We talk about a lot of stuff in this episode. I touch on one of my favorite topics: working twice as fast (lighting a fire under your team’s ass) with Scrum and Trello. I get real salty about PBN building and why I think you need to test, before writing them off. And I share one of my favorite acronyms, ABS or Always Be Shipping and why you gotta be doing it!
[Transcript]
Adam: On this episode, Rihanna forgot to remind me to tape the intro, so I’m taping it at home right now. We talk about working faster with Trello and Scrum, migrate with PBNs and…I don’t remember.
We’re taping right now, aren’t we?
Rihanna: Yeah.
Adam: Yeah. No, I was going to comment on that. We are in the same room that we were in last time, so we switched. By the way, this is the third episode. First episode, we were in my house.
Rihanna: Also brick wall.
Adam: Also a brick wall, that’s why we pick this brick wall. We changed here and episode two. Go watch episode two because if you zoom in, you will literally see like beads of sweat running down on my face because it was so hot in here. So we turn the AC on and we blew a fuse. So it’s going to be a sweaty mess, probably, and that’s just the way it’s going to be.
So, let’s get started. So, my name is Adam Steele and thank you for joining us on another episode, episode three of The Steele Entrepreneur Show. Today, I’m going to do things a little bit differently, and we’re going to keep experimenting with this thing because I really don’t know what I’m doing. We’re just trying to figure this out. Now I keep saying we’re, so I hope that…I’m going to introduce some of the crew because you probably think that it’s just me, it’s just I’ve got this little camera setup, but little do you know, we have a little crew going on. So why don’t we start off by bringing over Rihanna? Rihanna? All right.
Rihanna: Hello.
Adam: So this is Rihanna.
Rihanna: I just go in front of the camera?
Adam: Well, Rihanna, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself without getting too nervous? Now I’m making you nervous. Tell us about yourself.
Rihanna: I’m Rihanna. I was just behind the camera. I work for [inaudible 00:02:22] Media with Mr. Brandon who you will meet in a second. Yeah, having a good day.
Adam: Good. All right and how did we hook up, how did I approach you guys and what is your involvement so far with this show?
Rihanna: Yeah, Brandon and I have been here since at the beginning filming it or setting up the [inaudible 00:02:43].
Adam: I have never seen anything like this before. I always dreamed of using one of these. Did you know that?
Rihanna: [inaudible 00:02:49] microphone.
Adam: Yeah, even like about a year ago I looked at buying one. I was like, “Oh, that would be so badass if I could have one of those.” And I assumed they’d be like thousands of dollars, but they’re not actually that expensive which was kind of an interesting realization for me. I was like, “Oh, that’s so fancy. That’s so professional,” and I guess it is. I’ve got this…at home, I’ve got this like big yeti mic. Have you ever seen those? They’re good. They’re totally good, but it’s not one of these. This is fancy, man. It’s professional.
So we are filming at the Network Hub right now which is in downtown Vancouver at Richards and I want to say, Hastings, I think. And we’re probably going to keep it here. I think this is a pretty good place as long as we can keep the AC going. Obviously, while we’re filming, we can’t have that noise, but it’s all good. So, thank you, Rihanna. Brandon, why don’t you come over and introduce yourself with headphones and everything? What’s up, Brandon and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Brandon: Sure. I’m doing sound today and a bit about by myself…
Adam: What’s that?
Brandon: This is our portable recorder.
Adam: That’s pretty badass.
Brandon: Yeah, it’s great and I’m just happy here, making a video with you.
Adam: Yeah, man.
Brandon: I’m happy to do it.
Adam: Well, that was profound. Thank you for that. That was deep. All right, well, let’s get into the show. What are we going to talk about? Sometimes, I’m going to get questions and some of you probably have already noticed like when I get questions, I literally just set up my camera at home, and I just do that question and answer right there. So you’ll see, we had to bring in our channels together. We had two. I don’t know what I was thinking that I can support two channels.
So we brought them together and now we’ve got stuff that’s SEO related, Search Engine Optimization, marketing blah, blah, blah. So you’ve got that. We arranged it in like a playlist thing and I’m going to keep pumping those out. Those are going to come out a lot more often than the Steele Entrepreneur Show. I’m not really going to name it, we’ll just call it Adam Answers for now, and we’ll see how that goes. This will be more business marketing, that sort of thing.
So without further ado, Rihanna, I sent you some questions, not some questions, but some topics. Or Brandon, you got them? What do we got? What’s the first one?
Brandon: Tell me about moving faster with Scrum and Trello?
Adam: That’s nice. Yeah, I did a blog post on this one. It’s the coolest thing. It is the only blog post that I’ve ever written that actually received a tremendous response. I think I wrote it like I want to say one and a half years ago, something like that, and to this day, I get emails about that blog post. And you can find it, it’s on our Facebook page. Facebook.com…
Rihanna: There’s a link to it.
Adam: Yeah, you linked to it? Thank you, link to it right here somewhere, and we will also…so what is it? It’s Facebook.com/theadamgsteele, I think? So look for that. It’s linked, but just in case you can’t click it, which I think you will be able to, go there. It’s also on our agency blog, magistrateinc.com/blog. So start there, scroll down. I think it’s our second blog post ever kinda thing. We haven’t done a lot so you’ll find it.
But basically, Trello is a piece of free software that helps teams organize kinda like, I guess, Basecamp and Asana, and some of the other ones. But Trello is probably the fifth piece of project management software I’ve used. And I’ve gone through most of the major ones and Trello, well, I love that it’s free, obviously. But not only that, it’s got a really simple interface. It’s drag and drop. It’s like to-do-list. Many of you have already checked it, I’m sure because everybody knows about Trello by now. But Rihanna didn’t know about it at one period of time. Now they’re using it and they love it, that being Brandon…changed her life, right?
So I guess I would describe it as sticky notes, and you’ve got columns, and you move those sticky notes throughout the columns. It’s like you would on a whiteboard, and so we were doing that willy-nilly for quite a while. We had columns for different projects or columns for different…I don’t know just different statuses of that individual project or that individual task. We were using the cards themselves as tasks. We had these giant checklists in the middle or inside these cards that we had no idea we’re in there sometimes. You can use Trello really wrong and make a fucking mess of it.
So what happened is I ended up finding this book called “Scrum” and that’s what this topic is about Scrum and Trello, and marrying the two, and working really freaking fast. We married Trello to Scrum. The book is “Scrum: The Art of Doing Things Twice as Fast,” something like that. It’s by Jeff Sutherland, a recommended read, a recommended listen. I think the first time I listened to it, I listened to it on Audible.
Basically, Scrum is, and I’m going totally butcher this, but this is my understanding is it is a workflow process. It’s a way teams can move. And the best way I think I can describe it is basically explain how we have put it together, and how we’ve married it with Trello. So basically, what we’ve done is we’ve got…I don’t know how many columns set up in Trello, but we’re going to put a screenshot of what my typical Trello screen will look like. I might even share what our board as Trello calls it, our board for the Steele Entrepreneur Show looks like, but basically, it starts at resources.
So the first column, resources and I’m going left to right. Resources is a stuff that we’re going to refer back to assets, logins, stuff like that, things that we’ll use going forward over and over again. The second column to the right is product backlog. Now these are just…and again, every card is a task or an item. So product backlog is items that, I guess, ideas that come to mind that I probably won’t action anytime soon. So I’m out, an idea strikes me, I jumped into Trello on my phone and I dump it in product backlog. So those ideas just build up, build up and eventually, I will drag them into what’s called Sprint Planning.
Now, before I explain Sprint Planning let me explain a sprint. Again, I’m going to butcher this, but let me just explain it the way I know it to be. A sprint is a period of time, essentially, and the way we worked it out is it’s a seven-day period of time. So it’s like our agency sprint, which is all our clients and stuff, is Thursday to Thursday. So basically, I will queue stuff up on Thursday and then by next Thursday, it all has to be done.
So Sprint Planning is basically where we assemble that stuff, those tasks that we’re later going to do. We assemble them in Sprint Planning and we hash it out. We figure out, “Okay, what is this task going to entail? What is it going to look like when it’s done?” And so on Thursday, when we start our sprint, I will grab cards from Sprint Planning once they’ve been approved. We approve stuff using Trello labels and Trello has a whole bunch of different colors. We use green to approve stuff and then once it’s approved, we drag it into current sprint, so that’s our week. Everything in current sprint has to be done by next Thursday.
I forgot a column. It’s between sprint planning and current sprint. There’s a call in between called blocked, and what blocked is essentially is. Anything that was dragged into current sprint, so the stuff we’re doing, that we hit a roadblock on. Client didn’t have logins for us or client needed to QA something, or some crap gets in our way and we need to basically just pause it. It’s not going to happen today. It might not happen at all this sprint, this seven-day period, and so it goes into blocked. We explain why it went into blocked, and it just stays there.
Then I mentioned current sprints, that’s what we’re working on. And then when stuff gets done, it gets moved into QA or QC which is quality assurance or quality checking. They start things throughout the week and drag them to QA, and then to the right of that is done. Done is done. Done is…I don’t know, like a car ready to drive. It’s assembled. It’s ready to go, electronics work. Everything is done. It’s ready to go. It doesn’t mean it’s halfway done. It doesn’t mean that it’s almost there. It is done. It’s ready to show the client. We’re happy. We’re proud of it. And that’s the only way it will go into done. And that’s how we set it up and like I said, each card is a task and each task moves from left to right throughout the week. So I’m able to get a ton of shit done really quickly and just done.
Okay, now, next week, grab that stuff, put it into current sprint, good, done. Another week is done, and we just keep going like that. Now there are all kinds of other things I could get into, but if you go check out that blog post, it will explain some of the finer details. So I really recommend you do that, and I’ve got some guides, too, that are also available in that blog post, guides for your client, so to teach your clients and guides for your team as well. So that’s that one. What else we got, Brandon?
Brandon: About your gripe at PBN building.
Adam: Yeah. My gripe.
Brandon: Your gripe, though.
Adam: Gripe. PBNs are Private Blog Networks, so basically, they’re just sites that support a site, you could say or at least that’s generally what they’re used to, or used for. I guess the best way to describe them if you don’t already know what they are, they’re like we buy sites that we don’t necessarily use to promote stuff. We use them to support sites that we’re trying to promote. With this sort of thing and, man, I’m late to the party, but we are doing some pretty cool shit. We are doing things that, man, I swear, only the Japanese are doing and the Russians are doing it at this point because they started the party, I’m pretty sure.
Anyways, you can link from all these different domains that you own and control, by the way, which is a huge advantage. I won’t get into that, but it’s a huge advantage. And all of a sudden, client X sees results. So we’re able to get a client from basically nowhere into the top 50, top 40, top 30, sometimes first page within weeks. Like literally four weeks, we make it happen. And we won’t just take a network and point 40 links of the client. We’ll never do that. We’ll drip them. We’ll go slow. But we have these little niche networks, these little groups of sites. And I think we’re approaching…fuck, I never would have believed that we’d have these many websites. GoDaddy is approaching me and saying, “Hey, you’re a bulk buyer. We want to give you domains for three bucks now,” or something silly like that. Like I’m in that class now. It’s ridiculous.
We have something like 600 sites now, and it literally at the speed that we’re going, it literally won’t be long till we have a thousand sites. So we’re able to and very safely, slow, and you’ll say, “Oh, there’s no safe way to do it. You’re wasting your time.” It’s just a matter of time until you get nailed. That’s my gripe. That’s coming from folks who have bought into these PBNs from stupid providers that don’t know what they’re doing. And now, all of a sudden, they’ve decided, “It’s bullshit. This is no good.” And I apologize for my swearing sort of, but I get passionate about that stuff. I’m passionate about people who don’t test it themselves and just take one experience, and then just write it off from there, or take what they’ve read on some…I won’t say it, SEO blog and write it off from there. They don’t test. And for me, the definition of a good SEO is one who tests constantly.
So that’s what we’ve been doing is we’ve been building these very carefully. I’ve hired what I believe to be just the smartest of folks, people who understand the whole sysadmin side or system administration side, people who understand the hosting side super, super well, people who understand the CMS side and how to avoid footprints, and all that stuff. We have these amazing team that we’ve assembled and then we automated it. So we’re almost at the point where we have…my number is probably wrong, but something like 16 million records. So basically, a record, in this case, being domain, who is information, when does it expires, all that stuff and a bunch of other data points that I’m not going to talk about because it’s hush, hush right now, because we don’t know what we’re going to do with it. But we’re essentially able to do the digging. So it’s constantly digging, digging, digging.
Scanning websites, opening up all the URLs on that website, going to those websites, getting all the information that being who is information blah, blah, blah, and then we wait and hunt. We wait for those domains to expire and as soon as they do, we grab them. That part isn’t quite automated yet, but we will run metrics on them and if we’re interested in them, and they’re about to expire, we set and alert on them, and we watch, watch, watch. And when they open up to the public, we grab them.
Then we have the whole other system beyond that. Like once they’re grabbed, we’ll choose an archive or we’ll choose what CMS we’re going to put on it or whatever, and from there on, everything is automated. Literally, the building, the linking, all that stuff is automated or is about to be automated, the whole process which is freaking incredible. And all those footprints I was talking about earlier, those are removed, and they’re randomly removed.
So, we don’t just have this like one remove this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. We’ll remove this much this time, maybe this many this time, this many this time, and we vary it because removing the exact same thing every single time is a footprint in itself. So we’ve come up with…we’ve built practically an algorithm for deciding how we build these things, and what we leave in and what we leave out into the linking. It’s pretty badass. So the point of me bringing this up is I want to encourage you not only to try PBNs, building these assets for yourself. And it doesn’t have to be expensive, it really doesn’t. We’re able to do it for extremely…setting up the infrastructure and all that stuff, we can do it for pretty cheap. It’s maybe the labor of getting it set up that’s expensive.
So the moral of the story is test. And I don’t want to hear you saying, “PBNs don’t work,” stuff like that or “They’re a short-term strategy” or whatever if you haven’t tested. You’ve gotta test. You’re not a marketer if you’re not actively testing, and that’s my thing. You gotta test so I will leave it at that. Brandon, what else do we got?
Brandon: Always Be Shipping, ABS.
Adam: Yeah. You’ve probably heard of like Always Be Closing ABC. I’ve got a version, perhaps I’ve heard it somewhere. I don’t know. Everything’s been made up already, but ABS, Always Be Shipping. And I think that’s…I talk about reputation a lot. In the last episode, episode two, I talked about why I built as many businesses that I have. And again, it’s the trial and error. It’s that going through the process. It’s that learning those lessons over and over, and over again. I love that. I love that chaos. And Always Be Shipping is…it gives me that chaos. It gives me that repetition. It gives me those lessons, constantly because…like this week, for example, we shipped Loganix University, so loganix.net/university. It’s like 25,000 words of amazing content on local search and local lead gen, which will be an awesome topic for another episode, just general SEO, link building, whatever.
So we did that this week. We launched Loganix Premium this week, which is a full-service, white label product. We’ve got a number of agencies that have approached us, and they don’t want to do any other work. They’re really good at sales, but they suck at the actual processes themselves, at building the links, at buying the links. They don’t know who to buy them from. It’s just such as a hassle. So they come to us and they get the full package, and no one knows. They know, but their client doesn’t know. We are the monkeys in the background.
Anyways, every week, we’re shipping stuff. This YouTube show, people…I freaking love it. It’s my oxygen. People come to me and they’re like, “What other websites do you have now?” or “What else are you doing now?” And I’m like, “Well, I’ve got these five other things.” And they’re just blown away at it. They don’t know how I’m able to get so much done so quickly and constantly, and every year, year after year, month after month, we’re constantly shipping stuff. And you know the reason I do it is for that repetition, right? But it’s the best way to learn, and it feels freaking awesome as well.
So that’s my theory on ABS is there’s no better way to learn faster if you’re always shipping stuff. I don’t mean ship garbage. I mean ship good stuff. Ship stuff that you worked hard on. That Loganix University, it probably cost us like honest to God, $25,000 to put that together. Honest to God, those are our processes. We’ve worked for the last year just to put together those processes so that things are done seamlessly, right? So what we did is we just appropriated it for you guys. We put in a blog post format. We went even deeper to explain it, which helps us, right? And then we just released it.
So we’ve got 20 other things like that ready to go. And I’ll tell you about them in our other episodes, but Always Be Shipping, I think, is the most important thing. I think that does it for our topics today. I don’t even know what minute count we’re at, but it’s probably a little bit on the ridiculous side. What do we have?
Rihanna: Twenty-eight.
Adam: Twenty-eight minutes, that is my longest one to date. Actually, I had some feedback, some folks said, “Oh man, they got to be longer.” I’m not telling them enough and so hopefully, this one wasn’t just a bunch of fluff and there actually was some…I don’t know. I’ll find the balance. I’m learning. Hopefully, you can learn with me. It’s a hell of a process and I hope that you’ll join me on the process or join me along the journey. And if you think, “Oh Adam, you should do this better,” I hope you have some questions too, but feel free to tell me “You suck at doing this,” and I will try and get better at that. If there’s a way that I can deliver what I’ve learnt in a format that you dig more, I’m going to do that.
So a couple of you have left some comments on the other videos and in Facebook, stuff like that. I love that. As Gary Vaynerchuk says that is his oxygen. And for me, it makes me want to do more of these, it really does. So help me, I guess, help you guys. And I will keep working hard at this. As I mentioned, you can leave comments in the YouTube comments. You can join me on Facebook, and we can talk about stuff there. You can email me adam@magistrateinc.com and I will get back to you, and I will answer all of your questions. I will take the time to help you in whatever way I can. We’ll post all the social profiles so hit me up there. I’m always there.
Yeah, if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do. That too, helps me keep doing this for you and for everybody else. So it means a great deal to me. And if you do that, then obviously, you’ll get alerted every time we release an episode and whatnot. Like me on Facebook and that’s about it. I am everywhere, and I hope you’ll join me. And as always, I hope I’ve created a little bit of value for you. So, thank you. Have a wonderful, I’m typing this on a Friday, so a week or weekend. And I’m Adam Steele, and I’ve really enjoyed this. Have a good one, guys, thanks.
