Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

My Marketing Technology Toolstack for 2021

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 192

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This is part 2 (see Ep. 191 for part 1) of an introduction to my recommended marketing technology tools and apps for 2021, including a detailed breakdown of what tools I use and recommend for search engine optimization (SEO), content creation, writer marketplaces and tools, blogger outreach tools, backlink monitoring tools, website analytics, email marketing software, email verification, lead magnet promotion, social media dashboards, video marketing tools, and podcasting tools.

Tools Mentioned in the Episode

SEO Tools

Content Creation Tools

Writer Marketplaces & Tools

Blogger Outreach Tools

Backlink Monitor Tools

Website Analytics

Email Marketing Software

Email Verification Tools

Lead Magnet Tools

Learn More:

Neal Schaffer:

Hey 2021 is right around the corner. In fact, you might be listening to this while the new year has already started. Do you have the right marketing technology stack in place? To fulfill your promise to your boss, to your shareholders, to your significant other, to anyone in your business? Do you have the right technology? Do you have the right tools in place to support your successful digital and social media marketing going forward? That's what this podcast is going to be all about part two, of introducing to you my marketing technology stack that I use for my company, and I recommend to my clients, and this is going to be the infrastructure that will help you maximize your social influence in 2021 and beyond. And it's up next on another amazing, actionable advice pack full of I don't know what I'm saying anymore, but just stay tuned for the next episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. Welcome to the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners grow their businesses using innovative marketing techniques, leveraging the concept of digital influence throughout digital and social media. Hey, Neal Schaffer here. Welcome to episode number 192. That's right 192 of the maximize your social influence Podcast. I am your host, Neal Schaffer, for those of you that are new, or maybe have become a new listener recently, as you get more and more exposed to this podcast. Or maybe you just started listening with this episode, I want to thank you for choosing to listen here, I know that there are many excellent podcasts out there. And by you're subscribing to this podcast, you're making an investment in your time as well. So I want to thank you for that. And for those of you that don't know me, I am a digital and social media marketing, author, consultant, speaker, university professor, my latest book came out in March, it's called the age of influence. And really this podcast is where I try to provide to you my most thought, leading ideas, concepts content, and it also helps me develop my own content as well. I'm currently working on writing my fifth book I actually have by the time this publishes, I will be talking to my friend Lee Constantine over at publish Iser, again, give a shout out to Lee, if you don't know who he is, or if any of you that are listening are thinking about writing a book yourself. I highly recommend that you go back to episode number drumroll please, as I look for this in real time here, episode number 149. This is almost a year ago where I talked about how to become a published author with Lee Constantine from publish Iser, alright, and my main job I should say, outside of all that is as a fractional cmo. And what this really means is I work hand in hand with clients as a on demand, VP marketing, cmo, Director marketing, obviously, it depends on the stage in which my clients are at. And it's anywhere of a time commitment from one to eight hours a week. Obviously, my time is limited in terms of how many clients that I can work with at one time, I currently still have limited openings, those openings may go away if a current negotiation goes successful. But if you're interested, I will have in the show notes or as I should say the description of this podcast episode in your favorite podcast player instructions and how to reach out to me if your marketing needs a little shot in the arm for the new year. Alright, without further ado, let's move on to the topic of this week's podcast. And I should say first of all, last week, I sort of took the Christmas Eve Christmas week off. So if you're wondering where I went, well, that's where I went. And I wanted to not rush this episode because I tried to rest the last episode, there were just so much technology to share with you that I felt I needed to break up the episodes. And now I feel that I have all the time to really deliver on my promise to give you the remainder of the marketing technology stack that I recommend for you. Now, this is by no means comprehensive. For those of you that don't know me, and I mentioned this in the last episode, I am the co founder and really the driver of the content around a conference that was called the social tools summit back in Wow. 2014 2015. So I've always been well versed in the tools. I know that as a small business owner myself, really the tools are one of the few ways that can help you scale people process tools, right? So I'm a big fan of always looking for what's out there and I always have tools companies reaching out to me asking for my opinion or wanting me to do a trial. I mentioned him on my blog on my podcast, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, go back right now if you haven't listened to it, go back to the previous episode, Episode Number 191, where I went through these, the part one of the technology and tools you need for your marketing infrastructure. Now, that episode, because I didn't get very far, it was focused on the web part, specifically on content management systems. And WordPress being the most popular content management system, the system that I have used since 2008, and which most if not all of my clients use it. Well, I still have some clients that use Shopify as their CMS. WordPress really is, you know, the de facto standard. And I introduced a ton of plugins, have already got a lot of thank yous for that episode. And you're you're welcome. But I just a lot of plugins, and just the functionality that you should consider for your own website, because as you'll find out in this new book, when it gets out there, and I plan on releasing an E book to begin with, and hopefully I'm going to get that in your hands. Literally over the next few weeks, I'm strategizing on the final content for that, but it's already pretty much the rough drafts, the rough draft has been written, you want to have certain functionality because the web, or I should say your website is where people will primarily discover you first, they're not going to discover you because they automatically opted in your email list. They might discover you in social media, but man, socials a crowded place, especially if your business just the algorithms work against you. That's why chances are the first interaction digitally that someone's going to have with you It should be your website. And I want to help you get more and more engagement with your website. And that's what I'm going to be talking about. More and more in the book today. Obviously, I want to focus on the technology. So when we think web, we think content when we think content, we think search engine optimization, SEO. You know today, there's pretty much three major SEO tools. I know there are a lot of other tools out there. And I'm really sorry to all the other companies out there. And maybe a year from now I'll be able to say there are four major SEO companies or five major SEO companies. But it really comes down to sem rush, refs and Moz. Now, I believe that Moz is extremely popular, I believe that a lot of people use aah refs, a lot of bloggers use them for their backlink analysis, and sem rush. As they rebranded Her name is very popular as well, these three tools just do a lot of things. The user interfaces are different there. I just say the way they index content is different, etc, etc. I am a proud sem rush user, that is my number one tool, Rs though for those of you that don't know, they actually have a free tool for webmasters. So I highly recommend highly, highly recommend you check that out, I have sem rush, I have the tool that RS provides for free for wet for webmasters. I'm currently not a user of Moz. But if you're using one of those three, you're fine. Anything that I'm going to talk about in my book, and in previous and future episodes. They have the functionality to keep you covered. Now, when we move on from SEO, we move into how do we get better rankings in search engines to have our digital gateway, which is our website be discovered by more people, we get into content. And I want to introduce to you two tools that well one of them I've started using religiously over the last several weeks. But it basically what I was doing when I was looking for a topic idea. So I use sem rush for keyword research, right? And I find an idea for a blog post, well, inevitably, you need to confirm search intent. So you end up going to what are the top search results for this keyword? What are people looking for, and you quickly find that perhaps some of those keywords you're targeting, you know, you're not going to beat the competition. Or maybe what people are actually searching for based on the top result is irrelevant to your product or service. So you use search intent to confirm, you know what maybe you shouldn't be blogging about. But in terms of what you should be blogging about, you then want to make sure that you have the points covered that others in the top search results have covered. Right. Obviously it's your own unique ideas, don't get me wrong, but you want to see what others are talking about to make sure that you have a unique perspective, or that you have the bare minimum covered. So these two tools basically are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to do all of that analysis for you. Once again, whenever we talk about technology and tools, you want to have a process in place first, then find the tool that helps you automate it do it quicker and to actually do it more accurate the way that technology can help with so the two tools and I found out about these well one I found out from a client, thank you to my clients that also teach me while I teach them the other I found out from a black friday i should say paid and had all these different offers from all these SAS technology companies so that one is called phrase frse. Once again, you don't need to copy all this down, everything is going to be in the description, ie the show notes, I'll have a link and phrase is the tool that I use where I can put in any keyword. And I'm going to create a video around this soon. So make sure you subscribe my youtube channel as well. But and I'll put that in the links. Yes, I know. But phrase, you put in a keyword and it's going to take the top 20 search results. And it's it's going to basically tell you, what are the topics that you should include in your blog post? What are the specific words that you should use from a semantic? You know, analysis perspective? What are questions that people are asking about? What are the latest news around the keyword? What are the latest stats around the keyword? What are the h1 h2 h3 h4 headings that your competitors are using, it's at the end of the day, it's going to give a topic score. And you want to make sure that your blog post that you're creating hits, you know, 100 or it equals the top for whatever the top keyword score is or topic score is for that keyword, you're basically putting your your best foot forward. And if you thought Yoast SEO was enough to rank, I don't think so. In fact, if you think content alone is enough to rank i don't think so either. But this is really from a content perspective, using phrase is one of the best ways you can put your best foot forward, I have some SEO expert friends that recommend a more expensive version that probably digs deeper into things like using IBM Watson artificial intelligence and the Google Knowledge Graph. And I know about this because I had a chance to meet the founders. It's a tool called clear scope. So if you're an enterprise, and you want the best that money can buy clear scope is probably going to be your answer phrase I'm very, very happy with and it'll be interesting to see the content that created where that's going to rank for. And I will say that phrase also has a way of if you type in your current content and the keyword that you're targeting, it will give you ideas on how to optimize that content. It also has a way of since the whole idea about phrase is really helping you create content that people are asking questions about. It can plug in your Google Search Console and tell you hey, you need to create content around these questions that people are asking to get to your site. But yet your content doesn't directly answer. It also includes chatbot technology that I think they're investing a lot into as well to help answer questions that people have when they come to your website. Just using AI and the content you already have. pretty freakin incredible stuff. Man, that might be the you know, I might have to get the one of the founders of phrase on this podcast to talk more about it. It's that competitive technology. But anyway, I highly recommend you have one of those tools in place for your content creation. Now when I talk about content creation, there is a need at some point. Or you might get to the point where you need to scale that content creation. And I believe that there's a way to authentically leverage the writing prowess of content creators out there for your own website for your own blog, I have a group of writers that I have hired. And I highly recommend if you want to go that route, that you look into either Upwork Now, you might be thinking Upwork, it's all over the place, there is a way to use a service like Upwork, to find the best and most appropriate people for who you're looking for. I've developed the process. This is something I'll have to have a separate podcast episode on. It's something I teach my clients. But it does take some experimentation to find the right people. But I've been very happy with the quality and the cost effectiveness of the people I've found. There's also in terms of a writer specific marketplace, I highly recommend writer access, Byron white going to give him a shout out the CEO and founder. He also runs the content marketing conference in Boston that I've spoken out a few times. And if you want a little bit of help finding writers, and you don't want to go through the experimentation of Upwork, I highly recommend writeraccess. Another tool if you're going to work with external writers, or if you're going to have guest bloggers, you're going to want to have a tool like copyscape copyscape, basically will for any piece of content before you publish it, put it through copyscape in for you know 20 cents for 2000 words. So it's a company 100 words, it will find any duplicate of that content that might exist out there on the internet. And obviously Google loves unique content. I love unique content. And you if you really want to maximize your social influence your digital influence, you should love unique content as well. So just make sure you have that insurance in place. So we have the SEO, we have the content, we have the writers. The next is that other part of SEO and this is something that I also talked about in a recent episode, you're going to have to go back for especially for those newer people here. October 21. I had Episode Number 183 influencer marketing for search engine optimization, building backlinks for SEO become a big fan of this I'm starting to see some pretty incredible results and I'm actually starting to include backlinking as part of my own weekly process, once again, you'll begin to see the editorial calendar for this podcast sort of unfold in 2021. As I go through these topics, I highly recommend that the tool that I recommend the most for this would be a tool called responder. I've had clients that have purchased their tool, and you know, gotten really, really good results. I've seen great results so far. And if you're interested in respondent, you should definitely listen to the interview that I did with Farzad Rashidi, who is one of the co founders that is episode number 164. That we did back on June 10. There's also a great new tool, if you've tried respond, and it just doesn't work well for you. Or if you wanted to compare and contrast. The other tool is postoji. This is a newer tool, I want to give a shout out to the folks at pastaza. that have been they put on a lot of great educational webinars. And yeah, those are the two that I'd recommend. There are other more established companies out there. Like I said, I personally prefer respond on postage, that does have different functionality. And you know, you may like it better, I want to give you an alternative. And you know, respond to and postage. And basically we'll try to find email addresses for you for that outreach. But the best tool that I'm really keen on right now that I'm even using as almost like a quazi CRM for email addresses, is a tool called apollo.io. I want to give a shout out to my good friend, Adam Metz, fellow marketing author, one of the brightest minds out there, and he swears by this, and I've started using it and it's almost like a database, like LinkedIn, with email addresses. So you don't put in an email address, you literally search by by companies, and titles like you with LinkedIn. And then you can build a database. And then when you need to, you can actually email people either through that tool or using your own email marketing that that integrates with. It also integrates with things like Salesforce. So definitely check out Apollo, if you have not used one of those tools before. Now, this sixth tool is one of the newest tools in my technology stack. And I'm currently actually in the midst of doing a one week trial with five of these tools. Once you start doing blogger outreach and once you start doing guest blogging as well for your brand in order to scale your content efforts. Once again, this is all going to be part of this ebook. So stay tuned, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter i Neal schaffer.com. so you don't miss out when I launch it. But you know, I want a simple tool that just does backlinks. It just tells me when I have new backlinks when I lose backlinks and when my competitors have new backlinks. So I'm currently looking at five different tools. Maybe if some of you are more SEO minded and you use some of these tools, I'd love to hear your feedback. Right now I'm looking at five tools. Once again, links will all be in the show notes, linker D link el link minor monitor backlinks and backlink SEO, you know, Moz and our h refs, and sem rush all have backlink tools, but I just want something that sends me a daily notification will let me know, because at the end of the day, I do believe that backlinks are that important that you might want to consider a dedicated tool. And that's what I'm looking into. And then of course, when we talk about our website, we need web analytics. And lo and behold, we have the best tools, the freest tool, or I should say the free tool requires no money, which is Google Analytics. And you should all have that. And I had one client who wanted some training on it, and I have my kids, you know, when they need to do training, or they need a little bit of help with a tutor, they use a site called y zant.com. That's w y, z, A and T it's sort of a plan words of wise and, and there are people in there that actually will help you out with training on things like Google Analytics, or Salesforce, and maybe just one or two hours of training, you'll be able to find your way around those applications. So I highly recommend that if you're not confident, but as entrepreneurs and business owners, and of course, as marketers, we need to wear a lot of hats, and we need to have a better understand better understanding the technology that maybe we needed just you know, a few years ago. So you don't need to know Google Analytics inside and out. But I highly recommend that you know it well enough that you can navigate through understand what's converting where, why and how. And Google Analytics can give you all those answers once you have conversion setup, etc, etc. And you know how to look at them. So that's it on the website, everything there is related to website and content creation for your website, and obviously backlinking to your website and search engine optimization and what have you. So if I'm missing any genre of tools from this or any other section I'm going to talk about, let me know. Select plan. Alright, let's move on. So we have the search or WebPart. Now we have the second three major components of how you digitally engage with your customers and prospects which is email and email. Marketing is not dead by any means. And I have man, I've used a lot of tools and just to give you an example of gone from Constant Contact to MailChimp to Infusionsoft back to MailChimp, to ConvertKit to Active Campaign, and then to mailer light as a second email marketing solution as an overflow to my Active Campaign account. So today, what would I recommend to you? Well, if you're just starting out, you're gonna want a tool that gives you 1000 or 2000, free subscribers, MailChimp is a no brainer, but I would actually consider doing mailer light instead of MailChimp. Because I believe mailer light also has a free plan, I think it might actually be easier to use and have richer functionality than MailChimp does for its free plan. This is what I recently set a client up on, I have used it and I think it is just a great if you're looking for a great inexpensive email marketing tool that includes ways of tagging. It doesn't have much automation as a little like MailChimp, but it also includes, you know, pop up forms, what have you, mailer light is really a great tool. Once you want to get above that and you want to do more sophisticated automation, more sophisticated tagging, more sophisticated analytics. Well, that's where I went to Active Campaign. Now I moved out of ConvertKit. And I want to say that, although I think Active Campaign is the most technically advanced that of all these ConvertKit has caught up. And a lot of the reasons why switch to Active Campaign ConvertKit now offers support for and ConvertKit will give you this, a lot of the same functionality, at least for the Active Campaign plan that I'm on, potentially at a lower price. So I highly recommend that you compare and I say this because I don't want to say anything negative about any of the tools I use. But I've had a really big issue with Active Campaign supporting RSS campaigns literally things that a MailChimp or any other software support of being able to basically send out a RSS campaign from your blog, standard WordPress, RSS feed standard automation, standard email, I just got off the chat with their customer support, I have published 15 posts so far in December, only six of them have gone out. So I'm going to give a little red flag there. If you're considering an Active Campaign, especially if RSS feeds are important. It is a known issue. Apparently, I'm having them escalate this. But if that's important to you, it's something you may want to consider. If you want more advanced functionality that goes above and beyond ConvertKit, I would still go back through campaign and even though they have this issue with RSS feeds, everything else works fine. And I'm still using them. So I think you're not going to go wrong using any one of those four. But I am still you know, I'd say Active Campaign number one, number two ConvertKit. Number three mailer light, and then MailChimp just because it's just such a major platform. Number four. The other thing I want to talk about that you might use in terms of email marketing tools that go above and beyond these email marketing platforms, is an email verification tool. I suppose you could use Apollo dot Iowa for that as well. I use a tool and I have my clients use a tool called voila, Norbert, if you wanted to append your customer database with social media profiles. Or if you just wanted to verify when you have new subscribers, are these email addresses for real are they going to bounce when you do lead magnets or when you do webinars, and you want to upload 100 200 1000 5000 emails at once. Voila, Norbert is a great service to use just to make sure that when you send out your first email to people, it's not going to be bouncing. All right, you know, email marketing is pretty short and sweet. Because these email marketing dashboards are just so comprehensive. And what they do that now we're going to move on Oh, and then you know, I guess this is related. And maybe I should make note of this on my sticky note. So it goes up in the in the show notes. You also need to have lead magnets on your website. And I think I talked about this last time in terms of WordPress plugins, but as a reminder, because these do tie in to your email marketing, you know, when you use an Active Campaign, or ConvertKit or malar light, they do give you the ability to create forms that you can embed in your website directly. And indeed, I do use Active Campaign forms for that I've used ConvertKit in the past. But we also have things like opt in monster and lead pages and get better control or is it wait a minute is it get better control? Hold on a minute here. Let me just do a quick search. Now it is Wait a minute, get better control. Okay, I haven't used it in a while. So maybe if I can't remember the name, it doesn't deserve to go on this this podcast. But really, I think between OptinMonster and lead pages and an email marketing tool that should be enough to give you all the tools that you need in order to have those to support your lead magnets, your landing pages and those widgets that you need on your site. And I wish that I could remember what that get better control app. This is really going to drive me crazy. I hate when I don't have it, especially when I am doing a podcast because you know what? Okay, give me one second here, I'm going to find it for you really quickly. And if my podcast editor decides to cut this out, so be it. I'm not going to complain. But I'm going to try to find if I can get it. I do have a resources page on my website, Neal schaffer.com, slash social dash media dash resources that you'll probably want to look into. If you want to get a list of all this. Yeah, you know what, it's not even on there. Okay, well, if it's not on that page, I'm not going to talk about it. But there are other tools you can use, but really lead pages in OptinMonster. It's a great combination for any of those things that you might want to build. Let's move on to the next section, which is what the social tool summit was more about, which is social media tools. So you need to have a social media dashboard. There are a lot of great social media dashboards out there. My number one tool that I use religiously, is a Gora pulse. There's a widget on my website, if you look on the bottom or right hand bar, it'll take you to their website if you're interested in giving them a trial. But a Gora pulse is a very, very sophisticated tool that offers you everything that you need in a social media tool. Alternatives to agorapulse, I'm going to give a shout out to the folks that sendible just because they have a lot of compelling technology. And I know Gavin that, you know the founder and CEO have been to their office in London. And they're just a great group of people that I that I love deeply. So shout out to Senegal. And I know I have a lot of friends that use sendible as well. So between those two tools, if you wanted to do an A B test, that's what I would recommend. I also want to recommend another tool that I do use, and it's a tool that I love to use for content curation. I use agorapulse, to engage and to schedule all my content. But for my curation, I tend to use a tool called social B. And I like social B, it's very rich in functionality. Social B also has a concierge service. And I've recommended this to some clients. I've used their concierge service as well. They basically offer agency services for small business owners that use their tool. That sounds incredible or what? It's not necessarily inexpensive, but it's probably less expensive than working with an agency I highly recommend you check them out. That is social B once again, the notes will be in the description this website may Yeah, I may have to just like create a blog post around this. And I do have some blog posts where I mentioned these tools as well that I'll put in the show notes as well. Now what agorapulse and sendible and social bead don't do well. But there's an app that does do well which is Pinterest and for Pinterest. It's all about tailwind for Instagram tailwind is pretty compelling as well because they have a URL. Well, you know, what's the word that I'm looking for a link in bio tool called Smart bio that if you go to my Instagram, you're following me on Instagram, right instagram.com slash Neal Schaffer that's using tailwind smart dot bio tailwind for Pinterest also has smart loop. They also have tailwind communities formerly called tribes. And it is just an extremely pot you you know it is the secret to success on Pinterest really using tailwind So, but also Instagram, they have a lot of great features, hashtag finders, or I should say hashtag recommendations, it cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now the other part of well, you know, this goes beyond social media. So when we talk about the main types of content, right, we have photos, which I think a lot is for social media, we have text, which is for blogs, but we also have video and we also have audio audio being podcast. So for video, and this is something I'm investing more time in and I'd look to do a lot more in 2021. With we have First of all, we have video SEO tools. And the two main video SEO tools I see everybody talking about are to buddy and vid IQ I became a vid IQ customer recently, it's really written functionality. And I'm currently creating my keyword strategy using it so check those out, but I've become a fan of vid IQ. Also for video creation I have used subtitle to make to basically take a video, put some overlay on it put you know, a transcript, subtitles in the screen excuse me in a compelling way. And it's a really, really easy to use tool especially if you're a podcaster or you want to have just a short and sweet video that features you and you want to make sure that those subtitles or you have titles that appear all the time at the top or bottom. You know the type of videos I'm talking about. You see a lot of them on Instagram and on Instagram ads. Subtitles are great too. If you want to create something a little bit more sophisticated. We have stock photos stock video. I've been fooling around with wave dot video I think it's a pretty cool tool. definitely make sure you check them out. Finally we have the podcast tools. For those of you that want to start a podcast and if that is You will, you should obviously be checking out. Well actually, you know, come to think of it. I have an episode from a long time ago episode number 43. How does that go? Well, you know what? Okay, my podcasting journey starts in episode number one back in January 12 2013. The biggest reason usually become a content creator why started this podcast? We then have Episode Number 43 back in 2014. five easy steps to get started podcasting this year, we have Episode Number 175 why I am investing time in being interviewed on 100 different podcasts, which talks a lot about the power of podcasting episode number 179. The what, why and how of podcasting. And then finally, most recently, we have Episode Number 188, how to use podcasting to expand your reach. And then new customers with my good friend, Robert Lowenthal, who is the CEO and founder of wish ca. So I started this podcast on Lipson, and it's currently on buzzsprout. And in the very near future, I am committed to and I'm currently in the process of moving over to wiscombe. And there's a lot of reasons why I plan on doing that. But one of the reasons is it has a lot of advanced functionality. One of them that advanced functionality solves a problem that I've been having, which is interview recording when you have guests on your podcast. This is another type of podcast tool, the podcast hosting tool like Lipson, or buzzsprout, and or wiscon is really the main tool. But there's also other tools out there that help you invite your clients customers influencers and you do an interview with them. And they will create high quality audio that you can publish on your podcast. So a lot of people will use Skype or use zoom. But if you want to get to the next level, some people use Zen caster, I use squad cast. In fact, the interviews you've been hearing, I've been done through squad cast, which has an audio function, but it also has a video function. I was recently interviewed on a using a tool called riverside.fm, I believe is a name, that is probably the highest end for all this. But what I have found that wiska actually supports they have a cloud audio recorder, that if you use zoom, you can take advantage of the audio recording on wiscombe, which is going to be a better audio recording than what zoom gives you natively so I'm killing two birds with one stone. If you're still on a Lipson or buzzsprout. I'd recommend squad cast it, it has its issues, I still use it. But I will slowly as I transition over to wiscombe. I'm going to do all my interviews in zoom, which people are very much used to using and record the audio on the cloud recorder from wescot. Another podcast resource that I use when I was looking for episodes that I wanted to be or I should say podcasters that I wanted to be interviewed on. But also to really monitor the ranking of how I'm doing with this podcast is a free site called charitable calm, still surprised. I've had a lot of podcast friends that didn't know that this site existed. But this is a site that tells me where I'm ranking throughout the world. And if you're curious as to all these podcasts and how well they're doing, all you need to do is search for them uncharitable and you can get a good feel as to how popular they are. Visa v. Apple podcast rankings, and what have you. Well, there it is, it turns out that and I started the stopwatch a little bit later than I probably should have a tardy at 29 minutes. But it turns out, there you go. If I had done this together with part one, it would have been more than an hour. So I'm glad I cut this down. But that should give you a feel. You don't necessarily have to have all these tools, right? But I just want you to know what is possible. And if you wanted to go the route of looking into which of these tools might make sense for your business. I want you to start with the right tools. If you use different tools, let me know, if you represent a company that has competing tools. Let me know maybe I'll have you on the podcast, right? I want this to be a two way conversation. And it's really hard to hear you when you're speaking into your microphone because I can only hear my own microphone. So feel free, send me an email, you know, I'm everywhere in social Neal Schaffer, I have a website, throw a comment on Apple podcast. And I want to thank all those people that have given me comments, because that's really what keeps me going. But you know, feel free to reach out I'd really like to make sure that I am serving you through this podcast. I also as I normally do want to thank you all for your continued subscription to this podcast. I my friends in Sweden, in Spain in India, I know I've been going up the charts there. I know that in terms of business podcasts now, this is starting to go really well. I'm not gonna say viral, but I know I'm getting a lot more listeners, not only in the USA, but globally. We're now at you know, a global top business podcast, not in the top 100 yet, but obviously I'm trying to get in there as soon as possible but I couldn't do this without you. And I really think all of you in the background that have shared my passion Cast with your friends, you've tagged me on social when you share it. And obviously I'm thankful for everybody that does this. I also want to remind you that if you haven't subscribed to my podcast, man, I mean, you saw those things I talked about as I was going over the technology and all the other things that I should talk about next week, or I should say, on the next episode, I'm going to try to get out too, before the new year is going to be a big announcement, I'm gonna have very special guests that I've decided to launch a second podcast with, that I think you're all gonna want to subscribe to as well. But man, I was interviewed on another podcast today. And I was asked for all this advice. And I said, you know, okay, if I was the VP of influencer marketing for your company, this is what I would do. So that's going to be a future episode that you're not going to want to miss. I also am going to have I'm not going to do predictions for the year, because I think the predictions, I'm not going to say they're stupid, but none of us know right. And they're fun to think about. And maybe they go viral on social media. But I've always had the view of giving you annual advice of where I would bet my marketing dollars going forward in order to best most effectively maximize your social influence. And that is going to be hopefully my first episode of 2021. And that's not going to be If I was your VP of Marketing, or of influencer marketing, that's going to be If I was your cmo, this is what I would be doing. I have a lot more have this, this post it note that as all these podcast topics, I got a lot more to go. I have a lot of great interviews scheduled as well. So please, you're not going to want to miss this. I guarantee you're not going to want to forget to press that subscribe button. Alright, I'm going to end there. I didn't have a chance to wish you happy holidays on the previous episode, which came out conveniently just you know, a few days before the Christmas holiday. So happy holidays. Whatever holiday you celebrate, or maybe you already celebrated. It really is I sort of have tears in my eyes because it was a sad year in so many ways. And it affected me personally for those of you that have subscribed, I lost my father back in in April. And my 93 year old mother lives in a senior living facility where we've had some scares, because Coronavirus is just so prevalent in the world. So there's been a lot of sadness, a lot of nervousness, and maybe some of you have lost your job. Or you also have a significant other that that is no longer with us. Or maybe you yourself or a good friend or family ever has had Coronavirus and are still feeling the effects of it. And man, it's it's been a tough year. This is hopefully a once in a century tough year. And I don't think we're out of this yet that any means but I'm hoping that just as we slowly entered this pandemic in q1 of 2020, I'm really hopeful that we slowly exit this pandemic in q3 or q4 of 2021. I want to stay really hopeful. I'm deeply rooted in the reality of the situation. But I do think that if you are involved and you are heavily invested in digital marketing, that is going to be your best offense against all the bad that this pandemic brings from a business and economical perspective. So I'm going to stop there, make sure that you tune into the next episode, and you check out the show notes for all the links to all the tools that I talked about. And hey, if you have any specific questions or you're looking for that extra marketing help, feel free to reach out for as little as one hour a week for three months. I think I can really be a great help to your company while supplies last. But I do plan on launching a group coaching program when supply runs out. So make sure you go over to Neal schaffer.com Subscribe man. Okay, I really hate start. I really hate sounding salesy at the end of these podcasts. So I'm gonna stop there. You know, love you all. Thanks for all of your support. And we'll be back at you one more episode for 2020 hopefully, and happy holidays, like you know, hug your loved ones. kiss them, spend time with them. Watch movies that make you laugh, and I will see you again soon. So wherever you are in the world, make it a great virtual social day. Bye bye everybody and sale nada