Eli Schwartz’s incredible experience setting up a brand new SEO team in Singapore meant that he often wrote down instructions or explanations for his employees.

Eli had longed to be in Asia for a while, and SurveyMonkey’s CEO at the time, Dave Goldberg, granted Eli’s wish and opened an office in Singapore to keep Eli at SurveyMonkey.

Explains Eli: “I'd write down notes of these things that my team wanted to learn, and that's actually when I felt like I should publish a book. That was the first thing that really made me feel like I had something I wanted to share, because like it wasn't shared anywhere else.”

Eli’s book, Product-Led SEO, is published this month. It digs into his career and how to learn how to get things done.

SEO AT A STRATEGIC LEVEL

Eli explains: “The book is about how to think at a higher level, how to be strategic and not really chase the algorithm or chase SEO tactics.”

He believes that SEO pros and in fact anyone working on a website should be spending their time on being strategic, because SEO is different for every website. “It’s really about what Google believes your website to be about. So that is what you should focus on. What should my website be about? And not the little minutiae and little tactics on how to be successful.”

The second prompt for Eli to write Product-Led SEO came from his blog, also called Product-Led SEO. It’s about building products around users. One of his posts completely took off on LinkedIn, making Eli realize “There's really something here, I should build all of these ideas around this book.”

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE: TELLING A COMPELLING STORY

If you’ve regularly written a blog, Eli says that blog posts can easily become the foundation for your chapters.

However, the challenge is how to tell a compelling story. As Eli says: “How do you bring all this together? How do you narrate this? How do you bring color to it?”

Initially, when Eli started his book, he wanted to get his message out there and build a brand But if he pursued this path, Eli believed his book wouldn’t have been great. So instead he separated the book from his branding and career, and focused on telling all he’d learned about SEO.

“I had some ideas. I was writing some guides, but it still wasn't a book,” he observes.

He worked with some amazing editors who were able to pull everything together, bringing in color and a narrative.

PRODUCT-LED SEO

Eli describes product-led SEO as giving people what they want from content and services. 

“You're building something for users. And if all you're thinking is I'm building something, so I get some clicks then that is not valuable. That is just a blog post,” he explains. Eli adds that people need to determine product-market fit first, and then build an SEO strategy.  

“Whatever it is that you want to happen for any sort of use on your website, that has to happen from SEO, and SEO shouldn't be divorced from this idea that users come to websites, websites convert into whatever the user funnel is, the way it is in many SEO strategies,” says Eli. “SEO is to be part of that, it has to be an acquisition, one acquisition channel of all your other channels. So that in a nutshell is product-led SEO. Your SEO is a product. It's not just a keyword.”

LINKS

• Twitter

• LinkedIn

• EliSwartz.co

• Productledseo.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Eli Schwartz

Today, my guest is Eli Schwartz. Eli is a writer, author and search engine optimization expert and consultant. He has more than 10 years’ experience driving successful SEO and growth programs for leading B2B and B2C companies. Eli works with brands such as Shutterstock, Cora, and Zendesk, helping them build and execute global SEO strategies that dramatically increase organic visibility at scale. Eli led the SEO team at Survey Monkey, building organic search from nearly zero to one of the largest growth drivers at the company. Prior to Survey Monkey he led user acquisition at High Gear Media, pushing the company from 500,000 monthly users to over 6 million monthly users in just three years. Eli frequently speaks at marketing events across the US, Asia and Europe, at least before COVID. And he writes columns published on Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and Search Engine Journal. Eli's book Product Lead SEO was released just recently about a month ago, right? Yeah, on April 27.

Josh Steimle

All right. Well, anyway, Eli, welcome to the show.

Eli Schwartz

Great to be here, Josh. And great to be reconnecting with you. I'm sure we'll get into how we know each other.

Josh Steimle

Yeah. So Elijah and I are friends. We go back to our time in Asia. And let's see, I guess I met you in Singapore. Is that right? Probably at an event or something?

Eli Schwartz

Yes. But I think I met you virtually before I moved to Asia, you were referred to me, I can't remember how by multiple people as Josh lives in Hong Kong, talk to him. So I did end up moving to Hong Kong, but it was on my list; I ended up moving to Singapore. But I spent over a year trying to figure out how and where to move in Asia.

Josh Steimle

Got it. And somehow, I convinced you not to go to Hong Kong and to go to Singapore instead.

Eli Schwartz

Actually, that gets into the book story.

Josh Steimle

Cool. Well, before we get into the book story, give us a little more background, about your career and your history and how you ended up getting into the SEO world and all that. Go back as far as you want to you can tell us about your childhood or anything.

Eli Schwartz

Yes, actually I just feel like going even further back than usually I start. My first job ever . . . my first real job ever, I worked in New York Stock Exchange. I had this dream of being Michael Douglas, Wall Street, and getting filthy rich on Wall Street and I got a job as a runner in the New York Stock Exchange which the was at the time was sort of like the minor league for getting a real job working for an actual brokerage or bank on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And six months later, I did get this job. And it was the most horrific thing I've ever done in my entire life. I got fired after three months. I was abused. My boss was a cokehead a just a horrible, horrible person. Most of the people I met on the floor were not the greatest people ever. They were racist, or misogynist, like . . . sorry, if I'm defaming anybody that worked in New York Stock Exchange 20 years ago. But like, that was not a great experience. And I did not end up pursuing a career in that. And the reason I bring that up is my mom actually just found my jacket. So anybody's ever watched like CNBC you where there's like special jackets. So I'd like thrown it in a box. And now like I have kids, my oldest is nine, I was like, that could be a really awesome costume for them just like parade around in my stock market jacket. Anyways, that was not my career . . . I did that before I went to college, went to college for marketing. And my first job outside of out of college, I ended up at a lead generation company where I was helping . . . They were what they did was they sort of the middleman that, pipe between people that want to fill out a lead for a variety of industries, like home services, or car insurance or mortgages. And people that want to buy those leads, banks, insurance brokers, window repair people. And I was working with these affiliates who didn't really I knew the internet. I mean, I was young and able to figure out the internet. And I was working in this field. And they were making 10s of 1000s of dollars per month driving traffic and driving leads for the company I was working for and we pass them on to the customers. And I was like, I want to figure out how they do that. Like how do you make 10s of 1000s of dollars literally sitting in their basements, like that was the day when they were sitting in basements. And I reverse engineered what they were doing. I learned it was called SEO. And I'm sort of off to the races. I built my own site. And I decided to turn myself to SEO and start looking for jobs in SEO. And, you know, after I finally got out that company, my very first job was, as you mentioned, in my bio or earlier, at a company called High Gear Media, I was responsible for SEO, not really knowing what SEO was. And I learned it. I was able to learn it by fire, by learning hands on and I think that is the way anybody should actually learn how to do anything on the internet. You have to like get your hands dirty. I know that there are college courses that offer ways to learn SEO, ways to do social media, but you can't really learn this out of a book. You know, I know . . . . I published a book and I'm telling you can't learn something from a book. But . . .

Josh Steimle

It can help you you get started, though.

Eli Schwartz

It can help you learn a foundation and we'll get into what the books about. But you know from there, I built a career in SEO. And what I did was I was very fortunate and I consider my entire career to be, you know, a string of fortunate coincidences, and where I've really got lucky to be in the right place at the right time. So when I was at this company, High Gear Media, I was ready to move on, and I was looking for a new role. I didn't go to the greatest colleges, I didn't do as well as I should have done. I didn't build the brand. I didn't do any of the right things. I was good at packing it together and figure out SEO and pretending I knew something. I was looking for a new job. I interviewed at large companies, but I wasn't credible enough to get hired. And I saw a job opening at Survey Monkey for a job I thought I could do but they only hired people that can't went to really good schools. But the person hiring for that job, that recruiter hiring for that job, was the same person that hired me at the previous job I worked out for High Gear Media, company called Quin Street. I sent in a resume, she called me the next day, asked me questions about where I was living, how are things going, you know, just family stuff. And then she's like, alright, that was a good phone screen. I'm going to get you in touch with the hiring manager. And like the rest is history. I got hired because the recruiter had hired me in the past. And we were friends. And we had coffee and lunch together and like, string fortunate coincidences, and so working at SurveyMonkey. And I realized that at Survey Monkey, they do a different kind of SEO than I had ever done before. So I don't know if the listeners have ever done SEO or read about SEO or thought about SEO, most material out there on SEO is how do you pick your keywords? How do you do research? How do you write up page? How many words should it be? How fast should it be? What web platform you should use, all the technical stuff, all that technical stuff. At Survey Monkey, I realized that none of that even mattered. And I have, you know, stories in my book about my experiences there, where I know how to convince people to do things. So it was all about diplomacy, it was all about breaking the rules that I'd learned on best practices and SEO to make things actually happen. It wasn't my going to be my role to stand in a meeting, and make a PowerPoint about these are all the things you should do. That's it, my time is over, I'm done. Now go do those things, I really had to get people on board, help figure out a strategy, convince the CEO to invest in it, you know, is there for a long time, you know, get employees to join the to join my team, you know, coach them to learn best practices, all those little things that really went into a successful SEO effort. So that's really what the book digs into. The book digs into my career and how to learn how to get things done, how to think at a higher level, how to be strategic and not really chase the algorithm and chase SEO tactics. And that's where I think anybody should be spending their time because I think SEO is different for every single website. It really is like what Google believes your website to be about. So that is what you should focus on. What should my website be about? And not the little minutiae and little tactics on how to be successful. For sure, for sure. And yeah, my own SEO career, it was kind of a similar path. I mean, I . . . there were no books. When I got started, I think I got started in 2004, or something. And Rand Fishkin was publishing stuff online on his blog, but there wasn't that much stuff out there. And you had to just kind of experiment play around with it. I wish books like this had existed back when I was getting started. Oh, absolutely.

Josh Steimle

So what was your motivation to write this book? What was the moment when you said, You know what, I need to do this, I need to sit down, I need to write this book.

Eli Schwartz

So I'd say probably had two moments. So moment number one was I had the most amazing team and I think my team in my book, because they really helped me to write this book. So the most amazing thing on Survey Monkey, they would come to me with . . . so initially when I was there, and I really long career there, I was there for seven years. And a little bit of backstory here that's important for the book, which is, I got this idea in my head that I started doing international SEO, I got this idea in my head that I wanted to do more international stuff. And the only way I was going to do international things was if I actually spent a lot of time overseas, because again, I'm a big believer in you need to experience it, you can just read out of a book like I'm a, you know, an Asia expert, because I read a book about Asia. And I watched movies about Asia, and I watched documentaries, I felt like I had to be somewhere. And I chose Asia as the place I wanted to go and be somewhere and learn and embed myself into a culture. And I'd actually wanted to leave SurveyMonkey I'd gotten a job offer to go to an agency and run an agency team in Asia. I'd like I said before, the way we met is I really wanted to go to Asia, I met everyone that knew something to tell me about working in Asia. And I got this job offer and I was all set to move made. I sold everything in my house and rented out my house and gotten a new place to live in Singapore where I was going to leave this agency team and the CEO of Survey Monkey, who passed away six years ago Dave Goldberg, he . . . I gave notice to my boss, I thought I was giving very generous notice, I gave three weeks that I was going to be moving. And she wasn't having any of it. She brought it to the CEO. And I was like, good, yeah, bring it to Dave. I sort of knew him but it was attended meetings within the company was a lot smaller at the time. And, you know, 10 minutes later, she texted me and she said, David like to see you. So that was moving very, very quickly on you know, on any sort of time line. 10 minutes later, I was in the CEOs conference room. And he said, you're not moving to Asia. That is ridiculous. And I said, Well, I the time to say that is, that may be ridiculous, but the time to say I'm not he's already passed, I actually don't have anywhere to live anymore. I sold my wife into this. Our stuff is in boxes, we're living on air mattresses, and there's a lease to take over my house. He said, Well, you should stay another six months. And like, like I said, that that can't happen, you know, we're going. He said, I'll send you anywhere in the world, you know, send you to Brazil. And again, to me, I was I was shocked, like the CEO was offering to send me places. I knew he valued me, you know, he'd come over to me and like, you know, giving me floor tickets, the Warriors. But you know, he valued me that much. And he said, I can send you anywhere, but we have no business in Asia, there's no reason for you to go to Singapore, you can go to Brazil, you can go to Sydney, you can go to London, you can go to Berlin, I said I want to go to Asia. And the next day he emailed me, he said, Alright, it's done. You're going to you're going to stay with us. And you're going to Singapore, you're going to set up an office in Singapore, and you're going to be the only employee and, and you know. Long story short Survey Monkey did set up a company in Singapore, I was the only employee. As far as job title. He's like you write it, you write your salary, you do whatever you need to do. And like, you know, that is, to me one of the kindest things anyone's ever done I my career, I've dedicated my book to the memory of Jay Goldberg, because like, he empowered me, I was not an entrepreneur, I had a job. And I wasn't even that senior in the company. And he empowered me to be an entrepreneur within the company and to create my own career, which is what I did, and, you know, in Singapore, so my book is not about that time in Asia, my book is completely about something else. But my career is because of him. And you know, the ambition I had is because of him.

Josh Steimle

That's I'm a really cool story. By the way, for those who don't know, Dave Goldberg, who passed away . . . was the husband of Sheryl Sandberg, who's now the CEO of Facebook, who people might know her name a little bit better.

Eli Schwartz

Yeah. And she wrote Option B about, you know, his passing. But so that's, you know, that's that backstory there. Now, I can't . . . . So I was there for seven years, I came back to Survey Monkey after being in Asia for two years. And I built an SEO team, I had not had a big team before I built this team. And my team, were coming to me with some of the challenge that I'd worked on before, they would say, we need to forecast growth, or this person told us that they're not going to do anything for the next six months. And we'd sit down and strategize like, here's how you're going to get the content team to do this. And here's how you're going to build a forecast. When for anybody's ever built an SEO forecast. It's not really the most accurate thing, but you're not supposed to preface it like, Hey, I put a bunch of time into this. But it's all fake, right? It's like, I taught them how to do those things. And it's can you write it down. So I'd like write down notes of these things. That's actually I felt like I should publish it. So that was the first thing that really made me feel like I had something I wanted to share. Because like it wasn't shared anywhere else. And I wish I had those kinds of things. And the second thing was, I published a blog post called product lead SEO, which is my approach towards users, but not really an approach to our users, but building products around users. And this blog post just completely took off on LinkedIn. And this was shortly after I'd left Survey Monkey. And I was like, You know what, there's really something here, I should build all of these ideas around this book. And it was a terrible book. And in this two-year process, I think it became a book that I didn't, I don't know if your readers would be willing to read it or listen to be able to read it. But I felt like I would be willing to read it and learn from it.

Josh Steimle

Cool. Great story. So now, a two-year process, right, to get this book written?

Eli Schwartz

Yep.

Josh Steimle

So how did it start? What were some of the challenges you faced, while writing it?

Eli Schwartz

I faced a lot of challenges. Most of what I'd written were blog posts. And I'd say anybody looking to start a book, blog post or your chapters, but the challenge I had was telling a compelling story. How do you bring all this together? How do you narrate this? How do you bring color to it? There are stories in my book about like, how these things happened, and examples that people can learn from, and I worked with some amazing editors that were really able to tie this together. You know, initially, I started this book process, I wanted to, like get this message out there and build a brand that Eli wrote a book. But then if that would have been a bad book, what I turn what it turned into is a book on its own, separate from my branding, separate from my career separate from the consulting I do, it became this message of tied together. And something that I felt again, I feel like I can learn from what I had written, and that that's what it ended up being. So the challenges were, I had some ideas. I was writing some guides, but it wasn't a book, you know, to get it from point A to point x was a lot of work. And that's what took time and I thought like, no, my book is, I want to say 60,000-ish words. You can write 1000 words a day, if you're really diligent that 60 days, like that's not a book, right? Like

Josh Steimle

1000 words. That's like a medium sized article.

Eli Schwartz

Exactly. You can do that. You can write 60,000 words in two months. Like that's not I don't think that challenging, making 60,000 coherent words, no wasted words. That's the biggest challenge. Yeah, exactly. That's why we tell people when we're working with students in our courses, you got to come up with that vomit draft first, just get all the words out there. Don't worry about making it coherent, because that's where the real work comes in. That's the hard part. I'm going through that with one of my books right now where I've got, I don't know, it's about 200 pages. So it's probably around 60,000 words right now. But now it's like, oh, I've I swear I said this thing somewhere back in the earlier part, and I need to make that flow. Do I really have to read this entire 200-page manuscript to like, see how to fit those parts together? And sometimes, Yeah, you do. And that's where it really becomes a bit of a slog. Yeah, I mean, like I said, like, I felt like I could learn from a book. I've read it so many times, and it became a different book, rather than just a string of ideas.

Josh Steimle

Yeah, well, what's the short definition of product-led SEO? Explain that to us real quick for those who might not know much of anything about SEO other than it's making stuff show up in Google.

Eli Schwartz

So in order to understand product-led SEO it's important to understand the opposite of product-led SEO, which is content-led SEO. So content-led SEO is you take a keyword research tool, there are a lot of them out there, many of them are cheap, $99 might be an expensive, $99 a month. And you get some keywords that people are searching for. And you write some content around that. And you call that SEO, you put the keyword in your title. And you call that SEO and you publish it. Product-led SEO is really thinking back of which is, hey, do someone actually go into Google this? If someone Google's that? Will they want to click through? And what are they going to experience? What do we what are we creating for them? So I call it product. It's not necessarily a product, it is content. But think of it like a product, cuz you don't validate it by going to a keyword research tool, you validate it by the way, you build a product, which is for you to build a product, you determine whether there is product market fit. You talk to the potential users, you determine how to structure it, you determine what the resources you need to build it, you determine what the team is like that's going to build it. And it's not just like, Hey, here's a keyword I'm going to write it, and what I mean by like, determining all the things about it, which is, I know that I give it a classic example, which I'm living in Texas now. I think many people in Texas will experience this. You see all sorts of weird bugs. Yeah. So you see a bug and you don't . . .

Josh Steimle

Kind of like Asia, right?

Eli Schwartz

Exactly. You're when you see the bug, you don't know whether it's poisonous or not. And one thing you don't know is you don't know its Latin name, which is what most bugs have, right. So like, I wonder whether it's poisonous, the only thing I know is what it looks like. And for those of you who have never tried this, go describe a bug in Google. And Google's really good at giving you pictures of what you've just described, because this is a common use case. So that's the idea is like, Okay, I'm, I don't really know what the word would be like a bug expert. I help kill bugs, but more than an exterminator. So you want to build content? What do people want, they want pictures, they want to know whether it's poisonous, they want to know whether it can be their pet, they don't want a 1500-word blog post. So that's what I mean by product. Determine what is it that you need to create for that user. So if you're an exterminator, they want to know whether they should hire you, or they should kill all the bugs, not whether they can be making them pets, or not whether their house is going to fall down, or all those kinds of things. So you determine product market fit, and then you build your SEO strategy. And then when you gather those users, because they click on your website, can they fall into whatever your conversion event is. Now that doesn't have to be you make dollars off them, that could mean they pick up the phone and call you. That could mean they download the app that you've made, that could be they play your game, whatever it is that you want to happen for any sort of use on your website, that has to happen from SEO, and SEO shouldn't be divorced from this idea of users come to websites convert into whatever the user funnel is the way it is, in many SEO strategies. SEO is to be part of that it has to be an acquisition, one acquisition channel of all your other channels. So that in a nutshell, is product-led SEO. Your SEO is a product. It's not just a keyword.

Josh Steimle

So it's not that you're ignoring keywords. It's just where you're starting from. Right?

Eli Schwartz

Exactly. You're building something for users. And if all you're thinking is I'm building something, so I get some clicks. That is not valuable. That is just a blog post. And, you know, I was fortunate I've worked with some amazing companies, I worked with a company. They did some content marketing, they spent $4 million on content marketing, they set up a CMS instance, they hired lots of writers, it they never got a single conversion from it, because there's interesting articles to read. But this is not a media company. They created a media company out of something they should not have done, which had no parallel to their actual product because someone convinced them they should do content marketing. Yeah, content marketing is not just creating content and hoping it does something. It's like you said, it's setting up the right funnel, understanding what searcher intent is, what people want, what they're looking for. Absolutely. So now my brain is going because I'm thinking about SEO and having a book out there. Have you thought about this product-led SEO in terms of marketing your book, or how are you using product-led SEO to get the word out there about your book to get meta. I actually don't do any SEO for myself, because I have a website, I know you're gonna we're gonna plug it in the show notes. But you know, now's a relevant time to mention, but my website is Elishwartz.co, it's not.com. It's Eli Schwartz.co. The other thing I plug is my LinkedIn. So you can find me on LinkedIn, I don't need to tell you the URL. So I'm a I'm a growth advisor, I work with some amazing companies. The companies I work with, they're not googling SEO and saying, well, Eli is number one, I guess we should just hire him, or we should call him. That's not the way it works. So I don't I'm not doing SEO for myself, because there's no purpose in that, because that's not the way people are gonna find me, I'm going to build out a good website. So when someone hears my name, and they search me, they see a good website, or they search me on LinkedIn, they see something credible and want to reach out to me, there's no value in I need to be number one for international SEO, I have some decent keywords I get traffic on. But all that does for me, people read my blog posts, like that is not the channel, I necessarily care for people to find me on. The channel I care for people to find me on is Amazon, I want them to find this book. Look on Amazon, you find Product-Led SEO, read the book, and then decide whether I built an effective brand, not Google not find product, let SEO and Google, I don't know, does Eli come up for SEO and oh, we can't hire him. This book is worthless, or his websites worthless because it's not number one for SEO. The people that are number one for SEO, they spent time to be number one for SEO, not time to help their clients be number one for what their products are.

Josh Steimle

Good point. So now the book came out a month ago. Is that right? Yes. So how's it going so far? I know it's been a short time period. But . . .

Eli Schwartz

The response has been amazing. And that is fueling me to think about writing another book. Like I love putting ideas out there and having people consume them. You know, one thing I haven't done well is blog. And I've never really spent time in blogging because, yeah, you blog and we all blog, and it takes a lot of time. But when you write things and people respond to it, engage with it, and reach out to you, it encourages you to want to do more of it. Yeah, you get that high. And you're like, oh, man, if people actually liked this, and it's actually useful for people, then yeah, I want to give them more of it. Now, who is your ideal audience for the book? Who do you want to be reading it? So I wrote the book mostly to the marketing executive or to the company executive who wants to better understand SEO, and that book did not exist yet. So if you are looking for SEO on Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, or wherever your favorite book outlet is, you'll find a lot of SEO books. And they're mostly tactical books. And there's . . . for anybody looking for a top tactical book, The Art of SEO, it's a-900 page textbook on SEO . . . fantastic book. But no CMO can read that they don't have time for that. They want their team to read it. But they also want to understand what their team should be doing. And they maybe one understand who they should hire and how they should think about SEO. That's who my book is for. My book is also for anyone really doing SEO and wanting to know how to better think about challenges like how do you sell it? How do you build a product plan? I think SEO is going to transition because of many things that have happened into being more holistic and less tactical. And those kinds of questions are going to come up. I don't know that most SEOs that I've met know how to build a product plan and build how to build a long-term plan. They know how to make a content roadmap, which is the list of things they're going to write, they know how to make up a rankings report, they don't know how to necessarily build a forecast that is going to roll up to a leader who is then going to include that into an earnings call. Like, that's something that needs to be learned and needs to be understood. And that's why I've written my book for someone who wants to think about SEO from a broader context, rather than just the tactics. This is a great point. Because a lot of people when they set out to write a book, they say, Well, what do I know? All right, about what I know. And sometimes that's important in it. I mean, it is important to know what you're writing about. But if you just write about what you know, and you don't think about the audience, you can miss the mark. I mean, somebody who knows how to build houses could write a book about how to build a house, but is that going to help them sell more houses because homebuyers don't want to know how to build a house. But at the same time, the home builder could write a book about what to look for in a well-built house. That's something that homebuyers might be interested in. Same experience, but completely different audiences and completely different angles. And I love that you focus on the CMO marketing director role because that's what my first book was all about was trying to gain credibility with that audience so that I could get them to hire my marketing agency. I wasn't gonna write a book about SEO for SEO practitioners because what good would that do my agency? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just a tip here for your listeners who are looking to write books. I knew I knew who my audience was. I knew the ideas already new. But I didn't know all the things that my audience needed to know. And one thing I do is I'm an avid LinkedIn user, I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn. And I would see things that would become sort of popular as people discuss these ideas. And I would formulate my own opinions and turn that into chapters and turn that into things they need to know. Like, there would be debates about, you know, voice SEO, how much does that matter. But I think I realized that something that my readers should know, I hadn't really thought about writing before. So I'd write that, and just gathering ideas, and figure out what the gaps are, and then working with my editors, and realizing where there was gaps in knowledge and like, I referenced something, but nobody really knew what that was. So I needed to build that out.

Josh Steimle

So how did you ensure that when your ideal audience read your book that they would then do what you wanted them to do? What did you want them to do after reading your book? And how did you incentivize them to do that?

Eli Schwartz

Actually don't need people to do anything. My book is my business card . . . that I have written a book. And you know, I've had many conversations throughout my career with Well, everyone does SEO, How are you different? So now I'm trying to be different by having a book and putting my thoughts out there, rather than I have a blog, or I have 6000, Twitter followers or something like that, like, that's, that's my point of differentiation. If someone wants to read my book, and reach out to me and hear how I could potentially help their company, great. But other than that, my book is existing just to be a book. Now, one of the things I know about my audience, my audience is, you know, their senior leaders, they're not necessarily going to read my book, my book is 200 plus pages, they may or may not look for a CliffsNotes of it, they may ask someone on their team to read it, but I don't think they're gonna read it, they're more likely to use their company's money to hire me to implement my book, rather than to take the five hours or whatever it might take to actually read the book. So the follow on action is to internalize the ideas I put in there. And so a lot of these people, they might not be finding your book first, they're actually finding you first or learning about you. But then they say, oh, and Eli wrote this book, he must know what he's talking about, let's go hire him. It's that credibility piece. Exactly. The kinds of people that are looking on Amazon for SEO are not going to be looking for my book, you know, the, the kinds of people looking for SEO, and Amazon maybe early in their career, and they want to learn about SEO, I don't know that my book is necessarily for them, they can read it, I'd love for them to read it. They're not my audience. They're not the people that will ultimately hire me. They're the people that want to build a career in SEO, or maybe be an agency. Great. There are a lot of books out there for them. My audience is not looking for SEO on Amazon, they're looking for leadership books on Amazon, they're looking for team building on Amazon. And if they should happen to find my book, that would be fantastic. But more than likely, they're going to find me first. It's funny, because so many authors are hesitant to put too much information in their books, because they say oh, but if I put it all in the book, then everybody will know my secrets, and then they won't want to hire me. And I think your comment goes to this point, not only will they not want to implement everything themselves from the book, they might not even read the book, they might just see the book and be like, I don't even have time to read it. Let's just hire this guy, bring him in and have him trained the team on how to do it. All we need to know is that he has the book and we can check that off. And then we can go hire him. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have an example. My editor insisted that I really build out the Product-Led SEO example. So I made up a fictitious example, using, you know, knowledge around the pandemic, and how people are using medical information and how the world's changing so I just like I need to come up with an idea. So I came up with a hypothetical telehealth company, that they were building a service, they want to build SEO around it. And for anybody who reads my book, go ahead and steal that idea. No one is currently doing it from an SEO standpoint for telehealth, but that's not what it's about. Like when I recommend building products. We know products. I mean, Facebook is fantastic product, go build Facebook, go copy Facebook, if it's that easy, everyone a copy Facebook. So that's the idea that people read my book. There's nothing to steal. It germinates an idea in their head that this they need to build products, they need to build processes they need to grow and empower people and inspire people to go build effective SEO. That's what they should get out of the book. Not that like, oh, while I read it, and I'm done. I'm just going to there's a checklist. There is no workbook for my book. There's no checklist at the back. There is no like test that they can go do. This is a strategic approach. They need to implement the strategy. Most people that read my book are probably not going to because it is hard. No, I had a client who told me, I recommended that idea for them, which they never did. I worked for them for a year and they never did any of the things I recommended because it was hard. One of the things I recommended . . . they said this is hard and this is expensive. And I need to go get engineers and I need to go get designers. And what I pointed out to them was that the harder it is the longer it takes the more of a moat they've built when their competitors go and want to do the same thing. You think about like I have examples in my book of the best product. Let SEO companies TripAdvisor 20 plus years old, go copy TripAdvisor go try to knock them off their perch or Zillow, number one website for home valuations, everyone can do what they've done, go take government valuations of houses and put pictures on it, right? But go knock them off that perch. Everyone's gonna, we're going to be copying them. So find the idea in your space and your building that, like, that's what my book is about. I don't really think there's anything anybody can steal. And it's such a great point that we tend to see problems as a technical thing, where if we just check those boxes, we go through the steps, we follow the recipe, then we'll have success, but there's the part of the recipe that is brand building or SEO. And when you build up that kind of equity, yeah, it's hard for somebody to come along and knock you off that that's what we used to say, with our agency to clients is, hey, if nobody's doing this, that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It means that it's hard. And if you do at first and you get a head start, how is anybody going to be able to catch up with you, you're going to be years ahead of them, it's going to take in even if they do catch up with you, you'll still be three years ahead of them at that point. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So and that's the thing about like, the way I've written this book is like, you're gonna take a strategic approach, and you have to put the work into it. So I don't think there's other books out there like this. If there are I'm happy to have my opinion be there. I don't need to be the only book. Yeah, that's another good point is that . . . So what exactly are you looking for with results from this book? Is it that you want people that hire you for consulting for speaking gigs, all the above and more? Yeah, speaking gigs would be nice, I find that the amount I might be able to get paid for an hour or speaking time is better than an hour of consulting. I enjoy speaking, if none come from it, that's okay. I mean, the when I initially started this book, it was really all about the outcomes of for my consulting and for speaking. Now, I'm just happy to have a book and have people read it. Yeah. But that's the thing. If you were going for just speaking gigs, if that was your 100% goal, how many gigs do you need to get to totally change your life, I mean, 20 or 30 a year, something, you're doing pretty well, at that rate. And so the fact that there are other SEO experts out there, other people might look at this idea and say, Hey, I'm gonna go do that, I'm gonna write a book about that. Who cares? Because you're not trying to get every single speaking gig out there, you're not trying to get every single consulting gig out there, you're just trying to get enough to make you happy. And that exact small percentage of what's out there. Exactly. And you know what, and you know, this more than anybody, because you've written books, I know, so many people who I told I was writing a book two years ago, and they said, I'm gonna write a book too. And none of them have written a book. So if anybody would like to write a book, just like my book, it took me two years to do this. I'm two years ahead of all the people that are going to start today. And that's something I did not realize when I started. And I'm so grateful that I put that work in and, you know, kept at it. And it was hard. And I kept driving myself towards it. And I would have goals on like, put it on my wall. This week, I'm gonna write 1000 words, and they're gonna be good words. And then I would move it on to next week, because I had not achieved my goal. And I'd set out and be like, Alright, today is a writing day, I'm only going to write and like, I did it, right? So like, this is hard work. And I'm so glad I did it. And anybody look thinking about doing it, I'd say, do it. The most important thing to do is just keep driving towards that goal, it takes a long time, I never would have thought that it would have taken me two years, almost two years to the day, you know, even when I started working with a publisher, I thought, like, Okay, I'm on when I'm done. I have all the words. Here's the long document. And it's been a year since the publisher saw that long document. Yeah, people think finishing the writing part. Oh, yeah, you're done. That's maybe halfway, maybe you might be 20% of the way done when you get your manuscript done. So you worked with a publisher, so you didn't self-publish, tell us a little bit about that process. It's a hybrid I worked with Scribe Media. So there are there are self-publishing, but they are full service. So the reason I went and I ended up going this route was because what I want to do with this book is I want people to read the book. And I want that to be at the lowest cost possible for me, because I'm gonna give out a lot of free books. If I would have worked with a real publisher, and I'm talking to a lot of authors, they have to buy their book at some sort of discounted price from cost. By self-publishing, I own all the rights to my book, it's on Amazon, and I can print books for about four or $5 a piece, and that's my cost to go give it to other people. So my goal again, was to have in people's hands, and that helped me achieve my goal. My goal wasn't necessarily to have a book published by a recognized publisher. And honestly, like until I started down this path, I didn't even recognize any publishers. I knew like Wiley and Penguin, but all these other publishers never heard us and Scribe uses something called Houndstooth. No one knows Houndstooth versus any other publisher. They're going to look at books on their shelf. So that's what I've discovered. Scribe doesn't necessarily accept everyone. They work with you and decide whether your book makes sense. And I'm so glad that I chose scribe to this. And I did talk to a lot of other Self Publishers. I almost thought about doing this myself and hiring people to build cover designs for me and all that. But like, the full-service approach is absolutely what I needed. Cool. So with scribe then, just a couple of technical questions I have there so you said that you can buy the books at cost, and they could print it. So is that through scribe, like you call up scribe and say, hey, I want 500 books shipped to me. And they take care of that, or where are they getting printed from? Amazon. So Amazon will print individual books for me at cost. scribe has a different publisher. If I want 500 books, they have another way for me to get 500 books. But if I want one book, they'll print it. Amazon charges me four or five bucks.

Josh Steimle

Okay, so then you just order it yourself through Amazon as the author and then they do the print on demand thing.

Eli Schwartz

Yeah.

Josh Steimle

Okay. But if you want to get it in bulk, then Scribe takes care of that for you.

Eli Schwartz

Yeah, this company scribe works with. Yeah, got it. Okay. Cool. So now when you did Scribe, did you do like their $40,000 full-service thing? Or was it one of the other levels that you chose? It was the the bottom level, because I already had the manuscript and then added on editing.

Josh Steimle

Okay, got it. Yeah, cuz they have that these 40,000 packages for those out there where they interview you. And they essentially go straight the book. So they bring in a ghostwriter. There's a lot of work being done there behind the scenes, but they also have these other packages as well.

Eli Schwartz

Yeah, I wanted to write my own book. And I'd already read my own book before I started working with them. Hmm. Cool. So did you have a writing routine? As you were writing? Was it like, every morning, I'm going to do this? I mean, you talked about putting goals up on the wall and such, but did you have a routine, daily, weekly, whatever that you stuck to. I'm terrible at routines in general. So I had ideas around routines, you know, I'm going to close myself off, actually. So like I said, I moved to Texas, before I moved to Texas, I was living in California, and a very, very small house. So I didn't have my own space. And then COVID hit and that made things even worse. So it was really about finding ways to focus. And yeah, I would decide I was going to be focusing. And then those things didn't happen. So there weren't all of my routines.

Josh Steimle

So how did you get it done, then, was it Just here and there, you'd hit a spurt, and you're like, Alright, the next day, I'm gonna work really hard on this? And you do that for a day. And then . . .

Eli Schwartz

somewhat, yeah, and also, like, I'm consulting with clients, and they owned my time and writing, I feel like to get a good like two hours of writing, you need four or five hours of time. And when I'm, you know, jumping off to call, and I can say, oh, here's my two hours in between calls, and I'll go do writing. But now I had to respond to emails, and then the doorbell rang. And that's not two hours of writing. So then I would have different tasks. So while I was editing, I had feedback from the editor. And I said, Okay, I only have an hour, I'm going to do 30 minutes of editing right now, I'm just going to go and, you know, respond to things, where sometimes I would say, you know, what, I need a story here, I'm gonna go take a walk, and I'm gonna think about the story I need to do. And then I would just, you know, write down my ideas and turn that into something. So it was a long strung-together process. I know, some people can be more diligent about writing 1000 words a day and banging it all out. That's not me, because I wasn't completely focused on it between family and consulting and all the other things that come up. Cool. Well, as we're wrapping things up here, Eli, is there any one thing any one piece of advice that you would give to an entrepreneur out there who wants to write a book to grow his or her business? Is there any one tip or a piece of advice that you would give to them? I would say you want to test your ideas with some sort of market. So I'm all about this product-led SEO and don't just do things because you do things. So test your ideas. So take the idea you have for a book, share it on LinkedIn, share it on Twitter, see if people engage with that. Talk to people about it. See if they say well, that's very interesting, I'd love to learn more. And then you can start digging in there. And the book will sort of write itself in your head. If all you want to do is your goal is just like I want to write a book, I want to string together 1000s of words, I would say that's similar to like the content marketing, I don't like I'm writing words to write works. So if you want to write a book, make sure that there you have a receptive audience, even if that audience is really small, say you worked with a company, they're focused on facility management. In factories, there are not a lot of factories that care for their product, but they're the people that care for their product, really like their product. So whatever you're doing, if it's very narrow, find those narrow people, if they like, what your messages, that's where you're focusing on. So don't worry about you needing to have a bestseller writing about you know, the Trump years in the White House. Doesn't really matter. If your audience is going to be responsive, then you have a book to write. If they're not going to be responsive to your idea, come up with another idea. But do write. Perfect way to wrap things up. Thanks so much, Eli for being with us here today. Where can people find out more about you? So I have my website, Eli Schwartz co or you can Google me. That is the one term I care to come up first for is my own name. You can find me on LinkedIn, under my name, and I also have website for the book product lead SEO comm which my friends at Wix were kind enough to build for me. I they asked me to test out Wix and see their capabilities around SEO. And I started building a website for my book, and I realized I wasn't that good at building websites, and they were kind enough to help me out and make that look good. So Productledseo.com.

Josh Steimle

Cool, nice partner arrangement there. Yeah. Cool. Great. Thanks so much Eli for being with us here on the show today.

Eli Schwartz

Absolutely. Thanks, Josh. Good to see you again.