Dennis Yu

Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: What It Really Takes to Build a Successful Marketing Agency

Growth Mindset, Business, Client Management, Communication, ethics, Featured, Guest Posts, Hustle, people management /

This is a guest post by Nick Jaworski of Circle Social Inc. Owning multiple 7-figure digital marketing agencies, I never found the typical social media crowd very helpful. There are a lot of smoke and mirrors in the digital marketing world. Fake gurus are everywhere, but even the bonafide have never appealed to me very much. When I started my agency, I wanted to build something meaningful and impactful. And one thing I learned about impact over the years is that the bigger you are, the more impact you can have. I quickly realized that the majority of the experts out there were one-man bands. Maybe they had a couple of VAs or a Community Manager helping them out, but they’re not what I would now consider to be a large or scalable business. As I’ve learned over the years, that’s about as far as most people want to go. Whether it’s fear, lack of know-how, or just no interest in taking on the huge amount of work and responsibility that comes with growth, most agencies don’t make it past the 3-4 person stage.  I’m a big admirer of Dennis and all the work he’s put into helping young people and really having an impact on the world by sharing his knowledge. He also knows what he’s talking about. When I first started my agency, I had so much to learn and, like many in the same boat, scoured the internet for people to learn from. However, all I ever heard were platitudes like “content is king,” “marketing is about building relationships,” or “tell your story.” From the get-go, my agency was focused on return on investment. What really attracted me to digital marketing originally was the data. The fact that I could tie our work to real ROI, where I could prove our value to our clients. This is where Dennis stood out. I could tell from reading his content that he had true expertise in helping real companies. That’s why I was very interested in sharing my experiences on his blog as he’s the real deal. When I entered the realm of digital marketing, there was something glaringly missing from me in the world of social media and marketing influencers I found online. None of them owned large companies with a lot of staff.  Instead, as I started to network and get into the world of business, I saw all these people running 8 and 9-figure companies, but I never saw these people online. These people led or had built huge companies and most didn’t even have a Twitter profile. More than that, many of their companies didn’t either! That told me that following the online social media crowd was unlikely to be the road to success. Speaking with Dennis, I wanted to share a real story of what it truly takes to grow a successful agency. I registered my business in 2016 but didn’t actually launch it till late fall, so almost 2017. By the end of 2020, I had scaled it to a full-service agency with a consulting wing, marketing wing, over 20 full-time, W-2 staff, and a national reputation as the foremost expert in our niche. Our largest client does over a billion dollars a year in revenue, while most land somewhere in the $10-300 million range. That’s a pretty cool success story, but the reality is that it’s extremely rare and it took a tremendous amount of effort, risk, and investment to get where we are today. This article is not going to feed you a lot of BS about overnight successes and “passive income.” It’s going to talk about the never-ending real work and sacrifice that goes into it. Unemployed and Starting the Business I had been a teacher and, eventually, a school administrator ever since I left university. I had developed a reputation as a turn-around guy for schools, someone who could come in and fix failing programs. This led to me being called in by the largest daycare operator in the US to fix one of their most troublesome schools in Indianapolis, IN in 2015.  That turned into a nightmare. It was in a low-income area with lots of drugs and gun violence. We had just had a shooting at the school less than a year before and now the program was on probation by the state for the third time in less than 4 years and was going to be shut down. My job was to come in and turn it around.  After a year of 80-hour work weeks, no organizational support, and the challenge of finding quality teachers willing to work in one of the more drug-infested, violent areas of town for $8 an hour, I finally got the school re-licensed by the state and on track to national accreditation. It was an amazing accomplishment, but I didn’t want to be there. It’d been hell, so I asked for a transfer to a new school. Instead of transferring me, they told me that, since I clearly didn’t want to be there anymore, they no longer needed me. I was let go that day. That was the last straw. I’d been in education and working for other people for nearly two decades. I was burned out. So I decided to start Circle Social. I started it out of my house in-between caring for my daughter. We had just $2,000 in the bank and my wife was only making $10 an hour, so we couldn’t afford daycare. Circle Social was off to a pretty inglorious start. I was writing 1,500-word blog posts at $10 a pop under the company moniker, but really I was just a freelancer since it was just me and these were piecemeal projects. You see, nobody starts a business charging high fees. Most who do are quickly realized to be frauds by their clients. Their business may limp along for even a couple of years but eventually folds. To succeed in business, you have to charge

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Jason Miller is the True Rockstar of Content Marketing

Leave a Comment / Awesome People, Featured /

Jason A. Miller is literally a rockstar, as he is a full-time photographer and has a full-time gig running content marketing globally for LinkedIn. He has a book, filled with photos of rock legends and the stories behind them. I first met Jason when he was at Marketo, after having a 10-year career in the music industry, working for companies such as Sony. His insatiable thirst to become a pro impressed me so much back then that I made a note to follow him as a rising star. Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him grow and speak in cities all around the world. Here he is speaking about at C3 2017: He hates sleep. Because he feels like he’s behind. He has a truly incredible bias for action. One time, I had to get an article out for AdWeek and he graciously gave me time to interview him in-between speaking sessions. He did the same thing again by building a video course with us at LinkedIn’s London offices with only minutes to go before he had to give a keynote speech at the Adobe Summit. Jason’s more than a student of the game, he’s a true professional. He’s just like, Steph Curry or Lebron James, the first to arrive for practice and the last to leave. He’s got incredible humility and is one of the toughest titans in digital marketing. And because of that… He gives back. He teaches at UC Berkeley, despite a formidable travel schedule and a young one at home. He runs a podcast, has written several books, and speaks across the globe. Great teachers are great students too — just like a microphone is also a speaker when you reverse the current. On top of all of that, he is a catalyst for others as well. I was on a flight with no Wi-Fi and going through the exercise of who I think the best, most ethical marketers are that I know. And well… He’s definitely at the top of that list. The number of introductions that he has made for me plus the help he’s provided is enough to make anyone blush. I gave him a signed bottle of Jack Daniels but that’s just a small token of the endless gratitude I have for him. Jason Miller is a positive force. I’ve never seen him lose his cool or bad-mouth others, though anyone of his caliber has certainly been taken advantage of once or twice before. He’s always gracious, even when under pressure. And he has never resorted to tactics used by motivational speakers. It doesn’t matter if he’s flying around the globe, taking pictures at concerts, speaking in different cities, teaching, or giving his undivided attention to help. It is just undeniable… He is a true rockstar, not just in content marketing, but in life. The world needs more Jason Millers– do you agree?

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Want to unlock awesomeness in your business? Promote your winners

Leave a Comment / Facebook Advertising, Featured, people management /

Man, have I ever been so guilty of focusing on the troublemakers– the people who just can’t perform and projects that are failing. This means I neglect the performers since the “squeaky wheel” gets the attention. I’ve lost some good people because I was so busy helping the stragglers that I unintentionally ignored my top performers. The unintended result of my actions as a novice manager was to punish the performers and reward the troublemakers. Have you fallen for the “squeaky wheel” problem, too? The right answer is to spend 80% of your time with the 20% of your team that is kicking butt. You’d do the same with your boosted posts. And even if you’re not managing people, you can prioritize your projects in the same way. The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80/20 rule– a way to focus on what matters. Of course, you say– make the good things better. Who wouldn’t agree with that? “One way I exercise the Pareto principle in my work is to LIMIT the number of hours I work in a day. This drives my efforts in two ways. First, limiting my working hours forces me to focus only on those things that are the most important. I have no choice but to focus on the 20% of activities that drive 80% of the result. Second, limiting my working hours frees me up to focus on the most important assets I have, my health and my time.” The reason people don’t do this is because we all care for the underperformers. We want to help them– and then we end up continuing to help them more than we intended. And pretty soon, they have sucked up your time. The good-natured attempt by you to help has backfired, creating entitlement instead of improved performance. You’ve set an ugly pattern, since now they know they can cry wolf and you come running. Perhaps you’re like me, and your people have realized that you will let people get away with things since you don’t like to fire people. My mentor, who was CEO of American Airlines, told me that there are 3 types of managers: Those who are loved. Those who get results. Those who are loved get results. You’ll see 99% of managers in the first two buckets and 1% in that last bucket. The managers who are loved are kind to their people at the expense of getting results– this is the majority of managers. The managers who get results are called 4 letter names for being “bossy” since they don’t have patience or empathy– they want stuff to get done on time. The last bucket of effective and loved managers is rare because high-performance situations are possible only when the entire team is high-performance.  All you need is one freeloader, naysayer, or rebel (Leroy Jenkins!) to destroy the team culture. The most effective manager of all time, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, embraces the “up or out” management philosophy. He says you should promote the top 10%, ignore the middle 80%, and fire the bottom 10%. Sounds like a professor grading on a curve in school, right? This works because, in any group of people, you will statistically have some poor performers, mediocre players, and stars. The grossly incompetent ones are easy to identify and remove, but it’s the mediocre ones that could kill you. Especially true if your company is young and growing. With Facebook ads, you know to allocate your budget against winners, instead of putting the same amount on every post. Or worse, we’ve seen “gurus” recommend that you put even more money on losing posts to “average things out” or “help their performance”. In the same way that you should put more dollars against winning ads, why not do the same with your people and projects? We believe in equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome. Everyone deserves a chance. We’ll coach them, but not babysit– there’s a difference. I’ll end by saying something successful entrepreneurs know, but don’t want to admit. When looking at the performance of a group of people, especially in a start-up or less structured environment, you’ll find that the stars are not just 20% better than the “average”, but are usually 10-20x better. It’s not that they work harder, attend more meetings, or write 10X more code. Rather, their efforts make a 10-20x impact. “As an amateur swimmer, I used to mistakenly believe by kicking my legs harder and using more force on my stroke I could cover more distance. I was really just flailing and making a big splash. A pro swimmer covers great lengths not by exerting herculean effort but by having an efficient swimming stroke. As a manager, it’s easy to want to play the role of “lifeguard” and “save” those making a big splash and commotion. But your time will be better spent coaching up and rewarding your proficient performers.” There are millions of engineers who have built or tried to build mail processing systems. But there is only one Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail all by himself as a side project at Google. There are many who claim to be Facebook ads experts. But there is only one Logan Young who has experience optimizing across a broad range of massive companies. Where are the winners in your company and are you doing everything you can to promote them, encourage them, and spend time with them?

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As an entrepreneur, you face the most concentrated of unspoken evils.

Leave a Comment / Entrepreneurship, Featured, people management /

Yes, you’re busy. But go watch this video right now, anyway: It’s 48 minutes of encouragement and perspective for entrepreneurs with Elon Musk. If you’re still reading this, go back and at least watch from 34 minutes onward. As an entrepreneur, every problem in the company is brought to you, so you end up spending most of your time doing stuff you don’t want to do. Elon Musk calls it staring into the abyss and eating glass– to continually be on the verge of extinction and have a high tolerance for pain. It’s a lonely place and something we’re not supposed to talk about. So keep on pretending. Whether people admit it or not, life is hard. So be kind to one another. Elon poured half of his gains from PayPal into SpaceX, being fully comfortable that it might be a complete loss. And even though he’s been quite successful– commercially to deliver payloads to the International Space Station and send satellites into orbit– he still predicts 13-14 years to even achieve his goal of sending a mission to Mars. He’s been at it since 2002, so he’s already a dozen years into it. And he’s got the same trajectory for Tesla, which will also take at least a dozen more years to get to where half of all cars in the US are electric (made by Telsa or not). It takes 10 years to become an overnight success. Ask Facebook, Google, or most of the businesses you know, technology-related or not. The most important causes take a decade to realize. And for a founder to be willing to eat glass, it better be a cause of that magnitude. Are you working on something that’s truly worthy of your time? Is it the kind of mission that inspires others to join in your WHY? Are you looking to get bought out by some other company or do you want to grow to where you can buy out others? Alex Houg and I have been working on Content Factory for the past few years, but it’s been an idea incubating for much longer. We’re long-term believers in changing how students transition from K12 to the workplace and we’re building these connections with businesses. Khan Academy gives away their online education for free. They believe knowledge should be free.  We concur and go one step further to say that job support should be free, too. Next year will be 10 years since I left Yahoo! to be an entrepreneur, so my hope is that the time I’ve put in will truly start to pay off. If failure is the best teacher, then I’m one of her most familiar students. My hat’s off to anyone who is trying to get their business off the ground, make the next round of payroll, or take their mission to the next level.

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Do you want to really understand Dennis Yu?

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I did an experiment yesterday on Facebook. I posted a quote, unattributed. Post by Dennis Yu. And it got a few dozen likes immediately. Ironically, it was a Simon Sinek quote, which a few people spotted. Martin Luther King was able to get 250,000 people together in Washington DC on that August day in 1963 not because they followed him, but because of his vision. He just happened to be the conduit. Sinek quipped that it just wouldn’t be the same if MLK said “I have a plan.” The WHY is more powerful than the WHAT– the dream vs the plan. Then I tested by posting something informational. You can build influence by becoming a subject matter expert. Post by Dennis Yu. Arguably, the hottest current topic– plus I tagged a thought leader in online marketing. Yet it got zero response. Here’s a post from a friend that got almost 300 likes: Post by Christine Kavahei Brewer. Another WHY post. And as much as I like Christine, it’s about what she stands for, not her personal beauty. It struck me that people who seek to be wealthy or famous as their goal are hollow compared to people on a mission. This speaks volumes about the nature of influence. Here is the most popular post of all time on Facebook with over 4 million likes. Can you guess under what circumstances, as opposed to by who? People who clicked like did it because of what THEY believed and a celebration of THEIR success. It wasn’t about the attractiveness of Michelle or Barack, nor the quality of the photo, but of mission. Mission is shared and owned by many– inclusive, not exclusive; giving, not taking; clarifying, not distracting. Did you know the Greeks had 4 different words for love? PHILIA. A general love via the warmth of friendships and pleasures. I love donuts, ultimate frisbee and episodes of StarGate.  Maybe you really “loved” that restaurant last night? EROS. Physical, passionate love tied to a person.  This is where “erotic” comes from. Infatuation creates love goggles, masking lust for other things. STORGE. Affection usually between family members, based on acceptance and mutual protection. David and Jonathan had one of the strongest friendships in the Bible. It was not sexual, but one of fulfilling mission– David’s anointing to be the next King. AGAPE. Unconditional, sacrificial love. To lay down your life for another man. Continuing to give, and not reciprocal. Spiritual and without sexual implications. Think of the Good Samaritan. Or for Christians, consider Jesus and that “God is Love”. If Jesus were to be walking the planet in 2014, I’d bet he’d be on Facebook. And I bet he’d be a killer marketer. Up until a year ago, my life was always about me. I wanted to be in the spotlight as the image of success. But now it’s about a mission that all of us can embrace. It’s time for others to step up into the spotlight and for me to be in support.

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You wouldn’t believe this was me a year ago

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A year ago, I had nothing– no health, no money, and a career that looked more like a homeless man’s exploits than what might pass as a functional business. I explain what that life feels like here. Ever chase money and feel like a hamster on a wheel? I was chasing the idea of success, as no entrepreneur wants to admit public failure. They ask each other at tech events how things are going, and out come the white lies. This reinforces the false reality of running a business, creating a loneliness that only a founder or business owner would know. I still get email subscriptions from people who have worked for us, which creates a chore for me to unsubscribe. Do you sweep the floors, too? Today, I saw a video of a young man pitching his self-help materials. He was standing on a yacht, talking about how he could teach us success. Gold watch, blazer– all that was missing was the exotic car or bikini babe.  Though he was promising how you could be 3-5 times more successful by following his advice, all I could think was “Gee, how much did he pay to film his one-minute video on that docked yacht? Or maybe his parents have a kind friend.” I downloaded his ebook and read it in 3 minutes flat.  It was a younger version of Tony Robbins– good for young folks to understand that hard work, passion, and planning count and that we have to set goals in our careers, personal lives, health, spiritual lives, etc… And while the advice wasn’t necessarily wrong, it reinforces the very problem it claims to solve.  Kids coming out of high school still don’t know what they want. And neither do adults well into mid-life, as they are just older kids. I never understood the transition from school to work, so I was still swimming when the water turned to land.  The techniques I used to get good grades didn’t seem to work in getting me a job. In fact, it hurt me. The school taught me that collaborating with others was cheating, that there was always a singular right answer in the book, and that once you submitted the paper, that bit was over.  People in the real world know the opposite is true. You must act quickly to fail quickly and iterate.  Business owners make decisions based on relationships, not by your GPA. The stuff you need is not in the textbook, although Googling things can be quite helpful.  Yes, I used to work at Yahoo! and us engineers were using Gmail and googling things. And in doing Internet marketing for the last 20 years, if you count bulletin boards and dial-up, I’ve witnessed the same transition struggle for business owners. They understand the core of their business– the customer, their product, and how to drive sales.  But the electronic world has left them befuddled in a maze of software and witch doctors selling their wares. I get confused, too. The education system is like a giant soft serve machine that oozes out the vanilla twist, left on with nobody watching. It’s pumping out millions of graduates each year, who are not equipped to work in today’s modern world. It’s not the school’s fault, since a degree was never a promise for a job. And it’s not the businesses’ fault, since it’s not their role, at least not in the United States, to train students on basic business principles. We’re not even talking about teaching the mechanics of Facebook ads, learning how to program, or fancy stuff.  What’s missing is simply being able to communicate in a business setting, knowing how to manage your time and fundamentals that matter in any type of gainful employment. Living here in Minnesota, the land of not 10,000 lakes, but actually 12,000 lakes, we have many rivers, too. To portage is to carry your canoe out of the water to get around an obstacle or something in the way. It’s a necessary transition that requires multiple people to lift the canoe and someone to guide the group. I had no direction or true vision a year ago, though I could talk a good game.  But now, I have a family of close friends, a mission that matters, and a support network that is far more valuable than money.   And this is a transition, a portage, that has taken me a long time.  We have a lot to share and I’d welcome your help in this journey. I’m looking forward to sharing this with you over the coming weeks and months.

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Made with 100% Real SEO (How to make EASY money as an SEO consultant)

Leave a Comment / social media, Featured, search engine optimization /

I was at McDonalds recently and noticed the writing on the bag: “Made with 100% Real Beef.” And then something to the effect of “And with a number like that, you can’t get any better.” It reminds me of the breakfast cereals that are made “with” 100% real honey— meaning that they have a giant vat of cereal and high fructose corn syrup, and someone with a squeeze bottle squirts in a few drops of 100% real honey. After all, it’s made “with” 100% real honey, beef, leather, or whatever— as opposed to being made “of” that item. Whether marketing and advertising are just different shades of lying is a philosophical debate. But that’s not a question is the number of charlatans out there fleecing clients on PPC and SEO. This is not just run-of-the-mill “we’ll get you to #1 in the search engines” kind of talk—- these are professionals who charge insane rates. One of our clients is a major fast-food chain that spends 6 figures a month with us on a full range of PPC, SEO, email, and webmasters. We partnered with an SEO company that, in one of the first meetings, attempted to claim that he could at-will stop people from linking to the client’s site. When one of our guys asked how exactly this could be done (since I could just create a blog post and link to the site), he said that it was proprietary technology. After 2 1/2 months of keeping this guy on, with no improvement in rankings, we got rid of him— not before he attempted to ask for more fees, and also trumpeted the value of his RSS network, and 3-way linking strategy. His final gasp was to mention using Twitter as one of the keys to driving more leads for the client. It wasn’t a bad run for this guy, who makes a living getting first-page rankings on no-traffic terms. So if you want to make an easy living fleecing corporate clients, do this (I’m not kidding— this is so easy): Proclaim that you are an expert at SEO: Create a local meetup group (with 2 other conspirators) and say that you founded the “SEO experts” group in your city. Join a few professional organizations, such as SEMPO (yes, they are legit). Put up a canned website with huge logos for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Verisign, and other networks, saying that you are a partner with them in advertising. List yourself in a few directories. Get a few clients: Word-of-mouth marketing is easy. You won’t be keeping clients very long, so make sure you have a steady inflow of new clients to replace the ones who find out they’re getting fleeced. Don’t have references? That’s okay— mention that your clients are confidential. After all, you wouldn’t want other clients to know about what we’re doing for you, right? In your initial client meeting, spend the whole time talking about 301 redirects and 200 status codes— sounds ultra-technical, especially if you can’t actually program. Don’t worry. The client doesn’t know how to program it either, so your cover will hold. Create ranking reports: Using your proprietary technology (just pay for a subscription at seomoz.com or SEO book), create a monthly ranking report on terms that you choose. The key is to choose terms that have no traffic and nobody else is competing for. Choose 4 and 5-word search phrases: go for “large, custom blue widget manufacturer Los Angeles,” not “widget” or “blue widget.” Claim that the longer terms are “higher relevance.” When the client asks for how long it will take to get results, say that nobody really knows the search algorithms except Google and Yahoo themselves— and that anyone who makes firm promises is a charlatan. This excuse will buy you lots of time. Set up a few WordPress sites: Using those search terms you listed, buy the domains. To flush out this snake oil peddler mentioned above, we ranked on the “franchise review site.” Within a couple of days, you’ll be on the first page of Google for that term— if not in position 1. If you’re sophisticated with programming, auto-generate a bunch of fake content by scraping other blogs. Or follow what bluehatseo.com has to say about this. Not needed—- buying a few domains and putting up free wordpress templates is sufficient here. Source: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/content-scrapers/ Proclaim victory!: Whew, it’s been a LOT of hard work, but look— we got a #1 ranking on these 5 terms. If you want to get more mileage out of it, do it with lots of fanfare and spread out the results over time. If you deliver these results right away, they’ll think it was easy. Go on vacation for a few weeks, then come back and proclaim victory if there’s someone who’s smart about SEO in the client meeting, who asks questions about whether those terms have traffic, babble on about how you have to take a holistic approach to SEO and that many factors will affect rankings. Collect fees as long as you can: If you’re lucky, nobody will ask any questions. But if they do, be ready with these excellent comebacks: Why aren’t rankings on my main terms going up?: “Sometimes you take two steps forward, and one step back”— fluctuation in results is perfectly normal. Your site needs more unique content. We’re going against some strong competitors here, so it will take some time. But PPC seems to be driving traffic and leads, not SEO: PPC is a short-term solution that is bleeding you money. The real pros recognize that organic results are more trustworthy to users— and getting in naturally will save you money over time. I don’t understand what you’re doing— in fact, I don’t think you’re doing anything: There are many factors involved here that only trained professionals like myself will understand. I go to a lot of conferences to network with other people like me who don’t know anything either. We have a proprietary RSS network and a series of blog sites—

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The hidden career of the online marketer

Leave a Comment / Featured, Online marketing /

Lyft and Uber disrupted the taxi business by allowing anyone with an iPhone to be a cab driver whenever they had a little extra time. Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry by making spare bedrooms for rent. FancyHands, desk, TaskRabbit, and other personal assistant services let you be a secretary, caterer, or errand runner in your spare time. Could this work in more complex scenarios such as online marketing? You bet. Apps handle the complexity of scheduling, billing, and operations. They do the marketing for you, so you don’t have to build a website or run ads. The worker needs only deliver the core service, whatever that is. Strip away the ugly, tedious parts of running a business and you create a breed of entrepreneurs on both sides: those who create software that enables workers to do this, plus workers who use the software to engage in their specialty. This won’t work in highly regulated industries, which is why there’s no Airbnb for restaurants, the military, or health care. But online marketing is far from regulated. So far, in fact, there aren’t even widely accepted degree programs. Yes– anyone can be an online marketer. Try practicing as a cosmetic surgeon with no license and watch how quickly you get sued. I believe that tools to empower ordinary, non-technical people to perform online marketing are imminent. You have the Marketos and HubSpots at the enterprise end. Then Infusionsoft doing the all-in-one package for small businesses. It’s a matter of time before we have access to the student over summer break or the stay-at-home dad. And when this does happen, watch out!  Mass usage of these tools creates a certification and rating system– points and levels like eBay. Then we have trusted practitioners in a measurable ecosystem.  Bogus social-only metrics cede to business outcomes– leads and revenue matter more than fans and followers.  Schools struggle to incorporate this into their curriculum– this is already the case. But it’s even harder to get practitioners as traditional educators. Expect vendors to increasingly take over this role. Readers, are you ready?

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Syosset Lock Shop– the parable of the 7 circles

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Remember how Dante, in his Divine Comedy, had the nine circles of hell? Well, locksmiths have those too. Not nine, only seven, but surely you get the point. There are seven incredibly ludicrous ways to get locked out of your house, and, like Dante, we will discuss them in ascending order (skipping a couple, because like I said, seven is easier than nine). Circle #1: Limbo. Limbo is an easy circle to get caught in. Heck, even Radiohead has a song about it! Limbo is simply when you’re between places and lock yourself out. Example: You’re jumping into the car, driving off, halfway down the street you forgot something, you drive back, and you lock your key inside as you slam the door. Not pleasant, but hey, we’ve seen worse. Circle #2: Lust. Believe me; locksmiths see this one all the time. Really, it’s quite simple. Hormones rage, you stumble out the door after your lover, and your keys are still on the countertop, or worse, the countertop of that person you were never planning on seeing again. Welcome to circle #2, friend, you are now officially locked out of your castle. Circle #3: Gluttony. Again, this circle is a basic need. I mean, who hasn’t had that gluttonous feeling hit them at 1 am and driven down to the local Taco Bell, bought enough food to feed a Laotian village, and returned home only to realize: Shoot. I was so obsessed with the thought of food that I forgot to NOT LOCK MYSELF OUT! Your keys? Sitting in the gutter under the Taco Bell takeout window. Circle #4: Anger. No, I’m not talking about Angry Birds. I’m talking white-knuckled, ready-to-punch-a-brick-wall boiling rage. And, speaking on behalf of the masses, how many of us HAVEN’T thrown our house key at someone/something in a fit of rage? Am I the only one that does that? Really? Let’s move on. Circle #5: Violence. Similar to anger, you say? Not quite. I never said I actually hit my target while throwing my keys. And neither have you, most likely. Anger is not conducive to aim. But violence, now this is a whole new level. Those of you who lock themselves out of the house in an act of violence probably deserve to be locked out. And locked up. Circle #6: Fraud. Now again, if you lock yourself out while committing an act of fraud, you’ve got bigger problems than getting back into your dwelling. But still, consider this: A man I once knew (who shall remain unnamed) used a house key to try and break into another house. Not as a tool, but rather trying to convince the landlord his key SHOULD open this door, it really should! In the end, he lost his key…and his freedom. Pretty ludicrous. Circle #7: Treachery. If one gets to the point of treachery (also Dante’s 9th and final circle of hell), their minds are so full of deceit and the like that house keys are low on the mental list. Very, very low. As in, non-existing. It’s simply ridiculous to get locked out if you have nothing but treachery on your mind…simple as that. Now, cries the reader, how do I escape? How might I avoid becoming one of the inhabitants of the seven circles of stupidity? Fortunately, a local locksmith is there to help. Syosset Lock Shop has been part of the community for over 40 years, and no matter what circle of stupidity you may have fallen into, they will rescue you and reunite you with the inside of your house!

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