Success, SEO, and the Super Power of Generosity - Ira Bowman is RightOffTrack

Anya Smith:
Welcome everyone to RightOffTrack, the podcast where we explore their remarkable journeys of individuals who have dared to embrace unconventional paths to success. Get ready to be inspired as we dive into the captivating journey of Ira Bowman, a seasoned marketing and sales expert with over 25 years of experience in the print and graphics industry. As the owner of Bowman Digital Media, Ira has been instrumental in helping small and medium-sized businesses transcend their online presence and skyrocket their sales. through innovative and tailored digital media solutions. From SEO strategies to captivating content creation, from visually stunning photography to dynamic web development and engaging video production, Ira's expertise is remarkably versatile. But Ira's impact doesn't stop there. Beyond his entrepreneurial endeavors, he has made remarkable contributions as a two times TEDx speaker, best-selling author, and dedicated philanthropist. Through his heartwarming project, Project Help You Grow, Ira connects job seekers with employers across the globe, facilitating invaluable connections that paved the way for a brighter future for many. One of the defining moments in Ira's journey was his layoff in 2020, which led him to embrace change and turn challenges into opportunities. This experience not only shaped his resilience, but also fueled his passion for helping others navigating through tough times. Recently, Ira achieved another milestone by launching his fourth book, Business Tips from the Trenches. where he collaborates with 12 fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners who share their bite-sized tips and lessons learned. This treasure trove of wisdom guides inspiring entrepreneurs on how to avoid mistakes, reduce their learning curve, and fast track their success. With a massive social media following, boasting over 200,000 followers on LinkedIn and over 140,000 followers on Instagram, Ira's digital presence reflects the impact of his work and the admiration of his community. His passion for empowering others through knowledge sharing, networking, and social media marketing is palpable and contagious. In this episode, we will delve into the pivotal moments that have shaped his journey, the challenges he faced, the importance of staying authentic in a rapidly evolving digital marketplace, and what motivates him to make a difference every day. Join us as an insightful and inspiring episode as we uncover the depth, the wisdom of Iris, awesome sturdy. Welcome to the show, Ira.

Ira Bowman:
Thank you. I think we could just do a mic drop. That was pretty good.

Anya Smith:
That's it. That was the podcast. We're done.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah. I mean, it sounds so impressive. And then you're going to talk to me, and people are going to realize I'm just a normal guy. But no, that was really good. Thank you.

Anya Smith:
You are an amazing guy. Can I say, I don't know how this is gonna sound, but I think that what people need to realize people are people. And people who do remarkable things are still normal people who work, who go through a struggle and do remarkable things.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, well, I mean, I have I have a mantra that I live by life is too short to be selfish, but

Anya Smith:
Ugh, love it.

Ira Bowman:
part of that for me is it's also like, hey, even though I work in a digital space and I work with Photoshop and we create beautiful images and all this stuff, it's like life is real. So I don't mind sharing my warts with people and showing them my struggles. So I think that's why people gravitate towards me a little bit is because it's like, hey, you're not trying to be like this perfectly polished guy, you still show us like your flaws. I. I was in Las Vegas where I grew up just this past weekend, my mom turned 70, so we're there and it was hot. It was 112 hot, right? Like super, super crazy hot. Still not hot enough to make the pool water hot when you jumped in. It was still cold. And then you got to get used to it. But I don't know what temperature it needs to be for you to jump in the pool and not be cold, but I haven't found it yet. But anyways, I have my shirt off. And I let my kid take a picture of me with my shirt off and actually posted that later because I thought it didn't look too bad. But because I've lost 30 pounds, so I'm feeling

Anya Smith:
Congratulations.

Ira Bowman:
pretty good. I'm feeling pretty good right now. But if you see that photo, you'll know I'm far from like supermodel, like, you know, bodybuilder shape. I'm just I'm a 46 year old man with a dad bod now. You know what I mean?

Anya Smith:
You're amazing. No, again, just even from this little context, you can tell how genuine Ira is. And just a quick shout out to Judy who connected us,

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
who is my writing coach. And she was like, you know what, Anya, I have somebody who can help you get more information. One of my dreams is to do a TED Talk. She's like, talk to Ira. He's done it twice. He has some suggestions. I was like, cool. And then I saw who you were and I saw like everything you've done and the numbers. And I was like, oh my gosh, like, what do I have in common?

Ira Bowman:
And then

Anya Smith:
What can

Ira Bowman:
we

Anya Smith:
I

Ira Bowman:
found

Anya Smith:
offer

Ira Bowman:
out

Anya Smith:
him?

Ira Bowman:
you have quite a bit in common as we found out.

Anya Smith:
We did, we did, because people are people, right? But what I valued, A, you're a bit dorky, and I love that, because I have

Ira Bowman:
I'm

Anya Smith:
the

Ira Bowman:
a

Anya Smith:
same

Ira Bowman:
dork.

Anya Smith:
thing.

Ira Bowman:
Thank you. Yes, I am.

Anya Smith:
You're welcome, I am too, I'm a proud dork. I've never been cool, I'm now a mom and dork and not cool, but I love that, I love that about me. But you were like so genuinely helpful from the start, I was like, hey, I'm starting this, I'm doing this work, here's my knowledge on SEO, and they're like, okay. Let's talk about SEO. Like just the spark went up in your head. And I love that.

Ira Bowman:
Yep, yeah, you can talk to me about SEO, social media or photography and you'll see it in my face for sure.

Anya Smith:
Yeah, and you have done so much. I don't even quite know where to start with all of it. Do

Ira Bowman:
Let's go.

Anya Smith:
you maybe wanna share like, one tip I typically people say is like, Anya, you gotta focus. Like maybe if you just, you know, laser focus on one thing, then you would be really good at it. For better or worse, I can't, I'm passionate about this and I wanna go here. And I see you and like, you're doing a lot of things really well in excelling. How do you discover those passions and how do you still... are able to manage and balance those different passions of yours successfully.

Ira Bowman:
Well, I mean, it's trial and error sometimes, honestly, but I think at the at the heart or the core of my skill set is this ability. It's systematic thinking, but it's the ability to take complex things, break it down in its components and not just hyper focused. A lot of people can do that. But the ability to zoom out just a little bit and look at it from like a 30,000 foot view. and then zoom in when needed and zoom back out. Like that's kind of, I think, the thing that makes my brain a little bit unique for most people. So. I'm not an engineer. I'm not the guy who's gonna create the next invention that the world's gonna go like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. How do we live without that? That's not my skillset. But what I am really good at is problem solving. So I can not necessarily see into the future, but I do try to ride the wave. The power of the wave is in the front of the wave. So trying to be an early adapter, identify... trends before they become super big, and then gain that momentum that can be gained while that momentum is there, and then not sticking around too long so that the wave dies.

Anya Smith:
Hmm.

Ira Bowman:
Because, for example, I'll tell you a good one, and LinkedIn is a platform, a lot of people love it. I have a fairly large network, as you referenced in the opening on LinkedIn. In 2016, I was working in the Bay Area and I was doing primarily door-to-door sales. I was doing it every day and 30 to 50 cold calls a day. Like they called me the cold call king. I used to wear out shoes every three months. Like that

Anya Smith:
Oh my

Ira Bowman:
was

Anya Smith:
gosh,

Ira Bowman:
my life.

Anya Smith:
that's

Ira Bowman:
And,

Anya Smith:
rough.

Ira Bowman:
um, yeah, yeah. Well, in San Francisco in 2016, it was really rough. In fact, it got so rough that most of the, um, the businesses that we're calling on were inside the financial district. Okay.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
And so I had to. try to figure out a way to get inside, even when I didn't know people, which at one point just meant you had to get past security. Well, that can be done with just a little bit of homework and basically not dressing up like a salesman, right? So you dress up more like a client, you walk in with a stack of whatever and they don't know if you're who you are, you're just asking for somebody by name and you can get in. But in

Anya Smith:
Real life tips right here.

Ira Bowman:
2016, 17 and 18, Like it changed because then they were requiring appointments only. And even if you could get past security, you couldn't get up the elevators because you needed those magnet cards, right? So you'd tap it, and then it would unlock that level only. Well, what was I going to do? Well, this is one of those problems and one of the solutions I had to figure out. So what I realized was, well, I could get on LinkedIn, and I can build my network. And through that, I can get these appointments that I want. So I did that for a couple of years. And LinkedIn was great for that. Well, in 2020, when I got laid off, now I have another problem. I don't have a job. So what am I going to do to make my money? Well, I created Bowman Digital Media. And I helped small business owners increase their company's visibility online so they could generate website traffic. That was awesome. But I was doing it primarily through LinkedIn. Well, in 21, I realized I had an epiphany. The advantage that I get from LinkedIn is so much smaller than what I could get if I would focus on Google. So I switched the effort over, and it wasn't because LinkedIn was necessarily bad, but it basically has kind of played itself out. It's not growing like some of the other platforms are, right?

Anya Smith:
Hmm.

Ira Bowman:
It just is what it is.

Anya Smith:
Right.

Ira Bowman:
It's not one of these things. I know there's some people that are emotionally tied and connected with LinkedIn, and they love LinkedIn. I promise you don't love it any more than I do. But the fact is, I'm also a realist, and I can see where website traffic comes from. And so, like the emergence of TikTok. Well, if you look at the way TikTok has grown our threads, some of these newer platforms over the last four or five years, you know, they have outpaced LinkedIn. In fact, everybody thinks Facebook is dead. I could tell you that Facebook is actually growing faster than LinkedIn is growing. today,

Anya Smith:
Right,

Ira Bowman:
right? Like most

Anya Smith:
right.

Ira Bowman:
people would go, no, it's not. I guess it is. There are 2.98 billion monthly active users on LinkedIn right now. There's only 320 million monthly active users on, I'm sorry, I need

Anya Smith:
LinkedIn.

Ira Bowman:
to say that again, because I have dyslexia and I messed something up.

Anya Smith:
You're great.

Ira Bowman:
There are 320 million monthly active users on LinkedIn right now, okay? There are 2.98 billion monthly active users on Facebook. That's what I meant to say. So, When you look at just the sheer volume, but also the growth, Instagram has basically doubled their monthly active users over the last couple of years, so has YouTube. In fact, 80% of Americans, 18 or over, Americans use YouTube every single month. That is the number one used platforms for American adults. So anyways, that's the thing that I can kind of like zoom in and zoom out and help people in pockets. I thought when I launched my business that we basically would be a content creation company for business owners on LinkedIn. That's what I saw

Anya Smith:
Right?

Ira Bowman:
when I was creating the business. But we have moved over to SEO primarily, and it's simply because the volume that we can generate on Google is so much higher. I talked about 2.98 billion monthly active users on Facebook. Well, there are 7 billion searches plus. every single day on Google. That's 210 billion plus searches a month on Google. There's no traffic on the planet. That's anything close to Google. Google is the ocean and everything else is like a puddle.

Anya Smith:
So

Ira Bowman:
So

Anya Smith:
true.

Ira Bowman:
anyways, that's kind of how my brain works. Hopefully that gives you some insight in how I think.

Anya Smith:
No, it's so helpful. And just for additional context, like I reached out to you and I was like, Hey, I have a podcast and like you gave me some really helpful tips right away. And what I love is that not only do people have opportunity to work with you and gain value, but you also share a lot of things for free. Like you

Ira Bowman:
Oh

Anya Smith:
have,

Ira Bowman:
yeah.

Anya Smith:
you know, your page obviously, and it has YouTube videos and you do Ted Talk. So a lot of this information is out there and you reference those resources. So I appreciate that. I know for me, my homework for this weekend is to go and create blog descriptions and transcripts of all of my.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
podcast because that will help my SEO, like search engine optimization.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, let's explain that real quick just in case

Anya Smith:
Yes,

Ira Bowman:
anyone,

Anya Smith:
let's go.

Ira Bowman:
if you have in your audience anybody who has a website and you're doing podcasts, whether you're the guest or you're the host, what you want to do is you want to transcribe, what does that mean? You want to take the words that are spoken in the video or the audio and you want to get them in written format. And the reason why you want to do that is because your website gets indexed, which basically means they take inventory of what's on your website, but they only give you credit. for content that's written. So in other words, if we talk all about SEO today, which we probably will, because that's my main expertise, right? So we're talking about SEO. If somebody watches the video, they will learn about SEO. But when Google looks at your website, they'll give you credit for having a video, but they won't give you credit for what I said inside it, unless you do the transcription. So the homework for Anya is to take the podcast, transcribe those and then put those in blog format on our website. Now you don't have to put it in a blog. You can use like accordion text. I do that all the time. I showed on you that yesterday. You take text and you put it in accordion. So what is that? That's when you have like a little snippet and it says read more, see more or expand. You click and it opens up and there's the rest of it. Well, Google gives you credit for all of that written content. And how important is that? It's about 20% of your overall SEO score. So you're talking about a pretty big significant increase in improvement. The word here is SERP, it stands for search engine results page, but that's what page you are on Google when someone searches the key terms. So like for me, SEO is a big one, right? So when people are searching SEO, I wanna be as high as I can on the list, why? Because most people aren't gonna even go to page two. So if you can't get on page one of your main topics, then you're in trouble.

Anya Smith:
Yeah, very true.

Ira Bowman:
But more written content, more written content will give you a boost. Like I said, it's, it's basically, it's not exact. This is not an exact, but if you think of it this way, there's basically five pillars, we talked about this yesterday too, but the five pillars of your SEO are your site structure, your, your content, your, uh, site speed, how fast it is, your backlinks, and then your overall visitors. So each one of those is roughly 20% of your overall SEO score. But if you can get all five of those pillars. up, then you'll start outperforming a lot of your competition and your rank will go up.

Anya Smith:
You're amazing. And one thing that was funny is like I mentioned to you, I was doing a class, oh, what's funny? I have the book. So I have like books stacked up on my table to raise up the laptop,

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
literally looking at it. So like the art of SEO, third edition, and Spencer and Sertiola, I'm probably butchering that by O'Reilly. That was my textbook and it was like this sick.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
And when I bought it for this class, for my masters in science, it's like, what is SEO? This

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
is me, like, you know.

Ira Bowman:
Search

Anya Smith:
Educated

Ira Bowman:
search

Anya Smith:
person,

Ira Bowman:
engine

Anya Smith:
right?

Ira Bowman:
search engine optimization. That's what the acronym stands for. But let me tell you what it actually is. Right. Like if you had to ask me to define SEO in one sentence, I'll tell you, it's this simple. How do you increase your rankings on Google and the activities that you do to do that? That's what SEO is.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Most people don't like that answer, but that's actually the most helpful answer, because most people, when you say SEO, they have no idea what it means. Like, what do

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I do to increase my? Moz rating or my ARS rankings. Like, how do you do that? How do you increase your SERP? SERP is a word that most people have never heard of. It's probably one of the most important words that most people haven't heard. And the other thing that people don't ever talk about, but they really need to, is the bounce rate, right? Like, bounce is when someone comes to a website, but they don't actually consume anything. So they either get impatient because it's loading too slow or they don't see the content fast enough. to catch their attention and they leave. They hit the eject button. If you do that, that's considered a bounce. And the problem with a bounce is mainly this, most people won't ever come back. So you get one shot to make that first impression, it better be a good one. And

Anya Smith:
And

Ira Bowman:
that's

Anya Smith:
also,

Ira Bowman:
where you need your videos,

Anya Smith:
yeah.

Ira Bowman:
right? Why videos? Here's why. We already talked about your videos don't give you credit for the content inside it, for Google and for indexing. That's 100% true. But here's what it does do for you. If you can get somebody to play the video, it increases your user engagement time.

Anya Smith:
All

Ira Bowman:
Remember

Anya Smith:
right.

Ira Bowman:
I talked about the five pillars, visitors is one of the five. So if you can get your visitor count up or the amount of time that they stay up. So videos are considered or classified as interactive media. Any interactive media helps you with engagement, especially, and I don't know when you took your SEO class, I don't wanna age you here, but a lot.

Anya Smith:
Recently, recently.

Ira Bowman:
A lot of people think they know what SEO works for user engagement. They think about tracking cookies. Well, tracking cookies are now long gone, right? It's G4 properties instead of universal analytics. So with your G4s, they don't use tracking cookies. They use pixels and the pixels don't track how long a tab is open on that page. What they're actually tracking now is the user engagement on the page. So when they scroll, you get credit. when they pause and hit or click on anything that expands or opens or plays. So I'm talking audio files and MP3, video files and MP4, any type of image carousel or PDF or anything that they can click and it, and it does something. So if you have JPEG files, it doesn't work because nothing

Anya Smith:
Right,

Ira Bowman:
happens.

Anya Smith:
right.

Ira Bowman:
Right. But as long as you have multimedia type of a file or Again, why would the expandable what we call accordion text, why do we do that? Because if they have to click to read it, I get a credit every time they click. So I don't want less sections. I want more sections because if I can get them to click eight instead of just on one video, I actually did myself a solid that way. So SEO with the content creation, with what we call UX UI, user experience, user interface, all those things. There's a there's a science and art. both.

Anya Smith:
Mm-hmm.

Ira Bowman:
Right? So anyways, it's different. It's much different than it used to be.

Anya Smith:
Yeah, and Google and like there's different platforms, right? Google is just the main like,

Ira Bowman:
There's

Anya Smith:
it's

Ira Bowman:
no other

Anya Smith:
the main

Ira Bowman:
platform.

Anya Smith:
traffic source. Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, forget

Anya Smith:
Okay.

Ira Bowman:
it. Look, I will tell you this. I was actually talking to one of my buddies, Mike O'Connor. Mike O'Connor from SPN is why I got into this, all of this in the first place. I could tell you that story if you like. It's in my first

Anya Smith:
Yes.

Ira Bowman:
TEDx talk. But here's the thing. We were talking about, OK. I should ask you a pop quiz, but I don't want to embarrass you, so I won't. All right.

Anya Smith:
I appreciate you.

Ira Bowman:
There are three other main search engines on the planet. that are classified

Anya Smith:
Bing.

Ira Bowman:
as search engines, right? So Google is number one. We're gonna

Anya Smith:
and

Ira Bowman:
get

Anya Smith:
Bing

Ira Bowman:
to...

Anya Smith:
and, who is my third one?

Ira Bowman:
OK,

Anya Smith:
It's

Ira Bowman:
second is Bing.

Anya Smith:
not Yandex, it's not Yandex.

Ira Bowman:
No. Yahoo

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
is number three.

Anya Smith:
yeah.

Ira Bowman:
DuckDuckGo is number four.

Anya Smith:
Oh yes,

Ira Bowman:
All right.

Anya Smith:
yes.

Ira Bowman:
Now, the others are so insignificant, they don't even count. And I'll tell you why. Because they have less than 1% of all search engine volume. OK. DuckDuckGo is number four. It comes in at about 1% of overall user traffic every single day, search engine traffic, around the globe. And that's funny to me because it's owned by it's a Chinese based company. And you would think that China would force people to use it, but even they don't like use it. Okay. So then Yahoo. Well, Yahoo was really big, you know, in 1997, but you know, there's still some hanger ons, there's no growth there. It's like 1.2%. It might be 1.1. It's somewhere in there, but it's less than 1.5% of overall being. Owned by Microsoft. Come on, chat. GBT. We got this baby, right?

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
No, no. It's less than 2% of the overall use. So if you take the number two and number three and the number four and you add them together,

Anya Smith:
Not

Ira Bowman:
the

Anya Smith:
even

Ira Bowman:
daily

Anya Smith:
close.

Ira Bowman:
search volume on those is under 5% of all search volume. So if you're focusing, if you have a strategy and SEO strategy that's built for Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, you basically have wasted your resources. Don't. Don't don't waste your time because I will tell you, I actually study this stuff and most of them are just imitating what they're finding on Google anyway. So if you make a rock solid Google strategy, why do I want to do that? Because 92 to 94 percent of all searches that happen every single day happen on Google, 92 percent on desktops, 94 percent on mobile devices. It is there's no there. Like I said, if you want the second largest search engine by volume, not by classification, but by volume, it's actually YouTube. not

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
Google,

Anya Smith:
that makes sense,

Ira Bowman:
right?

Anya Smith:
which is owned by

Ira Bowman:
So

Anya Smith:
Google.

Ira Bowman:
yeah, the company that owns Google also

Anya Smith:
Alphabet,

Ira Bowman:
owns YouTube.

Anya Smith:
alphabet, yeah, alphabet.

Ira Bowman:
Right, right, it's 100% true. So the fact is, like your SEO strategies should primarily be Google for sure, for search engines.

Anya Smith:
Mm-hmm.

Ira Bowman:
For video work, obviously you wanna go YouTube. For shopping, you wanna go Amazon. So if you're gonna have three different SEO strategies, have one for Google, one for YouTube, and one for Amazon. And then... you start looking at social media platforms. You know, again, YouTube, if you want to consider that social media, then you can. It's a little bit different, I know. But what's your Facebook SEO strategy? What's your LinkedIn SEO strategy? SEO can be done on anything that has a search bar, right? So if there is a search bar involved on a site, then you can have a search engine optimization strategy. Should you, it depends,

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
but you

Anya Smith:
And

Ira Bowman:
can.

Anya Smith:
can I share my knowledge and you can correct me on all of this, but what I found fascinating about this is that we talk about the global web and what's funny is that we talk about that. I was like, they're called spiders, right? Like

Ira Bowman:
Mm-hmm.

Anya Smith:
the spiders like who has a crawl your website. And so when we talk about indexing, if you've ever done like any coding, basically there's little like code that happens for a header, the body, the thing like that. And so what it's doing is like, it's saying that you're categorizing the information there in order of importance.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
Right? And so it's following

Ira Bowman:
This

Anya Smith:
those

Ira Bowman:
is the

Anya Smith:
rules,

Ira Bowman:
structure.

Anya Smith:
the structure,

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
the

Ira Bowman:
This

Anya Smith:
structure

Ira Bowman:
is the structure that we're talking about. Yep.

Anya Smith:
to understand. And so what people like sometimes they create the stuff, like, but they're not thinking about the structure that's actually helping those spiders, uh, crawl your space and understand it. And if you can

Ira Bowman:
It's...

Anya Smith:
imagine like why video is not helpful, like to process video and derive understanding, it's very difficult. Although I'm understanding is Google is playing around in some of that,

Ira Bowman:
They're working

Anya Smith:
but that's

Ira Bowman:
on

Anya Smith:
why

Ira Bowman:
it.

Anya Smith:
text is so important.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, they're working on it. There will be a day where Google will crawl video content. I have no doubt about that. But what you're saying is 100% correct. And for those of you who have built your website on GoDaddy or Wix or Weebly, no offense, but you focused on what you could see, right? But there's so much more to your website that you didn't actually touch because you didn't even know it was there. It's, you know, it's... And again, I don't mean to be offensive by this, but you're ignorant to the fact that this other stuff is out there, right? So

Anya Smith:
Can I

Ira Bowman:
the.

Anya Smith:
fight back for a moment? I created my site with Wix, and they do have SEO in there. So

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
not the saying that that's optimal, and you can tell me.

Ira Bowman:
Well, I don't want to pick, I don't want to pick on you, but we talked

Anya Smith:
That's

Ira Bowman:
about

Anya Smith:
OK.

Ira Bowman:
your domain authority before we started the show

Anya Smith:
Yes,

Ira Bowman:
and that, and

Anya Smith:
yes.

Ira Bowman:
now I'm going to tell you that that's, that's a big part of why. Right.

Anya Smith:
is because

Ira Bowman:
So

Anya Smith:
I created it with fix.

Ira Bowman:
yeah, the S the SEO on Wix is there's, there's a couple of problems. And again, I'm, it's no offense to Wix the same for Weebly

Anya Smith:
No.

Ira Bowman:
and GoDaddy. It's the same stuff. So one of the, one of the problems in, in with Google is it looks at where you're hosted and

Anya Smith:
Okay.

Ira Bowman:
it goes, oh, you're on Wix. Oh, you're on Weebly. Oh, you're on GoDaddy. Okay. Well, who uses those sites? They're considered, they've labeled them what we call hobby sites. So you get penalized, even though it's unbeknownst to you, you get this penalty in the algorithm that says, hey, I am not gonna rank this over a professional site because they're a hobbyist, they're an amateur in other words, right?

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
But you can make a Wix, Weebly or GoDaddy site rank if you know what you're doing, but you don't wanna use their tools. This is

Anya Smith:
I love

Ira Bowman:
the bad,

Anya Smith:
it.

Ira Bowman:
right? So like their tools are better than nothing. But yeah, there's so many things that you need to do that they don't even let you see. Like I understand what they're doing. They're letting you go in and you get to do a little bit of meta description and it's gonna show you snippets. But like, here's an example, like CSS. You want to reduce the CSS files, right? Load speed, remember? Load speed.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Then you're gonna

Anya Smith:
And

Ira Bowman:
have

Anya Smith:
can

Ira Bowman:
all

Anya Smith:
you explain

Ira Bowman:
your...

Anya Smith:
what CSS is just for people who don't know?

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, so you've got your... Basically, your website is all code, okay? So the coding, the way the coding, the language the coding is written in the format of the coding all makes a difference in how fast it takes to process. So we call that a paint. When you load a website up for the first time, you'll notice there's a little bit of a lag. OK, so from the time you put in, you know, the website address, FoamAndDigitalMedia.com, to the time you actually see something and you can scroll and click buttons. And anyways, that gap, that time lag is what we call painting. And so that original paint, you really should have it like at one second. Right now, I just did mine. There's a there's a tool. I'll give this to you. There's a tool called GTmetrics. So

Anya Smith:
matrix.

Ira Bowman:
if you go to GTmetrics, you can actually analyze your website for site speed. And it'll give you some grades and show you some tips. Now, everything comes with a little bit of salt, right? They are trying to sell on GTmetrics some of their products

Anya Smith:
Shocking,

Ira Bowman:
and services. So

Anya Smith:
I'm shocked.

Ira Bowman:
yeah, take it with a grain of salt, right? But the idea, like I just did a paint for mine, for Bowman Digital Media, We have so much media on ours. We have so many files because

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I'm a photographer and videos. It is a little bit slow. I know that, but we were at three seconds now at 1.8 seconds. So we're, we are working on making it look faster. And one of the things we're doing is that CSS reduction, right? It's just trying to get the file smaller. So there's things called lazy load and there's all these different things that you can do the site, the site speed. A lot of people don't know that they need to be, they think sub three, but really, you know, if you're over three, you probably have a bounce rate in the 80 percentile. Like most people aren't going to wait three seconds anymore. It doesn't seem like a long time, but that is what it is. We want instant gratification. So one second, it should be your goal. And like I said, you got to have all your headers correct. You here's another thing that you'd probably don't have with your Wix account. You've got to have a schema. You've got to have a robotics text file. You've got to have this stuff. Like

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
if it's not there, Google penalizes you. And they don't care if you know about it or not. Site map schema, robot robot, robots.text file. You've got to have all that in place. You've got to have one header, H one tag. Everything else is H two to H six.

Anya Smith:
which is

Ira Bowman:
Um,

Anya Smith:
the

Ira Bowman:
you've

Anya Smith:
size

Ira Bowman:
got to have.

Anya Smith:
just by the way. That's like header one, header two, yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, well, the size is typically. Yeah, I mean, you can change it if you want. But the main thing, the main thing about the H tags, right, is if you do it incorrectly, which most people don't know how to do it, that's just another sign that you don't know you're doing. So Google penalizes you for everything you do wrong. And you can do penalty checks. You should do penalty checks on your site. When somebody has a SEO service like with Bowman Digital Media, we actually provide reports. We do all this for you. But this is what it takes. You want to stay penalty free. You got to have all your page errors eliminated. You need to make sure every link works. You've got to have alt tag descriptions. You've got to make sure your contrast is correct because of the ADA compliance. You know, you can't have colors like let's say you had a dark blue and a light blue and you thought, oh, that looks really pretty. I'm going to put. You know, my text up against that. Well, if you can't read it clearly, you're going to get strikes or penalties for those

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
two. So I mean, this is a whole myriad of things that get

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
in the way.

Anya Smith:
I love that. I love how passionate you are. And clearly, like, we could talk about this for hours. And what I

Ira Bowman:
Oh yeah.

Anya Smith:
find interesting is that people want to know about SEO, but they find it confusing, overwhelming. So I'm really excited to introduce you as a resource. Like, again, you have great material on your site. Again, I'm probably going to reach out to you after this, and we're going to work a little bit on my site. So.

Ira Bowman:
Well, my second TEDx was 10 minutes of explaining key terms and

Anya Smith:
Yeah?

Ira Bowman:
eight minutes of teaching you how to... I gave three tips in it that people could do without spending any money. Because I understand a lot of people are like, hey, I would love to hire Ira, but I don't have the money.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Totally get it. Well, here's... If you watch the TED Talks, I'll give you three tips that you can do to help you get from where you are. increase your web traffic and auspiciously, if you're selling anything, product or service on your website, more traffic should help you generate more sales. Then once you start making a little bit more money, then you can hire Ira. And then

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
we can help you make a lot more money because

Anya Smith:
Love it.

Ira Bowman:
like I can take a domain from like a six or a 10 and in 30 days I can get it up into the fifties.

Anya Smith:
And

Ira Bowman:
And that's

Anya Smith:
what's

Ira Bowman:
something

Anya Smith:
the range,

Ira Bowman:
that.

Anya Smith:
just so people know? Like what's

Ira Bowman:
What

Anya Smith:
typically

Ira Bowman:
is that?

Anya Smith:
the range? Like, if we say numbers,

Ira Bowman:
Oh,

Anya Smith:
five, six,

Ira Bowman:
oh,

Anya Smith:
the 52,

Ira Bowman:
yeah,

Anya Smith:
so.

Ira Bowman:
yeah. The average website across the globe depends a little bit on your industry, but it's anywhere from an eight to a 12, right? So sometimes people say 13, but anyways, it's somewhere in there. Five point spread, eight to 13. So if you're looking at, if you go on Google, you do a Google search and you look at the domain authorities on the first page, typically you're gonna see 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, somewhere in there. It's not that you can't find like a six or a 10 on the first page. But typically when you're going to find something like that, it's in a very specific, like what we call, long tail keywords. So the query, that's the term that you put in Google, is called the query. So let's say you were looking for...

Anya Smith:
how to make an omelet with, yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Advice on how to open a new business in Wisconsin.

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
That's

Anya Smith:
at three

Ira Bowman:
pretty

Anya Smith:
o'clock.

Ira Bowman:
long and it's specific.

Anya Smith:
Yes.

Ira Bowman:
So when you get something that's like six or seven words and it's got some qualifiers in it like Wisconsin, that's when you start to see smaller pages with lower domain authorities that can be on the front page. But if you type in your... Go up into Google right now, open it up, and just type in like, search engine optimization. Every single page that they show on the front page that isn't an ad, but what we call organic search results, they're gonna be 70, 80, or 90. You're not gonna see any 20s, 10s, sub 10s. So the way Google does it is, just in case this is new to everybody, they basically look at websites, they call it EAT. Okay, it's an acronym and this is in my talk. If you guys wanna watch it or explain it on my page, but go to Bowman Digital Media, go to the SEO page, go past all the services and the prices, and then you get all the free stuff down at the bottom. But one of the things that we talk about there is EAT, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Now that's relatively new. They came out with that in August of 22. So it's almost a year old now. But the A, in EAT is authoritativeness. And that A comes from how many websites, high-ranking websites, are pointing back to your site. So if you can imagine a tier system from 0 to 100, they break them up in tiers of 10, blocks of 10. So 0 to 10 is tier 1. 91 to 100 is tier 10. and it just kind of fills in from there. So if you can imagine, if you can get some higher tier websites, like right now Bowman Digital Media, our domain authority is a 54. Okay, so we're in tier six. So if we take on Bowman Digital Media and we point back to a website, they get a bonus of a tier six backlink, that's the authority. So

Anya Smith:
Right.

Ira Bowman:
what you're trying to do with your authoritative score is get as many of those as you can. Now here is a tip for you. If you have any government or school connections, so a.gov, a.org,.edu that is related to a school of some kind, could be a college or K-12, it doesn't matter, education related or government related. and get the backlink from their website over to your website. Google absolutely loves that. That's

Anya Smith:
What about

Ira Bowman:
like

Anya Smith:
nonprofits?

Ira Bowman:
the best.

Anya Smith:
Does that

Ira Bowman:
And

Anya Smith:
work

Ira Bowman:
nonprofits,

Anya Smith:
too?

Ira Bowman:
there's no bonus boost for that. Yeah,

Anya Smith:
Okay. Darn it.

Ira Bowman:
yeah. Yeah, I'd open up. I'd open a nonprofit just to have the backlinks of that work. But yeah, I know that the reason why they give you extra credit for those is because they're rare. They're hard to get. So like one of my biggest backlinks is I did my TEDx talks

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
and ted.org, which is a domain authority, I believe, of 91 on Moz, they linked back to my website, Boehm Digital Media. So that was a pretty big feather in my cap. Now we have other tier 10 links too, but that was a really nice one. I was not expecting that. I did TEDx talks, not TED talks. I know most people don't know the difference, but TEDx are independently owned and operated. sanctioned by Ted, but they're independently owned and operated. So I did Ted X. I'm not famous. So Ted didn't say, hey, Iro, we want you to come give

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
this Ted talk. Right. So that's a real Ted talk. But anyways, but they still carried my. They liked it and they carried it. They don't carry most Ted X talks, but they do carry some and mine was picked up. So, you

Anya Smith:
That's

Ira Bowman:
know,

Anya Smith:
awesome.

Ira Bowman:
that was that was pretty cool. But because of it, they gave me a link from Ted. over to yeah, Bowman Digital Media. It was a little feather in my cap, so.

Anya Smith:
You're awesome. All right, do you mind if we pivot? A, like I'm learning so much along the way. So I hope

Ira Bowman:
Yeah,

Anya Smith:
the

Ira Bowman:
no man.

Anya Smith:
audience is learning too because I am personally learning like, okay, we need to think about this stuff

Ira Bowman:
Yeah,

Anya Smith:
because

Ira Bowman:
I

Anya Smith:
it's

Ira Bowman:
might

Anya Smith:
important.

Ira Bowman:
be hurting somebody's brain though. So yeah,

Anya Smith:
That's

Ira Bowman:
we can

Anya Smith:
okay,

Ira Bowman:
go

Anya Smith:
you can pause,

Ira Bowman:
lighter.

Anya Smith:
come back. That's the beauty of podcasts, right? Like you pause, come back, you get into it, you listen to it a couple of times, you go reach out. Like

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
what I love about this, like I share every guest's information about how to contact them. So it's very much like you can... continue this discussion and connect with people on your own journey and ask

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
advice

Ira Bowman:
And

Anya Smith:
and

Ira Bowman:
I have

Anya Smith:
I was

Ira Bowman:
a

Anya Smith:
to.

Ira Bowman:
show. If people are interested in learning more from me on a regular basis and they don't have the money to spend, it's OK. Marketing Mondays with Ira Bowman is on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. Every Monday, I do it at 11 a.m. Pacific. What is that? 2 p.m. I think Eastern. So and they can they can watch and learn there. I've got a lot of people. They call them master classes in the comments. I don't intend for them to be that necessarily. But, you know, we're teaching a lot about marketing on that

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
show.

Anya Smith:
you're awesome. I'm checking it out. I know I need to do some work on my SAO, so this is really helpful. Do you mind if we pivot a little bit to another side of you? Well, not really another side of you, but some other aspect of you we really wanna ask questions about.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, go ahead.

Anya Smith:
And we can come back whenever you want to, but one thing I find fascinating is like, you clearly have things that you're knowledgeable but the other thing that I see throughout your work is like the care for helping people, right?

Ira Bowman:
Yeah,

Anya Smith:
And...

Ira Bowman:
I don't. Yeah, everything I do is intended to help.

Anya Smith:
Where do you think you got those values? Because I'm not saying that nobody has those, but it's weird to feel like somebody is really dedicating, not just their time, but a lot of intentional work and efforts and the project help you grow. That's very, very much not making you money, but an effort that is really helping others out of your passion.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, I mean, I didn't grow up wealthy. I know we were we were hand to mouth. In fact, there was plenty of times in my childhood that we actually didn't have a home to live in. So I've been like every kind of homeless you can think of as a kid. I we did couch surfing. I slept in vehicles. I slept on the street like I've literally done all those things. We we rented rooms by the week, by the day, by the month. I think when you grow up like that in Las Vegas of all places and you see how hard life can be, all you really want in those situations is somebody to give a crap and help. That's all you want, right? You're trying to survive. But as a kid, so I went through that as a kid, it was no fault of my own. I was like, you know, that was just my parents making some bad choices and I had to deal with it, right?

Anya Smith:
Right.

Ira Bowman:
But It's interesting because for a while as a younger adult, like in my, you know, late teens, early twenties, I was very, very selfish. Like I was modeled that from my, from my dad specifically. Okay. So there came a point in my life and then, you know, it was a, it was a church moment, but I was a church and, um, I thought, man, I don't want to be like that, right? Like my dad is not my role model. I'd rather be like. you know, the Bible is about Jesus. I'd rather be about Jesus and be like him. I can't, there's a story in where there's this guy and he's supposed to be some big, you know, he's a rich guy and he's beating on his chest. And he's like, hey, look at me and how wonderful I am. And I'm better than all these lowly people. And I'm like, dude, I don't want to be like that. And then there's this other guy who's like, you know, he's so humble and he's like, man, I'm really sorry. And you know, I don't deserve anything, but it's like, okay, I want to be that guy. my whole life. So from that moment on, I've tried to be that. Now, have I been perfect at it? Heck no. But that's the goal is to be helpful and to be humble because most people don't like it, arrogant, that arrogance, right? And most people don't wanna be around the self-centered guy. It's like, look how wonderful I am. Look at all these things I've done. It's like... I get embarrassed sometimes to admit all the things that I'm doing or I've accomplished because it starts to seem like I'm trying to boast. And it's like, you know, I don't apologize for, for having big goals and working hard to accomplish them. So like, I'm not ashamed of myself in that, in that respect, like, but when people are talking to me and what do you do, like, you might hear me say, Oh, I'm a photographer or Oh, I'm a journalist

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
or Oh, I'm a business owner. Or,

Anya Smith:
right.

Ira Bowman:
you know, I run a nonprofit. And I might not tell you everything at that point, because I think, you know, what's relevant in that moment is that thing. But the truth is I'm an entrepreneur and I have there's a lot to me, you know,

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
but the all the activities that I'm in, that is one thing that you will see throughout all of them. I don't do any of them just to please myself. Like I. Enjoy helping people become better, like that's a part of my fabric, so. It permeates everything that I do.

Anya Smith:
If you don't mind me sharing and if you do, we'll edit it out. When I told you, hey, I love your experience of the TEDx talk and that's something I would love to aspire to do one day. And I know you have somebody who actually has connections there. But you gave me a really good piece of advice if you don't mind me sharing. It was like, hey,

Ira Bowman:
No, guys.

Anya Smith:
way to go about it is Google the organizers and establish a genuine connection. Not like you reach out to them, let's be friends, but follow their work, show curiosity, comment and engage. and let that be the way to enter that space, through the connection. And I love that because it's so simple in a way, right? But very true about how we should be connecting in human nature. And I'm curious, like, eight, I took that helpful for the TEDx, that's what I'm gonna be doing, because that's just how we should be. We should be caring about people, yeah.

Ira Bowman:
sold for 20 years. That's how I sold.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
When I would go in, remember we talked about I was in San Francisco, I was doing the cold calling. Now, it wasn't

Anya Smith:
Mm-hmm.

Ira Bowman:
the only place I did it over my career. I did it in some other places too, but since I mentioned that, but that was what I would do. When I would walk in the room, when I would get in the room with somebody, I was not there saying, hey, would you like to buy some printing stuff? Because they don't, you know what I mean? That's not going to work. So

Anya Smith:
Right?

Ira Bowman:
what did I do instead? I figured out how to develop rapport with strangers. pretty fast. I used observations. So like if I saw a picture of a fish, then we'd talk about fish. If I saw, you know, uh, I hate this,

Anya Smith:
Family picture.

Ira Bowman:
this pains me to say, but like in Alabama or, you know, a Florida Gators, I'm a USC football fan, right? So

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I like that. I like the Trojans, but like, if I saw something like gave me clues that that's what they're interested in, I would just start talking about that. And frankly, I would not talk about the thing that I do until they basically said, You have to talk about the thing you're here for now, right? Like we because they would figure it out after like 15 minutes or 20 minutes. People like, wait a minute, we're just sitting here chatting like, you know, this is break time. I'm actually at work. I got to get to work. What do you what do you want, man? And I was not there to sell him anything. I was just there to try to spark a friendship. And so I don't care if you're on LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram or any of these places. If instead of. when you don't know somebody that you think you want to know, because you see they could be a potential client or whatever, they can help you out in some way. You see that advantage. If you lead with that, the odds are they're going to reject you, rebuff you, and frankly, some of them will just block you. So instead of doing it that way, the advice is simple. Spend more time in the comments of people's posts who you want to become friends with. Because it's so rare. Most people, when they go through, they scroll. They don't actually stop. They're like, they read it. They're good. They keep moving. Most people don't engage. So it's very small percentage of the platform. You might think, you know, everybody on the platform, trust me, you don't. Even LinkedIn, which is the 20th ranked social media platform on the planet right now by monthly active users. It's number 20. There are still 320 million people on that. Now, how many comments and how many posts from people have you seen? probably a thousand or fifteen hundred or something like

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
that. You think you know everybody like, no, man, you're just, you're, you're just the, that's the tip of the iceberg. Right? So

Anya Smith:
All right.

Ira Bowman:
how do you get those people to go from strangers to friends? Well, the advice is simple. Read the content. Don't say great posts or great share. Don't say how are you doing today? Cause that doesn't really do anything. They wanted to talk about whatever they posted about. That's the conversation starter.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
So now you get to participate in the conversation with the stranger. But if you, Well, just read the post and make a value added comment. And let me give you this tip to ask a question and don't ask a yes or no question, ask, try to ask an open ended question because they will answer sometimes or their audience won't answer sometimes, but either way, now you're building your overall friendship and influence, but I promise you it's so unique that I told you, I said, try it for 30 days and watch how many of them become your friends. they will send you connection requests after 30 days. I really want that answer. But the fact is, if you do that with a hundred people, you'll probably get about 25 new connection requests.

Anya Smith:
And the quality of those are going to be much higher than just random people you reached

Ira Bowman:
Well, think

Anya Smith:
out to.

Ira Bowman:
about the hundred that we had to pick, right? You search Ted X organizers. You could do

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
this for anything. Like if you say, oh, I only want to talk to CEOs. Well, do you really? Because CEOs probably aren't really on LinkedIn. Just in full disclosure, a lot of those are VAs. You're talking to somebody from another country who is working on behalf of that person. But

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
anyways, think about who you want. And then what I do just to take the secret off, like this is a secret

Anya Smith:
Who?

Ira Bowman:
sauce. Instead of going and finding them every day, I bookmark their profile activity as a favorite in

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
my Chrome. So I go to my favorites, I open up the folder with all those people in it, and I can just go very quickly back and forth. It's just a fast way to do it. Now, if you're doing it on your phone, it doesn't quite work like that if you're doing it on the app, but if you're doing it on the website, which I do, Because I'm 46, I'm not a whippersnapper who's always on my phone. Right. So because I'm doing it from my desktop, that's how I do it. But it allows me to get through 50 of them. I can get through 50 and do that evaluated post in less than an hour. I can read their post. I can make it a value added comment and I can do it in under a minute each.

Anya Smith:
That's amazing. Great tip. Write this down, try it out, let us know what impact

Ira Bowman:
Yeah,

Anya Smith:
that is having

Ira Bowman:
I've

Anya Smith:
on

Ira Bowman:
got

Anya Smith:
your

Ira Bowman:
YouTube

Anya Smith:
ghost.

Ira Bowman:
videos on that. If you guys really want to search for that, you

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
search, you know, book, bookmark tip by Ira Bowman and it'll

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
come up.

Anya Smith:
And can we talk about your amazing growth? You gave me a little bit of the rundown. I think part of it is the amazing impacts that the project helped you grow. Can you touch on that project first? And then if you want to share anything about what helped you grow to where you are today from a social standpoint or however you want to explain it, I'd love to hear about that.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, so in 2018... It had gotten so bad with the, with the cold calling effort that I basically, I could make 30 to 50 cold calls a day and not get any yeses. Like it had gotten really bad and that's not acceptable because

Anya Smith:
Ugh.

Ira Bowman:
I have those eight kids, I got to feed them. Right. So I, I knew that I needed to change the strategy because the strategy was outdated at this point. So what was it going to do? And you know, LinkedIn, I. I had a LinkedIn account. I had 1,520 connections at that point. But I was doing it like most people. I was going straight after. I was going after architects, engineers, and construction companies primarily, the AEC market. So I was going after what they call principles. They don't call them owners. They call them principles. I was like, OK, so I'm going to go out to these principles, and I'm going to try to get them to give me an appointment. Well, on LinkedIn, I would try to connect with them. But they didn't want to connect with me. Why? Because I'm a sales rep. Right. Like you don't want to connect with sales reps. Why? Because they're going to try and tell you something. That's their job. Right. Like,

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
well, so anyway, so like, OK, what can I do? Well, there was this guy, my friend, his name is Michael Connor. I think I referenced him a little bit earlier. He runs a company called Service Professionals Network. So he and I were connected in 2016, but I didn't really talk to him until 2018. It was May of 2018. He puts up a video. And in the video, he's kind of brash. He's a brash guy. He's big. He's six, five. I mean, he's this guy's like a Hulk. I'm five, seven. So, you know, I am the Danny DeVito to his

Anya Smith:
I love

Ira Bowman:
Arnold

Anya Smith:
the

Ira Bowman:
Schwarzenegger.

Anya Smith:
contrast.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah. And twins, right? So and we also we tease each other. He's chocolate on vanilla anyways, because he's spicy and I'm very easy going to.

Anya Smith:
Ha

Ira Bowman:
So

Anya Smith:
ha

Ira Bowman:
so anyways, he's brash. He's from Chicago. He talks like he's from Chicago. He's got that attitude. You know what I mean? But

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
he said something. in the video, I did not agree with it. And he said, I'll tell you what, now this wasn't live. It was a video he pre-recorded. He didn't know he was talking to me, he was just talking to everybody, right? We said, if you're smart, my number's in my profile, you'll call me. And I thought, dang, here's an opportunity to actually flesh this out. So I was living 55 miles away from San Francisco when I lived there, because of the eight kids that couldn't afford the $3 million house, right? So. I lived out in what we call bedroom communities out in a place called Manteca, California. Look it up, it's way out there, but it's 55 miles. It would take me two and a half to three hours to go from San Francisco to my home every day, right? So I knew when I called them, I had at least two and a half hours if the conversation went well. Well, it did because I talked to them the whole time. So in it, what we... What he educated me on really more than anything was how LinkedIn actually works at a core level. For example, if I ask you, why does LinkedIn have first, second, and third level degree connections? What's the point of that? Most people can't answer it. They've never thought about it. And I was one of those. I never thought about it. But what it's there for, which is key to understanding how to grow on LinkedIn. your reach on LinkedIn does not extend past the third level. There are levels beyond the third, but your reach doesn't go past it. In fact, not only does your reach not go past it, displaying like you make a post, first, second, thirds can see it. Nobody else can see it, okay, in their feeds. But you also, if like a hashtag, if you put a hashtag Bowman Digital Media and you search the hashtag on Twitter, It doesn't matter if you're connected to those people or not. Well, now it's X, I guess, right? We should use the new name. I don't know. I'm still calling it Twitter. Okay. So everybody can see the content regardless of your connected or not. Do that on YouTube, do that on Facebook, do that on Instagram, hashtags supposed to be universal while on LinkedIn.

Anya Smith:
Right.

Ira Bowman:
It's not. Test my theory, go to LinkedIn, do a hashtag search on any topic you want, go through the results. and see if you see anybody that isn't a first, second, or third. You won't see people that aren't past that.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
So if you want to increase your visibility on LinkedIn, you have to connect with more people. Now, at the time, again, I had 1,520 connections. Well, you have the actual capacity to go to 30,000 first-degree connections. You can have as many followers as you want. but you can only have 30,000. Now, it wasn't always that way. They actually, they instituted that rule after they launched. And anybody that was over that, they eliminated however many connections

Anya Smith:
Burn.

Ira Bowman:
that was. Yeah, they converted them to followers

Anya Smith:
Huh?

Ira Bowman:
and you didn't get the choice. They

Anya Smith:
Wow.

Ira Bowman:
just randomly did it. So it

Anya Smith:
That's

Ira Bowman:
made kind

Anya Smith:
brutal.

Ira Bowman:
of a mess. Yeah, it made kind of a mess, but 30,000 is the cap. There's no exceptions. I have a premium account with LinkedIn. I've sales navigator and full disclosure, but, but it doesn't matter. Free paid, everybody maxes out 30,000 first connections. What happens when you get to 30, you can't add another one until you drop someone.

Anya Smith:
Ooh.

Ira Bowman:
So like, if you send me a connection request, I will want to add you. I want to have to delete somebody else first. And so sometimes people send me a connection request and go, Hey man, why didn't you accept me? Cause I haven't had a chance to figure out who to drop yet. You got to give me

Anya Smith:
Ouch.

Ira Bowman:
a little time. Yeah. Yeah, that's what happens.

Anya Smith:
Don't

Ira Bowman:
So.

Anya Smith:
take it personally, it's just a wait period.

Ira Bowman:
It's a limitation and most people don't

Anya Smith:
Ouch.

Ira Bowman:
even most people don't even know it's there.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
And so that actually created some backlash for me in the beginning, because then people thought I was big timeing them. And I'm like, I'm really not because

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
it wasn't commonly known. And so people thought I was making it up. And I'm like, no, man, this is this is a real thing. So anyways, long story short, Mike shared with me how LinkedIn actually works and the power of connecting with strangers. And I was like, okay. So then from there, the way my brain works systematically, I was able to figure out the way to grow the fastest is to figure out how to help people with the thing that they need the most help with. And so Project Help You Grow was born through this process of figuring out that if I could create an apparatus, it wasn't even supposed to be a website at first, it was a project, but an apparatus to help connect job seekers to employers and recruiters who have openings they need to fill. How do you bring the two parties together? Project Help You Grow was born to do just that. The website now, which is just projecthelpyougrow.com, has been around for five years. It launched September of 2018. There's no ads, there's nothing on there. You can't donate, there's no subscriptions. Everything's free. And it's free for everybody. It's free for the job seeker. It's free for the recruiter. It's free for the employers.

Anya Smith:
That's

Ira Bowman:
They

Anya Smith:
amazing.

Ira Bowman:
don't pay to place their, they don't pay to place their listings. They don't have to pay to get access to the candidates. Everything is free. In fact, the job applications, I encourage them to happen on their websites, not on mine. So like they can, if they have a job listing already on another site, they can actually just add that link and it'll take them over to that other site. Cause We're not trying to make any money with this thing. We never were. We were just trying to help people find a job. So then what I started doing was interviewing recruiters and, um, coaches and people in HR, okay, what are these people doing wrong? Right. Let's teach them the things that they could do better so they can land the job better, they can get the interview, they can ace the interview, they can get through the ATS, they can figure out how to negotiate their salary, all that stuff. And so. We've written blogs on every topic you can think of, like how to find a job in a foreign country is our number one request. It

Anya Smith:
Oh.

Ira Bowman:
asks that all the time. So we came up with strategies. There's a lady, oh my gosh, my brain just

Anya Smith:
wonderful

Ira Bowman:
stopped.

Anya Smith:
lady.

Ira Bowman:
But anyways, she's a wonderful lady and she had been in recruiting NHR on both sides and she had changed countries, Brazil, Portugal, New York. So I was like, okay, I want to talk to her.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Um, Julia Rabbi is her name. Okay. So I interviewed her from her interview. I learned four, like four, like I gave you the five pillars of SEO. She gave me the four pillars of getting a job in another country, which

Anya Smith:
Oh, cool.

Ira Bowman:
included. I remember a couple of them off the top of my head. One of them was try to find a job where you are with a company that has offices where you want to be. And so now you're not trying to find a foreign job. Now you're trying to transfer, which is a heck

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
of a lot easier. She said another thing that you should do is try to downgrade your job one level. So like if you're at manager level, maybe you want to go to lead. You know why? Because the expectations with, um, with that are going to be easier for you to hit in a new country, cause you're going to have a new language, new culture.

Anya Smith:
Yeah, interesting.

Ira Bowman:
You know, there's just going to be some. assimilation that has to happen. And while you're assimilating,

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
you're going to get forgiven at a lead level that you wouldn't be forgiven for at a manager level. So I

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
thought that was brilliant advice. So all kinds of things. She said travel there. But don't just travel there like a tourist.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Okay, like if you're going to live there, try to find an Airbnb or something that is in the area that you could afford. And like if you're going to ride the bus, then ride the bus if you're going to drive, then drive. So you get to experience all this stuff because she said the number one thing that happens is when people do go is they find out the grass isn't always greener on the other side. It's like

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
real life everywhere. You know what I mean? Like traffic sucks, work sucks, whatever. So, you know, don't move on a dream, move on based something based on reality. So anyways, Juliana Robbie is a brilliant lady. So I had her on my show a couple of times, but I wrote these blogs based on what she shared in the conversations. And those were some of my most views blogs ever. Yeah.

Anya Smith:
That's amazing. And then you're following, right? Because of this, you're following kind of increased

Ira Bowman:
Oh, yeah.

Anya Smith:
as

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
a result of this work, right?

Ira Bowman:
So in May of 2018, I had fifteen hundred and twenty connections on LinkedIn. I launched Project Help You Grow, the project in May of 2018, because that's where I got the idea. And then by September of 2018, we launched the website. Well, when we launched the website, it just went nuts. I went from fifteen twenty in May up to. It was 25,000

Anya Smith:
Wow.

Ira Bowman:
connections by the end of 2018. Well, by February of 2019, just seven months after I had launched it, I was maxed out at the 30,000. Then

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
by the end of 2020, I was so I'm sorry, 2019. I was at 100,000.

Anya Smith:
Woo.

Ira Bowman:
The reason why I know this is because in May of 2020, I got laid off.

Anya Smith:
Right?

Ira Bowman:
And I had 150,000 followers on LinkedIn at that point. That's what gave me the confidence to do what I do now, because I had so much reach on LinkedIn that I didn't need to advertise for people to know who I am and what I was doing. So

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I launched my business knowing that I could at least get the word out easily and get the clients I needed in. Then with my sales background, I was able to do what I needed to do. And so we didn't have to take out any loans or anything like that. We were able to pay our bills. from the very first month with Bowman Digital Media, but it all came through, well, a couple of things. First of all, understanding that I needed to connect with people even though they were in another area, they were in a different industry, whatever is keeping you from doing that, you just have to, it's like, they call it stinking thinking. You have to change your stinking thinking. And so, you know, stranger danger doesn't apply on LinkedIn. Because

Anya Smith:
Right.

Ira Bowman:
what are you sharing in your profile or you're posting that is private anyways, right? If you are probably doing that on the wrong platform, it's

Anya Smith:
Right.

Ira Bowman:
all business related stuff. So who cares if you're connected to somebody who you never met before? If they spam you, then just

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
drop them. It's not a marriage. It's not a marriage contract. You know, you could connect with me today if you bug me tomorrow. I'm going to kick you out tomorrow. That's totally

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
you know, that's in my rights. That's in your rights. Like it's not like. You know, you can't ever get a divorce on social media. So anyways, so once I knew that and then I had this apparatus to help people, that's where I grew like a weed. But

Anya Smith:
It's

Ira Bowman:
I

Anya Smith:
amazing.

Ira Bowman:
started doing the same things I was telling you about. I started to learn like, hey, if I want to grow, it's not about what I'm posting. It's more about what I'm commenting.

Anya Smith:
Mm-hmm.

Ira Bowman:
So the commenting was a big deal, and I still use it. In fact. You know, when I started it, I was only doing that on LinkedIn, but I've since tested that on every platform. It works everywhere. It works on Twitter. It works on

Anya Smith:
bright.

Ira Bowman:
Instagram. I mean, I got 140,000, I think it's 143,000 as we're talking today, subscribers on my Instagram channel. How do I do that? Because I'll go through my feed once a day and I'll make comments on other people's posts, their photos,

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
you know, and I keep it nice. Right. So keep it courteous. keep it on topic and add some value of some kind. You will never see great share, great post for me, because nobody cares about that. I want to know why you think it's a great post. So instead of saying great post, like, hey, I think this is a great post, because you guys were talking about SEO, and I know how important that is to boosting your ranking on Google. Now you took it from a crappy comment that doesn't do anything for anybody and made it one that, give them something they can do with it.

Anya Smith:
Yeah, yeah. And we talked about it so much. I'm like, oh, so much we can still talk about. One thing I want to hit is your new book, because we were just talking about it

Ira Bowman:
Oh

Anya Smith:
yesterday.

Ira Bowman:
yeah.

Anya Smith:
It just launched, right? Can

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
we talk about

Ira Bowman:
Yesterday.

Anya Smith:
this? Yeah, congratulations.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
That's huge.

Ira Bowman:
Thank you very much. I just spilled on myself, but thank you. I'm excited about it. It's the first I've been in several books. In fact, this is my fourth book now that

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I'm in. And I've got other ones that I'm. I have a mental health tip book that's coming out next month. I'm very excited about that, too. But this book, the business.

Anya Smith:
How do you do everything?

Ira Bowman:
Well, I'm going to tell you, so this is one of the ways that I do these. I don't write the whole book myself.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I invite cohort. to come in with me and we all write a chapter each. It's so much

Anya Smith:
Love

Ira Bowman:
easier.

Anya Smith:
it.

Ira Bowman:
But if you go on Google, or I'm sorry, on Amazon, and search Ira Bowman, the first four books, that's me.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Right? So the first three are on diversity, and one of my friends, Jason Miller, who runs a company called Strategic Advisory Board, they invited me to join in on that series, and we were writing about business diversity, which is really cool. So

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
we're talking about that. And then I got the idea basically from that, was like, hey, I don't have to write all these books by myself. So business tips from the trenches, expert advice on starting your small business or side hustle is the name of the book that just came out August 2nd. So in that, me and 11 other business owners are giving three tips each of things we wish we knew before we started our business or side hustle. And then we're sharing one lesson learned each on like a bigger thing that could have discouraged people from going on, but it's like, hey, you know, business is a lot about trial and error.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
You're gonna fail a lot, but you don't let the failures stop you. You use the failures as lesson stepping stones. They're lessons that now help you be better moving forward. But imagine this, if you're a small business owner, if you've never done this before, how much better

Anya Smith:
Exactly.

Ira Bowman:
would you, yeah, how much better off would you be if you got to learn from some of the mistakes that other people have made, they're open and being transparent. And so now you know some things like, I'll tell you, the biggest mistake I made as a small business owner and is so common was I basically thought I had to be in control of every little thing. And so I was working and I told you this, I think yesterday, I was working six days a week from sunup to sundown past, I was working 16 hour days. It's 96 hours. It's 96 hours a week is what I was putting in and my family hated me. My friends hated me. My clients were starting to be resentful because I was in a bad mood and my performance wasn't so great, right? Like

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
it was a problem, but I created this, this prison where. I had to touch everything all the time. And so I learned one of the things I learned is outsourcing is wonderful. Right. You need to get a team. So find good, capable people, whether they're W2 or 1099, it doesn't matter. You know, the bottom line is you need some help. And so my job at my company now is to do the visionary stuff. What, what do I mean by that? Like, okay, well. Where are we going with products and services? What, what maybe we can add, maybe we should take away. Like for example, I haven't updated my website yet, but my social media packages for, um, my offerings is going to be changing tonight.

Anya Smith:
Oh,

Ira Bowman:
And,

Anya Smith:
cool.

Ira Bowman:
uh, what I decided is we're going to focus more on the content creation for our clients and less on the delivering it. So in other words, we'll create the posts and everything for you, but you got to actually have somebody on your team, put them up on your page. And you

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
can automate that if you want. There's plenty of tools that do that, but we're going to focus on the content creation. We used to focus a lot on the delivery, but the reason why I don't like it is because, um, it takes a lot of time. And frankly, it doesn't really matter who puts it out there. So if

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
I give you

Anya Smith:
little

Ira Bowman:
a quick

Anya Smith:
value

Ira Bowman:
serve,

Anya Smith:
add, yeah.

Ira Bowman:
yeah, is little value add. It's a lot of extra labor on my part. And frankly, like I said, I just, I think that that's where I'm making the change, but here's the cool part. my pricing for these packages is actually going to go down. Why? Because I don't need as much labor.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
So that's the most expensive part. So anyways, that's what I try to tell people, that my role right now is visionary stuff. And that's what I mean by that. And then I do the sales consultations. Why? Because as the business owner, I want to make sure that we're bringing in people that we can help. you know, that they understand clearly what our scope of work is and what the expectations are. And, you know, there's a good rapport there. Like nobody wants to work with somebody they think is a jerk. Right. So like, as long as all that's good, then I bring them in. So I'm basically still doing the sales. So I'm telling you, right. So vision and sales, that's what I'm doing. All the technical stuff, most of the labor is being done by one of my 32 team members.

Anya Smith:
it. That makes sense.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
You make each other better, right? It's the

Ira Bowman:
Yeah,

Anya Smith:
team that

Ira Bowman:
well,

Anya Smith:
makes

Ira Bowman:
now,

Anya Smith:
the whole

Ira Bowman:
but

Anya Smith:
better.

Ira Bowman:
I didn't I didn't start out with 32 people. I started out with just myself. And for the for

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
the first year, I pretty much grinded it out myself. Right. I was a grinder working 96 hours a week and burning, burning the candle both ends. And everybody hated me. Right. Like like you wouldn't you wouldn't have said you're awesome. Probably if he interviewed me that first year. And now, you know, I felt like I was accomplishing a lot. Right. We broke six figures our first year. Like, I mean, that

Anya Smith:
Ooh,

Ira Bowman:
was, yeah,

Anya Smith:
yeah.

Ira Bowman:
not bad for not bad for a new business. But You know, it wasn't sustainable. In fact, there was, I had already kind of hit the ceiling. Like we were already maxed out, but by adding more capacity, by adding other people, it gave me the opportunity to do things like date my wife and, uh, and sleep.

Anya Smith:
With eight kids, I'm sure that she really appreciates that.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, no, she needs dates. Yeah, she needs she definitely needs dates and she deserves

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
the date. So.

Anya Smith:
yeah, notice to all husbands, prioritize date night.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah. And, and what I've

Anya Smith:
And

Ira Bowman:
learned

Anya Smith:
spouses.

Ira Bowman:
about my wife is my wife wants me to come up with the ideas.

Anya Smith:
Oh yeah.

Ira Bowman:
You know what I mean? So like that's her time off from having to make any decisions. So where are we going to go to eat? What are we going to do after? Don't ask her anything. Not that she isn't capable of it, so she's tired and she wants a break and she deserves that

Anya Smith:
Oh,

Ira Bowman:
break.

Anya Smith:
yeah, absolutely.

Ira Bowman:
So now that's something I've really kind of just grabbed hold of after 23 years of marriage. So

Anya Smith:
You can't

Ira Bowman:
guys,

Anya Smith:
outsource that part, Tara.

Ira Bowman:
yeah, guys, if you're, if you're listening, no, you can, that's okay. Right? Like you can have a, you could have a poll on Facebook and stuff that you can totally do that. So if you're

Anya Smith:
Oh.

Ira Bowman:
void of ideas, like, well, I mean, maybe every wife is different, but with my wife, that's a, that's acceptable. Just don't get in the car and go, where do you want to go? She

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
don't want to hear that.

Anya Smith:
yeah, yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
So here's tips to celebrate five years tomorrow with my husband.

Ira Bowman:
Alright.

Anya Smith:
And so I'll share that tip with him

Ira Bowman:
Well,

Anya Smith:
for

Ira Bowman:
I'm

Anya Smith:
the

Ira Bowman:
going to

Anya Smith:
next.

Ira Bowman:
share. I'm going to share a fun one since we're having fun here.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
My favorite date ever cost me very little. It's a cheap date, but it's a fun date. Here's what you do. You give your spouse and yourself a budget. Now, my wife and I, I think we originally said 10 bucks, but then we pushed it to 11. But you could do like 20 for inflation. But you go to Goodwill or any thrift, like, you know, any thrift store will work. You

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
go to a thrift store. with their money, they're buying you an outfit. And with

Anya Smith:
Ah-ho.

Ira Bowman:
your money, you're buying them an outfit. Now they have to wear it on the date and they have to own that stuff. Like my wife made me look like a cross between Bill Cosby and a hunter. And if I had the picture readily available, I would actually show it to you. But I was wearing this wool sweater, it was awful. And then she bought me these camo pants. And anyway, she didn't even give me a dress shirt, but I was allowed to augment with anything that she didn't buy. So like if you

Anya Smith:
Okay.

Ira Bowman:
spend all your money on like the most hideous jacket ever or whatever, you can, they can supplement it. But then. Because I looked the way I looked, I was like, obviously I'm a red neck here. Right. So I took her to Cracker Barrel. No, no, no. Excuse me. Not Cracker Barrel. I took her to, um, what's the name of it? My kids wanna go there all the time. It's a buffet. Hang on a second. Lily. I can hear my kids out there.

Anya Smith:
Call

Ira Bowman:
They usually.

Anya Smith:
a friend. Call a friend.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, I got to call a friend. What's the name of this place? Hey. What's the name of that buffet you guys want to go to? Golden Corral. That's what it is. Golden Corral. So

Anya Smith:
I love

Ira Bowman:
I took

Anya Smith:
the team

Ira Bowman:
her to

Anya Smith:
help.

Ira Bowman:
Golden.

Anya Smith:
Thank you.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah. Yeah, that was that was one of my teenagers. Anyways, Golden Corral. And what I said is we're going to have steaks and shrimps.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
It'd be like improper English, totally. But anyways, we was having some steaks and some trims. And because I look like Bill Cosby a little bit, I had to have the jello. You know, got to have your jello.

Anya Smith:
All right, you're so awesome. I love

Ira Bowman:
It was

Anya Smith:
these

Ira Bowman:
fun.

Anya Smith:
stories.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah,

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I had a great time. Anyways.

Anya Smith:
Do you have advice for a husband's anniversary gift, which is tomorrow?

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, hopefully he's already bought it, but.

Anya Smith:
No, no, for me, for me to give to him. Like, I'm like,

Ira Bowman:
Oh,

Anya Smith:
we're going

Ira Bowman:
I'm

Anya Smith:
to

Ira Bowman:
with

Anya Smith:
go

Ira Bowman:
you.

Anya Smith:
out and to be fully transparent, full context, like I just started this job as an entrepreneur, you know, still find the money. So I don't want it to be expensive, but I'm like, I should probably make an effort. Probably dress up, put on makeup. Who knows? Go crazy.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, I mean, look, when money's when money's tight, you can always go with, you know, most husbands, what they really want. I'm just going to be really transparent. They really

Anya Smith:
Look

Ira Bowman:
want

Anya Smith:
sexy.

Ira Bowman:
yours. Well, no, that's the funny thing. It doesn't have to be sexy stuff, although I mean, look, we like that too. But what he really wants, what he craves more than anything is your approval and your respect. That's what a husband really wants. So any husband out there, I guarantee you, they will say amen to that. Right. Like. What you really want is you want to feel like your wife thinks that you are like, you say it to me every five minutes, like you're awesome, right? Do that to him, right? Make sure he knows that you're his biggest fan. He, if you do that and walk in a, in a, you know, nightie or something, that's all you got to do, right? Like, you know, game over, game over, you know, you can, you can buy him a hat. You can buy him a cup. You could buy him whatever

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
you want, but if you do those things, you're

Anya Smith:
Ah.

Ira Bowman:
going to have that fourth girl. Hahaha

Anya Smith:
Love it. Well, Adam Smith, I love you. You are awesome, just so you know.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, yeah, that's

Anya Smith:
Preemptively.

Ira Bowman:
what they want. That's what they want. There's something inside of a man that desires to be more than more than anything respected. You know,

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
we we're trying to be people that are worthy of respect, but we never like a woman, a woman, a lot of times they have the doubt inside them that self confidence, they don't like the way they look and all those things. A guy doesn't have that issue. Like we look in the mirror and we focus on the one thing that is still good, right? But, but the respect thing for us is huge. Right.

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
So anyways,

Anya Smith:
I love

Ira Bowman:
yeah,

Anya Smith:
this.

Ira Bowman:
there

Anya Smith:
No,

Ira Bowman:
you

Anya Smith:
I

Ira Bowman:
go.

Anya Smith:
love this. So you're so real. I love how real you are. I love how you share wisdom. And I'm going to reach out to you to, I really am curious about SEO, which we talked about. And I am really curious about how to outsource myself. I'm starting to do that in collaborations and friends who are helping me a lot, but there's so much more and I see the value in it. And to be transparent, yeah, go

Ira Bowman:
I did

Anya Smith:
ahead.

Ira Bowman:
something on that

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I actually shared. I've got a one hour, it's a course, but it's one hour video where I've created and showed people how to add a team without spending a single penny.

Anya Smith:
Ooh,

Ira Bowman:
Up to 10 people,

Anya Smith:
wow.

Ira Bowman:
you'll get 10 hours a week from these people and you

Anya Smith:
Woo.

Ira Bowman:
will not spend a penny on them. So what would you do if you had 100 hours of free labor?

Anya Smith:
Huh, yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Now, I teach in that one hour video, and I think I charge $300 for it as a full disclosure, so everybody knows there's a price for it.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
But that course, it's pretty simple. Now, there are some industries that it might not work for. But if you're a service-based industry, especially if you're working remotely, then this would work for you. So. I

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
might share that with you for free on you, because I like it.

Anya Smith:
Can I be very honest? I feel like one challenge, I feel like is the ethical part. Like, I feel like am I taking advantage of somebody if I'm doing

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
that? Is it okay if we ask

Ira Bowman:
Well,

Anya Smith:
that? Like...

Ira Bowman:
no, you should ask that. And it's a good question. Let me ask you this. If you've got a person who's unemployed and they want experience, what's the one thing they need that they can't get without getting a job?

Anya Smith:
Yeah, experience.

Ira Bowman:
Experience, but

Anya Smith:
Right.

Ira Bowman:
through this system, they can.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
So, you know, whether you call it internship or apprenticeship or however you set it now, I teach people how to do it, but I'm trading them two things for their 10 hours. I'm trading them. Education, because

Anya Smith:
Mm-hmm.

Ira Bowman:
I'm going to train them.

Anya Smith:
Right.

Ira Bowman:
But I'm also trading them the experience that they get along the way, because they can put that on their resume.

Anya Smith:
Yeah, that's

Ira Bowman:
So

Anya Smith:
fair.

Ira Bowman:
if they do it for three months, now what do you got? You got a stopgap from not having nothing. So it looks like you were unemployed, and now you've got something.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
But it's not for everybody. But

Anya Smith:
for sure.

Ira Bowman:
it's also the reason why we cap it at 10 hours. It still gives them the opportunity to go do something else for 40 hours a week and make a living.

Anya Smith:
Yeah, no, I love this. Thank you so much. I can I always want to be transparent with you, my guests and everybody listening

Ira Bowman:
No,

Anya Smith:
like

Ira Bowman:
I'm

Anya Smith:
how

Ira Bowman:
100%

Anya Smith:
I feel about

Ira Bowman:
transparent all the time. Absolutely. So, you know, it's, it's one of those things you don't want to take advantage of them, but I will tell you, I've had people go through it when they were over. They said, can I do it again?

Anya Smith:
Huh.

Ira Bowman:
Cause

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I do not take advantage of people. In fact, I kick people out and this

Anya Smith:
Go

Ira Bowman:
is the way

Anya Smith:
work

Ira Bowman:
you get

Anya Smith:
and

Ira Bowman:
kicked.

Anya Smith:
make money!

Ira Bowman:
This is the way you get kicked out. You get kicked out if you don't do the homework. So

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
it's like, if I was really all about just getting it from myself, If they gave me like half the homework and didn't do the full homework, I would be like, fine, because I know I'm going to get more hours out of you next time. Right. But I dropped them. Why? Because in my world, I only want people who are fully committed. And at the end of my program, those are the people that I look at hiring.

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
So

Anya Smith:
that's

Ira Bowman:
it

Anya Smith:
awesome.

Ira Bowman:
is, it is also, and I don't tell them that, although they're watching this, then they're going to know, but you know, it's a, it's an extended job interview.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
And I tell people at the beginning, like, I don't care if you go work for my competitor. I don't care if you start your own. Business and become a competitor because

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I'm not one of these guys that has a fear of missing out or I'm so guarded. That's why I share everything. And like, it still comes down to relationships.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
And I promise you, you're not going to learn from me in three months, which you, which you need to compete against me, right? No matter who you're learning it from.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
But, um, but the fact is I can take somebody from knowing nothing. And now they're in intermediate, intermediate in a few things. Like I have two, I have two courses that I teach this way. One is on organic SEO content creation and the other is just on graphic design. Cause they're, they're pretty different. So I do it in two different groups. So it is possible for one person to go through two sessions, but I don't let people go through the same session more than

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
once because

Anya Smith:
Well,

Ira Bowman:
I limit, I cap

Anya Smith:
yeah.

Ira Bowman:
it to 10 people, why do I cap it to 10? Cause I want to give them some individual, uh, attention. Yeah.

Anya Smith:
for sure. You're amazing. I don't know how you balance it all. It's probably magic. But we can't tell like

Ira Bowman:
Well,

Anya Smith:
we can

Ira Bowman:
I'm going

Anya Smith:
talk

Ira Bowman:
to

Anya Smith:
forever.

Ira Bowman:
tell you

Anya Smith:
We need

Ira Bowman:
that

Anya Smith:
to do

Ira Bowman:
it's,

Anya Smith:
it Iroh episode two or three

Ira Bowman:
it's called

Anya Smith:
and seven.

Ira Bowman:
a block. It's called a block schedule.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
So I live on a block schedule. So it's just like having a budget. Once you know what the budget is, you can spend the budgeted amount guilt free.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Cause you know, what's budgeted. If you, if you don't budget your time or your resources, then that's pretty foolish. But I use a block schedule. It helps me like every hour of the day. That's why when you asked me, you know, can you do it? You know, it was yesterday, but tomorrow I was

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
like, absolutely can. And the reason why I knew that is because I had the whole day blocked off for photography work.

Anya Smith:
Bye bye.

Ira Bowman:
So, you know, I'm just, instead of doing some photography work right now, I'm doing this, but you know, because I have the blocks set up, the blocks don't change meeting blocks, lunch blocks, sleep blocks, I've got three hours a day blocked for walking,

Anya Smith:
Oh wow, that's awesome.

Ira Bowman:
but you know, how many steps have I taken today so far? It. you know, it's four o'clock in the afternoon and I've taken 19,644 steps

Anya Smith:
Ooh,

Ira Bowman:
up or right.

Anya Smith:
ooh,

Ira Bowman:
And just in

Anya Smith:
you're

Ira Bowman:
case

Anya Smith:
amazing.

Ira Bowman:
anybody thinks I'm kidding, you can't see

Anya Smith:
I can

Ira Bowman:
it.

Anya Smith:
kind of see, it looks, it really looks very bright. We'll see, we'll see,

Ira Bowman:
Yeah.

Anya Smith:
we'll

Ira Bowman:
Let

Anya Smith:
just

Ira Bowman:
me see.

Anya Smith:
trust

Ira Bowman:
Hang

Anya Smith:
you.

Ira Bowman:
on. Let

Anya Smith:
We'll

Ira Bowman:
me

Anya Smith:
just

Ira Bowman:
see

Anya Smith:
try

Ira Bowman:
if

Anya Smith:
and send

Ira Bowman:
I can,

Anya Smith:
that

Ira Bowman:
if

Anya Smith:
one.

Ira Bowman:
I, if I lower this down, let's see if we can see it. Now.

Anya Smith:
You're so funny. Harry, you're awesome.

Ira Bowman:
Oh,

Anya Smith:
Oh, I see

Ira Bowman:
you

Anya Smith:
a summary.

Ira Bowman:
can kind

Anya Smith:
I see

Ira Bowman:
of

Anya Smith:
a

Ira Bowman:
see

Anya Smith:
little

Ira Bowman:
it right

Anya Smith:
bit.

Ira Bowman:
there.

Anya Smith:
Yeah, I can see it. Yeah, 19 something four four, 19 six four four.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, nineteen six forty four.

Anya Smith:
Okay,

Ira Bowman:
Yeah,

Anya Smith:
it's

Ira Bowman:
eight

Anya Smith:
real,

Ira Bowman:
point

Anya Smith:
it's real.

Ira Bowman:
eight point three miles. And

Anya Smith:
Oof.

Ira Bowman:
that's actually that's actually I'm under for right now. I'm usually over 20 by this point. But,

Anya Smith:
Okay, well,

Ira Bowman:
you

Anya Smith:
I appreciate

Ira Bowman:
know.

Anya Smith:
you dedicating your walking time to this. I hope it kind of

Ira Bowman:
No,

Anya Smith:
our audience

Ira Bowman:
you know,

Anya Smith:
also appreciates this

Ira Bowman:
yeah, no,

Anya Smith:
trade-off.

Ira Bowman:
I'll do I'll do some more walking. It's just 100 degrees out there right now. So I'm gonna wait till the sun lowers a little bit.

Anya Smith:
Yeah, we don't have that problem in Washington. We have those days, but rarely. It's a little bit cooler.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, we have them about 100 days in a row out here.

Anya Smith:
That's intense.

Ira Bowman:
But in Vegas, it was 112. So I actually came back and I was like, oh, this feels good. Yeah.

Anya Smith:
Cool down. Well, you're amazing. A, thank you for just being so humble, so curious, having so much to share and wisdom. And I can tell that you're always learning. And I'm always fascinated in people's minds who just embrace that learning. And they're very curious. And then they add value to others through this process.

Ira Bowman:
You

Anya Smith:
And

Ira Bowman:
wanna see something?

Anya Smith:
yeah.

Ira Bowman:
Always learning is not an exaggeration. All right. The

Anya Smith:
Ugh.

Ira Bowman:
books that I'm reading right now. I'm

Anya Smith:
Okay.

Ira Bowman:
going to turn them so you guys can see them. But these are all the books on my shelf that I'm reading right now.

Anya Smith:
Oh, hi.

Ira Bowman:
OK,

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
so like I love to learn. Now, you can't necessarily see all the titles because

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
of the lighting, but there's business books, there's relationship books, there's the GoGiver series, which is one of my favorite series. I'm reading that again.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
There's Chicken Soup for the Soul, which is actually a funny story because I did a photo shoot for one of the authors.

Anya Smith:
Oh cool.

Ira Bowman:
So

Anya Smith:
Huh.

Ira Bowman:
she

Anya Smith:
Oh.

Ira Bowman:
gave me a signed copy. So now I'm going to read it. The Resilient Life. This one's of a godly man. There's one on the Bitcoin standard, which is all about. Oh my gosh. Well, Bitcoin, but also it's got a whole history of money.

Anya Smith:
Ooh.

Ira Bowman:
This is a great book for nerds. Okay. So. This is the book.

Anya Smith:
Yeah. Yeah, I can do that. Cool.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah. So the Bitcoin

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
standard, if you read this, it tells you all about money, like the

Anya Smith:
Huh.

Ira Bowman:
history, the economy of, of money. And so now you can see how Bitcoin fits into, um, into that. So whether

Anya Smith:
Let's go.

Ira Bowman:
you like Bitcoin or don't like it, it's, it's interesting to learn about it and how it works. I'm not, I'm, I'm not claiming invest or anything like that. Like I don't, I don't have any currently. Okay. But it's fascinating to learn about the stuff so that you understand how it works. Now, there's something out there called Web3.

Anya Smith:
Yes.

Ira Bowman:
And, you know, these bitcoins, these alternative forms of money make a lot of sense for some of this Web3 application.

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
So I don't think it's necessarily going away. It might augment how it is now. And, you know, hopefully they'll regulate. I mean, I like the idea of regulation.

Anya Smith:
Yeah,

Ira Bowman:
Right? So

Anya Smith:
for sure.

Ira Bowman:
my comfort, my comfort level is to have, let's have some rules and some oversight. I like that

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
part of the dollar, right? But you know, everybody's got their own thresholds, but the fact is learning from reading and then applying your experience. And then I'll tell you one other component, and actually this helps with. The networking, social media, the TEDx opportunity, all that stuff. So I'll leave you with this. It's called informational interview. An informational interview is kind of like the precursor to a mentor, but you find somebody who's doing the thing that you want to do. And you kind of did that with me yesterday with the TEDx talk, right? Like, Hey,

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
I'd like to get on the TEDx stage. I know you've been on the TEDx stage. You got some advice for me. Yes. So by doing that, what did it do? We had

Anya Smith:
I have

Ira Bowman:
a

Anya Smith:
you.

Ira Bowman:
conversation. We had a conversation that led to another conversation. And now I feel like, you know, after an hour of this, like we're, we're pretty good friends now. You know what I

Anya Smith:
You

Ira Bowman:
mean?

Anya Smith:
know it, you know

Ira Bowman:
So

Anya Smith:
it.

Ira Bowman:
that's where, yeah. Intervait in informational interviews is something that if people could incorporate that into their game a little bit, it take them a long ways because the worst case scenario with an informational interview, you're just going to learn more about the topic, whatever you were asking them about. But if you do it right and you build that rapport, now you've got a friend who at the very least would. probably open up their Rolodex, their references and say, Hey, here's a connection for you. Like Judy did

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
to you and me, right? She said, Hey, you know, this is guy Ira. You should probably talk to him. So that's, that's the, the like, the thing that could change your whole life. It's not

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
just what you, it's not just what you know, but it's who you know. An informational interview gives you the ability to kind of do both at the same time.

Anya Smith:
100%. That's just been my whole journey and it's been two months. I've met some incredible people who I would have never connected unless I started this journey with just curiosity. It's like, hey, here's my mission. Here's what I want to help people. Are you interested? And I'm just like, I want to learn about your story. Can we talk about that? And I've made some amazing connections and friendships and this conversation would have never happened without that. So 100%, even in the short amount of time, my life has changed because of this approach. And I expect nothing. Like I expect zero going to the conversations because I'm like, well, you know, it could go like nothing. But sometimes you just click with people and it changes your life. And those people are like, I have WhatsApp messages of really cool people, like almost every day. And they inspire me and help me grow. And we're having this conversation and I'm gonna bug you later. Learn from you as well and share your research and help you grow. Like there is so much to gain if you look at life as a win-win. as opposed to competition, net zero, like stop limiting your life by having that approach. Start seeing the opportunity that can change your life because you embrace this connection.

Ira Bowman:
Yeah, well, life again is my mantra. Life is too short to be selfish. Right. So if you're figuring out ways to help others, I promise you that even if the people that you're helping can't ever help you, they're never going to be in a position to help you directly. You don't know who they're going to meet

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
or you don't know who knows them, that likes them, that sees the help that you gave them and say, man, that guy is cool as heck, because I know for a fact that lady on is never going to be a position to help Ira in return. But. You know, the world has this thing, you know, a lot of people call it karma. Again, I'm

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
a Bible guy, so I believe it's repute you. So, but however you want to express it or think about it, most religions agree that in this one, some form or fashion that what you put out is what you're going to get back. So it might not be directly from the person that you're helping. But one of the reasons why I like to help so many people is because I know I need help, too. We

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
all need help. Like you're in this world, you're going to need some help some way. Like I said, I'm not an engineer. If I was the last man on the planet, we'd all be screwed because I don't know how to reinvent any of this stuff. You know,

Anya Smith:
We'd

Ira Bowman:
I'm

Anya Smith:
have

Ira Bowman:
a,

Anya Smith:
a fun conversation.

Ira Bowman:
I'm a system. I am a systems guy. Well, I could, I mean, with eight kids, I could help repopulate the planet, I guess. But you know, hopefully some of them are smarter than me. Now I do have a

Anya Smith:
Hilarious.

Ira Bowman:
kid that's going for software engineering. So I can now say that I've got an engineer in the family.

Anya Smith:
Cool.

Ira Bowman:
Anyways, he must've got

Anya Smith:
Hey.

Ira Bowman:
that from his

Anya Smith:
All

Ira Bowman:
mom's side of the family.

Anya Smith:
right, you're awesome. Thank you so much. This was so fun. I learned so much. So there's so much takeaway. And I'm humbly hoping that this work helps others. Like

Ira Bowman:
I think

Anya Smith:
whether

Ira Bowman:
you were.

Anya Smith:
it's just to go to this episode and learn something, whether it's to see like what you can do when you embrace your own curiosity, your own kind of skills, your own path, your own mindset and take it where it can go. And like also try to help people along the way and see like that's not just something that's fluff. It actually will help you in return.

Ira Bowman:
Oh

Anya Smith:
So

Ira Bowman:
yeah.

Anya Smith:
like whenever you're ready, I have three last questions and I promise I will let you go. Although I feel like we could do this for a couple more hours and I would have fun along the way. So

Ira Bowman:
Go

Anya Smith:
whenever

Ira Bowman:
ahead.

Anya Smith:
you're ready.

Ira Bowman:
I am set.

Anya Smith:
Okay, three just short bit questions, but again, trust your instincts. First one is, success to me is.

Ira Bowman:
Success to me is raising my kids in a point that they can be self-sustaining and self-efficient.

Anya Smith:
Okay, my current purpose is.

Ira Bowman:
My current purpose is to help small business owners increase their sales. And I, and I use social media and SEO as the vehicle to deliver on that.

Anya Smith:
Okay, last one in the positive context going off track is

Ira Bowman:
Hmm. Going off track for me could be a couple of different things, depending on if we're talking about personal or business, but I'll tell you for, I'll give you one for both. Right. So

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
for personal, it would be like getting distracted and doing something with my wife off script. I'm not on block schedule, but I'm enjoying the moment and being present in the moment, which

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
is not, is not off track in the grander scheme. It's right on track, but you know, the calendar might

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
say I need to be doing this and I'm smooching with my wife or something,

Anya Smith:
Aww.

Ira Bowman:
so. fine. But

Anya Smith:
Get

Ira Bowman:
with

Anya Smith:
a

Ira Bowman:
business,

Anya Smith:
sweet.

Ira Bowman:
it'd probably be something to do with my camera. Because of all the things I do, the thing I love to do the most is take photos. So

Anya Smith:
Ugh.

Ira Bowman:
if

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
you do a photo shoot with me, even if I charge you for an hour, we're probably still going to do a four hour shoot just so you know.

Anya Smith:
Check out your site, right? Velvet Digital Media

Ira Bowman:
Yeah,

Anya Smith:
for the photo

Ira Bowman:
there's

Anya Smith:
session.

Ira Bowman:
photos

Anya Smith:
Is that

Ira Bowman:
in

Anya Smith:
where they go for that too?

Ira Bowman:
there. Yeah, or you could go iroboman.com either way. iroboman

Anya Smith:
Okay.

Ira Bowman:
or you can go to Instagram if you want to see all my photos. Yeah, there's tons

Anya Smith:
Yeah.

Ira Bowman:
there too. Yeah.

Anya Smith:
There's so much to you. And I feel like, again, this podcast doesn't contain all that there is to our moment, but I'm grateful for your time. And to our audience, please share with us, like, what did you take away? What questions do you have? Please tag us on social media. I sincerely love seeing all of your comments, all of your feedback. I know this is something that I'm always learning and trying to improve. So I sincerely value you being here helping make this mission meaningful and impactful to others. everybody listening, thank you so much for coming right off track with us today. I hope to have you another journey and adventure with us. And thank you, Aira.

Ira Bowman:
Thank you Anya.