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2008
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This week I took the guys over here at Global Marketing Strategies; Dave and Scott Brandley, and talked about their background in online marketing and some of their amazing tools. Not only did they give some great tips they also shared some interesting things going on with Trust Guard, their online website verification company. Take a listen above or read the transcript below.
Garrett: Hello everybody, this is Garrett Pierson here, Your SEO Mentor. I’m excited today to interview Dave and Scott Brandley of Global Marketing Strategies and Trust-Guard.com. I’m going to start off today with asking a question, so that those who don’t know the Brandleys can get a little bit of background on your SEO and online marketing industries, maybe your family, hobbies or anything else you want to talk about. Give us a little bit of your background, Dave.
Dave: Scott and I are father and son. We’ve been doing stuff online since 1997, back when the internet was a rumor. People were just starting to do things with it. We’ve kind of figured out how to make things work over time. It’s taken us a while. We built our own shopping cart. We sold products online, figured out how to get traffic in a small niche. We were getting about a million visitors a year to that small niche, which was pretty good. About four or five years ago, we sold that business. We realized that we had some skills that we had learned along the way about traffic and conversion. We love doing that kind of stuff. We’ve developed some tools that help people with their traffic and conversion. That’s kind of our hobby too. We love to come to work and do things like that.
Garrett: You guys work together, father and son. Scott, how has that been, working with your dad?
Scott: It’s been great. Sometimes we want to kill each other, but most of the time we’re like best friends. We work off of each other. We come up with good ideas and make our good ideas even better. It’s been a lot of fun.
Garrett: Why don’t you guys tell us a little bit, about why you guys enjoy it? Dave, you mentioned that it’s a hobby. Tell us a little bit, about why you guys enjoy online marketing, the industry, and your career these past ten or eleven years that you said you’ve been doing this?
Dave: I’ve always been interesting in computer-related things. Back when you actually had to use punch cards to communicate with the computer – that was a long time ago.
Scott: That was back right after electricity was invented?
Dave: Anyway, we like helping other people to find success with the internet. That’s really what drives us. It’s cool to do it for yourself, and that’s what we did at first. We tried to make things work for ourselves, but then we realized that when you can share that information or those tools that we’ve developed, with other people, and see them having success, it just makes you feel good. That far exceeds the monetary side of it. We would do this even if we weren’t getting paid. That tells you it’s a good kind of job. In fact, a lot of times we weren’t getting paid at the beginning, and we just kept plugging away because we really enjoyed it. We’ve helped a lot of people increase their conversion rates, increase their traffic, and that feels good doesn’t it, Scott?
Scott: Yeah, and we hope to help a lot more.
Garrett: Great – there’s a lot of new people coming into the industry. Scott, if you could give one really good gold nugget of advise to a newbie, what would that be, coming into SEO or online marketing or doing anything online?
Scott: I’ve got two, actually, if that’s okay.
Garrett: Sure.
Scott: The first thing I want to tell people is not to try to do everything yourself. There are people who can do things better than you. The internet is a perfect place to hire people to do what they do best. One really good example of that is when you’re designing a website, or if you want to redesign your website, go to a place where you can hire freelance graphic designers and programmers like Elance or ScriptLance. You can get their services for basically a tenth of the price of someone you would hire in the U.S.
The second thing I would say is that once you have your site up, don’t assume that the first version of your site is going to give you the maximum sales. You should always split test. Split testing is a huge thing. We actually learned that the hard way. We actually sold our store a few years back, like my dad said. After we sold it, we learned about split testing and realized that if we would have split tested our site, we probably could have quadrupled our sales with the same amount of traffic. It was a hard lesson to learn, but it’s something that’s crucial when you’re online.
Garrett: You guys have a split testing software, isn’t that correct?
Scott: Correct, we actually built it after we realized how important split testing was.
Garrett: Scott, why don’t you go into a little bit; somebody coming in might not know exactly what split testing is. Give us a ten to twenty word example or definition of what split testing is, if you can.
Scott: When you split test, you take one page, which is called your control or your original page. You make a new page. You turn the new page on and off for every customer that comes in. One customer sees the old page. Another customer sees the new page. It goes back and forth like that. You track the conversion of both pages to see which one wins.
Dave: You just want to change one element at a time so you can really see what’s making the difference on that page. It might be the color of your heading, or an image, or something like that. That’s “A/B” split testing, simple change.
Scott: There are all different levels of split testing software on the market. What we found when we built our software is there is not a starter option. There’s not something that beginners can use to get into split testing, so we built our software very simple so people can get involved, and get things moving on their site.
Garrett: That’s awesome. Where would somebody go to get that software?
Scott: ABSplittesting.com.
Garrett: Great, I’ll have a link to that at YourSEOMentor.com, for those that are listening on their iPod or iTunes. Dave, why don’t you give us, in your opinion, what you think the most exciting trend is in the SEO, social marketing, or anything with online marketing? Where do you see the trend going?
Dave: It’s definitely going more social. That’s an interesting avenue, especially for someone like me. We’re used to doing everything with search engines, and getting all of our leads through search engines. The cool thing about social stuff is you don’t necessarily have to show up so much in the search engines if people are talking about you in the social sites. That’s really a cool, exciting trend. Of course, that doesn’t mean you ignore the search engine part, but it’s really getting social and about telling your friends, “I found this cool website, or I found this cool product.” That sells better actually, than just having your listing in the search engine. It’s really cool.
Scott: It’s a lot more personal.
Garrett: Scott, why don’t you tell us; with the rise of social media, how do you see the Web changing in the next year or two. Go into a little bit more detail of what you see happening.
Scott: A lot of my view about the social media industry comes from you, Garrett; working with you. I see that there is huge potential. Social marketing is so much more personal. There are a lot more ways that you can promote your business. A lot of it is just even through information that you present, interviews like this, that you can actually hear. You are utilizing more senses in social marketing it seems, from audio to video, and you’re interacting with your customers more through voting, bookmarks, tags, and things like that. It’s a lot more interactive. It’s very easy to spread your message about something in social marketing. People talk and they share it with their friends and associates.
Garrett: Those are some great tips guys. I know you have built a lot of wonderful tools to help webmasters and online business owners really succeed in their business. I want to talk a little bit about Trust Guard. Dave, why don’t you tell us what Trust Guard is, and why anyone online should use this service that you guys provide?
Dave: A good example is if one of your friends tells you about a site. That’s the social side of it. You go to that site. You’ve never been there before. You don’t know that company. You don’t know that website. It helps to have something there that you recognize or that builds trust. That’s where trust seals come in. Besides Trust-Guard, there are some other trust seals out there, like Hacker Safe, Better Business Bureau Online, Truste. Those are our main competitors. They’re very good services.
What Trust Guard does that’s different is we combine all those services into one product that you can get on our site.
Garrett: What are those, Dave?
Dave: Our privacy seal, our business verified seal, and our security seal. When a person comes to a website and they see one of these trust seals, or they see the set of them, which is even better, they have this instant knowledge that somebody else has verified that website. That builds some trust and credibility into that website instantly. Statistically, you have about eight seconds that a person is going to stay on your site, or less. If you can instantly let them know that they can trust you, that means they’ll stay longer and their chance of purchasing from you is higher than it would be normally.
Garrett: Scott, we’ve heard of HackerSafe and McAffee, which is now McAffee. McAffee bought them out. What’s the difference between McAffee secured and Trust Guard?
Scott: The main difference is that McAffee Secure does something that’s called PCI scanning or vulnerability scanning. They actually scan your server for vulnerabilities, particularly to make sure that hackers don’t steal credit cards. What we do is something is called website verification where we actually verify your website. We verify that you have the proper security in place to protect a customer under normal conditions. Because we don’t actually scan your server, we’re able to offer our services at a discounted price.
What we’ve found is that most small businesses don’t actually need to have PCI scanning or vulnerability scanning because they store their credit cards with their payment gateway provider, which is generally Authorize.Net or PayPal. Even if a hacker were to somehow get into their online store or website, they wouldn’t be able to get the credit card information.
Garrett: So you’re saying Authorize.Net or PayPal are already doing PCI scanning for themselves?
Scott: Exactly, they already do PCI scanning to protect the information you store with them.
Garrett: That’s interesting. That’s quite a big difference. Dave, let’s talk about the verification process. For example a security seal, a privacy seal, and a business-verified seal, that you spoke about earlier. How hard is it to get verified and how long does it take? What does a small business or website need to have?
Dave: One of the things for security, we check an SSL certificate. We actually go through the shopping process. We don’t send a bot in there. We actually have a person go in through the shopping cart process. We actually look at their SSL certificate, the expiration date, and make sure that everything is valid. You would be surprised how many people that have an SSL certificate haven’t implemented it properly. It is kind of scary actually. We verify all that.
With the privacy seal, we actually look at your privacy policy. We make sure that you meet certain standards that Trust Guard requires. There are other requirements that California has for privacy policies, and there is the children’s act. What’s that called, Scott, COPPA?
Scott: The Federal Trade Commission has various standards as well.
Dave: We try and meet those things. We try to make sure the website we’re looking at meets those requirements. We actually have a person read that as well.
Then we actually look at the business. We verify that they have a real business address. We verify their email and their phone number. We know we can actually contact someone. Those are all important things.
Scott: One nice thing about the business verification; a lot of small businesses have their offices out of their home. One thing we offer is we actually verify their home address, but we give them an option to verify a P.O. Box. We’ll display the P.O. Box and verify both.
Garrett: You’re right. A lot of people do this out of their home. It’s kind of a side thing. That’s good to know.
Dave: One thing that we should point out is there is a reason why we do those three seals. That’s because people look for different things depending on their experience. Some people are really concerned about privacy, “What’s going to happen to my email,” and all that. Other people are really concerned about security. “Is this site secure? What’s going to happen to my credit card information?” Other people are really concerned about the business. “Can I contact them if I have to?” Some people have all three concerns.
By displaying those three different seals, you actually cover a larger population base. If you can make those different people comfortable on your site, like I said, they’re going to stay longer. They’re going to buy from you. You will have less people abandoning shopping carts, which really makes a difference.
Garrett: Scott, tell us quickly about the “Double Your Money Back Guarantee”. What’s that all about?
Scott: We are so confident about the service, and we’ve helped so many people, literally hundreds and hundreds of people have increased their conversion rate with Trust Guard, that we decided to have a double your money-back guarantee. We implemented that over a year ago. To this day, we’ve never actually had to give someone double their money back. We’ve helped so many people to increase their conversion.
Garrett: Nobody has ever asked for that back?
Dave: No; knock on wood.
Garrett: I know there has been a lot going on. Everybody listening, if you’ve been following some of my posts at YourSEOMentor.com, you know that I joined the team here at Global Marketing Strategies and Trust Guard. I have the opportunity of working with these guys every day, which is awesome. I know there is a lot going on at Trust Guard, lately. I know that because I’m here. Scott, why don’t you quickly go into some of the new things you guys have launched. What’s coming in the future if there is anything. Then tell my listeners where they can go to get this stuff.
Scott: Sure, first of all, it’s been great having Garrett work on our team and have him as the operations manager for Trust Guard. We appreciate you Garrett. Some of the things that he’s been helping us to develop is we’ve recently completed a whole new backend to our system, where people can split test the seals on their site, in real time, with a click of a button. They can see exactly what kind of increase they’re getting on the site.
Garrett: So, essentially, you’ve taken the split testing software that you guys already developed, and built them into seals. That’s just amazing. I love that. Is that an extra charge?
Scott: No, that’s included. Another thing we’ve done is we’ve developed our own privacy policy creator, which generates amazing privacy policies, that all of our members can use for free. That’s a ninety-seven dollar value. We actually have another site that we charge ninety-seven dollars for that policy.
Another cool thing, probably the coolest thing lately, is that we’ve just launched the first security verified video seal. It’s the only video seal on the internet. It’s getting great reviews. We’re just launching that now. It’s really fun.
Garrett: Go into a bit more detail. I’ll make sure to put a link over so people can check it out. When you say video seal, what do you mean?
Scott: Basically, traditionally you have a seal that says, “Security verified by Trust-Guard. Click to verify.” With the video seal, it actually shows an actor above the seal. You can click on her and she’ll actually tell you what we verify and what items the site has in place to help keep the client’s information secure. It’s really cool.
Garrett: It’s actually a lady talking?
Scott: Yeah, she talks. The cool thing is you can split test it.
Garrett: That is awesome. That’s great because a lot of people, if you’ve noticed online, everything seems to be going to video. The very point that you’re using video with your seals – and your seals are already helping conversion rates, helping these small businesses get better conversion and more sales; this video seal is going to add upon that isn’t it?
Scott: Like my dad said at the beginning, we really love helping people. We want to help people increase their conversion as much as possible. Anything we can do to increase conversion even more, we’re going to do it.
Garrett: How do they get the video seal, Dave?
Dave: They go to Trust-Guard.com. Look for the security seal. They can also do a search inside the site. If they follow the links that say, “Buy Now,” they’ll get to it. They’ll be able to see what the video seal looks like. It actually comes with a couple of our packages, our multi-seal packages. One is currently forty-seven dollars a month, or it’s three hundred ninety-seven dollars a year. If they buy now, they’ll be grandfathered in forever at that price. Because of the things that we’ve been adding to Trust Guard, we’re actually going to raise the prices January 1st. They’ll be grandfathered in if they get those now.
Garrett: So you’re saying the three hundred ninety-seven a year, that’s the multi-seal package. They get the security-verified seal, the business-verified seal, the privacy seal, and the certified seal, and you’re throwing in the new video seal at that price, right?
Scott: Right, and the video seal by itself is two hundred forty-seven dollars. We actually sell that individually on our site.
Dave: Or, they can do monthly at forty-seven dollars.
Garrett: Thank guys, I really appreciate your time with me. Hopefully all of you who have listened can go to Trust-Guard.com. I’ll have a link to that on my blog post, with this podcast interview. You can also check out ABSplittesting.com. Check out those products. They really sell themselves. Head over there and you’ll really be surprised at what the value you get is, with the prices of these packages. Before I started working with these guys, I used their seals. As soon as I put those seals on my site, the Trust Guard seals, I saw an increase in my conversion rate.
Everybody focuses on traffic, and they forget that once the traffic gets to their site, you need to keep those people on your site. You need to give them confidence. This is the perfect product for that. Thanks guys, for all your advice, for giving us a little bit of background on what you do. Hopefully we’ll do this again sometime.
Scott: That sounds good.
Dave: Thanks, Garrett.
Garrett: Thank you.
To find out more about who transcribed this interview check out Tamara Bentzur!
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Tags: Dave Brandley, Hacker Safe, McAffee, Scott Brandley, Split Testing, Trust Guard, Trust Seals, website verification
