Hi and welcome back to the Simple SEO Podcast. I am your host, Rachel Lindteigen, and I'm really excited to talk to you today about one of the most fascinating things, one of my favorite things about SEO, and that is how you can use SEO. Or search engine optimization to create a passive income funnel for your business. So I know most of us as entrepreneurs would love to be able to have a funnel that worked great, that fueled passive income in our businesses. And I want you to understand that SEO can be. The foundation of an amazing passive income or organic traffic funnel. It really can shape your entire business. And I know sometimes people are like, I don't know. I don't understand how it works. I don't get it. So I wanted to really walk you through it today. Now, if you're curious how this works, I've got even more information on it inside of my SEO 101. free class, which is on the website. So you can definitely check that out. It's going to kind of explain the process and how it works, um, in a little further detail, because obviously I keep these podcast episodes really short and sweet for you. I try to keep them around that 10 minute mark, so I can't go as much in detail here as I can there. But let's talk about it real quick. What exactly is a funnel? So when we're talking about online marketing or your website, what we're talking about when we talk about a funnel, there's three steps, basically. One is your website, one is your email list, and one, um, That would be the products or services that you sell. So our goal when we're creating a passive income funnel is to get traffic to your website so that they join your email list so that you then make money by selling your products or services. That's it. That's the three steps. So how does SEO create this for you? SEO is the best way to do this because search engine optimization is all about connecting the content that you're creating to the audience that you're creating it for. So you're already creating content. What we do, what I do from an SEO perspective is I use my SEO knowledge and background and my understanding of keyword research and my understanding of consumer behavior to help me find topics that will be helpful to my audience. So I use the same SEO tools. to come up with blog post ideas or podcast topics so that I know that the content I'm creating is in demand. There is already a customer base waiting for that content. They want to be able to read it. So that's the first step of it. That's what I want you to understand. Like, yeah. Why I say you should not be creating content without using SEO or without having SEO as your foundation. Because when we understand how to use the tools, we can focus on being very strategic with the content that we're creating. Then we're going to optimize that content. We're going to actually do SEO. on the content to make sure that it gets seen by our ideal customer. So that's stage one. And the reason that I say we focus so much on SEO, like I said, first is just when you understand how it works and you understand how the tools work and you can do, um, keyword research and all of that, you can use that as your foundation because you are then able to identify keywords to use in your blog post titles, your podcast episode titles. You know how to title it. so that you have a good chance of ranking like you've learned how to determine whether or not you have a good chance of ranking for a keyword and you know that there are people searching for content on that topic so you have this huge competitive advantage over anyone who's just creating content willy nilly or It feels like they're throwing spaghetti against the wall or they're just kind of pulling it out of thin air each week trying to figure out what to write about, kind of sitting looking at their screen going, I have no idea what I should write about. Oh, I guess I'll write about X. Instead, you're able to be incredibly strategic. And when you're strategic, you get better results. I have a student who was talking about it recently. She gave me a fantastic testimonial and she talked about how she had become so strategic that prior to taking Simple SEO content with me, she really had, she had a good understanding of SEO, but she hadn't been, she didn't really know everything and she didn't know the keyword research process and she didn't necessarily know to use that to help with her content development and all of that. So she was having some success from SEO. It was kind of limited because she was not quite sure what she was doing, but she was getting some results. But what she found was that she was getting results and she was ranking and getting traffic for keywords that weren't actually super relevant to her business. So by taking the class and learning how to do all of this and understanding the process, and she is a star student. She does everything that she was taught in class and she's had amazing results. She was able to identify Keywords that had significantly more search demand where she could rank, but rather than ranking for a word with like 10 searches a month, she ranked for a word with like 140 searches a month or 500 searches a month. So she was able to get a lot more traffic from the keywords by shifting her rankings. But also she was able to be very strategic because now she understood what type content to bring into her funnel to bring the right person into her funnel. So not only did she know what to write about, she knew how to optimize it, what keywords to use and all of that. That's what I want you to really understand what this course teaches you is how to be very strategic because now every blog post that you're writing is another opportunity for you to rank, meaning to show up on Google. To get traffic to your website. And when people are searching, they're actively searching on Google, they're using keywords, all of that, they're looking for an answer. They're looking for a solution. They're looking for someone to help them. They're more likely to convert. So that's the first step. We're using SEO to make sure we've got the right content on our website for our audience. So that's where we're using the strategy side of it. Then we're being very tactical and we're doing the actual optimization work. We're doing the actual SEO work on each page or each blog post that we're creating. Because now that's what's going to help bring traffic. We need traffic into that funnel to make sure everything's working, to be able to earn passive income, etc. So now that's step one. We've got the website working. We've got people coming in. Then you're going to need to collect their email addresses and you're going to need to have an opt in. And if you're not sure how you build an email list. Um, I want you to listen to episode 120 that's going to talk about how you can use SEO to help you build your email list. If you don't yet have an opt in that's working for you or you're not sure if it's working, I want you to listen to episode 52. That's going to walk you through like what an opt in is and how to create one. Because you're going to need to have a good opt in. We've got traffic coming. Now we need to catch that traffic. We need to capture it so we can build your email list, which builds your leads. The third stage of this is to have your products or services that you sell that your business makes money. So what we want to make sure is that when we're creating content, the way I teach you to do this in Simple SEO content, is to make sure that the content that you're creating all ties back to your products or services in one way or another. It's not all sales, sales, sales, sales, sales because nobody wants to listen to that. Nobody wants to read that. It's not helpful to them. But just providing value and helping and answering questions and very naturally positioning you as an expert as someone who can help them as a business that has a solution to what they need. So that's what we're doing when we're building this passive income funnel using SEO. Now the passive income comes in because your. SEO traffic will continue to grow the more content you create that is strategic. It's optimized. It's got keywords you can rank for the more traffic you will be able to generate the more people come to your site. If you've got a good opt in, the more people you'll be able to get on your email list. And from there, you should start selling more products. So if you want to build your email list to get more leads, to sell more products, book more services, et cetera, and you want to be able to do it without having to sit in front of your computer all day long, or having to run ads and pay for every single lead that comes into your business, Then I want you to join me in Simple SEO content and learn the framework for this. How to do this to make it work for your business. I also want to let you know, I know sometimes we talk about creating content and people are like, I don't want to do that. I have an AI SEO playbook. It's how to use ChatGPT to help with as much of this as possible. It is a bonus that you can get when you take SEO 101 and you register for simple SEO content within that first 24 hours. That's the only way to get that AI SEO book. It is going to walk you through what you can and cannot do with ChatGPT to speed this process up to make it faster and easier. And I've even given you the prompts that you can use to do this for your business. So there's a lot that ChatGPT can help you with to make this a faster process for you. And I walk you through exactly what to do. So if you're ready, join me in simple SEO content. Let's build out this passive income funnel for your business. And then the great thing is once you know your funnel is working organically, once you're getting conversions, meaning people are coming in from your content, they're joining your email list. They're buying your products or services, then you can start to scale with ads and then you can grow even bigger. You can do as much as you want with SEO and with that organic traffic. And then if you want, you can start adding ads into the mix. That's what I did. I do a mix of multiple marketing channels. I do some ads. I do the podcast. I do the blog. I do a little bit on YouTube. I'm kind of thinking I may start doing a little more on YouTube again. Now that things have kind of Freed up. My time's freed up a little bit compared to where it was a year or so ago when I paused on YouTube. So you can do different things. You can and you should. You should have content on multiple channels. You should have it coming in from other channels, but I want you to get that organic Passive income funnel running first, then if you want to start to expand and you want to look at, what else can I do, then you can look at adding in ads on the back end if you want, once you know that everything is running organically and you're making money and your funnel is working. You're good to go. So if you're ready to build a passive income funnel for your business and you're ready to like make sure it's all working, you've got it, you need SEO as the foundation in order to be strategic. And I want you my friend to be strategic. So if you have questions be sure to check out SEO 101. It's got a little more information as to how we choose the content pillars, what topics, um, it really walks you through like how you figure out. The keywords and the, the scalability for your business and how close to ready you are. And it's going to give you your only way to get that ChatGPT SEO playbook. And there's also a discount if you go through that funnel. I'm going to be honest, that's my passive income funnel. It is the. Webinar, it's all the content, it's the podcast, it's the blog, et cetera, to the lead magnet, which is the SEO 101 webinar or the Beginner's Guide to SEO. Those are the two most popular lead magnets for the SEO course. Then into the SEO course. If you're on the freebies tab on my website, you'll notice there's also a beginner's guide to email marketing and a beginner's guide to podcast SEO, and those courses are coming. Podcast SEO is available. I will be launching that like officially soon, and I will be developing the email marketing one, um, over the summer of 2025, and that should be ready to go for you in the fall. I'm going to work on that while we're on summer break this year and get that ready for you because I want to be able to teach you all the different steps of creating this passive income funnel for your business, because it is so powerful and I want to show you how to do it. All right. Thank you so much for being here. I will see you back next week. Bye for now.