googles Your Brand Name By Using a Platform Called Software as a Service
[00:08:55] John Kremer: Yes. I understand that at one point from my name, John Kremer, I owned probably nine out of the ten first listings on Google. And they found different, my social media pages and some of my websites and things like that. And normally, like two or three pages from my main website, which I presume is what happens with you too and something like that. And that’s given that with my name, John Kremer, with a K R E M E R, you wouldn’t think I would have that much competition, but there’s at least 20 people in the world that spelled the name the same. One’s a Sports Fisher in Alabama and other’s a German Psychologist and he’s written books. You think you would show up more. There’s a minister. There’s a football player in Pennsylvania. I see them every once in a while, because, of course, I have a Google alert telling me when somebody is writing about me. And I’m sure that’s probably one of your recommendations is to set up an alert.
[00:10:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Definitely set up an alert. I’ve actually built a SaaS platform. It’s Software as a Service. And it actually tracks what appears when somebody Googles your brand name, it gives you information about the sources that Google is looking for, and it actually tells you how to educate Google, which sources Google is getting those possibly pieces of plates from.
[00:10:29] John Kremer: So, a little piece of software code or something that people sign up for that service and then, boom, they’re halfway there at least.
[00:10:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. If you’re willing to put in the work, it basically says, do this, do that, do that, do that and bingo. And it also tracks the mentions, but I didn’t build it as a mention tracker, but it tracks mentions actually better than mention.com or even Google itself which I’m pretty pleased with. And it was total luck that it happened to be that good at it. It came out of something else I was trying to do. But that’s the beauty of building these things is that you’re aiming to do something and if you’re not closed-minded, and you’re able to take a step back and see actually it does this too and I hadn’t thought of that. And being open and honest with yourself is, I might not quite achieve what I wanted over there, but it’s had this knock on effect over here, which is really interesting.
[00:11:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And when you talk about dominating your own Brand SERP, that’s an interesting point, because we all have ambiguous names. Jason Barnard, there are about 300 in the world. There’s a footballer like you. There’s an academic in San Francisco. And yet, I totally dominate and that’s a lot to do with the child being incredibly confident in what it’s understood about me. And so building confidence, so you’ve got this child, it’s got its plate and the more you can build its confidence in how it has built this little plate about you, the better you will perform in terms of the way it presents you.
[00:12:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And you mentioned bluelinks, but there’s also Video Boxes. There’s author boxes. There’s Twitter Boxes. I just got song boxes on mine this morning. You have my site. Obviously, you want your site to rank number one because that is where you want people to come to find more about you from yourself and that’s what Google wants as well. But you can also, underneath that, I’ve got my Twitter Boxes because I use Twitter a lot. I’ve got all the boxes which is articles I’ve written for relevant journals and media platforms in my industry. And I’ve got Video Boxes because I produce a lot of video. And so Google is this multimedia machine. So if you can feed it the multimedia content, it will show it.
An Example Where a Client Got Mixed Up With the Same Name on Google and How an Entity Home Could Have Helped Control It
[00:12:43] John Kremer: Wow. I want to add more feed to Google. And this is really important to book authors, especially, it would be for book publishers, but actually, I think authors should take control of their own name. Publishers would be terrible at it.
[00:13:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I actually had a client. There were two authors with the same name. And Google kept getting the books mixed up between the two authors. And she actually asked somebody at Google, can you correct this because you’re mixing up these things? Somebody at Google or personally Google actually went in and corrected it, which is brilliant because there’s a little feedback button when things like that happen. And then within a week it switched back and then she came to me and she said, I don’t understand why it switched back. And the point is this child that is the machine actually ultimately makes the decision. Even if you get somebody at Google to correct a piece of information about you, if the machine disagrees, it will switch it back. And so, I had to then do my Sherlock Holmes of digging down to find out why the child was misunderstanding. And it turns out that the two authors with the same name had the same publisher and the publisher had one page that mixed them up. And from her perspective, it took her a long time to get the publisher to correct that page so that it’s separated them correctly.
[00:14:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it’s easy to look back over the spilled milk and say why shouldn’t have got the milk bottle out of the fridge when you’ve got greasy hands. But if she had an Entity Home where she controlled it, she wouldn’t have had to ask the publisher because the child would have been looking to her website to see which book she had written and not the publisher’s website.
[00:14:37] John Kremer: And I think that’s really important. It’s one of the key, I guess you could say, influencers sites probably for Google for authors is Goodreads.
[00:14:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah.
How Having Your Own Domain Can Improve Your Brand SERP
[00:14:52] John Kremer: And you should obviously have your name on Goodreads. But Goodreads keeps wanting to give me these German psychologist’s books as mine, and I keep telling them no, no, those aren’t mine. Amazon does the same thing. It’s trying to associate those German psychology books with me and I’m going no. Sometimes you have to keep telling them.
[00:15:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. You have to insist. The problem with ambiguity of names is that, and as you can see them, and as you’ve just said, Amazon, Goodreads, all of these platforms have massive problems with that because of the amounts of information they need to deal with and the lack of human beings to actually do the work. And Google just looks at that information and aggregates it. John Mueller from Google calls it reconciliation. The machine is reconciling this fragmented information, which is why I use that plate analogy. It’s reconciling the information and the reconciliation needs to happen on your own website, as I said earlier on.
[00:15:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, buying your own domain, creating even a one page website is such a good idea. And creating a one page website using WordPress or Wix or Foursquare or one of those other platforms is a very simple task, but the domain name itself needs to belong to you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your name. Mine is jasonbarnard.com and that’s logical for my audience. But it could be jasonmartinbarnard.com or jasonbarnard.me or jasonbarnard.co.
[00:16:30] John Kremer: johnkremerauthor.com or something like that. Especially when you have, if you’re named John Smith and there’s a hundred thousand people with the name, you would want to go, John Kremer author, John Kremer book author, or something like that, I mean John Smith and to distinguish yourself from all the other John Smiths.
[00:16:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. A hundred percent. And that is one way. Another way is to keep a middle initial John B. Smith, that reduces it. You still got ambiguity, but John Bob Smith that was already moving us away from the ambiguity. And we’re not going to have to go down that rabbit hole, but there are also pseudonyms that come into play which create immense problems for Google.
[00:17:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): My mother is a Jazz Musician. She’s called Kate Westbrook. And there is an author who uses the pseudonym Kate Westbrook. And so now Google is starting to put my mother and this woman next to each other on my Knowledge Panel, which is slightly disturbing.
Introduction of the Knowledge Panel and Its Sources of Information
[00:17:36] John Kremer: So you have two mothers now.
[00:17:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brilliant. Wonderful. Who could wish for more.
[00:17:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. The Knowledge Panel, we talked about that a little bit before. I think it’s really important to say what it is. The Knowledge Panel is what you see on the right-hand side on desktop, when you search for a person, or a film, or a book in fact, or a company. And it’s Google’s understanding of the facts and it’s Google’s summary of that understanding of the facts. So what Google is doing is saying here is a summary of what I have understood about this person, this author, or this book, or this company, or this film that I think the audience of that person, book, film, whatever, is going to be interested in. And a lot of people think it just comes from Wikipedia and that’s partially true. Let’s say 60% of it comes from Wikipedia at the moment, but that used to be 90% and it’s dropping very quickly. Google gets its information from all sorts of different places.
[00:18:38] John Kremer: It’s tough with Wikipedia because you can’t always control that listing because new editors coming in all the time, changing things and so on. But I have noticed that it used to be almost a hundred percent for me on the right side was Wikipedia. And that was not always useful information for me. And now I’m seeing that Google is starting to draw from other sources.
[00:19:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And in fact, the Software as a Service platform that I’ve built also tracks that. It tracks how much of information is coming from different sources, which those sources are, so that we can then identify where we can place information to help this child build the correct plate. So, it’s not just having an Entity Home saying this is to the child. This is the information that I’m presenting to you. It’s checking that the information about you all around the web creates the pieces that do actually fit together. So, it all makes sense that all of this corroborative information is accurate and true and then saying where is Google looking within my industry? I need to place information there too, to help the child better understand and build its confidence.
[00:19:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, there’s a whole process that you can build. And what’s really interesting, you were talking about kind of promotion and making videos and so on and so forth, the more that you do that, the more information the child has, and the child is hungry for information. And when you think, oh, I can’t create 200 pages because it’s too many. 200 might be too many. I don’t know. I’ve got 200 different pages that talk about me because I created them. But Google digests literally thousands of billions of pages a day. So, your 200 pages is absolutely nothing to this child. It’s a tiny drop in the ocean. It goes through it. It processes the whole thing. It’s very important for you, for its understanding of you, but in the bigger scheme of things in terms of what Google is doing every day, it does it on such a massive scale. We can’t even begin to understand and comprehend, I think.
[00:20:48] John Kremer: And I think, it really serves in, like you said, you have 200 pages out there on other websites, not just yours.
[00:20:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Exactly.
[00:20:58] John Kremer: And so, you’re helping Google find you through other platforms. And that’s one of the things that with podcasting and syndicating a podcast like this, it’s going to about 40 websites, but they all lead back to my main website.
[00:21:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yup. You’ve just nailed exactly what needs to happen. You need to point from your Entity Home to these sources and these sources need to point back and then Google, because it follows links, it goes back and forwards, seeing the same information on all of these different sites, especially within a sphere that is incredibly relevant to you. And that’s how you’re going to build up its confidence. You basically educate this child by pure repetition.
The Software as a Service Platform Points Out Which Pages Exist That You Need to Correct and Fit The Pieces Together and How The Concept Is Very Simple
[00:21:43] John Kremer: So, your software is a service platform that could help you create all these pages?
[00:21:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It points you to where the pages…
[00:21:51] John Kremer: Or it teaches you how to do it? I mean, it teaches you go to this site, create a page, go to this site.
[00:21:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. The first thing it does is point out which pages exist already that you now need to go and correct and make sure that the pieces all fit together because that’s what people miss is that they failed to realise that they’ve created or themselves, or they’ve allowed to be created around them, a very confusing, fragmented version of themselves that the child finds very confusing.
[00:22:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the first thing to do is the housekeeping. Correct all of that. Then the next thing to do is say now, where can I start hitting the sources that the child is looking at? And if you take the child analogy, you’re the parent, then the sister or the brother repeating the same thing, then the grandmother. Those are all obvious. But then you need to think who else can the child listen to? Who it will be confident in and they trust is authoritative? The history teacher for history. The geography teacher for geography. You wouldn’t send the child to the geography teacher for something about history.
[00:23:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you need to make sure that you’re placing this information in those authoritative trusted places that are authoritative and trustworthy for your topic in this case, authorship and whatever topic you happen to be writing about or whatever genre you’re writing about.
[00:23:16] John Kremer: Yeah. Because I’ve been working on podcasting and so on and discovering not only all the syndicates and naps and directories for podcasts, but I also, because I do a lot of videotaping of the podcast and also syndicate that, I’ve learned, like YouTube has a sharing part in for, I don’t know, about 10 different websites that you can share your video too. So, I started sharing that video to every one of those websites. And the neat thing about that is that it’s reactivated some of the, as you said, things that you created a long time ago and then you just let slide.
[00:24:01] John Kremer: So, I have a couple a Blogspot Page profiles and I’ve let them go. But now, because YouTube encourages me to share it there, I’ve been sharing it. So, I’ve reactivated those pages and that’s true for a couple of other pages, a mix.com page, and a couple of other places. And because YouTube is connected with Google, hopefully, that’s going to help lead everything back again to my main website at bookmarketingbestsellers.com. But it’s something that I’m starting to play with as I understand what they’re doing. And so, it’s kinda neat because they’ve encouraged me to do it.
[00:24:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. A hundred percent. And your analysis is spot on. I think you’ve really nailed this. We’ve only been talking for 35 minutes, I think, but you’ve already nailed what it is that needs to be done. And what I love about this is, it’s so simple. Somebody told me, don’t share the secret that you’ve discovered and I’m thinking, it’s so simple. Any of you can do it. It’s not something I’ll be able to keep a secret. What I need to do is write the book, create the courses, and build the SaaS platform that brings value to actually implement what I’m talking about because what I’m talking about is idiotically simple, which is lovely. And when I think one of those moments in life where you wake up one morning and you think, that’s it. And the Entity Home idea with the corroboration and the broken plates and the reconciliation was that moment for me. You think I can explain this concept in 15 or 20 seconds? And that is a great sign that this is something incredibly powerful.
[00:25:50] John Kremer: Right. But now you’ve provided the SaaS, Software as a Service platform, that makes it easy for people to actually implement your ideas. Once they’ve realise, oh, I need to do this, to me it’s like plain simple. Okay. Go to jasonbarnard.com, something or other, or wherever you find the Software as a Service and we’ll provide the link in the listing for this. And you can share it at any time in the audio as well. That’s fine.
[00:26:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. My company is called Kalicube and the platform is called Kalicube Pro. And actually, I also do consulting. And I did one hour of consulting with a guy called J. Scott Graham, who’s an author, and his Knowledge Panel, what was appearing on the right was not what he wanted. And I gave him one hour of consulting and three months later, he wrote me an email about this long saying, thank you so much. It’s all sorted out. It’s now incredibly brilliant. It’s exactly what I wanted. And once again, it took me one hour to explain to him, not just the theory which we’ve already got, but exactly what he needed to do step by step. And he did it. And there was not one line of geeky code in there. It was all normal, everyday human being, marketing, and writing, and correcting information.
Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) in Dominating His Brand SERP as an Author
[00:27:12] John Kremer: That sounds great. I’ve noticed in setting up the podcast syndication that some of the syndication platforms are terrible in terms of trying to say, hey, I got a podcast, can you list it? And then they’re just like really complicated to try to figure it out. So, one of the things I did is I figured it out and now I’ve shared it with people in my podcasting for millions to millions course so that people can understand. Here are the steps. It’s really simple. Once you’ve dug out where it belongs, things like that. And I would guess it you’re a Kali… what is it again?
[00:28:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Kalicube Pro.
[00:28:02] John Kremer: Kalicube Pro. Okay. And it’s Kalicube.com?
[00:28:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, you got Kalicube.com and Kalicube.pro which are two different sites. And there’s an interesting point is I did an experiment once again, I’ll just spend my life doing experiments. And what I did was say, I have Kalicube the company, that’s Kalicube.com that does the Consultancy Service and exists as a Company, then Kalicube.pro, which is Kalicube Pro the SaaS platform, Kalicube.academy, which is the courses, and jasonbarnard.com. So, each individual entity has its own website. And that has proved incredibly powerful to, for totally dominating, when you search for any of them, they will all appear on each other’s Brand SERPs. So, I managed to control a great deal of what’s being shown. So, that’s a really neat trick.
[00:28:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if we come on to the book, another experiment is I actually started writing the book and I’ll show it because this is the opportunity. I started writing it not particularly because I wanted to write a book, but I wanted to see what effect it would have on my own Knowledge Panel, my own Brand SERP, and Google’s understanding of me because Google understood me as a musician because I was a musician. As you can see behind me here, this one, if I can do it, this one here, and this one here, and this one here, it’s all music. So, I’m actually a musician in Google’s brain. And by publishing the book, I could get it to switch my subtitle from Jason Barnard Musician to Jason Barnard Author, which is more in line with what I do today in terms of digital marketing.
[00:29:46] John Kremer: And then in terms of actually selling the things that you’re doing now, because a musician stuff is probably more locally controlled or real life controlled rather than digitally, but marketing a product of service or Software as a Service, you want to show up as something other than a musician probably.
[00:30:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Exactly. Yeah, no, I understand. And the problem with musician is because of the way Google educated the child to start with. It educated the child using trusted databases that a human curated. So, it started with Wikipedia, Wikidata, Free base, IMDb, MusicBrainz, Discogs, that kind of site. So, the machine was trained on the blue dog, yellow koala cartoon on my IMDb, which had music in it plus MusicBrainz plus Discogs plus Deezer plus Spotify, all of these sources that were just saying Jason Barnard is a musician because I was a musician for 20 years and getting Google to change its mind once that’s been anchored in its brain. This child wants it to understood something. It’s very difficult to convince it, to let go of that understanding.
[00:31:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it’s taken me quite a long time and the book was the trigger for that particular change, which was great. So, I learned from that then I wanted to see what happens if you search the name of the book. And you get a Knowledge Panel such as this is the book by Jason Barnard. It comes from Google books obviously. And it then links through to me. So if you’re searching for the book, you can find me the author and vice versa.
[00:31:23] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then I tried another experiment and we can talk about reviews because I think that’s a really important topic here is I got reviews on Amazon, like everybody. And then I thought, okay, Goodreads, obviously second choice. And I thought you can actually get reviews in the Knowledge Panel itself. So, people go to the Knowledge Panel on Google, they click on it, and they give a review. So I got, I think it was 15 reviews in the Knowledge Panel, an experiment. I had no idea what would happen. I don’t know.
Asking Associates to Give Reviews to Improve Your Knowledge Panel
[00:31:52] John Kremer: Did you ask friends or associates or influencers to go and click?
[00:31:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I ask 16 friends and 15 gave me a review. They’ve all read the book. They all know what I talk about. So, they’re not giving reviews, the reviews mean something. But basically I just reached out to people I knew and said, this is an experiment. Could you give me a review on the Knowledge Panel? And the interesting thing is, number one, of course, the Knowledge Panel now looks much better because I’ve got these five stars reviews, but also in America, when you search for the book, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but sometimes when you search things in America, you get what I call Filter Pills at the top. So, you will have overview. For me, it’s Overview, Videos, Listen, and Education Songs, and something else I can’t remember.
[00:32:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And what happened with the book, so you can filter basically. So, if you search for Jason Barnard, you can click on Videos and it’ll just give you a list of videos. You can click on Listen and it will show you places you can listen to my work, my music. And this is for me, incredibly interesting because once you get that, it starts to look like a real mini site on Google about me. And I’m figuring out now how to control this mini site, how I can build this mini site on Google. I’m really excited. But the book got one too, and the book got one where it says Overview of the book and then Reviews and you click on it. It just shows you all the reviews.
[00:33:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, that’s very powerful because I’ve managed to get Google to expand the presence of the book itself on its own Brand SERP. And the other really interesting thing is now if you search for what is a Brand SERP, the Knowledge Panel for the book shows up. So, I’ve turned the term Brand SERP, which I coined a few years ago. Now, when you search for it, not only do you get my answer at the top from my own website, but you get the opportunity to buy a book, which for me is commercially very good news.
Google’s Problem With Multifactedness
[00:33:49] John Kremer: That sounds wonderful. I can see how this is just going to be magical for book authors, because it’s basically you’re talking about basically two Brand SERPs, the title of their book or their brand for books and then their name because both are important for most authors and you have to control both or you have to encourage the little kid of Google to discover what you really are about and what you’re doing. Now, for some authors I know I interviewed an author the other day that has like four or five different categories she writes in. She does a couple of fiction categories. She’s got a couple non-fiction categories. So, she’s all over the place. She probably got 30 or 40 books. Educating Google for something like that, it’s probably got to be pretty hard.
[00:34:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, no, it is. It’s incredibly complicated. A guy called Andrea Volpini from a Company called WordLift, an Italian company and they’re brilliant and he’s a genius, talks about multifaceted facetedness, I can’t even say it, multifacetedness and that’s a massive problem for this child. My problem with multifacetedness are I’ve been a musician, I’ve made records, I’ve written songs, I made a TV Series, I was a blue dog in a cartoon, I actually played five characters in the same cartoon series, I wrote it, I co-directed it, and now I’m a digital marketer specialising in Brand SERPs with the book. That’s multifacetedness taken through an extreme that Google really struggled to deal with.
[00:35:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And what I’m finding interesting here is it gives me immense opportunities to experiment and see how we can educate this child and how we can get this child to represent us correctly. And that example about the songs is, it thinks the songs are incredibly important and they are, I’m very proud of the songs that I wrote about, I played, and the album that I recorded, but right now they’re not the most important thing. So, convincing the child to show it, I think it’s important that this child shows that aspect of my life, but it needs to prioritise the digital marketing aspect, the Brand SERP aspect and now the author aspect.
John Kremer as an Author and a Podcaster
[00:36:08] John Kremer: And so I welcome you to the world of authorship.
[00:36:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thank you very much. The official welcome to the world of authors.
[00:36:17] John Kremer: I’ve been an author for, gosh, almost 40 years. When I wrote my first book, I’m still only 39.
[00:36:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brilliant.
[00:36:30] John Kremer: My mom was 39 for about 20 years. But I admit my age, I’m 73 right now. And I’m happy.
[00:36:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That surprise is I wouldn’t have guessed it. You really don’t look or your vibe and your energy is definitely much, much younger.
[00:36:49] John Kremer: My mental age is 14 or my emotional age is more accurate.
[00:36:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): How many books have you written?
[00:37:01] John Kremer: I’ve lost count, but when you count variations. So, my main book, 1,001 Ways to Market Your Books has gone through seven editions.
[00:37:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Wow.
[00:37:12] John Kremer: Over 35 years or something like that. I update it every once in a while, but it depends on how you do it because for one thing I love quotes. So, I’ve compiled like 40 quote books. I haven’t put them all up for sale yet, but I’ve compiled them. They’re all somewhere between 150 and 300 pages.
[00:37:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Are they big, long quotes or very short quotes?
[00:37:41] John Kremer: They tend to be short quotes.
[00:37:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Can you quote me please?
[00:37:45] John Kremer: Send me some great quotes and I’ll put them in.
[00:37:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Google is a child thirsty for knowledge. We need to learn to educate that.
[00:37:53] John Kremer: Send me the quotes.
[00:37:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I can just say it online.
[00:38:02] John Kremer: I have too much input and too many things to look for. So, if you want me to do something like that, because I do. I’m doing multiple podcasts as well. I do one called Tell Me a Story, which is stories. And if you want to contribute one, I’d be happy to share a great story. They’re usually, somewhere between one paragraph, five paragraphs long. If you record the audio or if you have one already telling the story, I’ll be happy to include it. Otherwise, just send me the words and I will read the story. So, I started that podcast to share my wife’s stories because she has a lot of short stories. But now, I also have a new podcast called Heroes for Today and it’s people taking a controversial position on some topic, political, social issues, things like that, where they’re being what I consider brave heroes.
[00:39:05] John Kremer: So, I’m sharing their quotes. And I’m having fun with that. I’ve actually compiled, I’ve almost done compiling two books on that compiling the quotes. So that’s coming. I’m an intense Content Creator. I’m well known for as a book marketing expert, but I do a terrible job sometimes marketing my own stuff because I’m going, oh, new bubble and used to call it chasing off in another direction to write another book. And so anyway, it’s interesting. So, I end up in a lot of different categories as well, but that’s fine. The thing is if my name shows up, all the books will show up.
[00:39:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. The Google child has made the connections and it can make those connections and those connections, we think they’re incredibly obvious. We’re thinking why isn’t it understanding when it gets it wrong? And it isn’t half as obvious as we think it is. It’s obvious to us, but it isn’t necessarily obvious to the child that is Google. So, it’s our responsibility to educate this child.
[00:40:21] John Kremer: It’s what happens when people, I worked with a lot of authors and they’ll write something about their book and I’m going, okay. Now, think of yourself as somebody who doesn’t know anything about your topic. What you’ve just written isn’t going to help me because it’s written from your knowledge standpoint, but like you said, the Google kid’s not going to understand it.
[00:40:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I had a massive problem writing the book with that. I actually got some help from a lady called Emily Batdorf. And basically, I thought it was already obvious and she was just, I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything that you’re talking about because you’re using all these words that I’d never seen or heard before. And we had to go through the whole book and explain and make sure that we were explaining as we went along. And she really helped me turn it into a story.
[00:41:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it’s very readable and it’s not very readable, thanks to me. It’s very readable, thanks to her storytelling capacity. And she helped make it accessible to absolutely anybody. And the test was that her boss, who didn’t talk to me at all for the entire time we were writing the book, and the test was we gave it to her on a Friday evening. And on the Monday morning, she had to have read the book from start to finish and come in and hopefully say, yes, I understand that all, it made total sense. And I was very nervous that whole weekend. Would it make sense to Zoe the boss?
[00:41:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the answer is yes, it did. She came in, a company called Bright Ray Publishing, who are absolutely brilliant, helped me write the book and the lady the boss Zoe came in and said, that makes total sense and I enjoyed reading it. That’s what we want. That’s what I wanted. And I’m so happy. Thank you, Zoe. Thank you, Emily.
Controlling Twitter Boxes, Video Boxes, and Article Boxes by Engaging With The Audience on Different Platforms
[00:42:15] John Kremer: And that’s really great. I think actually the people that would really like to know your secret sauce and so on, are internet marketers, all the people that are selling digital services and so on. And they want to dominate in search engines and they all think they have that a lot of SEO people out there saying, here’s how to dominate in SEO. But you’re really talking about something really intensely practical, which is not just SEO but actually getting at the top of the page for all those little things that you’re talking about. You said, the video thing, there’s a Twitter thing now, there’s whatever the other little categories are, that you don’t want to just have the links there. You want the videos, you want the Twitter tweets, you want the whatever.
[00:43:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And Google wants to show that stuff. It wants to make these results multimedia engaging and interesting. And if you think about it, if you search for somebody’s name, Google, what it actually does is present you the different ways you can engage with that person. So, if you look up my name, Jason Barnard, you’ll get my site at the top option number one, then you’ve got Twitter, I’m on Twitter a lot, then you’ve got LinkedIn, then you’ve got my company. If you want to engage with me commercially or professionally, then you’ve got Video Boxes. If you’re interested in the videos, it will show you three videos that you can watch, then article boxes with the articles I’ve written. So, it’s basically a lot. And now it’s got songs since this morning. So, I’m terribly pleased.
[00:43:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Basically says, you can go to a site, you can interact with them on Twitter. You can listen to his songs, you can read his articles or you can watch his videos, or you can go to LinkedIn or go to his company to do business with them. And that’s giving my audience the choice of how they want to now interact with me. And that was an important point. It’s why we were talking about digital marketers.
[00:44:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We worked so hard on social media, on different platforms to engage an audience, to get that audience on board, but we often fail to think what happens when they get to the bottom of the funnel and they search my name. That’s the crucial point. And that’s the tipping point where either they tip over and they become a client, a fan, a dedicated person who loves you and your books and your products or whatever it would be, or they think actually, no, finally, doesn’t look that impressive so that Google Business Card needs to be convincing as well as being accurate and positive.
[00:44:56] John Kremer: And it’s actually probably less work to get that Google Business Card up to date and reflecting you than do all the social network stuff that so many people say, oh, you gotta be on Twitter, you gotta be on Facebook, you gotta be in LinkedIn, you gotta be on Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. And to some extent, yeah, you do. I see too many authors spend hours a day on Twitter or something like that and that’s not a good use of their time.
[00:45:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I would agree greatly. And one thing with or without the book, the courses, or the SaaS platform, if you just sit down and think about my Entity Home, where am I present? Can I correct all that information? Can I get it to link backwards and forwards from the Entity Home, which is the website that I own? In three months, your Brand SERP will look brilliant and you don’t need to buy any products from me. I don’t need to sell you anything. You just need to use your common sense.
[00:45:57] John Kremer: But the first introduction is probably your book.
[00:46:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Honestly, if you read the book, you’ll go, oh, I hope you’ll go, oh wow. It opens lots of new doors and it really is accessible to everybody. But what I meant is my position here isn’t actually that, I want to make a living, but I don’t think they want to make masses amount of money or sell millions of books. I want to understand my entire motivation here is I’m curious about how I can educate this child and to what extent I can get this child to understand me, who I am, what I do, and who my audience is and then represent me in the way that I want to be represented. And so, the curiosity drives me. If we talk about rabbit holes, Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole is one of my favorite animated gifts, just because that’s me everyday. Everday I wake up, look at something and fall into a rabbit hole and I absolutely love it.
Jason Barnard’s (The Brand SERP Guy) Brief Introduction on His Work and His Previous Profession
[00:46:53] John Kremer: Does that mean that you’re updating the Software as a Service every month or every week?
[00:47:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I do multiple things. I’ve got a database where we track 70,000 brands and we’ve been tracking them for seven years now. And that database has 400 million lines of data. It has something like a billion data points, a billion different pieces of information about different entities, people, companies, books, films. And so, I dig into the database, which I built myself, and I look at patterns and information, I look at what’s happening, and I look at where Google’s understanding has changed. I’m a bit of a geek from that perspective. But then I also look directly at what’s appearing on Google and I saw the songs this morning and that got me excited. So, I started thinking about how I can do that. How can I make the thumbnail that it shows for each song, the thumbnail that I choose and not the thumbnail which was chosen? That’s something we’re doing. I’ve got, I think about 90 songs that I’ve written, and so far, I’ve managed to get it to show about 30 thumbnails that I chose, not Google.
[00:48:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, this education it goes right down to the tiniest little image it will show for a particular song. The first thing I had to do, of course, is to educate it which songs I had written and that took me quite a long time because it seems obvious, but it isn’t. Who wrote a song that’s on an album is not, for example, The Barking Dogs, which was my group or Boowa and Kwala, which is the blue dog and yellow koala, you can see behind me here, it doesn’t say Jason Barnard. It says Boowa and Kwala and it says The Barking Dogs. So, I needed to point out to Google that I was Boowa in Boowa and Kwala, I was the blue dog, and I was in The Barking Dogs and then get it to join those dots. Once I got it to join those dots, I could start getting it to say, right, this song written by Jason Barnard, performed by Jason Barnard, at least partially, and this is the image I want, Jason Barnard wants you to show and the child goes okay, right, fine, and does it.
All of The Big Companies Like Amazon Are Just Building a Child That Aims to Understand The World
[00:49:00] John Kremer: It’s the same challenge even in Amazon, because Amazon, for example, with my book has all six editions and trying to get them to showcase the new edition can sometimes be a challenge.
[00:49:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I bet it is a really interesting point. I’m sorry. I think I’ve just interrupted you. I didn’t mean to.
[00:49:22] John Kremer: No. It’s okay.
[00:49:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m actually giving a keynote speech in a few weeks at a conference. And they asked me, it’s a very, very vast topic. It’s about how the world has changed and how the world is changing specifically COVID, how much it’s changed the world, the way the internet functions. And they said, can you do a keynote? And I said what can I possibly do? Because I’m really focused on Google. And then it occurred to me, actually, all of these companies, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, they’re all building a child that aims to understand the world.
[00:49:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that child is then being trained to best serve their users, their audience, their clients. So in fact, this idea of educating the machines that are looking to understand the world for these major big tech corporations is actually applicable. I said it was a niche that actually applies to everybody within Google at least. It’s actually a niche that applies not only to everybody within Google, but everybody in all the other big tech platforms. So, my niche has suddenly become so massive.
The Child Analogy Always Works
[00:50:31] John Kremer: Yes. And it becomes very much a challenge to educate that little kid. I liked that image.
[00:50:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It works really well. And whatever you talk about within this kind of sphere, that analogy of the child always works. I haven’t yet found something that somebody has asked me where I can’t figure out a way to express that analogy and use that child analogy to help explain or help clarify.
[00:51:03] John Kremer: Yeah. It’s a wonderful thing. And it’s also, I think for a lot of people that are wondering about this issue and trying to work with it, it’s a lot better to think of it as a little kid you’re teaching than a big anonymous algorithm that no one understands. It’s a big machine, a robot, something like that. It’s just a little kid trying to understand the world.
[00:51:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And as you say, it’s trying to help its users. Obviously, they’re making money, but it’s still a child trying to help people. Actually, the first time I ever talked about it was, I live in France and I’ve just got French nationality a couple of years ago and I’m bilingual in French, and my first ever conference talk was in 2015. And I use that analogy even right back then seven years ago. And I remember talking about it and I was talking about this exact topic seven years ago when I hadn’t really fully got round the whole question.
[00:52:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it was very, very, very delightful because at the end people applauded, people came up and said, that was brilliant, that was absolutely wonderful. And I was going, oh, did you understand what I was saying? We have no idea what you’re talking about, but it was a great presentation. And that was when I realized I had to simplify it. But it was so lovely that they said it was a brilliant presentation when I said, did you understand that? Absolutely. No idea what you were talking about.
[00:52:40] John Kremer: I had something similar like that one time when I was talking about Book Marketing. Book Marketing to a lot of authors just sounds like so complicated, so impossible, and so on. And then I was speaking to a group of I think it was women writers of the West. They write western novels and historical romance or things like that. And I was talking to them and then it hit me. All you’re doing is creating relationships. And then I said, you’re making friends and that all marketing really boils down to making friends. And now in this case, it’s making friend with a little kid.
[00:53:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And interesting enough. You talk about that a hundred percent. It’s making friends and making friends with the right people. And what you’ll find as well is the little kid, once it’s understood who you are and what you do, you can start to ask that little kid, who are my audience? And you can see the people that Google is pushing you towards by the keywords that the search queries that you then start to appear for. What the child does is then understand like who you are, and what you do, and who you might be useful to, where you might provide a great answer, the best answer, or the best solution.
[00:54:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then you’ll see the queries, the search queries that appear where your site starts to appear in Google. And that’s when you know what kind of words your audience are using through Google’s understanding of you and what you offer in your audience. And that’s a really interesting state to be at.
Connecting With The Audience Who Appreciates What You’re Doing
[00:54:20] John Kremer: Yeah. And it probably really helps you to connect with the influencers you want to connect with, not just your ultimate audience, but the people that could introduce you to your ultimate audience.
[00:54:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I understand. It’s something that doesn’t work particularly well right now, but definitely something that’s going to be happening. I play a game called Knowledge Panel hopping and it’s a bit like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, I think it’s called. But when you’ve got a Knowledge Panel and you’ve got names in the Knowledge Panel or the little photos at the bottom People Also Search For, and you click on them, then it gives you a carousel and you click on some of those and you can get from incredibly weird people to other incredibly weird people in a few hops.
[00:55:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And right now Google’s knowledge and understanding of relationships is relatively limited. So, you can’t necessarily see relevant, I wouldn’t think, relationships, but certainly further down the line that’s going to be a really nice way to research. If you could think about who Google associates with you most closely within your jaw, then you can start looking at their audience and reaching out to their audience and be pretty sure that it’s going to be an audience who will appreciate what you’re doing.
Comparing Amazon and Wikipedia’s Understanding and How To Educate Them as a Child
[00:55:37] John Kremer: The one thing about that for an author is at Amazon’s already doing that.
[00:55:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, right, okay. There you go. So, I don’t know much about Amazon so you’re going to teach me.
[00:55:45] John Kremer: When you go to somebody’s author page, Amazon would say here are 10 other authors that you’ll probably like. If you liked this author, and so I can see Google doing the same thing, in fact, I think I have seen that on Google a couple of times where I search somebody and ended up seeing that there were a lot of related people that Google said, you might want to check out these people too.
[00:56:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, you’ve made what now seems to me to be an incredibly obvious point is Amazon is much better at that than Google, but Google is certainly starting to do it. And one kind of interesting point is that Amazon has a massive Knowledge Graph, and Knowledge Graph is basically an encyclopedia for machines. So, it’s like Wikipedia, but it’s for a machine. And whereas Wikipedia has an idea of notability. So, if you’re not notable or famous or important, there’s no point in trying to get into Wikipedia because it’s for people. If people aren’t going to spontaneously search your name, to try to get information about you, don’t even try to get in Wikipedia.
[00:56:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But these machines don’t have this idea of notability. They just want to understand absolutely everything. And Amazon has a massive, massive, let’s call it machine encyclopedia of products, including books, and Google has a massive machine encyclopedia about the wider world but have less good one about products. So, they’ve got these two different machines with different understandings and Amazon is trying to understand the rest of the world and Google are trying to understand the products.
[00:57:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So they’re both coming together in this kind of once again, child understanding and which I find phenomenally interesting. And I forget because I focus so much on Google, that Amazon and Microsoft as well, particularly, and Apple, incredibly important to start educating those children too. That sounds good. Isn’t it? It’s incredibly important to start educating Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, the children.
[00:57:45] John Kremer: We’re becoming great school teachers.
[00:57:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah.
Jason Barnard’s (The Brand SERP Guy) Book and Courses to Learn More About Brand SERPs
[00:57:53] John Kremer: So, this has been wonderful. I know that after we get done, there’s two things I’ve got to do. I got to read your book and I got to check out your Software as a Service. And then what courses do you have? And then you talked about it, and you said you had some, but what are they about?
[00:58:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We have one which is the Foundation Course for Brand SERPs, which is basically the book taken to the next level. So if you’ve read the book, the foundation course is the next logical step, because that does have some slightly more techy, geeky stuff in it. You don’t need it, but it will definitely help. Then, we have a course about Triggering the Rich Elements. You said, oh, videos, that’s interesting, Twitter Boxes, that’s interesting. We have a course of how to manage those and how to get Google to show them and how to control what shows in them.
[00:58:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): We have another one about Negative Results. So if you’ve got some kind of problem, bad result on your Brand SERP when somebody searches your brand name or your personal name or your book name, how to get rid of it. And there are lots of techniques, lots of strategies. It’s much less difficult than you would think. Online Reputation Management companies charge thousands and thousands of dollars and say, it takes a year. So, they’ll be charging $5,000 for a year. It’s not that complicated. It isn’t worth that. You can do it yourself. It really isn’t that difficult.
[00:59:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then I’m actually finishing up now a course about Content Creation and the idea of how do we create content that the machine can understand whilst still being appealing to our audience. So, it’s taking what we’re creating anyway and packaging it for the child machine. I’m really excited about it because I’m not an expert Content Creator necessarily, but I certainly know how to package what I’m creating for the child. And then I’m going to do another course hopefully in the next kind of four or five months about how to manage the Knowledge Panel. And it’s going to be a book that isn’t geeky. Like this one, it’s going to be a book where anybody can do it that isn’t going to be something where you need to know any kind of stuff.
[01:00:02] John Kremer: And I had to wait six months for that?
[01:00:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Sorry. Yup. I wanna write a book as well. And I’ve actually got a library card for Oxford University. So, part of my plan is to write at least one chapter of the next book in the Harry Potter library at Oxford University. That’s my plan. It won’t make the book better, but it’s going to be fun idea in my little brain.
John Kremer’s Course on Marketing on Pinterest
[01:00:27] John Kremer: For your background for me, I created a course on marketing on Pinterest because I’ve had a good number of my graphics that I created that got over a million re-pins.
[01:00:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Wow. That’s because you’re a genius graphic designer?
[01:00:46] John Kremer: And dozens of them that have had a hundred thousand or more re-pins. And so, I teach a course on, okay, if you want to get real re-pins, not just some, two, three people looking at your graphic on Pinterest, here are the ones that have worked for me. And so, I actually talk about it because my main value is it’s a thing called Tipographics, where you’re not just putting in a headline, but you’re giving them five or six tips in the graphic so that they know if they click on that graphic, they’re going to get to something that has actual information rather than junk.
[01:01:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Tipographics.
[01:01:30] John Kremer: Yeah. So anyway, that course has done very well for me. It’s a course that helps people and that’s wonderful.
[01:01:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it looks like you’re going to be reading my book, taking my courses, and I’ll be taking your courses and reading your books.
Importance of Brand SERPs and a Concept With Google Called Topical Authority
[01:01:48] John Kremer: That might be the case. Anyway, I think those are two of my action steps, just read the book and look at the Software as a Service and decide. It sounds like something that’s like a no brainer to want to sign up for it given once you’ve realise how important the Brand SERP is.
[01:02:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): A hundred percent. I think once people caught onto the idea, trigger onto the idea, that the Brand SERP is phenomenally important. It’s bottom of funnel audience. You’ve worked so hard to get them to know who you are. So, they’re actually interested in you, interested in your books in this case, or your products as a company. It seems foolish in the extreme to me not to design that Google Business Card and not to manage that mini website that Google is creating for you on its results pages.
[01:02:43] John Kremer: Yeah, I actually have to check mine out again. I haven’t done that enough. There was a time when I would search every week to just see where I was. And I owned, back when I was really doing a lot of website content, I owned an incredible number of number one search terms. And I’ve lost a lot of them because I’m not doing that content anymore. But I should check out, see how my name is, and where I stand for the term book marketing, which I’m trying to own that term in social media and other places.
[01:03:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. There’s a concept now with Google which is called Topical Authority and that’s incredibly important. It’s more important than the number of the words in the pages, as it were obvious, you need to use the vocabulary of your audience. But what Google is looking for is people, companies who are topical authorities on their speciality. So, you need to demonstrate to this child that you are the authority on the topic of book marketing. I need to convince it that I’m the authority on the topic of managing your own Brand SERP and educating the child. Oh, that’s ironic. I’m convincing the child that I am the authority on educating the child itself. Genius.
I’m convincing Google the child that I am the authority on educating the Google child itself.
jason Barnard (the brand serp guy)
[01:04:09] John Kremer: It’s just all goes into a circle.
[01:04:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And the child goes mad and then Google blows up. Brilliant.
[01:04:16] John Kremer: I doubt it’s going to blow up. And I think we have a real responsibility to help educate that child so that it really understands what we’re doing. So, I’m really happy I was able to connect with you because it’s just, I’ve loved this session that we’ve had. And I may have to come back to you again just to have some more fun.
[01:04:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Definitely. With immense pleasure, I would love to come back. And I really enjoyed digging down into the world of authorship and books because obviously with Brand SERPs, it applies to everybody. And so what I enjoy about this kind of show is people come to me with a local business prove angle or in this case, authors or films. And so, all these different podcasts that I can appear on and you force me to look into the specific rabbit hole of this particular audience. And it’s wonderful because I learned loads just from being prompted by you by your questions to think about it more in your context which is lovely.
Learning From Other People Through Asking Questions and Listening to Them Talk About Something They Truly Know
[01:05:21] John Kremer: Yeah. It’s one of the reasons I like going on and speaking to audiences because I always tell them, look, I’m getting more out of this than you are. Because when I go and speak live, I’m there for two or three days and I’m asking question after question and after question of the people. They share stories of what worked for them and things like that and then I just pass it on. And I love doing that kind of thing. And you seem to be of a pretty similar mindset.
[01:05:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think we’re more similar than just the white beard.
[01:06:00] John Kremer: I still got hair.
[01:06:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, yes. Yeah. I think we are similar characters. I think there’s a great similarity and I agree, asking questions and listening to people, that’s how I’ve learned so much of what I know today. And listening, understanding, and hearing people talk about something they truly know and they’re truly enthusiastic about is where I learn stuff. And today you’ve taught me a few things and pointed out some things that I now see as obvious, like Amazon is going to be better at predicting which books you going to like than Google.
[01:06:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): That’ll probably stay pretty well, especially since the Amazon also owns Audible. And so, they’re paying attention to what people are listening to. And my wife because she can’t read that well right now because she had got coma and cataracts, so she listens a lot. So, her whole profile now it’s on Audible. But it’s under my name so Audible is going to get confused.
[01:07:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Yeah. And that is going to be a problem is when people use other people’s accounts, they get very confused. But in fact, IMDb belongs to Amazon as well.
[01:07:20] John Kremer: And Goodreads.
[01:07:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And Goodreads too. So, all of this is feeding into Amazon’s massive machine.
[01:07:26] John Kremer: And they have a big one. Yes.
[01:07:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And then Google is also crawling all of this information using its bots for the index. So, it’s learning from all of these Amazon points. So, from a book perspective coming back to how to promote your book, don’t forget Goodreads, don’t forget Google books. You can give reviews on Google books, give reviews on the Knowledge Panels or get reviews rather than on the Knowledge Panel, which feeds directly into Google, which is going to help Google understand you better. And if it understands you better, it’s more likely to present you as a great opportunity, solution, helpful resource for its users.
[01:08:04] John Kremer: Right. Thanks a lot, Jason. For people who want to know more, just Google him. If he’s any good, you’ll find him.
[01:08:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Absolutely. If I’m any good, Google my name you’ll find me and it’s up to you how you connect. Thank you. Brilliant.
[01:08:27] John Kremer: Otherwise it’s jasonbarnard.com.
[01:08:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Exactly. Thanks a lot, man. That was brilliant, John.
[01:08:34] John Kremer: Thank you.
