Regardless if you’re a veteran link-building enthusiast or someone who’s completely new to it, backlinks from social bookmarking sites are worth procuring when building out a well-rounded link profile.

They’re completely white-hat, and a lot of these high DA social bookmarking sites pack an extremely powerful punch when it comes to ranking in the SERPS.

Not to mention – they’re usually free to get if you want to manually build them yourself!

What are Social Bookmarking Sites?

Social bookmarking sites are websites that allow you to store and share internet bookmarks.

They typically help people like your Aunt Martha post pictures of her cat and organize her thoughts about you being single in the form of posts.

Some examples of social bookmarking sites are Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and so on.

We all use these sites, and at this point in the SEO game they are an absolute must when it comes to building a natural link profile.

Benefits of Using High DA Social Bookmarking Sites for Links

They are great for getting user engagement and traffic to a newer site.

Before sites rank up in the SERPs, they can use links from social bookmarking sites to get people to their site and begin the process of creating “buzz.”

You can diversify where you get backlinks from since each platform is different.

Each platform has different linking options including profile links, image links, comment links, video embeds, etc. Having link diversity is very important in the ranking process.

You can get high authority links from trusted sites.

The social bookmarking sites in our list include some of the most popular sites on the internet. Their high DA and trust is unmatched by other sites you will be able to easily obtain links from.

They are a natural starting point for newer sites.

Social media sites are a natural starting point for any website to start getting links from. You can safely use these backlinks along with any other pillow-linking techniques to sites that may not even have links yet.

They are a great addition for sites with age that need to acquire new links.

Got an old site that you’re having a hard time finding some pillow links for? Throw more social bookmarking links in the mix. The options are limitless.

There are tons of them.

These social media platforms exist to promote all sorts of things all over the world. You can acquire more and more of them as you build links without running into any problems.

Some of them rank.

Some of these top social bookmarking sites will rank for your brand even before your branded URL will! They are a great way to set up a solid network that will take up the front page of a Google SERP for a brand or anything else.

Most of them are free.

You don’t need to pay for most of these platforms in order to build profiles on them yourself.

They are 100% white-hat.

There is no need to worry about link building penalties with these free social bookmarking sites. These are a natural way to get links that real businesses use.

What Makes a Good Social Bookmarking Site?

• Authority – DA (Moz) or DR (Ahrefs) are some ways to gauge site authority.
• Ease of Use  – Could grandma do it?
• Accessibility – How hard is it to get access and begin using?
• Rankability – Can it rank on page 1 of the SERPs?
• Population – Are a lot of people/brands on the platform and actively using it?
• Competition – Do your competitors have these links? Get them!
• Cost – Free is the best option of course, though manually doing them will take time.

The Best Free Social Bookmarking Sites for Backlinks

In no particular order, we’ve gone ahead and put together this list of our favorite free, high DA social bookmarking sites you can get links on for your SEO purposes today.

Youtube

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 100

Ahrefs DR:  98

Youtube rocks at creating authority and building trust while granting the user the ability to gain a following using their platform. It has over 1 billion users and gets countless video watches every single day.

Not only that, but you can rank these videos all over the SERPs as well!  There is no reason not to be on this insanely powerful social bookmarking platform, even if just for a profile link.

Google

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 100

Ahrefs DR:  98

Google is the mega corporate empire that controls the world, and this is a platform you can use to get free links from them and promote your business… you know, in their search engine.

No, I’m not trying to be facetious here, it’s just really obvious that you want this site to be in your network. If you’re doing local, it’s a must when trying to rank in the map pack.

Facebook

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 96

Ahrefs DR:  100

Mark Zuckerberg really nailed it when he gave the world one massive playground of a place to lay down posts, groups, and shenanigans of all types with his free site.

Create a profile and get ready to share the most interesting cat photos you can find with nearly 2 billion users.  It’s a great place to share links of all types… and get some as well. 

WordPress

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 92

Ahrefs DR:  93

Use this social bookmarking platform to create posts that you can link back from with DoFollow links.

It’s an easy to use platform that basically works like a blogging/journaling site.  It’s a great option for building out a lot of rankable content that can resonate with your brand.

Plurk

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 88

Ahrefs DR:  84

This free social bookmarking site allows users to send little snippet messages (Plurks) up to 360 characters long.

Users can talk back and forth on this platform similar to Twitter.  Threads can have up to 300k responses making some threads very popular.

Twitter

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 94

Ahrefs DR:  99

About 320 million users get on Twitter every day to yell snippets of thoughts into the abyss that is the internet.

Get your profile on this site and reap the rewards of being able to shout your name from one of the strongest social bookmarking sites out there.

Buzzfeed

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 93

Ahrefs DR:  91

Buzzfeed has a section where you can sign up and blog from them similar to other journaling sites. Boasting high authority and ease of use, Buzzfeed makes for a great social bookmarking site to be on.

Pinterest

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 94

Ahrefs DR:  97

Over 100 million people use this free social bookmarking site to share or help make purchases on various products. Share images of all types and get people promoting all sorts of products. Pinterest is a great platform worth getting links off of.

Reddit

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 91

Ahrefs DR:  95

Considered a social news aggregator, Reddit makes for a great platform to use as a link building or brand building influence. Registered members can submit links, images, or whatever they want… and users will up or down vote them.

It’s ease of use and ability to interact with millions of users worldwide make this one of our top picks for social bookmarking sites to be on.

Goodreads

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 93

Ahrefs DR:  92

Goodreads is a catalogue of books, annotations, and book related reviews.  Sign up, make a reading list, and show everyone how well read you are! 

But while you’re at it, realize that this is a huge social media site that boasts 20 million monthly visits.  Popular as it is, it’s definitely a profile worth having.

Instagram

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 93

Ahrefs DR:  99

Though it’s not that big of a SERP influencer from the perspective of links, looking at traffic value you can generate makes this platform very worthwhile.

Some 67% of brands have accounts on Instagram, and just under 500 million active monthly users are browsing.  Especially if you’re selling products, Instagram is a must-have free social bookmarking site.

Ted

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 94

Ahrefs DR:  92

Yes, it’s the same TED from the inspirational TED Talks you love to watch! It’s a little harder to get, but you can get a profile link from these guys that lets everyone know what an inspirational business you have!

This is usually one of the links your competitor doesn’t have, and doesn’t know they can get.

Linkedin

Cost: Free and Paid

Moz DA: 98

Ahrefs DR:  98

The #1 source for professionals or Facebook for the more refined, career-oriented grownup. Get on this site and be connected to every suit in tie in every town around the globe.

If business is your language, then Linkedin’s 400 million users are ready to listen and share to what you have to say.

Medium

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 96

Ahrefs DR:  94

These seem to rank pretty well for brand terms and overall give you a boost in authority. Use this high DA social media site to actively journal about your brand and send backlinks where you need them.

Diigo

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 89

Ahrefs DR:  85

Diigo is a place where people can sign up and tag other web pages, dissect them, highlight certain parts, etc.

Diigo is an acronym for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other stuff,”  so you can expect this to cater to a wide array of audiences.

Flickr

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 92

Ahrefs DR:  95

Need to share some videos or photos? This is a good spot to do that.  About 1 million photos and videos are shared every day by about 115 million users.  Another great authority site worth getting a profile on.

Soup.io

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 89

Ahrefs DR:  89

With just under 4 million users, Soup.io is a top social bookmarking site to get a profile on. Use this platform to upload images, comments, or even files. 

Easy to access and easy to use, Soup.io is another social media site worth being on.

Quora

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 93

Ahrefs DR:  91

This Q&A site is a great resource when it comes to building out your social bookmarking profile. Used by around 85 million people, we would say it’s definitely popular enough to warrant attention.

You can be sure that if you are posting a question you’ll probably get a response, and you’ll probably be able to answer someone else’s question for a backlink or two if you look for those as well.

Disqus

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 93

Ahrefs DR:  92

Disqus is considered a “blog comment hosting service” used to network other social media sites and people together. It gets about 150 million monthly visits, making it a high authority social website to be on.

Tumblr

Cost: Free

Moz DA: 88

Ahrefs DR:  95

Tumblr isn’t the greatest social bookmarking platform when it comes to ease of use, but it does work well to build authority. You can get these ranking for brand terms in the SERPs as well.

Tumblr is sort of a mix between Twitter and Facebook.  Tumblr has about 200 million blogs hosted on it with plenty of places to interact and get links from.

Top Social Bookmarking Sites List Wrap-Up

Social bookmarking sites are a great starting point for getting backlinks for any site, or to help gain a well established site extra authority.

These days it seems like most everyone is just sticking to the big names like Facebook and G+, but there is a whole world of social sites to get your profiles set up on.

We highly recommend acquiring them because not only are they very safe to use – they help you rank as well.

Choosing the best PBN hosting for you can be an extremely daunting task.  As if there weren’t already enough footprints to worry about, hosting seems to be the main reason a PBN gets de-indexed.

It’s incredibly difficult to make sure you avoid getting hosting on bad IP’s and separating nameservers… all while maintaining your pocketbook (and peace of mind). In leu of that, we went ahead and made this list available to anyone wanting to build their very own PBN.

After managing a PBN for years, using every type of host available, and de-indexing enough PBNs to amount to a fortune, we’ve figured out a few tricks that should help make your lives easier.

We use all of these hosts to maintain over 2,000 PBNs to this day. Without any further ado, here are the best PBN hosting providers based on our experience.

Don’t Cheap-Out on PBN Hosts

Though you maybe inclined to pay “The Mega Cheap PBN Host Proz” $2.99 per year to host 50 PBN’s, we would strongly recommend against that.  The type of sites hosted on these IP’s are sure to eventually get your PBN de-indexed.

Spend a little extra cash up front with some of the better PBN hosts, and you’ll add a level of security to your PBN network that might help you sleep better at night (at least a little bit).

Managed PBN Hosting – Our Favorite Options

Whether you’ve owned a PBN for 10 years or you’re just getting started, our opinion stands that managed PBN hosting plans make life really easy for the amount of money spent.

Years ago, there was a whole fiasco with some managed hosting providers messing up and getting a ton of de-indexes overnight.

Thankfully, those days are over. The technology nowadays is more thought out and secure, making them are our favorite way of getting a PBN hosted.

As for pricing, they have become more competitive with each other in recent years. So, it’s really about choosing your favorite seeing as they all have the same trial period and cost per month.

For about $2 per site, you can get a PBN hosted easily on any of these platforms. We obviously think that’s well worth it.

Here are our reviews of our favorite managed PBN hosting providers.

Bulk Buy Hosting

> Click Here to Get Started with Bulk Buy Hosting <

The reason this gets the #1 spot on the list is that they give you Cpanel access. This makes PBN work much easier, and some of the other managed providers do not offer it.

This is looking at things from the perspective of a seasoned PBN manager who wants more ability to prod and manipulate things.  If I was new to PBN building, I would recommend option #2 on our list instead of this one.

Pricing:

10 Domains hosted for 27$/mo and better as you increase site amount.

Pros:

– Has a trial period for $5 for the first month

– Friendly Dashboard

– Fast and Friendly Customer Service

– Cpanel Access

– Good mix of IP addresses

– Deindexation and DA Check

Cons:

– Doesn’t have some automatic features like auto-update to SSL, site backups, etc.

– Dashboard is a bit cumbersome compared to others

Easy Blog Networks (EBN)

> Click Here to Get Started with EBN <

Another great PBN hosting option we really like are the guys and gals over at Easy Blog Networks.  Their dashboard is not only really easy to use, but it also has a sophisticated look and feel to it.  Like I said before, if you’re a bit newer to messing with PBN’s, then this may be the best option for you.

Pricing:

10 Domains hosted for 27$/mo and better as you increase site amount

Pros:

– Has a trial period of $5 first month

– Beautiful and easy to use dashboard

– Good mix of IP’s

– Good Customer Service

– Index and TF Check

Cons:

– No Cpanel Access

– When you get site errors, it prompts you to wipe the blog – annoying

– Quite a few plugins not allowed

LaunchCDN

> Click Here to Get Started with LaunchCDN <

LaunchCDN uses content delivery networks to separate your PBN hosting.  This is great when it comes to getting a lot of PBNs up, but you have to be a little more careful to not to let the fact that all your PBN links will be coming from CDN’s become a footprint.

If you go this route, you will need to be more mindful of properly diversifying your link profile. We use CDNs to further diversify our PBN link profile in conjunction with other providers.

Pricing:

10 Domains hosted for 27$/mo and better as you increase site amount

Pros:

-Has a trial period of $5 first month

– Friendly enough dashboard

– Good IP’s

– DA, TF, CF check

– Great Customer Service

– FTP access

Cons:

– Working on the sites is cumbersome because of how CDN’s work

– No de-index check

– Overall just issues with it being purely CDN based – works fine as it stands

Non-Managed PBN Hosting

If you decide to go with a managed PBN hosting service, you can be assured that any of the above options are excellent.  Managed PBN hosting providers have made it their business to take care of proper separation and provide an easy access point for anyone looking to get started with PBN building (also see our PBN Checklist).

That being said, they aren’t for everyone. Some of you might just be looking for stable and reliable hosts you can use and separate out on your own.

If you’re confident in your PBN building and you’re ready to host your own PBN on reliable networks, then here’s a list of some of our favorite non-managed PBN hosting providers.

Namecheap

> Click Here to Get Started with Namecheap <

I’ve always loved Namecheap. In all honesty, they’ve always been my favorite hosting provider for PBNs, but also just in general.

There is something about how professional and fast their customer service is, the way they give you free Whois with domains (I know that’s registrar side), and are overall just super reliable and easy to use.

Pricing:

Starting at $1.44/mo shared hosting for 3 sites

Pros:

– Excellent Customer Service

– Dashboard is very easy

– Excellent Prices and Reliability

– Nick’s favorite

– Did we mention Ukrainian College Students on live chat support?

Cons:

– None that we are aware of

Namecheap is the best non-managed PBN hosting provider, but the rest of this list are also going to be solid options that you can use to diversify your PBN hosting.

SiteGround

> Click Here to Get Started with SiteGround <

Pricing:

Starting at $3.95/mo shared hosting for 1 site

Pros:

– Sites stay up – Reliable

– Solid Dashboard

– Good uptime

– Solid Load Times

Cons:

– Customer Service is a little slow but not bad

– Get ready to need fake emails for verification

– Higher Renewal Rates

A2 Hosting

> Click Here to Get Started with A2 Hosting <

Pricing:

Starting at $3.92/mo shared hosting for 1 site

Pros:

– Reliable – Sites load Fast, Very Fast

– Secure

– Easy to use dashboard

– Good Customer Support

Cons:

– Higher Renewal Rates

– Might get some restrictions on cheaper plans

HawkHost

> Click Here to Get Started with HawkHost <

Pricing:

Starting at $2.99/mo shared hosting for unlimited sites

Pros:

– Secure

– Nice Dashboard

– Good Uptime

Cons:

– Might take a while for initial setup according to some

– Verification may be Difficult

Hosting24

> Click Here to Get Started with Hosting24 <

Pricing:

Starting at $0.80/mo shared hosting for 1 site

Pros:

– Decent Customer Support

– Automated Backups

– US and Euro Servers

– Good Uptime

Cons:

– Can be a little slow at times

Hostpapa

> Click Here to Get Started with Hostpapa <

Pricing:

Starting at $3.95/mo shared hosting for 2 sites

Pros:

– Easy interface

– Fast Servers

– Lots of clean IPs

Cons:

– Chat and Customer Support can be a little lacking

GreenGeeks

> Click Here to Get Started with GreenGeeks <

Pricing:

Starting at $2.95/mo for shared hosting for 1 site

Pros:

– Reliable Hosting – solid uptime

– Good Security

– Good Support

– Environmentally Friendly

Cons:

– Dashboard isn’t the best

– Price is higher after a year

HostGator

Pricing:

Starting at $2.75/mo for shared hosting for 1 site

Pros:

– Easy to use dashboard

– Good Customer Service

– Lot’s of IPs

– Great Uptime

Cons:

– Slow Page Speed

– Hit you with extra fees if you’re not careful

– Fees go up after a year

A Small Orange

Pricing:

Starting at $8.80/mo for shared hosting for unlimited sites

Pros:

– Easy to use Dashboard

– Reliable and good uptime

– Great Support

Cons:

– More expensive than some

– Can exceed their data limits

BlueHost

> Click Here to Get Started with BlueHost <

Pricing:

Starting at $2.75/mo for shared hosting for 1 site

Pros:

– Easy to use Dashboard

– Reliable

– Chat is quick

Cons:

– Addon domains and Reseller options are a bit of a mess

– Higher renewal fees

Caution: Know What You’re Getting Into

After years of building PBNs, I’ve definitely figured out what a hassle it is to build and develop systems sophisticated enough to really keep one alive.

If you are going to be building a PBN from the ground up, then you should make sure you have a proper education on separating things out well enough. This can range from using CDN to using reseller options with the host to mask IPs (not all hosts offer this).

This list of PBN hosting reviews is a good place to start when it comes out to figuring out hosting solutions for your PBN.  If you have other options you like, please feel free to leave them in the comments so we can keep growing the knowledge-base and community.

Eric Arnow is the owner of For-Knees and is considered by many to be the oldest dude in SEO. On this episode of SirLinksalot’s SEO Podcast, we talk to Eric about his unique story and journey into SEO, how to stay true to yourself while making money, and much more.

Think you’d be a great addition to our podcast or have a request for someone to be featured? Head over to our podcast discovery page.

Watch the Podcast:

Read the Full Transcript:

Nick:

Hey, everybody and welcome to another exciting episode of SirLinksalot’s Podcast. We are here with Eric Arnow, who is the oldest person known to be in the world of SEO.

Chris:

A World Record. World Record Breaker.

Nick:

Or at least … World Record, yeah, Oldest Person in Affiliate SEO. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff. I’ve had the luxury of speaking with him before, learning a little bit about his story. Spent, I think, something like 40 years as a Buddhist Monk, just really interesting road to what is now … He’s living in Thailand on this Affiliate journey, so I’m going to let you go ahead and take it from here, but if you want to just give the audience a little bit about yourself and how you got into SEO, a little bit about your life.

Eric:

Sure.

Nick:

Feel free.

Eric:

All right, okay, so first of all, I’m not bragging as being the top, one of the top over 70 SEOs in the world. All I can say is that I’ve gone to a couple of the Chiang Mai SEO Conferences and I’m pretty sure I was the oldest person there, but that doesn’t mean that I’m the one of the old … There’s probably other older SEOs who are doing Affiliate Marketing, so …

Chris:

You’ve got to take the crown. Take the crown.

Nick:

Yeah, for now, it’s SirLinksalot World Record Oldest.

Eric:

Thanks, all right.

Chris:

We’ll spread the rumor.

Nick:

Yeah, there we go.

Eric:

Okay, one other item is that in terms of my Zen practice and monk practice, I’ll give you a very basic how I got into that.

Nick:

Sure.

Eric:

Because that is like, that’s kind of the foundation of my life. When I was nine years old, I was watching a television show. This is like 1957, and there’s this guy … and I came from a very normal, middle class family where people had regular haircuts, and they wore ties, and all that stuff. So I’m watching this TV show, and there’s this guy with a beard and a beret and he’s smoking this funny looking cigarette and he’s talking about Zen, and I’m thinking, “Zen? What’s Zen?” So, that happened and then four years, five years went by, I was in junior high school at the time, I walked into store one day after school. And I saw this book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, and I thought, “There’s that word… Zen.”

Eric:

So I see this book and I just think, “This is really cool stuff,” because the ideas that they were presenting were like mind expanding experience for people. They raised issues that really appealed to my sense of personal freedom… My big values are truth and freedom, freedom from conditioning, freedom from lies, all the kinds of things that constrain us nowadays.

Nick:

Right.

Eric:

So that was very appealing to me and then I went to university and I was studying chemistry in my sophomore year, the Vietnam War was going on, and I was having serious misgivings because I knew what was going on in Vietnam and I thought, “They’re training me to make weapons, and I don’t want to do that.” So, I decided to change my major and go into the Humanities, and I switched my major to German. Now it turns out that my family all came from the Russian empire. They were all Jewish. Four grandparents, all Jewish, all basically fleeing the chaos that was going on in that part of the world and it’s basically still going on. It’s like a replay. It’s unbelievable. So, they all came to America and I’ve always been kind of haunted by that… What happened during that period of time: pre-World War I, pre-World War II. You know, a lot of difficulties.

Eric:

That was like asking me to … You know, what is the meaning of life, those kinds of deep questions, and then in my German studies I was realizing that many of these German philosophers were asking the same kinds of questions. One of the great writers, Goethe, he had a play called Dr. Faustus, and the story is that he makes a deal with the Devil where the Devil will show him all kinds of experiences. And at the end of 24 years, the Devil says, “You’re mine.” The 24 years go by, he has all these adventures, and the Devil says, “Well, now you’re mine,” and Dr. Faustus says, “No, I’m not, because I’m not attached to those experiences. They’re just experiences,” and I thought this is really interesting.

Eric:

And in parallel, I had been reading about Zen and these ideas of freeing ourselves from our cultural conditioning, and really understanding what is going on in the world is very appealing to me, and I felt that I needed some discipline. I grew up… My father died when I was eight, so I didn’t have male role models, and I felt that I really needed to have some kind of masculine, male training, so to speak. And I didn’t want to go into the military but I thought, “Well, I’ll become a Zen Monk.” I found this …

Chris:

It’s a very like, opposite end of the spectrum.

Eric:

Right, and oddly enough, my mother remarried and her husband had a son who did go in… my age… We graduated at the same time. He went into ROTC and he went into the Special Forces and I became a Monk.

Chris:

Me and Nick …

Nick:

Are you real close?

Eric:

We got along reasonably well but we’re not … We live in different worlds, you know. We didn’t fight or anything. It just … and he was a decent guy but we just …

Chris:

Me and Nick almost went into the military.

Nick:

Yeah, we almost did, yeah.

Chris:

We were pretty close …

Nick:

And then ended up going on a walk about to Asia.

Chris:

Yeah, that’s about 10 years ago, where we almost made that choice.

Nick:

Yeah, I’m glad we didn’t …

Eric:

Much, much wiser.

Nick:

We feel the same way, yeah.

Eric:

Good for you. So I went to… I was living in a Zen community in San Francisco – San Francisco Zen Center. I was ordained after six years; I stayed there for another seven as a Monk.

Chris:

What year was this then?

Eric:

I started in 1971, 1971 and …

Chris:

Okay, so right at the end of … or right at the kind of … I’m not well versed in that time period but maybe like kind of towards the end of the Hippie movement, so I’m guessing, that time at the Zen Buddhist Center in San Francisco is probably pretty hopping.

Eric:

That’s right. It was, I mean San Francisco was unbelievable … It was really amazing what was going on there. Which was the reason, one of the reasons I went there, because I felt that it was on the cutting edge of cultural change, which I’ve always been interested in. So I was there, and then in the early ’80s, the Reagan administration came in. There were very, very serious international tensions between the West and primarily Russia, although, later on there were problems with China. But the US was putting missile into Eastern Europe which could hit Moscow in a few minutes, and it was not a … It was a pretty dangerous time.

Eric:

Our Zen community was involved in the peace movement back then, and at one time, we used to go down to the Financial District of San Francisco. And we would hold a silent vigil for Nuclear Disarmament, and this woman walked by one day and said, “I owe stock in Lockheed,” and I thought, “You know, I think we have to deal with our economic system, because people are profiting off of the possibility of our all dying in a Nuclear war.” I mean this is crazy.

Chris:

Well, we’re still here, maybe the peace vigils worked, huh?

Eric:

Well, yeah, knock on wood, we’re still here. So that was 1982 or ’83. 1984, there was a big … what can I say? A big upheaval in this Zen community, and I felt that I was being … I kind of got as much out of it as I could, and that at a certain point, I was feeling constrained or it became habitual or something like that. So I thought, “I think what I need to do is just go out and get a regular job and learn about how money works because I didn’t have any idea of it,” and so I went into the insurance and financial business. The precipitating event for that was I had gone to a meditation retreat, tore the cartilage in my knee, I had no health insurance, and so I was …

Chris:

What kind of meditation was it?

Eric:

This was another … It was called Vipassana, which was a, it’s a Southeast Asian form of meditation, very similar to…

Chris:

I’ve done two of those, the 10 day retreats.

Eric:

Right, maybe Goenka?

Chris:

Pretty serious stuff, yeah, SN Goenka.

Eric:

Yeah, yeah, Goenka is a very … They do not kid around in those retreats, as you know.

Chris:

Yeah, it’s hard.

Eric:

You go to those retreats, you learn about yourself.

Chris:

Yeah, some people left because they couldn’t physically sit like that for 11 hours a day.

Eric:

Right.

Chris:

So it’s not surprising that you messed up your knee doing it.

Nick:

For those of you in the audience that don’t know, this is a silent retreat that Chris …

Chris:

Yeah, it’s super hard core. It’s no talking. I don’t think you’re even really supposed to look at people really in the eyes. No talking, no reading, no writing, no music for 10 days… you’re sitting Indian style, meditating for 11 hours a day.

Nick:

And you ended up having to do it for 20 days, right?

Chris:

Well, I did it one time in Calcutta … Sorry, in Hong Kong, and then I wanted to … I was traveling so I wanted to give back. I wanted to volunteer at the one in Calcutta, in India. But they found out that … When I got there, they found out that I had only done one 10 day retreat before, so they were like, “Oh, no. You can’t work, but you can sit the retreat if you want.” And so I just had this flash in my head, like, “Oh, my God, I’m going to die here. I can’t do another 10 days so soon.” Because it was only a couple of weeks after. It’s pretty intense, I wasn’t ready, but it ended up being awesome. Yeah, fully recommend to anyone looking into taking control of your mind, basically, doing some brain push ups.

Eric:

Awesome, fantastic.

Chris:

Ah, yeah, sorry about that, go ahead. So you messed up your knee.

Eric:

I didn’t tear it in a retreat, I tore it actually in a … It was kind of a freak accident, so anyway, there I was in a retreat and I thought, “How am I going to pay for this thing?” I thought, “People need insurance.” So I decided to go into the insurance business, and knowing absolutely nothing about it. And I just kind of networked and made contacts with various insurance companies and so I got into that, and the first company I was with … I won’t mention names here … But they were doing pretty sleazy stuff, basically screwing their policy holders, so I had to get out of that.

Eric:

Then I found this, another company and worked with them for a while and they were same kind of thing. I did find a decent insurance company. I think the company is reputable. Some of the agents’ practices are not necessarily totally legitimate, but in the sales business, this is kind of par for the course. I stayed in that business. I did switch companies after about 12 years, because I felt I could get a better deal working with a competitor that was, I felt was equally good. But what happened after 10 years in this, I had not practiced actively, and I felt I really needed to get back into practice because I just thought, you know, just doing business, it’s like, this is not who I am.

Eric:

I found another teacher. I found one teacher, he didn’t work out. And then I found another teacher who I felt is very good, and I still have a relationship with that person in Northern California. His name is Nelson Foster, and he’s a very straight up, really good guy.

Chris:

I’m sorry, what’s he teach?

Eric:

He’s a Zen teacher.

Chris:

Okay, so you went back to Zen.

Nick:

Okay.

Eric:

Yeah, I went back to Zen, and so I practiced with him for another … Let’s see, this is 1998 … So until 2004 and in 2004, I decided to come to Thailand because I … in 2000, we had an “election,” which was was rigged basically, and in 2004, I just had this feeling that I was tired of business, I wanted just get back into spiritual practice. So I came to Thailand, and for the next 10 years, I traveled around Asia, visited Myanmar, Laos. And then in 2007, I went to China because Zen originated in China, and a friend of mine said, “Hey, let’s go to China.” So I went there and immediately connected with a Chinese Buddhist monk who turned out to be an incredible person, a fairly famous artist, art historian, has a very deep understanding of Chinese culture and civilization. And because I had studied Zen and had this …

Eric:

You know when you practice this kind of practice, it seeps into you, so I felt tremendous affinity with Chinese people and Chinese culture.

Chris:

Just to ask you one thing, so during all this time that you’re doing … That you’re saying you’re away from business and you’re focusing on your Zen practice… how are you supporting yourself during this time, or is that something that you don’t really have to worry about too much considering you were kind of like a monk? Was it taken care of by whatever kind of monastery or whatever you’re involved with?

Eric:

Right, well, when I lived at the Zen Center, I didn’t have to worry about money… It was like a work, study program. You work and you do whatever is needed, and they give you room and board and some spending money. Then of course, I did support myself with my business when I left. And I had in the insurance business, you have something called renewals, which means that even if you stop generating business… As long as people pay their premiums, you’re still getting some money.

Eric:

So I was getting some money every month, but of course over the course of time, that money was dropping because people who would … they’d choose another company or whatever and so everything was going okay for a while, but I could see my income was going down, and I’m thinking, “You know, I think, I’d better start taking of the material end of things.”

Chris:

Back to the grind.

Eric:

Right, I did qualify for pension in US law, at least the time. I could get my social security earlier than the usual 66 years, so I started collecting it four years early and that kind of tided me over. I’ve been living on that basically. I continued doing that until 2014, and then this is where a big transition occurred. I injured my knee a second time, and I realized, “Eric, okay, you’ve had your fun, you’ve been practicing very diligently for 10 years, but I think you need to get back to work.” I had this knee injury, so I thought, “How can I integrate my own personal experience with the business?”

Eric:

And I found a knee brace on Alibaba, and I started marketing that on Amazon. And that was how I got back into business. The product did extremely well at the beginning, and then competition came in and really devastated it. So I thought, “You know, I think I need to branch out. I need to get a supporting website.”

Chris:

How did you even find out to do that? How did you have that idea to take the Alibaba product and to sell it on Amazon? How did you get that idea?

Nick:

Because I’ll speak to my father even, and it’s like he couldn’t fathom creating a business like that… Like the idea doesn’t resonate with him, right?

Chris:

Or I, even before I really was introduced to SEO by Nick, I would never have had that idea. It just wouldn’t have crossed my mind.

Eric:

Well, just doing Zen meditation for many years …

Chris:

They’re teaching business in Zen, ha, really? Teaching you how to make a buck.

Eric:

Actually, I’ll tell you, the Zen Center that stayed at, it attracted a lot of very, very talented people, very smart people. And one of them was this guy who he was a friend of mine, and he opened up a little corner grocery store across the street from the center, and it was immediate success. And then during that same transition period when we both left, he opened up this restaurant. He’s probably… I’m sure he’s a millionaire right now. He opened a very high end restaurant in San Francisco, and so there are people like him. Not everybody… A lot of people were not business oriented but there were some people like that.

Eric:

I’m kind of like… I’m somewhat entrepreneurial. I’m certainly not a business genius the way he was, the way he is. But I have this kind of sense of being financially independent. I don’t like bosses. I don’t like being told what to do. I’m not even … I’m kind of like mentally retarded, I can’t even … You know, when somebody tells me to do something, I just think, “How can I get out of doing this?” You know, if I had been drafted into the military, they probably … They would have made a big mistake.

Nick:

“Kick him out.”

Chris:

I wonder how long you would have lasted.

Nick:

It’s like when Jimi Hendrix was in …

Chris:

Yeah, he was such a rebel to the core.

Eric:

Right, right, so anyway… I had this idea of being on my own, being a business person. But at the same time, how can I help people? I don’t want to just go in there and make megabucks at the expense of other people, because I feel … When you practice meditation, the concept of me breaks down. You realize that you’re much bigger than our little self in that we are the product of our family, our culture… So to think that it’s all about me is simply erroneous.

Nick:

Right.

Eric:

And what you think … How do I say this? If you think selfish thoughts, in the end it ends up hurting you. You end up hurting other people, and you end up hurting yourself. So for me, it’s always been: we’re in this together. How can I help? My customers are helping me with their money, I’m helping them by solving their problem… By taking away their pain, and that’s how I like to think about what business should be.

Chris:

Yeah, I’m not very well versed on business literature, but … so I can’t even really quote what I’m trying to say, but that’s one of the tenets of a successful business is when you genuinely put the customer first.

Nick:

Yeah, there’s reciprocity.

Chris:

You know, it’s not about making money. It’s like, what are we doing to help these people? And once that becomes the primary focus, everything else kind of falls into place.

Eric:

Right, exactly. And you know, in modern business culture, that idea has been de-emphasized. You know, the purpose of the corporation is to make money for its shareholders. That is the dominant ideology, and it’s unfortunate and we need to change that. So anyway, I decided I should start a website and I … Oh, one other thing is that by … I don’t remember how it happened but I found out there was some kind of course that you could take to learn about how to do business on Amazon.

Nick:

Okay.

Eric:

And it was a very expensive course, about $3600. But it was very comprehensive, and I learned the basics of how to get an Amazon business going.

Nick:

Do you remember the name of the course or who taught it?

Eric:

Amazing Selling Machine, and it’s gone through various iterations. I was in Class Four. I think they’re up to Class 10 now.

Nick:

Okay.

Eric:

And I wouldn’t recommend it actually at this point because …

Nick:

In hindsight, yeah.

Eric:

Well, at the time it worked, but things change and the whole business model around Amazon is … I think it’s very difficult for people to succeed in it. Most people I think have quite a lot of difficulty. Some people are extremely successful, and there’s a lot of people who just can’t do it. And I’ve met people who are successful business people who said they couldn’t make it on Amazon, so it’s a mixed bag.

Eric:

At a certain point, I realized that being dependent on Amazon was too risky and investing in a product that you have to resell… And you have to package it, you have to do all kinds of things to make it work… You’re in deep competition not just with all the other Amazon sellers who are basically stealing your ideas… I have people selling a product that looks like mine, it was a generic form of what I… Basically the one I created, and they have my pictures on their Amazon listing.

Chris:

No shame.

Nick:

Internet …

Eric:

Me, it’s like unbelievable, you know. I’m demonstrating my product and they’re using my picture on their listing.

Nick:

Right.

Eric:

It’s crazy.

Chris:

Did you go after them? Is there something…

Eric:

I sent them a letter. You know, they’re not making the sales that I am, and I’m not doing fantastically. But I’m making a little bit of money, and as I’ll tell you in a little bit, I think there’s a good possibility that I can really pull this off.

Eric:

So, basically what happened was I decided that I needed to build a website. And I was really intimidated by SEO. I took this course called OMG, which was very expensive course.

Nick:

Right, it’s where I got my stripes.

Eric:

You did? Okay, and I’m not a techie and I’m an old dog, it’s not easy for me to learn new tricks. And it was really beyond me, and I took a succession of other courses… None of them really worked. I tried different Amazon courses to other courses, spent a lot of money on this stuff …

Nick:

Yeah, it sounds like you racked up quite the bill with all these courses, knowing how much they cost. I mean, we’re talking two to $3,000 per course typically here for these kinds of things.

Eric:

Absolutely, that’s right. It was pretty nasty.

Nick:

But you were very targeted on what you … The endeavor, and you believed in this business model working for you.

Eric:

Yeah, that’s right. You know there are other … Like people could do drop shipping or other kinds of stuff. I started with Amazon. I could see its limitations quite early on, but I was willing to work with those. I didn’t want to … Basically, I had a product which I believed in. I got letters from people. I got a letter from a Vietnam Veteran, and he said, “Eric, I used to be a paratrooper, and I blew out my knees jumping out of helicopters. You on the other hand were climbing mountains and you were doing the Zen thing. And so we both have bad knees, but that’s what we have in common, and your product is really great. It’s like the best product I’ve used.” These are his words, and I got so many letters from people saying, “This is a great product, don’t give up on it.” So I felt, “Okay, I’ll just keep going. I’ll do whatever it takes to make it work.”

Nick:

That’s so interesting, especially, you know, in comparison to a lot of people we talk to in marketing, or especially SEO, where it’s like I feel like a lot of people are just completely detached from the products that they’re selling. Especially, you know, it’s their first businesses, it’s more so, “What niche can I access, how can I get involved?”

Chris:

“How much money can I make?”

Nick:

Exactly, yeah, and here we’ve got, I think, a very unique perspective in this world of SEO. Yeah, it’s really interesting.

Eric:

Well, at this point, if I do bring other … I think the strategy that I’m going to use and I hope I’m … Maybe I’m giving away the story here, but I think the strategy that I’m starting to use will work with Amazon and I’ll see what happens. If it does work, then I would consider doing other kinds, introducing other kinds of products. I’d be willing to entertain it, because I feel like if I can crack the code of how to actually rank a product on Amazon and sell it in decent amounts, then maybe I would continue with it. But I’ll have to see how that goes.

Nick:

Sure, but I’m sure you’ll always have some sort of personal attachment to the products themselves… Or personal belief in the product.

Eric:

Yeah, right, right, you know, I mean people have tried to get me to sell all kinds of stuff, and I just don’t want to do it.

Nick:

Yeah, I’d imagine you would, yeah.

Eric:

Right, you know, part of the SEO… Part of Internet marketing is Facebook, so I took this Facebook ad course. And I realized immediately after getting into it… This guy is … He’s doing stuff that could get you banned on Facebook, and I just thought the ads that they use on Facebook are clickbait ads and the products that they sell are shitty.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

You know, why even … It was a mistake, that was a mistake. I just have to write that off. So it’s always best if you think of, “How can I help the other person and stay true to myself and stay true to … Stay true.” You know, that if a product is … If it proves that it can help people, then it’s worth promoting. If it’s not, forget it. It’s just not worth it. I think we actually do psychological damage to ourselves when we do things that are we’re only in it for the money, and then we’re hurting people at their expense.

Nick:

Sure.

Eric:

And making money at their expense.

Nick:

I like that. I love how everything, you know, from this conversation… You’ve taken a broad perspective to what is going on in the world and then tied it into everything. Literally, everything that you do from what it sounds like.

Eric:

Right.

Nick:

And you know the biggest picture of being this interconnectivity and this need to propel everything forward, rather than just yourself. I think that’s really, it’s a fresh perspective in this world.

Chris:

So I know you said you didn’t want to sell the other products that people kind of brought to your attention, but is this still the only product that you’re really pushing? Is this your main …

Eric:

Yeah, this the only product that I’m pushing. Interestingly enough, while I was in China, I spent a lot of time in China and I made a lot of friends there. And one of the women friends that I made friends with is like a professor of advertising, and she’s a good person. You know, it’s like advertising, ugh, but she’s a good person. And she’s married to this guy, and they have some company and she’s a brand manager for some companies. And I know she’s the kind of person who would not promote a product that she doesn’t believe in. So at some point I’m thinking I could do a partnership with her. She could hook me up with some good companies that have products that are worth promoting, and then I could do that. I’d feel okay about that.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

There are certainly new technology kinds of products or household products, various things that can be very helpful for people, and if I can make some money at it makes their lives easier, then sure, why not?

Nick:

Sure.

Chris:

Are you in China right now?

Eric:

No, I’m in Thailand.

Chris:

Ah, sorry, yeah. Okay.

Nick:

Going back to China real quick because you kind of spoke about it earlier, but you said you met somebody who was into Zen, was a … I think you said famous artist, we’re not talking like Ai Weiwei here, are we?

Eric:

Not talking about what?

Nick:

Ai Weiwei, he’s a real famous Chinese artist …

Eric:

No.

Nick:

That was like, that would be amazing. Sorry, huge fan.

Eric:

Yeah, no, this guy is his name’s Mi Wang Fa Shur. Mi Wang is his name, Fa Shur is his title. Fa Shur means a teacher, a teacher of Dharma, so to speak. For your listeners, Dharma is the teaching which you see both in Indian practice as well as Buddhism. Dharma mean truth, or the way, or the method, or how things are. And so … It’s not a belief, it’s a practice.

Nick:

Right.

Eric:

So anyway, this guy was an extremely knowledgeable person, and we hit it off immediately. And the story of that is incredible. I was walking on the street in a Himalayan hill town, what they call the foothills of the Himalayas, a tourist town in China. I see this guy, he looks like a monk. He’s got a shaved head, he’s got funny looking clothes, and some guy approaches me. And he says, “Can I help you?” He’s trying to … He speaks in English. I said, “Yes, that guy a monk?” He says, “Yeah.” I said, “Can I talk with him?” So he said, “Sure.” So we met, and we talked for eight hours straight.

Nick:

Wow.

Eric:

From 1:00 in the afternoon, 9:00. I finally said, “Hey, you know, I think we .. it’s getting really late now.” And they invited me to go on a trip with them to this famous mountain in China, and when I went there, the first-

Chris:

Which mountain?

Eric:

Jesu Shan.

Chris:

Okay.

Eric:

It’s in Yunnan Province, Southwest China. And the first thing, I go and I see when I reach this mountain is a statue of the most famous Chinese monk of the 19th and 20th century named Shu Yin. Shu Yin was born in 1840, and he died in 1959, so he lived to be 120 years old. China went through two… Not one, but two holocausts. They lost 20 million or 50 million, uncountable number of people in the mid-19th century because of the Opium Wars and rebellions and so on, and then in the 20th century… Then of course the Western countries came in and demanded concessions. They demanded Hong Kong, Macau, and Xiamen, other cities, Shanghai, and they said, “We’re going to take over, and we’re going to just take over these cities. And we’re going to import a bunch of opium into your country and you’re going to sell it. You’re going to allow us to sell it to your people so we can make a ton of money.”

Eric:

And so China basically fell apart for the better part of over a century, and it was not until 1949 when they finally kicked all these people out. So that’s the back story of this guy Shu Yin. And so I had read Shu Yin’s biography 30 years earlier, so it’s like running into this old friend, this person that you have tremendous respect for, and you say, “Oh, so here’s the temple that he founded. How cool is that?” I don’t know if your listeners can appreciate this, but that …

Nick:

I’m sure, yeah. I mean, if nothing else, we sure do. I’m sure that … I got to go out to Mount HuaShan and climb there, and that was quite an experience, especially within the same … I think it was like within the same 15 hours or something, you can wake up on one side of the mountain, walk to the other side, watch the sun go down, and then sunrise. It’s pretty awesome.

Eric:

Right. Right, right.

Chris:

Yeah, I actually, I was in China as well for about a year.

Eric:

Yeah, he just got back.

Chris:

And, yeah, I mean, even while I was there, you know, of course I was aware of the past colonialism, but it never … for some reason, I guess my … I just never looked into it too much, or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. But the idea that we colonized to push opium is really hard core stuff.

Nick:

Yeah, that’s new. Very.

Chris:

That’s something I think that’s kind of lost in a way. Normally, when people talk about the hardships of China, they talk about Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Chris:

And the lives that were lost there. They don’t really talk about the bit before that.

Nick:

Right.

Eric:

Right, yeah, I think one of the biggest problems that we, in the West and in the United States in particular, have is that we have no historical context. It’s just we see things in the present situation. They don’t know how things arose or any of that, so they don’t have any … They can’t appreciate, they can’t put themselves in the other person’s shoes.

Eric:

It’s part of what I was talking about earlier. There’s a separation, it’s us versus them. They don’t realize, oh, actually, we’re bound together in ways that we really need to understand and appreciate.

Eric:

So now getting back to this, the monk named Wang Fa Shur, we spent some time together. We went up, we climbed to the top of this mountain, and then he says to me, “You know, Eric, you know so much about Zen and most … a lot of that has been lost in China, so you should come back to Xiamen, our home city, and study Chinese, and then you can hang out with people and they’ll really appreciate you.”

Eric:

So I said, “Well, maybe I should do that.” I was planning to stay in this part of China, but maybe I’ll take a side trip to this place Xiamen. So the next day they say, “Well, we’ve changed our plans. We were going to go to Shanghai, but we’ve decided we’re going to take you to Xiamen.” And so they booked three first class train fares, and we took a three day train ride from Yunnan. It’s like a 2,000 mile train trip from Southwest China to Southeast China, and I spent a month at his friend’s house. Sha Shen Je was the friend of Mi Wang Fa Shur, and we developed this long relationship.

Eric:

At one point, I did some translation for Mi Wang Fa Shur, and we were creating a little, kind of a little booklet. And I said, “What do we call this? A chance meeting results in a friendship?” He says, “No, no, a thousand year appointment made a thousand years ago finally kept.” He says, “You and I were brother monks at this famous Zen master’s monastery, and we finally met again.”

Nick:

Really?

Eric:

Yeah, I mean is that cool or what?

Nick:

That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s very cool.

Eric:

So you can tell that China was a completely transformative experience for me. I learned so-

Nick:

Why’d you end up leaving China?

Eric:

It’s not easy to live in China.

Chris:

I agree.

Eric:

First of all, I would have had to get a full time job in order to support myself, which is kind of against my nature. And then I had injured myself, so I could have gotten medical care, I suppose, in China, but it was … China’s I think more difficult to live in than Thailand is. The visas in Thailand are much easier than they are in China.

Chris:

Yeah.

Eric:

It was a kind of a practical decision, and then from a cultural and personal standpoint, I have a great affinity with China and Chinese people. And from a practical standpoint, Thailand is a very comfortable country. The people are just really nice, they’re very polite. They’re very friendly, and it’s not so difficult to live here, and it’s not expensive.

Chris:

So financially, compared to where you were at in China, Thailand is easier to get by?

Eric:

Right.

Chris:

I was in Shanghai, and of course Shanghai is not a cheap place.

Eric:

Very expensive, yeah, very expensive.

Chris:

You said you were in Xiamen?

Eric:

Xiamen, right, which is about 400 miles north of Hong Kong.

Nick:

Okay.

Chris:

Okay, the name is very familiar, I’m not sure how I know the name, but is it a bigger city or is it a smaller place, or what?

Eric:

I think it’s about five million people, so it’s by Chinese standards, it’s …

Chris:

A tiny city.

Eric:

Yeah.

Chris:

For the US, it’s huge.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

Right, right, it’s a very attractive city. It’s on the coast. They’ve got a beautiful university there with an incredible campus, and there’s a lot of culture … You know, Chinese culture there, and so it’s a very … One of the nicest cities to live in in China, which is the reason why Mi Wang Fa Shur, my friend, lived there.

Chris:

Okay, and so when you decided to make the move to Thailand, you were … I know you had said, you had found the product that you were selling on Alibaba … Was it Alibaba?

Nick:

Yeah.

Chris:

Alibaba …

Nick:

Selling on Amazon.

Eric:

Right, let me … Yeah, what happened was, so this was 2014, I had been doing another meditation retreat. I felt a kind of a twinge in my knee. The retreat ended, my knee was hurting, it’s kind of … I went to do a yoga class with a very intense yoga teacher. My knee was really hurting after that, and when I got back to Chiang Mai, I thought, “You know, I think I better get an MRI.” When I got the MRI, they said, “Yup, your knee’s screwed up.”

Eric:

So I found an orthopedic surgeon trained in the United States who did the operation for me, and it cost probably like a tenth of what it would cost in the United States.

Chris:

And so you ended up in Chiang Mai, which is kind of like the center of the SEO community, by chance or …

Eric:

No, Chiang Mai is … I think of it as like a town on the edge of the empire. If you think of, in Star Wars, you know, there’s this sort of city state that’s pretty far away from everything and it’s got a lot of strange looking creatures that you’ll find in…

Chris:

So that’s Chiang Mai, huh?

Eric:

That’s Chiang Mai.

Chris:

Sounds cool.

Eric:

That’s Chiang Mai. It’s part of the empire, but it’s far enough away that it attracts seekers and scoundrels and ne’er do wells and saints and all kinds of people. And they have meditation centers, and the food is good, and the housing is cheap, and so on and so forth. So I basically had a home base in Change Mai since 2006, you know, I had been renting a place and finally bought it in 2006, in 2014, I guess, actually I bought it.

Eric:

I was just living here, just doing, just living, and then I took this course on Amazon. I was working, trying to develop my business on Amazon, and then I realized, “Oh, I guess there are some people around here who know something about websites.”

Chris:

Cool. What a coincidence.

Eric:

Somehow I found about this Chiang Mai SEO community and showed up at this coffee shop there they would hang out on Thursdays, and I met some guy named Matt Diggity who seemed like a pretty nice guy. And so I was struggling along with my website, and I had had several people work on it and they all screwed it up. And then I bought this SEO course from these people in … I guess they were like an … One of the people associated with OMG Network.

Nick:

Okay.

Eric:

They were Network Empire, and then they split off, and they were charging $500 a month.

Nick:

Sounds familiar.

Eric:

For this SEO course, and my site totally crash … They’d started doing well and then it completely crashed, and I just thought, “Oh, God, what am I going to do now?” So then I met Matt, and one day I was in the coffee shop and Matt says, “Hey, Eric, why don’t you come over here and let me take a look at your website?” And of course, you know what happens when Matt looks at your website.

Chris:

You make a million bucks. Yeah.

Eric:

Now this guy, I’m doing shameless plugs for Matt.

Nick:

No, I was about to say, and for those of you that don’t Matt Diggity, he’s a very famous SEO. He’s got a course called The Lab, it’s great and runs … What’s his affiliate or …

Eric:

Affiliate Lab.

Nick:

Yeah, Affiliate Lab, there we go and …

Eric:

And he’s got several other companies, Lead Spring and some other companies.

Nick:

Yeah, there we go. Yeah, but great guy.

Eric:

So here’s this guy, famous SEO with this 70 year old slob who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. He said, “Hey, let me take a look at your website,” and he says, “Oh, you’ve got to fix this, this and this and this.” And I think, “Oh, geez …” Try and figure this out, and then at a certain point, I did fix some of the stuff. There was a lot of duplicate content… Because I had my site structure, I had categories and archives and all that. It was all duplicate.

Eric:

So I fixed that, but the site was still dead in the water. And then at some point, I heard that he was doing a $200 off promotion, so I thought, “Hey, man …” I had hired another SEO company to do on-page for me, and they weren’t doing the work, and it was not working, and they’re taking my money, and it’s all bullshit, and I’m thinking… You know, “I’ll just have … I’ll take Matt’s course and give it a try.”

Eric:

As I was going through it, I realized, “Oh, so that’s what I’m supposed to do. I’ve got to do meta tags, I’ve got to do title,” you know, meta descriptions. I’ve got to do title tags, and so I started going through my whole … I went through my entire website myself and fixed a lot of these things and rewrote the content and lo and behold-

Nick:

So, sorry, previously, were you kind of just outsourcing that work?

Chris:

Yeah, he said it …

Eric:

I was outsourcing it.

Nick:

Okay, got you.

Eric:

Yeah, I was hiring. Every single SEO company that said we’ll do on-page for you, we’ll do all this stuff for you … None-

Chris:

Where were you finding them?

Eric:

Some of them I met at the conference, and some of them I … were kind of fairly well known.

Nick:

I feel like SEO’s one of those things where like, you know, Steven Floyd, you’ve got to be able to inspect what you expect. And especially with on-page, I remember that being a sore point of struggle for me early on. Because, you know, without the study, you’d give it off to somebody, and when you get it back, you’re going, “Well, I think it’s maybe okay …” but, you know, it depends on how it resonates in the SERPs.

Eric:

Right, right.

Chris:

So you made the on-page changes yourself, after watching the course.

Eric:

Right, right, after watching his, after doing his … I’m not even through his course, yet, but I did a lot of the on-page stuff. So what was really interesting, guys, was that having hired these companies to do my on-page for me, for like 10 out of … I had about 40 posts. My site wasn’t ranking at all… was dead, and I hire these people and I say, “What’s going on with my website? What’s going on with …” “Well, you know …” They’d give me some excuse and when I went in and looked at it and on the basis of what Matt was teaching, I realized not one of these guys had done title tags or meta descriptions or schema, those things.

Chris:

What were they doing?

Nick:

What were they doing? Yeah.

Chris:

I mean that’s like the bedrock of on-page.

Eric:

Yeah, they were doing nothing.

Nick:

Nothing, just taking money and saying, “Uh, well …” It’s crazy.

Eric:

Yeah, I really, I mean, that’s like the basic stuff. If you don’t have a meta description, if you don’t have a title tag, that’s like basic.

Nick:

What the hell are you doing, yeah? Like it’s … At that point it’s a pure scam.

Eric:

I’m paying these people $500 or a $1,000 a month.

Nick:

Wow.

Eric:

So what happened then was after about a year of being like a flat line, brain dead website, all of a sudden there was a little jump. And I actually got a couple of sales from my Amazon affiliate links, and then I hired Affiliate Lab which is his link building business. And I saw this big spike, relatively speaking, big spike, and since then … It’s not like huge amounts of money, but I’m making $150 a month, something like that …

Nick:

It’s a win, yeah.

Eric:

Which after nothing, after zero for years, it’s huge. So that’s basically how my SEO journey has gone. Now I want to just bring up one other item which is that, Charles Floate had a company as you probably know, and he wasn’t able to sustain it. It sounds like he kind of bit off more than he can chew, and had no … Charles is a good guy, I don’t want to cast any aspersions or anything, but he wasn’t able to do what he said he would do. But one of the strategies that he recommended was something that you can use to rank on Amazon, and that is called a Parasite SEO.

Nick:

Parasite SEO.

Eric:

Yeah, I had never heard of Parasite SEO, and so this is another example of … I’ll give kind of a shoutout. So I was in at one of our meet ups with our Chiang Mai SEO group, and somehow the subject of ranking on Amazon listing came up. And this guy from Israel named Uval, said, “Oh, yeah, well, what you can do is you can send PBN links to this website, and I know a company that’ll do it.” I thought, “Okay, well, that sounds like it’s worth trying.” So this was Arch SEO, and I made an order for it. And then the owner of the company contacts me, because he knew me because he had been to Chiang Mai as well.

Nick:

Okay.

Eric:

He’s from Singapore, and I had bought another crummy course, and I said, “Do you know this guy from Singapore, Pat something?” He said, “Oh, you know he’s … Just drop that course, it’s terrible, terrible,” and I could tell that course wasn’t very good, so with his encouragement I dropped it. And so he’s been kind of a guardian angel for me, as well, and so I submitted my order and he contacted me. He said, “Eric, no, no, this is what you’ve got to do,” and he explained to me how to create anchor texts for this kind of order.

Nick:

Sure.

Eric:

He went out of his way to help me and he said, “Eric, I don’t normally do this, but because I know you and I want to help you out …” So it’s a great feeling when you have people who … It’s not like a … In a way, we’re competing with each other, but in a way, there’s a lot of support here. And you guys are part of that by giving me a chance to tell my story, in a way that maybe can inspire other people to think about their lives and how they can improve their own lives on a deeper level. And so this whole idea of helping people, there’s no money involved. He just said, “Eric, this is what you really need to do in order to make things better for yourself.” You know, Matt says, “Eric, let me take a look at your website.” It’s like along the way, there are these little guardian angels who come in and have helped me out and it’s a really wonderful feeling.

Chris:

That’s a good thing to have. You know, you’ve been telling your story and it’s “I got this course, I got this course, and then these people didn’t know what they were doing and this person said this, this person said this.” There’s just, I feel like a lot of people, especially people that maybe aren’t in Chiang Mai or don’t have any kind of SEO people around them, they get lost in this, basically, sea of information, and they have no way to validate anything.

Eric:

Exactly, right, right. Yeah, it’s really been extremely helpful, it would have been impossible for me to get anywhere near where I am now without being in a community. Even in terms of my Amazon product. You know, my Amazon product, I brought that product to market in 2015. Within three months, I was selling $10,000 worth a month.

Nick:

Wow.

Eric:

Which was great, and then competitors came in and my sales eventually fell to a $1,000 a month, which was pretty discouraging.

Nick:

That’s wild, yeah.

Eric:

So I found some Facebook groups and some Chiang Mai, Amazon FBA, Fulfill By Amazon, so that’s the business model where you store your stuff at Amazon warehouses and then they ship it for you, taking your cut. So I went to a couple of meet ups with these people and they said, “Oh, what you need to do, you need to repackage your product.” I just had in a very simple plastic bag, I just thought, you know all those packaging, who needs it? It all just creates more garbage.

Nick:

Right.

Eric:

They say, “Well, Eric, you’re really going to have to make that concession,” so I did that and I found a graphic, a good, a real graphic designer who has done great work for me since then. He lives in Chiang Mai. And I got some other ideas, so that now my product is… It’s not up to the $10,000 a month, but it’s trending upwards. I’m up to about $4,000, which is profitable at this point. I’m actually making some profit from it.

Nick:

That’s great.

Eric:

And that would not have happened if I had not been in Chiang Mai hanging out with people who have had experience and were able to help out.

Chris:

So what would your advice be to maybe people who are listening to this who are not in Chiang Mai, who are… Maybe they’re struggling to put together their first $150 a month from a site like you were at one point?

Eric:

Right, well, I would say, speaking just of Affiliate Marketing, I would say take Matt’s course.

Chris:

Sure.

Eric:

It’s an excellent course, and get into his Facebook group, because if you have questions, you can always ask them and people will help you out. Not every answer will be what you want, but Facebook groups are a pretty good substitute for being actually physically in the same place.

Chris:

Are you in our Facebook group?

Eric:

I’m not sure. What is it?

Nick:

It’s SEO Roundtable.

Chris:

Well, you better be after this.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

SEO Roundtable, okay.

Chris:

No, but Matt’s group is great.

Nick:

Matt’s group is amazing, yeah.

Chris:

Definitely one of the good ones. We’ve got one going now as well, SEO Roundtable.

Eric:

SEO Roundtable, yeah …

Chris:

We don’t have the numbers of Matt’s group but me and Nick are in there every day.

Nick:

Yeah.

Chris:

Trying to help people as much as we can and trying to facilitate the community where other people can help them as well.

Nick:

Right, I think that’s something, too, is this is a fairly new industry, right, as far as its popularity and growth. We’re talking the last 10 years it’s exponentially grown and so we keep seeing newer and newer faces, but I think just like for you, it happened to me… Probably Chris as well. As we’re learning we go through all these different ups and downs of almost hitting a win. Then you get sucked out by buying the wrong thing, listening to the wrong advice, and there’s so much of that out there.

Eric:

Right.

Nick:

But I think it provides a lot of opportunity for people that want to educate, based on what they’ve actually been able to test and then supply these communities. I think guys like Matt Diggity, Steven Kang, people that have these massive communities that are putting out free information, I think that’s really interesting, and I think it’s great because it’s providing avenues for people to kind of exist on the plane that you were talking about earlier, which is the one I want to live on, where I don’t have a boss. I do kind of make my own path through this business venture so to speak, but it definitely was not easy to come up in, so I feel that for sure.

Eric:

Right. Right, I would say for people who are fairly new or having, I don’t know, other challenges, find you a good course that gives you some structure. There are a lot of courses that are not structured very well. I think Authority Hackers, another course which… I own and I haven’t really used it as much as Affiliate Lab, but I think that’s also a good course. So I would say, take one of those good courses that I just mentioned, I can specifically speak of Matt’s. Find a couple of Facebook groups that can be useful. I belong to more than one and often I’ll put my question out into several groups and see what comes back.

Eric:

See if you can … My guess is that most people live in somewhat larger cities… New York or Austin, Texas, or Boston, or some cities like that, generally. And see if you can find other people that you can hook up with and hang out with because they may not have world class SEOs, but at least they have people who can give you some moral support. And moral support is very helpful, too.

Nick:

Yeah, sure.

Eric:

And just trading ideas back and forth, it can only help you.

Chris:

Right, right, someone to bounce ideas off of.

Eric:

Right.

Chris:

Someone that might take a little bit more interest in your problems than, I don’t know, just random people in groups on the internet.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

Right, exactly. I mean if you just … As I say, I’ve taken courses with people and they just didn’t resonate with me and I think I hear that that’s the case with a lot of people. There’s a lot of courses that just, they just don’t seem to work, and they can-

Chris:

The course market is real. They’re all sitting there waiting to grab people looking for a lifeline, right?

Eric:

Right, yeah, exactly. I just saw the Federal Trade Commission has a complaint website, and one of the things that they … There are two items that they specifically talk about. There’s like six different things that they talk about as being problematic. One of them is health supplements, and the other is work at home schemes. So there’s a lot of predators out there.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

People have to be careful. I would say, one thing, if you think you’re going to take a course, if you’re thinking of taking a course, if it doesn’t have some kind of guarantee, you know, like a 30 day or a 60 day guarantee that if you don’t want it, you can get your money back, don’t take the course.

Nick:

Sure.

Eric:

Because you can get into it and then you can find out, you just got yourself into quicksand and just lost a bunch of money.

Nick:

Yeah, I remember doing that several times where it’s like, you open the course, you open up a few videos, you fast forward through different things, and you just realize automatically, “Well, dammit, you got me again.”

Eric:

Exactly.

Nick:

It’s funny in hindsight, but I remember those days as being so nerve wracking and just wanting to pull my hair out basically, because the people that these courses prey on are the ones that are looking for the lifeline. And usually you’re not making great money and usually you’re trying to get a leg up.

Chris:

At that point, it just seems like an illusion.

Nick:

Yeah.

Chris:

SEO is an illusion.

Nick:

“You’re lying to me.”

Chris:

Making money online is an illusion. These courses are all an illusion, none of it’s real, and then it just clicks one day like it did with you. You make some on-page changes and, “Oh, my God.”

Nick:

Wow.

Chris:

“I made a few bucks.” Progress, right.

Eric:

Right, right, and I can see, you know, it’s like now I can see, “Oh, so this is how I can go forward,” and I found a couple of partners. Affiliate Lab, they’re basically doing … so my Anchor text for me, when they place links, and it’s not cheap. It’s like $500 a month, which it’s a fair amount of money. And I’m also, I just hired Alpha Investors, and they built a website for me, they did very good work. And I’m asking them to do content writing for me and they’re very straight up kind of people.

Chris:

So it seems like you pretty much outsource everything. Like you outsource your link building, you outsource the website. You outsourced on-page at one point, but now maybe, you’re doing it yourself.

Eric:

Yeah, I’m doing a fair amount of my on-page and some content writing also.

Chris:

Okay.

Eric:

Because I feel those are the things that I have the most control over. In terms of link building, you know, outreach, and things like that, I’ve tried those, it hasn’t really worked for me, to be honest with you.

Chris:

Yeah, it’s its own beast.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

Yeah, and basically, see, my Amazon product is fueling my affiliate business at this point. The profits that I’m making for Amazon are going to pay for these other services.

Nick:

Okay.

Eric:

Basically, my goal is to build up my Amazon business in conjunction with my affiliate website to the point where it’s making five figures a month of profit and at that point, I would probably sell it, and that would give me enough cash that I could then use that money to develop other sites.

Nick:

Sure.

Eric:

Because there’s other niches. One of the niches that I would really like to develop would be the green niche, green energy, sustainability type of thing.

Chris:

Again, something that you are interested in yourself that you think is beneficial to people.

Eric:

Right, right, exactly.

Chris:

That’s an, yeah, a pretty different way of niche selection that a lot of people …

Nick:

Yeah, that’s awesome.

Chris:

That a lot of people use, but it’s definitely make you sleep better at night, yeah.

Eric:

Well, I hope so, you know. There’s one thing that I just … We’ve been online for a while and there’s just one thing that I wanted to bring up and that is … This is probably kind of controversial, maybe you can … if you post it, you can edit it out but we’re …

Nick:

No.

Eric:

But you know we’re living in an age of Fake News and …

Chris:

Yes.

Eric:

We’re facing a lot of challenges with disinformation of all kinds and …

Chris:

Absolutely, we were just talking about this right before we went on air.

Nick:

Right, before we got on, yeah.

Eric:

Interesting. And one of the things that I’m really, really concerned about is the fact that websites are actually getting banned or demonetized. You know, there’s YouTube channels that are being demonetized because they’re saying things that are not in line with what the powers that be want to be said.

Chris:

Yeah, this is new stuff, yeah.

Eric:

Google is … like I have, there’s websites that I go to and I’ve seen their traffic fall dramatically, because they’re basically taking Anti-War positions. You know, things like … We’re not talking about violence, advocates of violence or anything, violence or anything like that. It’s just they’re questioning what is going on in the society and they’re getting demonetized, and Google is part of that. So as SEOs, I hope that we can … We’re basically in a … It’s like a love/hate relationship with Google, we need them and yet at the same time, are they our allies or are they adversaries?

Nick:

Right.

Eric:

Pretty hard to say.

Chris:

I take the more adversarial approach.

Nick:

Interesting. Yeah, I like the idea of being a rebel so I take that, but at the same time, it’s like if you’re honest and rational about it, yes, we have a very symbiotic relationship that …

Chris:

Yeah, we also have a unique relationship in the way that we have our fingers on the pulse of this beast, you know.

Nick:

Correct, yeah.

Chris:

And so we are the people that are, maybe that you could say understand it the most or at least we should.

Eric:

Right.

Chris:

Maybe we even have a responsibility as almost like a watchdog in this scenario to … I don’t know … make people aware of exactly what’s happening, because I don’t think this is something that’s talked about enough …

Nick:

No.

Eric:

Right, exactly.

Chris:

In mainstream media outlets.

Nick:

Yeah, especially with this last US Election, but not … Well, not only this one, but we talk about like using WhatsApp to market to people, for the Brazilian elections. I think that happened in Indian elections. So it’s like all over the world, we’re seeing this digital manipulation happening, and I feel like it’s very hard to for somebody that’s on the outskirts of this Internet … Not even just Internet culture but … What would you say we are like?

Chris:

Community? Internet community?

Nick:

Yeah, Internet, yeah, this community. The SEO community or just like the data manipulation community in general, and you kind of see how easy it is for this to be mass produced and used for pretty nefarious practices. And honestly, it’s not only disheartening, but pretty scary …

Eric:

Right.

Nick:

When you feel very awakened but then you speak to your peers and you realize nobody really understands how this information is being used or used against them. That’s a scary thought.

Eric:

Right, exactly.

Chris:

Yeah, I’ve said for a while that … and I think people kind of brush it off … but I think in our lifetime, if Google goes off the rails, which it kind of seems like they’re inching that way… once they stop taking people’s best interests at the heart of their ethos or whatever, they’re going to be the biggest bogeyman of our lifetime …

Nick:

Yeah.

Chris:

Especially if once the government gets their fingers in there and they decide what can be said and what cannot be said and tying that to your financial well being and it starts to get pretty scary.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

Right, exactly, exactly, so that’s … I’m really glad that we’re on exactly the same page and I really appreciate the fact that you understand this issue, and I hope that what I see is that, yeah, we’re in a struggle here to become successful in business. And we have to take care of ourselves, there’s no question about that. So if we can include the idea of our being part of a larger community, which we’re not just SEOs, we’re part of this whole, a whole country, a whole planet that’s in crisis. And if we can use our skills to create more mass consciousness, then that would be a really great thing. See, we, SEOs have the tools to be able to do that, which other disciplines don’t have.

Nick:

Right. This is the first industry that … and I fell into it, but it’s the first one that I saw immediately… It would have massive scope or an ability to give you massive scope, and so no matter what you wanted be involved in or how, you could through the platform that is SEO. I think that’s really interesting and considering that it’s basically, exclusively, business for me right now, I am excited to stay in the industry so that maybe it can transfer into something a little bit grander at some point in time.

Chris:

So, Eric, do you have any ideas as far what we could do to do what you’re saying, to try to kind of get people woke or whatever you want to call it?

Nick:

Yeah, advance the …

Eric:

Well, in terms of how we run our own business, I kind of sneak things in, you know.

Chris:

Sure.

Eric:

So, for example, in my … It’s a health oriented website. I address the issue of predatory drug companies, for example. I think one of the main things in our kind of daily discourse in our … Whenever we’re interacting with somebody, or interacting, or on our website, if we can just put a little bit of “Do we really need to spending 12 times the amount of money on our military that Russia does, and we’re calling Russia the threat?” Is that …

Chris:

So you’re planting little seeds.

Nick:

Yeah.

Chris:

Planting the seeds of cynicism or …

Eric:

Right, but … Well, it’s not cynicism.

Chris:

Yeah, maybe that was a bad choice of words.

Eric:

I mean cynicism is the negative way of putting it.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

But it doesn’t have to be cynical, it can simply be, “Yeah, you know, why does Flint have dirty water, and we don’t pay for bombs, why do we have to pay insurance premiums?”

Chris:

Sure.

Eric:

You know, they bail out the banks but they don’t bail out the home owners.

Chris:

Right.

Eric:

You know, with something … Maybe we should be thinking about stuff like that, and of course you don’t hit people over the head with it because it’s … People can get overwhelmed or they shut down or something like that. But if you can, in the course of our sort of daily conversation, or in the course of our, how we conduct our business, there are probably little ways… Tiny little way that you can do that. And that’s how things work in societies that have difficulties. You know, there’s a small group of people who understand what is actually going on and they … It’s like blades of grass creeping up through the concrete.

Eric:

You guys have been in China. You know what, you understand Chinese philosophy. There’s in the water, when you’re in a stream and there’s lots of rocks, the water always finds a way through. When you’re on a mountain top and there’s a huge rock there, you find a tree that grew out of that rock. How did it do that? Because it found a little nook or cranny where it could sprout and grow life …

Chris:

Actually, that was like one of the biggest things I took away from China, I can’t even remember, I’m really bad at this stuff, but yeah, it was the idea of flowing water and basically not going against it. Like you have to go with it to find the real like opportunity or something more advantageous to yourself, a better position, rather than basically trying to force something where you’re fighting upstream.

Eric:

Right, right, the concept of harmony in Chinese culture is very, very strong. So their whole idea is that you cooperate with things and you make them … Yes, you can turn them your way, but not by force.

Chris:

Yeah, not by brute force.

Eric:

Right, that’s the difference.

Chris:

By being a little bit more slippery and adaptive, I guess.

Eric:

Right, slippery is kind of got a negative tone to it.

Nick:

Yeah.

Chris:

I’m saying a bunch of negative stuff.

Eric:

You’re bringing the natural language philosophy …

Chris:

It’s like if you’re in a wrestling match, right, you just lube up with Vaseline all over your body, then they … You’re a slippery guy and they can’t …

Nick:

Oh, I get it now …

Eric:

Right.

Chris:

But, yeah, no negativity.

Nick:

I think it’s pretty cool … I’m trying to remember the documentary I watched recently but it had something to do with the political revolution somewhere or other, and I remember a quote being that this person didn’t think that any future revolutions would be anything grand… But they were these small kind of microcosms that we create by doing the little things, these little inflections that then become far grander because they sort of steer waves of thought. And I think that’s really cool and I think it’s nice that as SEOs we have the power to consider … Let’s say, you have somebody else write your copy, fine, you can still go put little bits and pieces here and there to cater some sort of personality and change. I think that’s an interesting observation.

Eric:

Right.

Chris:

Well, Eric, this has been a little bit different from our other podcasts but it’s been extremely enjoyable.

Nick:

Yeah.

Chris:

Do you have any kind of parting advice, parting words, you’d like to give to anyone who may still be watching at this point?

Eric:

Don’t give up.

Chris:

Even if it takes until you’re 70 years old, right?

Eric:

Well, hey, I started when I was what? 66.

Nick:

Yeah, really, I mean … yeah, you’ve done really well. To me your story is awe inspiring. I think it’s awesome and I think it’s going to help a lot of viewers, too, who may be … You know if you speak to like certain people I know in my family, it’s like, “Well, I’m too old to figure out how that stuff works.” Well, that’s more a frame of mind than it is any sort of truth, so …

Chris:

Yeah, my dad’s 66 and there’s no way, there’s no way in hell.

Nick:

Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing.

Chris:

Not a damn chance.

Nick:

They won’t even watch our podcast.

Chris:

Yeah, not a damn chance that I would get him to start making money online. Just not going to happen. I’ve tried, I’ve floated it to him a couple of times to give him something to do in his retirement.

Nick:

Same.

Chris:

But not happening.

Eric:

Now, I actually, there’s some other things that … this is going to kind of … It’s off topic but it’s not really.

Chris:

No, it’s good.

Eric:

Is people should stay active. They should … Get a bicycle.

Nick:

Yeah, we were talking about exercising the other day.

Eric:

Exercise, exercise, I’m kind of sloughing off lately but I do, I try to do push ups is like my main exercise so-

Nick:

I mean you look incredibly fit and healthy. You know, you are, you’re a very active person, I’m guessing, right?

Eric:

Right, I mean today I had to go get my passport so I hopped on my bicycle. You know most people say, “Oh, just get an uber or hop in the car or whatever.” I don’t have a car. I haven’t had a car since 2004. I have a bicycle, and so that’s the other thing is… You combine activities. So I’m getting exercise, I’m going where I’m going, and you don’t depend on other people. You do as much as you can yourself, you do as much as you can yourself. Yes, I do outsource stuff. I also try to do as much as I …

Nick:

But you learn … yeah.

Eric:

I do as much as I can myself and especially physically, as I’ve said to one of my other Internet marketing friends, nobody’s going to take care of you. You have to take care of yourself.

Nick:

Right.

Eric:

Especially, younger people who are not … if you’re not eating properly, if you’re eating junk food and you’re not exercising and you’re sitting in front of your computer all day and you’re not stretching and you’re not doing any kind of stuff like that, you’re basically cutting your life short.

Nick:

Right.

Eric:

It hurts your state of mind. It hurts your productivity, so it’s very important to take care of your whole life together. Don’t compartmentalize your life.

Chris:

Sure, yeah, actually that’s kind of a mistake I’m … now that I’m back from China and I’ve been back in the US, my life is a lot more compartmentalized. I’m driving my car. I miss riding the bike. I was riding a bike every day in Shanghai. Even if it was just to and from subway stations but, yeah, definitely being active is something huge for people who are working in front of the computer in their home all day. You’ve got to get up and do something.

Eric:

Right, I mean there must be, you can find an excuse. There’s got to be, “Oh, I’ve got to go 7-Eleven to get something.” Okay, fine. Either walk or take your bike, don’t take your car, whatever it is. Stuff like this. Again, it’s looking for the little things that you can do. You don’t have to make massive changes. Look for the little things you can do in your own life to help yourself, to help other people.

Nick:

Got you, yeah.

Chris:

Well, there you have, ladies and gentlemen. Eric Arnow, be physical and get some exercise, get off your butt, and don’t give up.

Nick:

Yeah.

Chris:

Thanks for coming onto the show, Eric. We really appreciate it and we enjoyed it.

Eric:

Thanks for inviting me.

Nick:

Yeah.

Eric:

Terrific, yeah, same here.

Nick:

Of course, hope to have you again sometime.

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Google has guidelines that webmasters must follow in order to keep their sites healthy and moving up in their SERPs. Sometimes these webmasters do things that are deemed tricky by Google, and the site gets slapped in the rankings.

The great thing about checking if you have this issue is that it’s very simple to diagnose.
All you have to do is open your site in Google Search Console and scroll over to the Security and Manual Actions tab.

 What you want to see here is a message that says, “No Issues Detected.”

If you happen to be one of the unfortunate people effected by a manual action, then it will read differently depending on exactly what you’ve been judged for by Google. This can range from using unnatural link practices to having duplicate content issues.

For a full list of manual actions, click here.

The good news is that Google themselves will tell you how to fix and recover from the issue. If you end up with a manual action, it’s probably a good idea to rethink the way you are doing SEO and start playing it a little bit safer (or smarter).

Algorithm Updates

Every once in a while, Google will roll out a core algorithm update that really shakes up the SERPs and updates what exactly Google wants to see top-ranking sites have (or not have). This may cause sudden ranking drops in Google.

These are easy to check for, but diagnosing exactly what happened to your site after the algo update takes a little bit of exploration.

My favorite tool for checking for algorithm updates or overall SERP volatility is Algoroo, but checking Google news for terms like “Google algorithm update” will yield results as well.

It also helps to be in trustworthy SEO groups or forums where people discuss updates and what they think has been affected.

Bouncing ideas off one another in a place like the SEO Round Table is a quicker way of getting the issue diagnosed and resolved since multiple people will be discussing niches and other variables effected in the latest updates.

Like manual actions, you can always recover from ranking drops caused by algorithm updates once you correctly diagnose and fix the problem. It might just take some time!

Site Structure and Content

At times, you might get anxious about your content, the way your site looks, your URL structure, your schema, or other on-page factors.

Every time you change these things, you alter the way your site is being crawled and understood by Google’s bots. Ask yourself:

• Did I change the way the site structure is set up?

• Did I alter the inner-page URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, etc?

• Did I make changes to the site’s content that could affect things like keyword density?

These things can have serious effects on how Google ranks your site as they some of the most important factors for on-page SEO. If you made good changes, you can see positive ranking results. Bad changes, however, are going to have the opposite effect.

Depending on what you did to your site, you might just take a short-term drop and come back up naturally (if you did things properly). For this reason, it’s worthwhile to let your rankings settle over the next few weeks before freaking out and changing things back to how they were before.

Hacked Sites

So your site has gone blank, your rankings in Google fell off a cliff, and your site’s title now reads, “PwnD by MasterHx6969.”

Or maybe they were less obvious, and you just noticed a random IP has been digging around your website. Either way, you can be sure that the hackers are up to no good and you need to step up your security game a bit.

This can range from things like installing the right plugins to making sure your username and passwords are strong and unique.

If your site has been hacked, then all you really need to do is install a backup file of your site and change your password. Your hosting provider will usually have a copy for you (depending on the host, they sometimes charge a small fee).

This will reverse any changes the hackers may have made that could have caused your rankings to drop. If you/your host didn’t have your site backed up, you will need to look for these changes yourself.

You can also check Google Search Console periodically as they have a section under the Security and Manual Actions -> Security Issues tab that will give you details on malicious actions taking place on your website that you may be unaware of.

NoIndex

There are a couple of ways to encourage search engines to ignore a website, and it’s something worth checking for as it could be a quick fix to your Google ranking drops if they were accidentally done.

In WordPress, there is an option to do so, and a good tutorial on auditing these settings can be found here. It also goes over reviewing your Yoast settings (if you are using that plugin).

There are also a handful of plugins you can use to check the status of a page – Robots Exclusion Checker is a good one for Chrome Browser and can be downloaded here.

WordPress Updates

Maybe WordPress just updated to the latest version, or you went ahead and updated WordPress, 13 plugins, and 3 themes all at the same time. You then go to check on your site, and it’s a literal mess.

The idea is for WordPress to work cohesively with everything you attach to it, however the reality is that all these moving parts are made by different developers and they don’t always work together perfectly.

Should you update a lot of things all at once and get an issue where your site rankings start to dwindle, it’s probably best to go in and deactivate each plugin you have activated and reinstall each one while simultaneously checking that your site is working properly.

Eventually, you’ll find the culprit that’s been hurting your site and rankings.

Losing Backlinks

Maybe a year ago your site had some awesome press, but today those sites have decided you are no longer relevant. Now, they’ve taken your link away or moved it far into an inner page.

Although losing links is natural and we don’t think you lose all the juice from a lost link, losing links can still hurt your rankings if you lose too many that were propping the site up.

Google wants to see a healthy site that is continually getting spoken about (linked to) and found by users. Essentially, it needs to know that the site is relevant and popular enough for being shown in the SERPs.

You can use a backlink auditing tool like Ahrefs to figure out if you may have recently lost some links that were packing a punch to your website’s rankings.

 Something else to consider are 301’s and other types of redirects that may have been broken or just stopped redirecting properly. This can effect your rankings as well and is worth looking into if you have ever done a redirect to the site in question.

Did you recently disavow a bunch of links through Google Search Console? You may have accidentally mistaken a link that was giving you power as a spammy one. We recommend only doing disavows as a last resort – and really only if you understand what makes a good backlink before building a disavow file on your own.

Anchor Text Over-Optimization

Have a look in Ahrefs at the “Anchors” tab and make sure your anchor profile is looking nice and natural. We typically want to see more branded, naked, and generic anchors than money anchors.

Anchors should be blended pretty naturally, and over-optimized anchors are an easy way for Google to tell if someone is gaming their system. This also seems to be growing more important as time moves forward.

If you see a decrease in rank and feel over-optimized anchors are the culprit, we recommend using more branded, naked, random, and long tail anchors to dilute your anchor profile. This is fairly simple to do if you are buying backlinks but can be done over time naturally as well.

Spammy Links

Another thing you can check for with a tool like Ahrefs is spammy links. These links can take many different forms, and sometimes deciding what is spammy is not that easy to do.

A rule of thumb is to check the way the site looks and reads (although looks on their own aren’t enough). Does the site/page serve a purpose? Sites can serve all sorts of purposes, but you can typically tell if something looks like it doesn’t.

Maybe the link is surrounded by disjointed spun content, or maybe the site itself is just uninformative text linking out to all sorts of random low quality sites.

Spammy links can cause a rank drop, and should you find them the best way to remove them is to do a disavow (will take some time to recover). We recommend only doing this if your site is experiencing negative effects and you are 100% sure the links are indeed spam and are causing the problems.

Make sure not to disavow good links!

Too Many Non-Relevant Links

Link relevance is very important (though not necessary for every single backlink you get). It can seem unnatural to Google if your site gets too many non-relevant links.

If your site is about pets but almost all your links come from video game niche forums, this can hurt your rankings over time. A site that’s about pets should be getting links from other sites or pages that are somehow related to pets.

The practice of building non-relevant links may work for a while, but eventually Google won’t see your site as relevant in it’s niche and will start to devalue it in the SERPs.

If your link building practices are more about getting random juice from anywhere and any type of site, then try getting more niched-down links and see if that helps the situation.

Negative SEO

Some niches are extremely competitive, and the practice of using malicious links against competitor websites is very real.

One day you’re sitting comfortably at the top, and the next day a plethora of targeted links hit your site with over-optimized anchors from shady sites.

If this happens, you will want to submit a disavow file to Google to remove the incoming links. The frequency you will have to submit them will depend on the frequency at which you are being attacked.

DDOS attacks are also fairly prevalent as well. These attack your hosts resources in order to slow or crash your site. You can upgrade your hosting security or even use a content delivery network like Cloudflare to help protect from attacks.

Excessive 404s and Inaccessible Pages

Check your site to make sure all of your pages are accessible, loading, and responding properly.

Plugins sometimes update automatically and cause internal conflicts. These conflicts could end up causing 404s or other errors that prevent pages from displaying properly to users as well as Google’s bots.

You can check this by loading random sample of pages manually or with a tool like Ahrefs. Google Search Console will also show this information under the Crawl -> Crawl Errors tab.

Stiff Competition

Maybe you got into a good niche early on, but now the word is out and the competition is starting to catch up (or even beat you).

If you need guidance, always look at what the top sites on Google are doing and base your new ranking approach on the information you gather.

Check the quality of their content, site structure, backlinks, and anything else that might cause them to outrank you. If you’ve been slacking in any of the areas they’re beating you on, then start putting energy into revitalizing them and gaining ground on the competition.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is content that appears elsewhere on the internet and should be avoided at all costs. Google doesn’t like websites that appear to have copied content from others.

If you outsourced your content, then it’s important to use a tool like Copyscape to check if it was plagiarized from somewhere else. If duplicate content is found, then replacing the content with well-optimized, unique content should help get your rankings back in time.

Some sites may get away with duplicate content for a while, but it can very likely lead to a Google ranking drop.

Low-Quality Content

Look at the top pages in the SERP you are going after. If you’re targeting an American SERP, is a 5,000 word article written by a non-english speaker in the top 3? If you’re in a worthwhile niche, the answer is most likely no.

Don’t skimp on content. Using low-quality content is not only going to effect rankings, but it will affect overall user experience as well.

Your content should be well-written and unique. We advise staying away from auto generated content, spun content, and non-native content that’s packed with errors.

Natural Fluctuations

If you’ve just noticed a drop in rankings on Google and it’s only been happening over the last couple of days, you need to let time pass to really understand what is happening to your site.

Fluctuations in SERP positions are common and occur for a multitude of reasons. It’s important to stay calm, be analytical, and let things work through themselves and settle before making any extreme decisions.

Acting too quickly could just cause more uncertainty and problems!

Dramatic Google Ranking Drops Can be Fixed!

So your Google ranking dropped dramatically (maybe for natural reasons, maybe not), but if you audit your website properly you should be able to find and address the issues.

If you aren’t sure about what you’re doing, make sure to join a community such as our Facebook Group and ask questions. If you aren’t experienced in SEO, you definitely don’t want to cause more problems than you started with.

Remember that no matter how damaged your site is, there is always a way to fix the issue you are facing and keep moving forward.

Adrian Borg is the owner of Aphex Media and is known for being successful in many of SEO’s most competitive, bad-neighborhood niches out there. On this episode of SirLinksalot’s SEO Podcast, we talk to Adrian about those niches, the shifting SEO landscape, and some on-page optimization tips.

Think you’d be a great addition to our podcast or have a request for someone to be featured? Head over to our podcast discovery page.

Watch the Podcast:

Read the Full Transcript:

Nick:        Hey everybody, we’re here with a new SirLinksalot Podcast with Adrian Borg. He’s the owner of Aphex Media, has been in just about every competitive/nefarious niche you can imagine and succeeded at it. Yeah, overall, just a really interesting character who’s been in the SEO world for a long period of time. So we’re super excited to talk to you about what you’ve had going, what you’ve got going, but do you want to give a little intro about yourself? How you got into SEO, your claim to fame, just a little bit for the people that don’t know you.

Adrian:    Hey. Hi guys. So thanks for the invite guys, first off, I’m super excited to be here. Yeah, basically I got into SEO almost by coincidence. It was around three years now, so actually not that long I guess, Nick.

Nick:        Feels like a long time in SEO, though.

Adrian:    Oh yeah, it’s true.  even three months is a long time.

Nick:        Yeah, I think because me and you started probably I guess, around the same time then with the deep dive into SEO, or at least for ourselves.

Adrian:    Yeah, exactly. So I don’t remember the good old days.

Nick:        I don’t either.

Adrian:    I hear about them, but-

Nick:        Yeah, we weren’t there.

Adrian:    … I never really … I wasn’t there. I’m based in Malta, and so as you know gambling is big, and just going almost 10 years into operations and trading because I was into casino myself, but on the sports side. I got this job with this affiliate company basically on the operation side, and literally that was the first time I heard about SEO and marketing a site.

Nick:        Really?

Adrian:    Yeah, yeah. That it was how it landed and then got me curious. That was right about the time I think that I heard about… More or less you, and think it was Matthew Woodward back then. The all-famous black hat world forum. Then after a while… Matt Diggity.

Nick:        Yeah, big names.

Adrian:    They are the big names, then you start reading and reading and reading and you keep reading, then you start trying, right?

Nick:        Yeah, sure.

Adrian:    So yeah, that’s kind of how it all started. And SEO was mainly a big thing in casino, especially because it’s one of the avenues where PPC, a lot of the paid media is blocked. So a lot of effort and focus is put on the SEO side. That’s how basically that niche kind of led to others because once you get a bit of a hand into how stuff works, there are other niches which have the same limitations.

Adrian:    So yeah, but then just curiosity really and big curiosity… Kind of you keep building sites and keep learning. Now we’re going off here. Aphex Media is 18 months old, more or less, maybe a bit less. We started off doing some link selling. Mainly it was reselling and some SEO service, and now we’re diversifying because of the … basically monetizing the internal network, which we use for clients as PBNs, but it’s not even PBNs. It’s money sites. We’re essentially in three niches and now we just started with the fourth niche, which are all like you said, all the dirty niches …

Nick:        So casino, payday-

Adrian:    Yeah, casino, payday, adult.

Nick:        Adult, yeah.

Adrian:    Yeah, adult and now basically pharma.

Nick:        Oh, pharma as well.

Adrian:    Yeah, that’s the new thing.

Chris:       So you basically say, “Normal niche,” and you’re like, “Fuck that.” You pretty much stick to the bad niches.

Adrian:    With pharma, we have a little experience with the weight niche, you know, weight loss stuff. But now we’re kind of getting into it with a client and we’re super excited actually because it’s different.

Nick:        It’s for clients mainly? Or are you promoting your own assets at this point?

Adrian:    Pharma is for sure clients because of all the paperwork and everything. Because the way we like to work is the assets we built behind a website, basically we’re constantly increasing our network of great sites.

Nick:        Of course, right.

Adrian:    And tier sites and then just the nature of the game really where if you play with numbers, then you will hit that odd site every now and then, which ends up being bigger than your money site.

Nick:        Gotcha.

Adrian:    And those are basically the sites that we end up monetizing internally or see what we’ve gone through with them. But essentially as long as you play with the numbers, you will hit these odd sites every now and then, which sometimes… It’s always explainable, but they just fly just on their own.

Nick:        What kind of SERPs are you going after? Is it foreign SERPs? European SERPs? Where are you basing most of it? If you don’t mind me asking.

Adrian:    So basically for casino it’s all European. And we’re doing a lot of client SEO there. That’s a mix between a lot of Scandinavian, UK, and Central European. So that’s very kind of targeted. Then for adult, it’s wherever really.

Nick:        Anywhere?

Adrian:    With adult that’s a bit of a different game.

Nick:        So adult would be the main one that’s kind of set apart in its own way?

Adrian:    It’s a very interesting niche I would argue.

Nick:        Yeah?

Adrian:    Yes it is, and I’ll get to it. But the reason why I like adult is it’s literally completely unfiltered. So basically Google doesn’t bother about anything. So you can see certain basics, how they are, but it’s just spam basically.  literally you get away with duplicate content still within that niche. But you can run some tests where you wouldn’t be able to on other niches. So that’s in a way what you learned from it.

Adrian:    And to be fair, it’s quite technical as well because things like crawl budgets, I think it’s the perfect niche to test how crawl budgets is being handled. Because we have a website with 8,000, 10,000 pages, right? And you’re trying to optimize how your crawl rate is affecting your ranks and you don’t have to write 8,000 pages of content… and worry about Copyscape and all that stuff. So it’s the perfect niche to test certain things without having to worry about the actual setup too much, at least.

Adrian:    So, yeah, you know, I think the positive thing about being in multiple niches is that you start seeing things from different angles. And by default, certain things only are more evident in certain niches like payday in Payday. It’s one of the old niches they say. And the thing with the old niches is that the keywords are… for anyone being in payday might understand is that they’re very close together. So you know, at which point, and especially now with BERT, we’ve dealt with the recent changes that Google has been trying to implement with some semantics and BERT and all that.

Adrian:    The question is, you know, “How is Google interpreting the associations and the entities,” because you know, everyone speaking about entities. But where is that fine line where, you know, “Should this keyword be on this page or should that be on this page?” And it’s something I think that is not spoken maybe enough in the SEO world. But I think one of the best optimization methods that I’m finding lately is actually de-optimizing stuff.

Nick:        Explain a bit further.

Adrian:    Essentially, in layman’s terms, if you have “dog” and “dogs,” right?  if you’re trying to use come common logic, you might say you might need one page to rank the same terms. But if Google is basically just associating those two keywords, which for you, they might relate to same entity. But if Google basically wants two pages essentially, you need to give your two pages. And some people might interpret this as what the user wants… Basically user side. So you know, I’m trying to answer the query essentially, but it’s not so simple. I think it’s more scientific than that.

Adrian:    And I think actually this morning because today was a very big day. I don’t know if you want to touch that, but-

Nick:        I do actually, I was going to ask you if you noticed-

Adrian:    Sure, sure. Yeah, when we can just get to that. But I was talking with Michael from Surfer because I think at the moment they are the guys who are the closest to getting deep into this. Into the keyword clustering based on what Google wants though. Because everyone’s kind of trying to do topic clustering and all that. But at the end of the day, even the way I like to think is there’s a lot of science and algorithms, AI, machines and all that which is all great. But at the end of the day, practically you just need to feed Google what Google wants. And your best source for that is just by analyzing the SERPs.

Nick:        Right, yeah. Simple.

Adrian:    you can’t just go try and complicate everything but simple is best. Surfer, I think are getting quite close with that. Basically look, if you’re ranking for a keyword on a page and the top 10 are not ranking for that keyword, you probably should consider de-optimizing for the keyword. And I’ve seen crazy, crazy, crazy jumps using that-

Nick:        Just specifically from that.

Adrian:    And I’m talking about top SERPs like casino. Just the word “casino” jump from positions 12 to 3.

Nick:        And what kind of saturation were you saying that… like what percentage, if you had to give a idea, would you be removing from an asset that needed that?

Adrian:    So first off, you need to identify which keywords you need to remove. And for that, that’s the painful bit because it’s very manual intensive at the moment.

Nick:        Yeah, it’s a tedious task.

Adrian:    we have some tools, but I think the easiest thing would be to just download your eight steps and see basically, you know, it’s kind of reverse gap analysis. Reverse gap analysis tells you what you’re missing. But here you’re trying to find out what you have that you don’t want there. And then it’s quite simple really. You know, just reduce the exact matches or the term frequencies and you should be done. It’s not complicated really.

Nick:        No, just tedious, right?

Adrian:    Yeah, it’s a pain, but.

Chris:       So you’re talking about removing or de-optimizing for certain keywords and then seeing your main keyword, your main target for that page, have huge jumps.

Adrian:    Yeah, big time. I’ve seen it work so much that it’s something we do all the time even on top SERPs.

Nick:        So it’s one of the beginning things you do, I’m assuming to audit if you’re having some kind of issue with a page?

Adrian:    I’m not sure about all the things. We don’t really do all the things…  it’s something… what’s his name Cuttridge, what’s his name? Matt, I think-

Nick:        Daniel?

Adrian:    … talks a lot about it. Daniel Cuttridge.  we do a lot of progressive optimization and the reason for that is that optimizing is a big word, right? Because you need to optimize based on what state a page or a website is. And so the optimal basically is a constantly changing. And so I’m willing to really call it an audit, it’s quite maintenance.

Nick:        Maintenance, sure.

Adrian:    But yeah, that’s something that we really keep an eye on, especially for those… And sometimes you have a cluster of keywords that get stuck, especially those positions between 10 and 12 especially and that can be a reason you’re either missing some off-page signals. It can be local links or topical links or whatever. But it can also be on-page mixed signals, let’s call them mixed signals. So your signals are not accurate.

Nick:        Gotcha.

Adrian:    But yeah, that’s something I just wanted to share for you.

Nick:        Nice.

Adrian:    So I think it’s really talked enough.

Nick:        That’s a good tidbit for sure.

Chris:       So on the same topic, I know you’re saying that each SERP can be very different as far as what they’re allowing or basically how many keywords they’re allowing to rank depending on the keywords. So maybe you’re trying to rank casino and whatever gambling on the same page, maybe Google is just not letting that happen. I know it probably changes a lot for every single SERP, but do you have any kind of general guidelines of how many keywords you try to rank on a page or are you just doing it all case by case?

Adrian:    No, , so basically it is case by case because like I said, you need to give Google what Google wants. That’s really what this is all about. And you know, until last year, my favorite, favorite, favorite tool before… or maybe a bit more, before POP, Page Optimizer Pro. It was, and it still is kind of, you know, I used to love website and we used to use TF-IDF, right? For anyone, whoever used… and that was basically checking keyword frequencies.

Adrian:    Then there was Page Optimizer Pro, which you know, kind of was the same thing but maybe a bit more in depth because it was also checking the HTML code. Then you know, Surfer came into the picture and with some more effort into keyword frequencies, which was really good. I think it was a median between the TF IDF, but frequencies were maybe a bit lacking. I think now we’re moving into a bit of a different direction with entities because with entities now we’re moving into machine learning.

Adrian:    And the issue with machine learning, you know, it’s a cluster of words that make up a topic. So while frequencies might still make sense … One suggestion I might have, and I’m not sure if it was POP that have it, was a tool to remove … because what you can do is to remove any words that do not exist. And so you can to basically de-optimize, but you can have other signals that you are doing unaware. Because if you have an internal links for instance that…

Adrian:    So what I like to do basically is just download all the keywords from Ahrefs for the top 10 for the top SERPs, once you get them, compare them to what you have and then basically anything that stands out, essentially de-optimize for that. That’s simple.

Chris:       So you’re pretty much only replicating what’s currently working?

Adrian:    Isn’t everyone doing that?

Chris:       Especially I think a lot of maybe newish people to affiliate or whatever they’re doing, I see them kind of trying to always get this additional leg up, by trying to squeeze in extra keywords like, “Oh well, maybe I’ll be able to do this. Maybe I’m the first person that’s ever thought of doing this.” So you would advise against that and say completely replicate what’s on page one, top position.

Adrian:    Yeah, fore sure, definitely.  it’s not something I would definitely suggest.

Nick:        Yeah, sounds like a time saver.

Adrian:    Look, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel and especially for someone that’s just starting out. For someone that’s starting out actually I would suggest copy more and do more. So don’t start 1 domain, start 10 and then-

Nick:        You’re part of the school of thought of going with 10 versus 1.

Adrian:    Yeah. Always, always, always.

Nick:        You’ve got to have a somewhat unlimited bank roll or resources, you know?

Adrian:    Not necessarily. If you’re just starting out, and I look back at how I started at the end of the day, and especially now, because if you’re just starting, right? Everyone talks about content because that’s usually one of the initial bottlenecks. Let’s say you’re going for a topic… help me out.

Nick:        What’s the best hover board?

Adrian:    Just get a topic, Amazon-

Nick:        Washer.

Adrian:    … hairdryers. Write one page if you have to yourself. If you are not good at writing, we need to find whatever you like doing, spin it over. You know there’s a lot of good spinners nowadays.

Nick:        You’re still spinning content?

Adrian:    Yes.

Nick:        Yeah?

Adrian:    But I don’t use spinners, I like to use translate or double translate stuff. But you know, for starters, for English it works maybe a bit slightly less in some niches, but you know, start with that. If that’s your bottleneck, don’t worry. Like do it, let’s decide-

Nick:        So just get it done.

Adrian:    Yeah, just get it done. Let the site age. As soon as you’re done then just see what’s started to move and then if anything just start revising the content… Especially above the fold stuff. And then you do this progressive optimization because that’s what this is all about. You focus your energies where they’re worth it. So that’s something yeah, definitely. And because I was almost going to miss it. But you know, nowadays you can easily get a couple of expired domains which would basically… and I’ll spare, you know, you have all the foundation ready or…

Adrian:    Or you can even, which is also one method we use quite a lot for PBNs. So basically instead of repurposing, buy a brand something which is on topic in terms of PBNs, find a powerful domain, whatever niche it is. And then 301 it to your PBN and all of a sudden it can be a money site using the same method, right?

Nick:        Absolutely. Nice. I feel like a lot of people typically say, you know, “Get started with one project.” But it does make sense… especially if… yeah, like I know when I got started, I still have a treasure trove of random stuff I started from three years ago. You know, and I remember talking to you, it’s like before everything worked, you’ve got all these different random projects. You’re trying different things. You know, it’s like having a garage with a bunch of busted down cars and you’re just, little pieces here, little pieces here… And one day something will start driving around I guess.

Adrian:    Yeah, I have some domains from back then. I think I will keep them just out of-

Nick:        Just the nostalgia.

Adrian:    It’s like memorabilia almost.

Nick:        Yeah, for sure. I have a few of those too and it’s like, I don’t know why I have them, but you know.

Adrian:    My favorite one is I think is my Pokémon PBN.

Nick:        Oh, you’ve got a Pokémon PBN. Nice. That’s cool.

Chris:       How much for a link?

Nick:        One thing I wanted to talk about since it is a new day for the Google algo update, you and I were talking privately, you mind sharing some viewpoints you might’ve found on what’s going on today?

Adrian:    Sure.  Sort of like science, right?

Nick:        Right. I saw your numbers and your science is all going shooting through the roof, so I’m sure your profits are happy.

Adrian:    Yeah, we’re laughing for once.

Chris:       Someone else commented on the post in our group that actually said that they had adult site as well, that was-

Nick:        Oh, really? It’s doing well.

Chris:       … that shot up.

Nick:        Yeah, Adrian’s got some ideas as to some of that I think.

Adrian:    Yeah, no, basically look, it’s too early to make any conclusions. But from the indications that I’ve seen so far and I think today, like I was telling Nick earlier… because it was rolled out yesterday here in the evening and I had a bit of a late night and woke up at 4:30 actually today. Yeah, these algo updates get me a bit excited. But what I’m seeing is that there has been a somewhat a bit of a relaxation almost on the YMYL kind of niches, so the medical.

Adrian:    Actually, I’ve seen a couple of medical pharma sites that kind of cut back. For payday, there was a shuffle, which seemed to show some signals that sites, which maybe didn’t have the best EAT…

Nick:        YMYL, you’re?

Adrian:    Your money or your lifestyle.

Nick:        Yeah, there we go. Your life, there we go.

Adrian:    … pharma, health, weight loss. Some finance. Yeah.

Nick:        Is the last algo update that hit that niche real heavy, right? Or it was the previous?

Adrian:    Yeah, most of the last ones were targeting that… I wouldn’t even call it a niche almost because it’s multiple niches. But it’s a section, I think of the SERPs where Google feels vulnerable or I don’t know. But yeah, there was for sure a big shuffle, for adult, I’ve seen some jumps, but I think that niche is the one that really is usually not affected that much. You really have to try hard basically to get penalized in that niche.

Nick:        Really?

Adrian:    Yeah. It’s really, really hard. Of course, on the other side is that it’s a niche where you’re getting 100K users a day and it’s not like-

Nick:        How does that translate to profits and monetization?

Adrian:    First of all, it’s all about the geos, right? So there’s a big difference between having traffic from Egypt, India and having traffic from Japan or the U.S., so that’s that’s a starting point. But then I think it’s also down to the non-SEO factors, which I’ve read that too that Chris is quite into… it’s all about CRO and the optimization… You know, you can have the same traffic and Chris might be doing this much from that traffic and someone else might be doing a lot less, or a lot more, right.

Adrian:    And the more time passes, I think that’s something that it’s kind of becoming a bit more part of CRO. You know, the conversion of basically, you know, “Yeah, all right. So you’ve got the traffic now, what are you going to do with it?” Even if it’s laser targeted, but you know how well can you use that traffic? So yeah, it’s all about-

Chris:       And I feel like a lot of people are starting to turn more towards CRO now. I don’t really know the reason. It might just be that people are getting more used to the internet and so basically all the sites on the internet are getting better at what they do. And so it’s like if you don’t pay attention to it, you really stick out. Whereas three, five years ago, whatever, it was a little more chill.

Adrian:    Yeah, for sure. And to be honest with you, that’s why I also like lead gen because it’s so much easier to optimize. Of course, you get paid less. And especially the for me, where you’re maybe not mature in all areas of the business yet. At this point in time, I almost prefer to focus more on the traffic side. So basically, kind of focusing more on dealing with the traffic issue wherever I can of course. But lately we literally just started from a few months ago there to put some effort into improving in that area. Because it’s almost a different beast to be honest.

Adrian:    Because, you have the traffic, the traffic is targeted, the traffic is hot. You know, we start putting the traffic with warm traffic, cold traffic, then you know, the funneling stuff where the user is going, the message. And it’s a different thing than a SEO to be honest. There are some guys who really, really put a lot of effort into it, so it shouldn’t fall under a SEO to be fair.

Chris:       Yeah, it’s a different beast.

Adrian:    With an agency, kind of everything ends up off table.

Chris:       So do you normally do CRO type stuff yourself or do you pass it off to someone who’s a little bit more specialized?

Adrian:    No. Basically, I don’t do everything myself. We have a team of 19 now, so not solo, thank God. We’re blessed with a team. In terms of CRO, so it really depends on the projects we do. With most of our clients, we just handle the SEO side. So basically it’s corporate kind of. So it’s PBNs, PBN management (see our PBN Checklist), PBN strategy, some link building. Then when it comes to the clients where we handle everything so to speak, yeah, of course maybe CRO might end up on our table for that.  we usually start off doing the obvious ourselves because, again, even with design, we move from phases. We don’t spend three months designing the best site that we think that CRO would work. So we start from a foundation then keep evolving.

Adrian:    I’m in talks with a couple of companies for CRO mainly converting… You probably know the guys. But of course you need a certain amount of volumes specifically on a page for that to happen. But yeah, it’s not one area… That’s certainly not my strong point.

Nick:        I got you.

Chris:       Yeah, like you said, it’s something that a lot of people are just now kind of starting to turn towards a little bit more seriously.

Adrian:    Yeah, we have to. And the thing is you need to have the desire I think for it as well.

Nick:        Yeah. It’s a very specialized task list. You know, I don’t think everybody’s going to find it to be the most interesting, but it’s definitely valuable. And I know my inner ADD, if I had one definitely kicks in when I’m doing stuff like that or when I’ve tried to do stuff like that.

Chris:       I would figure you would like CRO more, you’re always on analytics trying to…

Nick:        Yeah, the only kind of stuff that matters to me like that is if I can extract … I guess treasure would be the traffic, but it’s PBN hunting, that kind of data analysis excites me a lot more. It feels more like I’m uncovering some kind of mineral or something like that.

Adrian:    More numbers, less colors.

Nick:        Hey, speaking of numbers, let’s segue into how you like to use Yandex and Clicky because that was something that I hadn’t heard anybody express and now I’m sitting here like, “Yeah, that sounds cool. I’m going to give that a try.”

Adrian:    Yeah, basically so, before I found Yandex out…  I am quite technical, but for some reason after each of this, the type of life was getting frustrated. Time to learn analytics again. And I have to say I don’t really like the UX of it. Basically, they do dimensions, right? And I’ve dealt with big databases and big data, but for some reason I never felt super comfortable with it. And I stumbled, literally stumbled on it.

Adrian:    And Yandex essentially is like analytics, but the difference is from experience now is … it’s actually funny, it’s more accurate on the Google data then analytics. It’s more accurate on Bing, it gives you even a lot of more keywords like reference.

Adrian:    So you have more keywords for reference and on top of that, the bounce algorithm or calculation they use makes more sense. Basically the way they calculate the bounce rate is that if a user interacts with a page at least for I believe it’s 15 seconds, which at the end of the day, it’s quite accurate. But most importantly is that they have recorded sessions for users, which then you can aggregate and create heat maps.

Nick:        Okay.

Adrian:    So if you create some sort of triggers, you can filter by whoever visited your cart page and then try and take a look about what the journey was for user and how he interacts with the page, why he fell through, why it continued. And it’s kind of an integrated, basically it’s like having Crazy Egg analytics at the same time. So it’s quite amazing. And you’re not creating footprints as well.

Chris:       Right.

Adrian:    So yeah, I think that’s one I love for most money sites. And Clicky also is another one which is decent for anyone who doesn’t want to create footprints on PBNs maybe. I believe it’s free for each emails or you can create an email on domain itself and have an account. So, yeah, that’s-

Chris:       Going back to the heat maps with Yandex, I’ve never done any kind of heat maps myself but I thought maybe that was something that was possible with analytics. Is that not something you can do with analytics at all?

Adrian:    That’s something I never really got… Before this I would probably go for … would use tools like Crazy Egg probably I would … what was the other one called? I’ll get the name. But I don’t know to be honest. It’s something I haven’t tried with analytics.

Chris:       Gotcha. And what was Clicky again? Can you, can you talk about Clicky a little bit more-

Adrian:    Yeah, it records traffic in its basic form. But, the positive thing about it is that if you’re worried about footprint, maybe you have to decide three sites, three money sites and you want to reduce your costs. So you plan to use your PBNs on multiple sites for some reason. So basically, reduce your footprint, it’s a tool that monitors your traffic, gives you from where it’s coming from.  it’s quite basic but it’s free. I would use it if I… Some people are really afraid of Google search console or the analytics and anything that touches Google.

Adrian:    If you fall under that hat, Clicky is one of the options you can use, I would probably suggest Yandex.

Nick:        How long have you been using Yandex for now for this purpose?

Adrian:    Sorry?

Nick:        How long have you been using Yandex for this purpose now?

Adrian:    I think it’s going to be a year almost. And I think the only thing with using Google properties is search console just because kind of you have to. And tag manager… Just because for retargeting stuff and for some functionality. It comes in handy as well.

Chris:       Okay, gotcha. So, Yandex, you’re using on both PBNs and money sites?

Adrian:    when there’s a PBN …  basically for PBNs for sure, it would be too much of a hassle to use anything else really. But even for money sites, we always use the Yandex as well.

Chris:       So just better overall, cool. I’ll definitely have to check into it.

Adrian:    It’s quite interesting.

Nick:        Now, you operate in some of the most competitive niches. Via this conversation, it sounds like you’re sort of more of an on-page guy. Would that be accurate or what’s your stance on that?

Adrian:    I’m not sure, but basically the thing I think … basically, my whole on-page interest came actually from off-page because when we started, you’d run the same process and usually it was the same thing and then you ran it on one site and you see the site fly… And then you run the same thing on another site and nothing happened, and of course you know, it’s always bad links, right? Isn’t it?

Nick:        It’s what they say.

Adrian:    And I started getting really frustrated about that. And, sometimes it’s obvious you can answer that, but then you have those situations where it’s maybe a bit deeper than just spending an hour or two on a website. And that’s how my interest kind of got more on the on-page bit… Because from one hand, you feel bad because it’s called service back then. It’s not delivering and without having an answer, you can’t really say much.

Adrian:    So, that’s how I got into the on-page, but then, over time it all kind of started clicking that at the end of the day, a good site basically needs to have all signals in place and that’s maybe the difficult bit on SEO because you just need to have all the signals in place.

Adrian:    If you have a signal that is overpowered, in some cases and you end up with a website that is unbalanced and that is also an issue you need to deal with. But yeah, without getting into the whole geeky stuff, the on-page, the first thing is the basics. As long as you have your basics in place, just making sure that your SERPs are clean, pages that are still 301-ing shouldn’t be there, 404s shouldn’t be there, pages that are-

Nick:        Yeah, the basic maintenance of … now would you say-

Adrian:    We’re talking about SERPs, right?

Nick:        Uh-huh.

Adrian:    So just scrape the SERPs, make sure nothing is there, nothing, nothing, clean. All pages, the index, basic technical stuff just to reduce 301s, on-page, so no broken links. Then just running basic H1s, H2s, and then from there, just start optimizing using whatever tool you like, whether it’s a free tool like website or a paid one like Pop or Surfer or whatever and then start joining the dots. That’s where you have to start thinking there.

Adrian:    Because when you start joining the dots it’s … but there’s a lot of tools now that you can use. You know, recently, there’s this really, really cool tool InLinks I think it’s called, but even POP actually are doing entity mapping. So you know, there’s a lot you can do, it’s just a question of interpreting of how you can make Google think or understand that you are covering the whole topic, right? So, that what it’s all about.

Nick:        Now, in niches like this that are hyper competitive, would you say that it’s a extremely advantageous as far as your pocket book goes to start with good on-page? Like those fundamentals are going to help you grow exponentially with off-page, but that you’ll have to try significantly less with the off-page if your on-page is on point?

Adrian:    I think it really depends on which niche you’re referring to, but the niches we deal with, I wouldn’t even suggest for anyone that doesn’t have experience to even get into them to be honest because it’s the type of niches where money doesn’t solve all problems, that’s the issue again.

Adrian:    And that was probably one of the mistakes I did when I started. But unless you know the niche inside out and you perform some really deep keyword analysis and you find that small pocket that might return some ROI, to be honest I wouldn’t even consider it now if I was in that situation.

Nick:        Really ?

Adrian:    Because, I think the only way for anyone to make some… not compete but you know, to take a small bite of the cake would be to have … like literally to be an expert on the topic already. So I’m not talking about basic keyword research, so I’m talking about topics that keywords to come probably because I think it would be… If someone’s starting out, adult maybe, because adult is a bit different, but when it comes to casino for sure. It has become too hard probably. Pharma, it is what it is, you know, payday there are some clusters which are accessible, macro clusters at least.

Adrian:    But if you’re starting out, it’s not niches I would suggest for sure.

Nick:        Right. But your entire career has been spent in these niches, right? Basically have you ever even worked on let’s say a local plumbing or a local website, something like that?

Adrian:    in terms of local, I worked a bit, just out of curiosity again… yeah, with the intention of spamming GMB, yes. But it was mostly basically GMBs with exact matches or a semi exact matches and then basically building citations to them. They work amazingly well. That’s something I would suggest to anyone starting out, but other than that, –

Nick:        Wait, say that again, sorry. Citations directly to GMBs is what you were advocating-

Adrian:    Citations, yeah, it was a mix, GMBs and to the domain itself after setting up the markups, having the address stuff on board and social media… And this is stuff you can easily get done. There’s a lot of vendors basically. It works amazingly well actually, but it was more out of curiosity.

Adrian:    But nowadays I’m just using directly as part of the EAT in some niches, which is kind of required, but yeah, basically I prefer to stick to what, what…  the niches where we are the kind of big enough to… there’s always something new to learn.

Nick:        Right, keeps you entertained.

Adrian:    Oh yeah. Especially Google keeps us entertained, on our toes all the time.

Nick:        Always, yeah-

Chris:       Definitely keep things fresh, that’s nice, thanks Google, thanks a lot.

Adrian:    Yeah, thanks for the nights of no sleep.

Nick:        Yeah, right.

Chris:       You know, when you think about it, they’re actually creating opportunity though-

Nick:        For sure-

Chris:       … with each thing that they roll out, they’re creating a new playing field, a new set of opportunities you can go after depending on how everything really settles.

Nick:        Yeah, you touched on it at the very beginning how we, you and I and Chris have gotten to hear about the glory days of SEO, right? And it’s like, I remember when I got into SEO how bad it sucked to figure things out and I feel like every year it’s getting more and more competitive in a sense. That if you’re not serious about analyzing what’s going on in the SERPs, exploring what’s going on in the industry, then the days of capitalizing in this industry I think are probably over. You know, it’s pretty limited on what you can spam out and get a huge bank roll off of, where you’re not at least going to have some competition I would think.

Chris:       I feel like a lot of local still kind of-

Nick:        Yeah, local may be is more simple, but then it’s the client getting I feel like is what’s difficult for some people, you know?

Chris:       For sure, yeah.

Adrian:    But I think that over the last three years, whatever have improved after all is that we have some amazing tools which I think weren’t available.  if you just touch Cora for a bit, right?  these tools are so powerful that … we’re talking about a different game. In terms of opportunity, I think a lot of people kind of ignore one and most important thing in SEO-

Chris:       Oh my god, what is it?

Adrian:    That’s not links, it’s not a on-page, when it works, it works against clients.

Nick:        What’s that?

Adrian:    It’s time.

Nick:        Time, sure.

Adrian:    The job of the SEO essentially is to put things into a growth trajectory, right?

Nick:        Right.

Adrian:    as long as the site is in a positive trajectory, an SEO can only do so much because, Google would still need its time to put the site where it thinks it should be. Then you know, after things kind of get back into a linear position, then the SEO needs to kind of go back to that and see what can be done again.

Adrian:    Probably some people try to maybe do too much sometimes, especially when they are pressured from clients in some instances and unless you know exactly what you’re doing, you need to wait for that straight line to do the next move and keep doing stuff.  nowadays, I think that’s maybe one of the small advantages we have is that we know what the next phase will require. So we basically shift to the next phase while the previous phase is still being developed.

Adrian:    So we kind of try to create that linear line of growth without having to wait for that straight line. But again, you still get that odd website where you know that your expertise doesn’t always go exactly as planned, but it’s time, it’s all about time.

Nick:        I feel like that’s a really hard pill for a lot of people to swallow.

Adrian:    Yes it is.

Chris:       Everyone learns it in the beginning, everyone learns you have to wait and see. But even you still see people that even really should know what they’re doing at a certain point and they still… it’s like they kind of forget that point. They think they’re too good for time to matter anymore. They think they can just do it immediately and get results, but-

Adrian:    If there’s anything I’ve came to understand, it’s about SEO is there shouldn’t be any secrets about SEO because you know, anyone that wants to stay in the game basically needs to keep investing into what’s going on and the complete sharing of information, the communities are so important just mainly for that because one person basically can’t absorb and do all the research.

Adrian:    And the time factor and but yeah, the problem is that sometimes, yeah, don’t oversell a SEO if you’re doing clients, never oversell a SEO because it will bite you back and it’s … just don’t do it literally.

Chris:       So with the way things are moving with all the updates that Google will continue to roll out and just how SEO is evolving, do you see any kind of difficulties in the future or do you think it’s at least for present times something that we’ll be able to keep up with?

Adrian:    Yeah, I think the times of winging it are kind of getting over now, I think people should start focusing on, especially unless they have the systems in place on niches, that’s for sure. Because there’s a lot of things that are niche-specific now. And so you need to kind of specialize when you’re starting out in terms of the old backlink, on-page stuff.

Adrian:    On-page, everyone knows on-page is not what it used to be. So, everyone should start really looking into that and everyone should probably start reading a bit less and doing a bit more.

Nick:        Sure, always helps if-

Adrian:    Because all the theories I’ve read when I started and then you start testing stuff with it, wait, wasn’t this supposed to not work?

Nick:        Yeah. It’s hard to trust anything that’s been out there for-

Adrian:    So yeah, read but do more.

Nick:        Well, read and do, right? It’s like if you see something, don’t take it… it’s what we see all the time. It’s like somebody read something and it, “Oh well but that said this, so that must be the way it is.” Well no, unfortunately, if you go out and test that, any variants of what you read might occur and it’s going to be based on different criteria. Like you said, the niche is all specific, you know what you’re doing on-page, off-page, etc. So it’s about playing with the variables, right? Self exploration.

Adrian:    Actually I was speaking with a very good friend of mine this morning or last night, call it what you will, and he’s doing a really exceptional actually just buying spam domains. You know, what do you look for when you’re looking for a domain? Chinese links.

Nick:        He’s looking for Chinese links, yeah. Have you ever used them for 301s to web 2.0s or anything like that? It’s awesome, spam links-

Adrian:    To be honest I haven’t.

Nick:        It’s awesome, man. You can buy something where it’s the main criteria I look for is, is it spammy, as shit, and then is it indexed? If I see both of those things, then I know I can probably play with it and you can test it just by using it as a PBN, sending a backlink to something. But if it’s good, 301 with a really spammy domain, maybe not to your … not directly to your money site, but as a tiered option is … I like doing it.

Chris:       Nick really likes the dirty stuff.

Nick:        I like some dirty stuff. I think it’s fun, and you buy these spammy domains, everybody’s like, “Oh no, oh my gosh.” You know, it’s like you, you bought a domain with a million links for $9 and let’s see what the fuck happens. You know, if it blows up, it blows up, but it was a lot of fun trying, right?

Adrian:    This is really bad neighborhood for you.

Nick:        Yeah. Bad neighborhood for all of us. We shouldn’t have gotten together.

Adrian:    Actually there’s one thing I wanted to share if anyone’s still around. I ran quite a big test. Yeah, testing is my thing. And there was actually… I’m currently talking with Ted I think from POP, maybe we’ll just do something about it. But yeah, let’s just share it here.

Nick:        Sure.

Adrian:    So you know, so people talk about keywords, frequencies or term frequencies, right? And I found this amazing correlation this week when… you know have those domains, where you have that dash in the URL, and essentially let’s say, you have “best what?” Best hoover, what? Give me a word.

Nick:        Yeah, best dash vacuum cleaner.

Adrian:    Best vacuum cleaner.

Nick:        Sure.

Adrian:    So there’s a big difference between having a domain bestvaccumcleaners.com and best-vacuum-cleaners.com.

Nick:        Okay.

Adrian:    I’ll explain why. So basically, if you analyze your source code, bestvacuumcleaners.com, that’s not an exact match. But that’s an LSI even I think, right?

Nick:        Okay.

Adrian:    But the domain that has the dashes essentially is picked up by Google as a keyword frequency.

Nick:        Oh, really?

Adrian:    Yep.

Chris:       So dashes are good.

Adrian:    No, bad.

Chris:       Dashes are bad, okay.

Adrian:    Yeah, because then basically what happens is that when you need to de-optimize all your team, because all your team links, you need to rebuild them using the incomplete URL. Because otherwise they would be picked up as another… you know, basically, you would be over optimized by a mile and they will underperform literally.

Adrian:    There’s a project I’m involved in Sweden that literally, just by doing this, so we went through all menu links, all the OG items or whatever we could find and change these things to, I don’t know the name actually, but yeah, basically just to remove the domain and change them to just the path. And we moved from like 12 or 13 for quite high competition actually to four in a couple of days. It was one of the-

Nick:        I’m guessing in high competition, right?

Adrian:    Medium. I know it wasn’t like high, high, but the moves were really enough to show really significant indications and for on-page stuff, we don’t re really need to wait. So as long as you force index, you see the changes in minutes, right?

Nick:        Very cool. That’s awesome. I appreciate the tidbit. How long have you been testing that?

Adrian:    How what?

Nick:        How long have you been testing that?

Adrian:    This domain was really strange because you know we have our systems and stuff and this particular domain was underperforming by a mile in a niche with, like I said, I it’s not hyper competitive. It’s competitive but not top top. But it got me curious and the last week, this is by coincidence, I ran a couple of page optimizer because I was mainly using Surfer and that’s I think one of the issue now with SEO. Surfer is good at one thing, POP is good another one, cognitive SEO is good another one, you end up getting a mortgage for-

Nick:        Yeah, a huge tool box.

Adrian:    Yeah. Actually we also build our in-house tools now.

Nick:        Mm-hmm, you have a coding background, right?

Adrian:    Yes. More or less my background is coding and trading.

Nick:        Yeah.

Adrian:    So numbers and code. And the difference is that POP use their source. So basically there’s the code for the data. And I noticed, “Oh wow, we really over optimized,” and then I ran the same test on domains with these dashes. And yeah, maybe it was in front of-

Nick:        In front of the same thing.

Adrian:    Really, it’s not big news, it’s in front of us, but it’s one of those things that,  I was surprised-

Nick:        It’s good information for anybody starting on anything, anything new or yeah, if they’re having issues.  that’s a pretty tricky bit of information to find, you have to be heavy into exploration to figure, something like that out.

Chris:       And just to clarify, are you talking about just the root domain or are you talking about dashes and inner page URLs as well?

Adrian:    Mainly I’m talking root domains because for exact match domains, right?

Chris:       Yeah, okay.

Adrian:    So just having that dash, that’s the difference.

Chris:       Well you heard it here first ladies and gentlemen, no dashes in your root domain. If you have them, go buy a new domain. Now we sell domains, so…

Adrian:    those are usually domains you might find, right? They are solid, they work really well, but you have to first de-optimize your team. That’s the trick basically you have to optimize your team. So only buy them basically if you have some coding skills.

Chris:       Sure. Well thanks for the tip.

Nick:        Yeah, thanks for that. Maybe start winding down, I think we’ve been going like an hour, right?

Chris:       Yeah, sure.

Nick:        Maybe some just finishing touches, like, you know, where you see SEO going here in the future, what your plans are for the future. Anything along those lines?

Adrian:    Yeah, look, basically the way things are going with SEO is a big word, “proximity” I guess. Everything is changing to proximity whether it’s location or topics. So SEOs need to kind of up their game. I’m guessing we’ll have a bit of … the game is changing. Look, especially for the local guys,  some of the niches, Google is constantly trying to get more real estate with these zero click SERPs now as well. So, anyone starting out, make sure to do your homework, what niches you’re going in, what niches you’re not going in.

Adrian:    For sure, I would definitely suggest to do some research and you know, the PPC and then GMB or you know, ways of how you can get into niches more effectively, potentially and maybe faster.  for myself, we have some products which at least I know one of the positives I guess is that there are, if yours SEO-friendly, because there are some niches that just because of the nature of how they are, they maybe have a bit of more longevity in terms of SEO, which if you think of voice, right?

Adrian:    No one’s going to ask voice to pay for a slot I guess. I’m not sure how that would work, but yeah, just keep updating yourself and be up for the challenge because challenges are constantly increasing and the game is getting constantly more hyper-focused as time passes. And I think it’s affecting mostly the local SEO at the moment for sure.

Adrian:    But it’s also moving to affiliate with all the real estate Google is getting now with the snippets or the positions. So just keep on the ball, keep focused and you’ll be okay I guess.

Chris:       All right, yeah, ladies and gentlemen, Adrian Borg, yeah, thanks again, man. We really liked having you on.

Nick:        Yeah, really appreciate it, great talk, great tidbits.

Chris:       Same guys, was nice talking to you.

Nick:        Look forward talking to you again.

Mads Singers is a management consultant and coach who’s worked with some of the biggest names in the SEO industry. On this episode of SirLinksalot’s SEO Podcast, we talk to Mads about common management mistakes SEOs make, scaling your agency, and much more.

Think you’d be a great addition to our podcast or have a request for someone to be featured? Head over to our podcast discovery page.

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Read the Full Transcript:

Chris: All right everybody, welcome back to another edition of our “SirLinkSalot’s SEO Podcast.” This is number two. Today we are with Mr-.

Nick: Mad Singers.

Chris: Mad Singers, Matt Sorenson… which one is it?

Mads: Mad Singers.

Chris: Mad Singers, okay. Do you want to give us a quick about you, a little elevator pitch about yourself?

Mads: Sure, man. My name is Mad Singers. I’m originally from Denmark. I haven’t lived there for about 17 years now. My background generally has been in management. So, I used to work with large companies like Xerox, IBM etc, and my passion for many years, pretty much all my life has been management, how to be effective with people, and how to manage people well. Basically, I left when I was about 18… I left Denmark. I lived in Ireland, the UK… I’ve been living in Eastern Europe and Asia. I’ve been around, and right now I own a bunch of businesses.

So, I have my primary business. The one that I spend the most time on and find the most fun is my management coaching and consulting. I also run an outsourcing business in the Philippines where I spend a fair bunch of my time. Then I’ve got a couple of sales projects and things like that.

Nick: The management business is that you’ve got like a remote location that you operate out of with employees etc. How does that work?

Mads: Yes. So, the management coaching, it’s a little bit of a mix. I have a specific course that’s called Management Mastery, Effective Management Mastery, which I say is the “80/20” of management. What I basically tried to do is take most of my key lessons and kind of condense it down to about four hours worth of video content split into a bunch of modules, which really take people most of the way there when it comes to management. For a lot of the clients I work with, when I first start working with them they’re like, “Oh I’m not good at managing people. I don’t want to do it. I just want to hire someone to do it or something.”

But most of the people… if you can learn SEO or you can learn e-commerce and stuff, getting the nuts and bolts of management is not that difficult. A lot of people want to work with me for a couple of months, and they actually start enjoying it because most of the time when you’re not good at something, you don’t enjoy it. What tends to happen is that when you start getting some skills and you start really realizing, “Oh, when you manage people well, that can give me a big benefit.” Then a lot of people actually really start significantly enjoying it.

Nick: Absolutely.

Mads: Then, I also do coaching on Skype on a one-on-one basis or one to more basis. I do a lot of retreats with people. So, a lot of particularly online business owners, they meet a couple of times a year, they bring the team together in one location, particularly the management team. Very often I then fly in and spend one, two, three days with them and really help them move to the next level.

Chris: Is this primarily for SEO related companies or are you doing a big mix of stuff?

Mads: Really, management is the same everywhere. I work with lots of online business owners in general. I have focused a lot on the SEO and e-commerce industries just because… how do you put that politely? A lot of a SEOs aren’t naturally good with people.

Nick: Yeah, you are right. Sure.

Mads: I think that is the most polite way you can say it. A lot of SEOs aren’t naturally good with people, which means you have a lot of easy wins.

Chris: Which is why maybe they’re drawn to SEO in the first place.

Nick: Yeah. I was curious about that because you’ve worked for big companies like Xerox and IBM. So, that’s where you got your start and now I’m really interested in how you niched down because you’re a powerhouse in this industry. We’re a small community – SEO is small relative to what you were doing with IBM and Xerox. How did you end up coming from such a conglomerate type backdrop into where you are now? Or are you still working with corporate entities like that?

Mads: So, really what happened was initially when I was working with IBM, I started doing coaching on the side. I’ve always been extremely passionate about management. I’m really passionate about helping other people to learn and grow. What happened initially was I was working with other people in corporate, and to start out, it was mostly other individuals who either wanted to get into management or who wanted to grow within that current management role. But very quickly, it started also being companies. The thing is, it pays very well but when you are into big companies to drive in the motivation, it’s a very different one.

So, what happened was when I left IBM, I ended up managing people here in in Asia. What happened was I moved out here and I spent a bunch of time particularly in Philippines. Very quickly, I got into these entrepreneurial networks where I very quickly saw a huge opportunity to help a lot of people – which I started doing. Obviously, if you go and do coaching in some of the large companies, they’ll pay you 20, 30, 40 grand a day. Most entrepreneurs don’t have that kind of money.

It’s a totally different game in terms of the money aspect, but the thing is when you show up, it’s a totally different level of commitment. It’s not like people leaning back and saying, “Oh great, I know I’ve got four hours off kind of time to just lay my head down on the table and sleep,” kind of thing. Whereas entrepreneurs and generally entrepreneurial organizations, even the people within them… they’re just much more dedicated. For me as a coach, honestly it’s not as much about the money. For me, it’s about my love for seeing people develop. Within the SEO industry, I’ve worked with, I say all the big guys.

Nick: Everybody, yeah. I mean you just left Chiang Mai. You were a speaker there, you’ve spoken there multiple times, am I right about that?

Mads: I’ve definitely spoken in Chiang Mai, but I didn’t speak this year. But yeah, I’ve spoken in Chiang Mai. Yeah, I mean again I’ve worked with all the big guys. I worked with Diggity. I worked with all his companies, I work with Philip. I work with Ahrefs. I work with most of the big guys. Really, it’s so fulfilling for me to really see people grow. I think Kurt is probably a great example of someone that has gone from a couple of people to 20 people.

Probably one of the most successful businesses you’ll see in this industry. A lot of the time when people do it on their own, they bump into all these issues and they have all these growth challenges. But he’s a great example of someone I’ve really helped just keep pushing through all those barriers. Really helped him take his team to the next level. A lot of the time, what happens in management is you have these three kind of blocks.

When you start getting to eight to ten people, which is more than one business owner ideally should manage, most people hit a big block. Some people never actually go above that. Then there’s sort of another block around 20 to 25 where the companies start getting so big that it’s a bit too far from their owner. Everyone makes sure everything’s getting done the right way. At that point and really up to the next challenging point around 50 people, it’s all about having make sure you’ve built the right level of management around you.

Because that’s where your organization will really crumble. If you haven’t developed your staff well enough, and then when you get to 50, again that’s the challenge… the layers between the owner and the bottom of the organization start becoming so big that again that if your management team is not very well versed, you start seeing a lot of challenges. So, there’s sort of three of the areas that I focus a lot on. But, Kurt is a great example of someone that built a great company primarily with a Filipino workforce.

Nick: For people that don’t know his story. Do you mind just giving little bit-.

Mads: Quick recap.

Nick: Yeah, a quick little recap.

Mads: Yes, he started a CRO company. So, not SEO specifically but CRO. He basically started out primarily helping affiliate owners. He’d do CRO on their websites and optimize them for conversion. After that, very quickly he moved on to adding more pieces. So, again he was very good at niching down to start. Then he’s gradually adding more and more niches as he managed to master them and find all the equipment. Most entrepreneurs tend to do this in the beginning, they’re trying to say I work with anyone, anywhere… like I do SEO, E-commerce, local, whatever.

The problem with that is they don’t really niche down… they don’t really go specific, which means it’s always that everything is custom – everything is individual. The revenue might be good but the profit margins generally tend to be very low because of that. When you haven’t really automated and when you don’t know a niche very well, it’s so much harder to make really good profits.

Nick: Right.

Chris: It seems to be a big problem with new people making affiliate sites as well. They try to go too general instead of niched-down in the beginning and spread themselves way too thin and end up kind of just floundering.

Nick: Based on your experience with people who have succeeded in getting these 20-plus person teams, you’re talking about foundational strategies being the most important in scaling a company. I’m guessing primarily through automation of workforce. For somebody new getting in SEO, and we’re jumping ahead here but since we’re talking about it – what strategy would you advise anybody that’s getting involved in this business that wants to scale and should focus on at the early stages… at the very early stages?

Mads: Yeah. So, I talk with a lot of people about this but basically, fundamentally pick a niche. What happens with most SEO companies’ day to day as I said – they do everything all over the place. What happens is very often when they become successful, what’s happening is they’ve suddenly bumped into a client and they are like, “Oh, this is an interesting niche, let me do some more on this niche.” That’s really the point where they start becoming successful. So, if you do that from the beginning, your likelihood of being successful is generally higher or being successful faster is generally higher.

So, I’ll take a specific example. If you start out and want to do SEO… and from an SEO standpoint, if you look at the likes of local SEO, it tends to be a lot easier to deliver quick results. So, if you start out and you say, “Okay, we want to do local SEO.” Then my suggestion basically is to find a niche that has money… find a niche that’s not ridiculously competitive. Really dig in, really get into it, really try to fully understand it.

Now, if you pick a niche… let’s just for argument’s sake pick something – let’s say companies that do rentals of heavy machinery. I don’t know about tractors and trucks and stuff like that, where that’s a very high ticket item. So, getting clients is worth a lot, right?

Chris: Sure.

Mads: If you’re picking it, you’re like that. You don’t necessarily have to niche down to a region but you definitely can, and for most people picking a country makes a lot of sense at least. But the whole thing at that point you want to do is you really want to have one or two, maybe three clients, and you really get to master it. You really get to understand what it takes to rank in this niche. Really what you can do when you get to that point is duplicate most of the work you do. Because you’re doing the same thing in Iowa that you’re doing in St. Louis.

It’s going to be the same thing – it’s the same keywords, it’s the same content. I’m not saying you should duplicate the content even though that does work in local. But if you have a content brief, you can literally use the same content brief again and again. If you work with a few clients, for example on the CRO side, to try and optimize for conversions as well. What happens is you start knowing what works and again generally what works in Miami works in New York. Generally, I’m not saying everything, but generally if you learn some things that work really well in one place, and they’re really likely to work really well in other places as well.

Now, this does a few things. One is that your lead-gen become significantly easier. Just like when you build a website, you’re like, “Oh, we do SEO, everyone come to me.” Why should people pick you instead of everyone else? And what it comes down to at that point is the cost. The thing is, if you get compared to everyone else, and the main sort of differentiator is your cost, if you are the cheapest, you will have a problem with margins and making money and delivering results. If you’re not the cheapest, you generally won’t get picked. So a lot of the time, people end up with all these funny, weird customers. What most people do in the beginning is they start out with low cost customers. The problem is when you don’t have a lot of resources, delivering results to customers with very little money is super time assuming, it’s difficult, and they’re the most difficult customers you will ever work with.

Because the thing is, people who only have $1,000 in their back pocket, they’re the most difficult to work with because they really want to make something out of that money. Then I was looking at it from an ROI, look long-term perspective. They are like, “Hey I’ll give you $1,000, bring it back to me right now.”

Nick: It reminds me of PBN sales, I want to cringe a little bit.

Chris: So, I think most people that are starting local agencies… We’re based in Austin, so the average local agency here in Austin, they would really target Austin based companies. But they wouldn’t really niche down – so you would consider that a pretty big mistake.

Mads: For me, it is 100%, because what happens is when you start with the marketing, your life becomes so much easier, trying to hit everyone everywhere all the time. It’s not a great marketing strategy in any business. So, just like with my coaching, like us targeting specifically SEO, specifically e-commerce business – my stuff works everywhere with any online business. I do it because it’s so much easier for me. First of all, when you want to sell to people seeing your name and seeing you around a few times, it makes it significantly more likely that they will contact you. But the second thing is also specific case studies. One of the tools I love for lead generation particularly for small agencies is LinkedIn.

So, if you can start hitting up, let’s say heavy machinery type niches. If you can start reaching out to those, and say, “Hey, we work with heavy machinery companies, AKA you specifically. Here’s a case study when we helped take one company from making 20 sales a month online to making a hundred sales online per month.” You have some very specific examples that are 100% relatable to them. When you’re the SEO company for heavy machinery, it’s like, “Oh, you’re talking to me, you’re not talking to just anyone. You are talking to me.” It makes landing clients so much easier.

Chris: It’s kind of running a targeted ad. Essentially, it’d be like your entire business is the targeted ad.

Mads: Exactly. When you start with Facebook and stuff like that, you’re just so much more targeted. The thing is when you do the same clients again and again, I mean there can be a little bit of variation though, but you know the niche, you can talk with them about their specific terms, about their technical tips, and you can really get to know this thing. Whereas if you work with a dentist one day, and the next day with an accountant, and the third day with that heavy machinery business, then you don’t know their businesses.

Nick: Right. You’ve missed industry standards and then you’re going to lose respect overall at some point in time. You’re going to lose clients in the end too… it makes perfect sense.

Mads: Exactly.

Chris: So, would you say this is probably the number one mistake you see people making in the SEO industry right now?

Mads: I was about to say in every business but definitely in SEO the most. I mean, most people starting a business do this thing. They want to hit everyone because they’re desperate for work. It’s natural… it’s a natural behavior. I don’t say people are being stupid doing it. I’m just saying there’s often better ways, and one of the problems with niching down a bit initially is it can be a little bit more difficult to get the initial customers. But as soon as you do get them, things start ramping up significantly faster. One of the key things is that you can also afford to charge a lot more, one of the things people always do in the beginning is they always charge bottom dollar. If you haven’t got a client, getting a couple of clients where you can get some testimonials can make sense though, I get it.

But the thing is, if you have a client that’s paying $2000 a month or client paying you $4,000 a month, the difference in the results you can deliver make it much more likely to deliver amazing results if you have four grand to work with compared to if you have two grand to work with. That’s one of the key things – charging more. It’s not just a question of being “more expensive,” it’s the ability to deliver results even when unexpected stuff happens.

Chris: Right, sure. I guess that’s a pretty big struggle for a lot of people. Like I said, they’re trying to get in with a cheaper price. There’s other people saying they can deliver amazing results for a cheaper price. So, it’s kind of this this balancing act you’ve got to play between-.

Mads: One of the key things, just touching on pricing a little bit – the amount of agencies that are charging $500 to $1000 a month is kind of scary. If you’re looking at it, if you’re charging a client $500 a month, the overhead and the administration and everything, it is so limited but you can actually provide a value for a client for that amount of money. So, again when you’re charging bottom dollar, what happens is you get the worst clients. So, one of the things I always tell clients that I started working with who have a small agency or are just starting out is to really charge a significant amount of money because the thing is – a lot of people have been burned by SEO’s.

You want to set yourself apart in the other direction. If everyone else charges a thousand dollars a month, make your prices visible. Put them on your website and say starting at $4000 a month. The reason is you will scare away the people with very little money that are not the ideal clients anyway. What happens is a lot of serious businesses aren’t interested in working with bottom dollar guys.

Chris: Sure.

Mads: Again, getting your first one or two clients and testimonials in some case studies can make sense to charge not so much. But after that point, if you can get your prices up – I mean, I am not saying $4000 is necessarily a magic number. I could be $2000 or $3000 or whatever, but you want to move your prices up. By the way, when you pick a niche, make sure it’s a niche that actually has money. Sometimes I find people who niche down on niches that have absolutely no money, and they make tiny profits. Obviously, that way they can’t pay you a lot of money.

Nick: Even in hindsight… It’s like all right. When I first got into SEO. Yeah, let’s build the agency website. Let’s get a rank for the city we’re in, it’s going to be awesome. We’re going to get these clients. But talking to you, it’s like if I really wanted to make sense of what I was doing and I had the education I do now. Okay, I’m going to go back. I am going to focus. I am going to niche down.

In niching down, you’ve created ability to execute target markets via SERP manipulation, finding data industry standards, what their products go for, etc. It’s simplified, but when we start out, I feel like there’s an overwhelming concern for money or for growth like you said… and it’s just not there. But I think if somebody took the time to do that and take your advice on something like this, they’d grow exponentially and much quicker versus the road we did. Then it’s two years before you ever actually make anything that could support you in the industry. But yeah, makes perfect sense.

So, let’s talk about growth a little bit. Let’s pretend that I’m somebody who’s taking all of your advice right now. So, I’m starting niche down, I found a good niche that has decent margins. I’m starting at a higher price because I don’t want the bottom feeders. I don’t want people that don’t have the money to spend, basically. But I need these initial clients. Do you have any tips for the new guy to get over that initial hump?

Mads: I think being honest can go a long way. I work with a few people who basically started out going to some of these relatively big, reputable companies. Kind of say, “You know, I’m starting out in this thing, I’m not yet perfect. But I’m wanting to do some good work.” I’m going to do this at a reasonable rate or even sometimes do something for free just to get that case study, testimonial, etc.

I think as soon as you have it, a lot of my clients find LinkedIn so beneficial. Because you can really target people specifically by industry, specifically by role, and really reaching out in a personal manner to people can really go a really long way.

Chris: At what point do you generally see people who are doing this – who are starting a small local agency. At what point do you see them starting to automate some of their processes with teams?

Mads: It depends a lot on how well they niche down and how well they do things right. It really depends on what the founder’s skillset is. So, if the founder’s skillset is a SEO person, they would quickly often get a sales guy on board. So, SEO is kind of coming in a few different ways. Some of them kind of like sales, but not too many. Some of them absolutely despise the sales. If it’s sort of a very technical, nerdy SEO, they generally don’t like sales. One of the first roles they often get on board is that – either part-time or some commission-based sales guy – which makes a ton of sense. I mean, it really depends on the size of the clients and the amount of work involved, but some people, when they start getting three, four, five clients… start building a team.

It depends a lot on the process, it depends a lot on the type of clients, and on the work involved. Some agencies start all the way from building the website, SEO etc. So, depending on how much the scope is, it varies quite a lot.

Nick: Something I’ve heard you talk about on other podcasts as well that I thought was pretty interesting was – at what point in time do you think a business owner and entrepreneur needs to look for help? At what point do you want to start automating through human capital… through other people? What point is that?

Mads: The right answer is – when they want to grow. Because what happens is even as an entrepreneur, you can actually, again depending on exactly what you do, but that a lot of entrepreneurs can actually do a lot of things themselves. They can, but obviously you’re limited by hours – you’re limited by a lot of things. It depends a lot on what you have in the bank. If you’re constantly having to make a profit to sustain your own living, obviously that puts a limit to how much you can afford to invest in growing with people. So, there’s different scenarios but generally I would say when you’re ready to grow and when you want to take it to the next level. The key things for me are when you’ve found a business model of work, you’ve found a good niche, you’ve found the good audience, and you have a relatively consistent way of getting leads.

Then you start looking at – well, how can I scale this? Before you start pumping a ton of money into Facebook ads and stuff, you often want to make sure that you can actually fulfill. You’re starting to hit your eight, nine hours a day or whatever, and you’re struggling to fulfill, then adding more customers to the base is not going to help you do that better. That’s often the point, so what happens with most people is to start working ten hours, eleven hours, twelve hours a day. Then they start looking for help, and very often that’s kind of a bit too late. Because when you start working twelve hours a day, you are very ineffective generally.

Chris: Then micromanaging somebody else.

Mads: So, it is very financially dependent. I always say that one of the worst things you can do is put yourself under significant financial pressure… like if you don’t know how to pay your bills because you hire an employee. It only leaves you a couple of grand and you’re struggling to pay your bills at home – that’s detrimental to you and to be able to succeed. Some people can give you that extra push, but for a lot of people they end up spending so much mental energy on how they are going to pay these bills and what they are going to do to eat every day and stuff. It consumes so much of that time that they actually become really ineffective doing what they used to be very good at.

Chris: Also, it makes them a little too conservative in their decision making as well.

Mads: Actually, it makes them do things for clients out of fear of losing clients that often leads to a bad path… leads down a bad path and really puts them in a situation where the clients own them. It helps them build the business right now, but as soon as you have enough money to start leveraging things, what I always recommend is basically to have a clear sort of pyramid philosophy. What you are supposed to do in business is you want to start out, and in the beginning you are everything. When you start building a pyramid, basically what you’re consistently trying to do is to increase the number of dollars that each of your hours are worth. By doing that, you’re constantly trying to basically push the value of what you do.

Every time you’re doing things, when you look at your to-do list, and you say, “Well I know this stuff could be done by a guy but getting paid $5.00. I definitely don’t want to do that anymore because my time is more valuable than five dollars.” You start looking at… here’s some stuff that could be done by a $20 an hour – I definitely don’t want to do that… my time is worth more. Then you basically start building up the pyramid with people where you push low value work down the pyramid. Effectively, you end up building assets and taking up a company. That’s sort of the mindset behind it. Now, a lot of the time people really struggle to recruit in the beginning, and it’s natural. If you’ve never hired people before, the chance you’re going to go out and hire true superstars is generally fairly limited. Even if you know what you’re doing, hiring three superstars in a row doesn’t happen all the time.

One of the key things in the beginning, and for me the number one thing, is really having a good network. Because a lot of the time, you recruit in the beginning, and you’re much more likely to be successful if you either know someone or know someone that knows someone who’s a good fit for you. I generally think learning recruitment and learning to hire great people was one of the most important… probably one of the two most important skill sets for an entrepreneur. But taking the time and actually really perfecting that skill set is difficult with your first couple of hires. Because the first time you interview a human being, you have nothing to compare it to. For me now, I’ve interviewed thousands of people.

When I sit down and interview someone, I started to get the level of “Where is this person?” It’s definitely a good skill to learn, but you definitely can burn yourself a little bit in the beginning. Personally, I really love utilizing networks and so on. Also in the beginning, utilizing freelancers can be very freeing because you don’t need to employ them full-time.

Chris: So, this was something I wanted to ask you about someone who’s first starting to build their pyramid. They’re starting to bring on their first employees. I think a lot of people’s first instinct probably in this day and age is going to be to find outsourcers online – probably to keep costs down, and I was hoping you could shed a little light on building a team in-house versus outsourcing.

Mads: Again what I would say despite the fact that I own an outsourcing business, is it’s definitely not the answer to all things as many people would make it. Basically, the way I look at resources is that you want to get the right people doing the right things. If you’re hiring a sales guy as your first employee for example, you probably don’t want someone in the Philippines. I’m not saying you can’t find good salespeople in the Philippines, but more so that you want to get the right people in the right places. If you’re running a business where for example a lot of what you do is very simplified tasks like doing a ton of research every time you have a new client or you’re doing very low-level work, then yes it can definitely make sense to find that sort of cheap outsource workforce.

One example is we have a bunch of clients. They build that ton of sites, they’re like lead-gen sites for example and stuff where it doesn’t really make sense to have a native US person doing it. So, I really look at what the specific stuff that you need help with. Let’s say that for example you start your agency, and you’ve had a lot of luck landing these two and a half, three, 4k clients initially. Really what you want to do is you want to bring in people at a higher level who can help do, for example, SEO. When you do that, you basically… again, there are two roles. One of the challenges that most people have is it’s very difficult to hire people who already know and understand SEO at any reasonable rates. Because if you find a really good SEO, they would probably make a lot more money just doing that for themselves. So, very often what I’ve seen is people end up paying 8, 10, 12 grand a month for finding a really good SEO wanting to work in an office-based location in the US.

So, what most people go down the road of, which makes a lot of sense, is finding someone local who is maybe not well trained in SEO but is fairly technical… is fairly clued on. What they do is they end up teaching them pieces of the process. So, one of my fundamental rules is don’t clone yourself, and this might sound totally the reverse of what most people do. But the thing is, for most people it takes them three, four or five years to become good at SEO. If you’re really good and you’re training someone, you might do it in two years.

But the whole thing is you don’t hire people to have them sitting around for two years before they know what to do. From a business standpoint that just doesn’t make sense. Really what makes sense is looking at what the primary stuff you do is. So 80/20 of your task list, what’s most of the work you do? Let’s say for argument’s sake most of your work is link building. Well, then you want to bring in someone and you want to start up by focusing them on that areas that take the most time away from you. We specialize in how to do link building. For them, from a learning curve learning how to do a link building is significantly easier than learning to replicate you and learning all of the SEO game.

That could be learning to do keyword research or learning how to set up site… how to use Elementor or whatever sort of site building software you use. By specializing people, what happens is you’re much quicker to get them to the right level of expertise that matches what do you do. When you start, you start down at the bottom, and you learn a bunch of skills. The whole thing is if you hire someone else and particularly if you try to teach them everything, they would definitely start a little bit higher than you, but there’s so much to learn that they won’t grow significantly.

But if you just teach them link building, they will quickly get to a stage where they’re not significantly below you in skillset. If that’s all they do 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, they will very quickly get to a point where they’re probably at a similar level to you. Because they start perfecting, they start finding shortcuts, they start learning, they start doing things that mean they quickly grow. So, getting people up to similar level as yourself is important.

Nick: Right, make sense.

Mads: Then, basically what that enables you to do is that it enables you to… first of all you’re not less vulnerable. Because if you specialize people, they can turn out a lot more of that work. So, you’re much better at hiring three different people doing very specific roles instead of three people all doing what you do. Because for three people all doing what you do, the problem is if you’re one person and that one person leaves, that sets you back immensely. Whereas if you’ve got someone doing link building who leaves, you can bring in a replacement and train them up relatively quickly. It’s often a much simpler way or a much faster and much easier way building systems. Again, even within the US, there is this big range. There might be things where you can hire a great college student and they will be someone who has just finished studying, and they’ll probably get to a good level pretty quickly.

There might be some roles that are sort of business-critical. It might be tougher to find a good workforce for where you want to pay a bit more. But again, if you say link building is an easy thing to do, you’re better off paying a little bit less for getting link building and then having someone getting paid more, for example, to write copy or whatever. Just the last point in this is know what you want to perfect. What I mean with that, for example, if you run an e-commerce company, you generally don’t want to deliver your products by yourself. You hire a shipping company, you do it through Amazon, or you do something, right?

One of the key things about business is knowing what do you really want to perfect and what are the things you’re okay not doing within the business. So, if you do SEO, it could that you want to own the website thing. You want to do it in-house, you want to be an expert at tweaking sites and really fixing everything that’s on the website because and that’s often because that’s the owners strength.

That’s what they’re playing at… that’s where they set themselves apart from most of competitors. But they might say writing copy is not their game. They’re not good at it, and if that’s the case, you’re totally okay to find an agency or find a freelance copywriter who generally does your copy. You don’t have to own everything in-house but it’s important to make conscious decisions of what you own in-house.

Nick: Sure, makes a lot of sense. Let’s dive a little bit into how you’ve created this philosophy.  You’ve got great ideas and great strategies for management. If your story is anything like mine, or you know 99% of other entrepreneurs, we’ve all tried to build the pyramids multiple times with all sorts of accidents happening, etc. How did you grow this fundamental kind of ideology about what you currently do today?

Mads: I mean honestly when I started out, I was only 18 when I kind of got hit by the management by IT… like initially when I was younger I had this idea that I wanted to be a IT guy. What happened was I got a job pretty early on where I got the most amazing manager, and made people happy to do work and happy to be at work.

For me, my entire childhood, I was told, “School is amazing, wait till you get out of school and work life is horrible.” You know I didn’t particularly enjoy school to say the least. So, when I got the job and I started working with this woman who made people love their work, I was like dang, that’s what I want to do.

Nick: What was it that she did? What was it that made her that person?

Chris: Can you remember something?

Mads: Yeah, so very specifically it was her management skills… and that’s very broad. But it’s the way she nurtured people, it’s the way she cared. It was the way she was; I mean everyone felt that she was personally invested in them and their success. The thing is, her method of management was really good for me. But there were definitely people who didn’t enjoy it to the level I did, right. So, again, the same way when you manage people, the more they like you the more likely they are to like working with you.

Chris: Sure.

Mads: Like if you work with Elon Musk, you have to have a very certain personality to really enjoy working with him, right?

Nick: Yeah.

Mads: Because he is, and most people don’t like me saying this, but he can be a very tough guy.

Nick: Yeah.

Mads: If you don’t like immense pressure, if you don’t like phone calls at 3 o’clock in the morning with someone screaming at you, he’s probably not the boss you want, right? Some people who live life under that pressure, but again a lot of people don’t, right? So, anyways back to the story, the whole thing was that I got super inspired. Literally within a month and a half, I went from having this idea of me being like an IT tech guy to becoming a manager. I started frantically studying. For about 10-12 years, I paid for attending a bunch of management seminars out of my own pocket. I got mentors, I got coaches.

In the company I was working, I would literally find other managers in the business. I’d say, “Hey, when my shift finishes can I spend an hour sitting looking at what you’re doing?” I was totally hooked, right?

Chris: Did you say you were 18 at this time?

Mads: Yep.

Chris: Okay.

Mads: I know that’s not normal 18 years old.

Nick: It wasn’t for us, but it’s awesome, yeah.

Chris: Not just that you were super work-motivated, but the fact that you were an 18-year-old manager.

Nick: Yeah.

Chris: I’m assuming… were there any difficulties with trying to be a manager at such a young age?

Mads: I wasn’t a manager when I was 18, but that’s when I figured out that’s what I wanted to do. So, for me, it was again like within probably two or three months from that point I ended up becoming the deputy manager when my boss was away. That was out of sheer passion. I mean there were people on the team who were triple my age, right? Honestly, it wasn’t as much of an issue. So, the key thing for me was I very quickly got engrained in all the logic.

One of my biggest regrets and actually the reason I ended up leaving Xerox was because I really struggled finding other people, even within the higher level of the organization, who had the passion for management that I did. I ended up joining “IBM” which obviously is a huge company as well. I had a lot of different management challenges there, which were great. But again, there was definitely more people with sort of interest in developing and growing. But still, I didn’t feel like I met peers with my same passion. So, initially all my knowledge came from reading books and all this stuff.

When I first wanted to go into management, when asked people how they got there, they said you can go do this five-year degree. My view of school at the time and to this day is not the most positive in the world. So, a 5-year degree was not what I was interested in… which really was what pushed me to be frantic about the self-development. I started reading a lot about these people who didn’t have all these degrees and actually managed to become very good managers anyway. But that was really what sparked it. Then from there on, I obviously became a lot more experienced.

Chris: Sure.

Mads: But what ended up happening was that, it wasn’t that I didn’t make mistakes. But what happened was when I made mistakes very quickly, I realized, oh I should have done this instead. So, because I already had the theory in my head I started understanding when I made mistakes. It was very easy for me to troubleshoot and find out where I went wrong.

Nick: Right, great practice system.

Mads: If I hadn’t had the theory in my head, what would have happened is I would have thought that was the right way to do it and the person was stupid for not responding to me the way I wanted them to. But really, because I had all the theory, it really enabled me to grow really, really quickly when I started to go into management.

Nick: Right. So, speaking about some of these things, do you have any resources if there’s somebody interested in diving into what you’ve done or getting involved in management positions? What are some resources that really impacted you?

Mads: Yeah, so my number one resource, very objectively is obviously, is my management course. Everybody should get it. Besides that, I have some favorite books. My favorite book of all time from a management standpoint is called First Break All the Rules – What the World’s Best Managers Do Differently. Beside the fact that I love the title, that’s probably the book that shifted my mindset the most, and I’ll sort of talk about 30 seconds about why it did. It’s basically studying a lot of main ideas. Very often, when managers are like, oh I want to be like Elon Musk, I want to be like Steve Jobs.

The problem is they often pick these characters that are not like them in character. The thing is, if you’re trying to be something you’re not… if you’re trying to be an asshole calling up people at 3 a.m. in the morning and that’s not your personality, you’re going to fail at it.

Nick: Right.

Mads: One of the reasons why there’s so many very similar personalities in business management and large businesses today is because a lot of people try and be like these. But the thing is, with this book it basically goes through and says the best managers are the ones that really get to know themselves first. They really managed to master their strengths and understand their weakness and figure out how to work with these things in relation to management.

For me, that was really eye-opening because most people ask the question, “Who’s the best type of personality to be a good business or a good manager?” Nowadays, my answer is – everyone can be. The key thing is really knowing and understanding who you are and what you bring to the table. What are your core strengths and what is it that can make you really good as a manager? What are the things you can compensate on? A good way to compensate is hire people who compensate for that thing.

If you’re an SEO and you hate setting deadlines for people and pushing people, actually bring in an individual who is very good at project management who is very good at setting deadlines and pushing staff to deliver. That’s a great way of mitigating. Whereas, what most people do is they try to become the person they think they should be. Because it’s not natural to them, they’re still going to be shit at it, though.

Nick: Makes perfect sense.

Mads: So that’s one of my favorite books. I have a couple of other ones, and there’s an obvious one called “Traction” by Gina Whitman which is a phenomenal book. It’s probably one of the most actionable books to read on management. Then there’s a guy called Peter Drucker that I’ve read everything of. For people starting out, the best book is called “The Executive”.

Nick: Okay.

Mads: Which basically it’s a lot of theory and it can be a little bit dry. But from a management standpoint, it’s probably the best book out there. Then there’s a couple of other business books that are good for not necessary management, but more for business. Which would be things like “Profit First” by Mike McCalla, and that’s also an amazing book. So, well that’s a couple resources.

Nick: Great. Plenty for somebody to just start studying on most definitely.

Chris: So, walking back a little bit, what are your greatest strengths? What were your strengths that you realized early on that you tried to cultivate?

Mads: So, my greatest strength in general is knowledge that builds to comprehend and put a lot of data sets in my head and make great decisions. So, my natural personality is very similar to most SEO’s. I am generally like an SEO; they love data, they love information, and so on. So, that’s also one of my natural strengths, right. I’m really good at working with numbers… I’m really good at what what most SEO’s do when they look at a spreadsheet full of numbers and it’s kind of like the matrix. They see the graphs, and it makes sense to them.

One thing I learned pretty early on is kind of two in one. But it’s basically if you want to be successful, the number one skill that you have to improve is communication. Because communication is the single most frequent behavior as human beings that we engage in. It doesn’t matter if that’s your relationship at home, the relationship with your friends, networking or business relationships like employees, etc.

So, I did spend a significant amount of time from when I was 18 to about 22, 23, basically improving my communication skills immensely which is a large part of what’s in my management course. But really, that was a game changer. When you look at businesses today, salespeople and developers can’t talk together. Most organizations, when you have a sales team and you have a delivery team, they really struggle to communicate together. They don’t speak the same language. That makes it really really difficult for them to be very successful.

If you are one of those people who can learn effective communication and communicate between those parties, you put yourself in a very favorable position.

Nick: What kind of steps did you take in garnering that ability to communicate? Were you an introvert before or did you just think you needed to up your skillset to get to this level?

Mads: So, one fundamental is I’m a big believer in a behavioral framework called, “Disk” and I generally consistently use that to change the life of my clients. People don’t change natural behaviors, however what happens is that you can learn to be the less uncomfortable with things. So, if you’re a total nerd today, you’re never going to be a great salesperson who is running around talking to random people just out of pure joy. It won’t happen. If you’re uncomfortable talking to other people, what you can learn is to become a lot less uncomfortable doing it.

Nick: Right.

Mads: But it will never be a strength compared to people who have it as natural strength. So, the key thing here is definitely the framework of. The second thing I did was public speaking. So, I’ve done that now for about 12 years. I started out with organization called “Toastmaster’s.”

Nick: Yeah.

Mads: It’s probably the number one thing I recommend to shy clients and clients that struggle with their communication skills. Both because it’s a great network… you meet like-minded people who want to improve their skills, and they generally care enough about themselves to do self-development. For a lot of people, for a lot of people who don’t communicate well, actually building a network of great people is a really good place to start. Now second of all, a lot of SEO people… what they’re very good at is details and data.

When they first start talking about SEO, they won’t shut up again… nearly as bad as me. But they won’t shut up, right? What happens is, a lot of the time they talk a lot about details and they often struggle to be concise. One of the things you really learn with doing public speaking is… you know, I have 5 minutes. I need to take all this stuff I have and condense it down to 5 minutes… make it actionable, make it valuable. Public speaking for people like that is really, really beneficial.

It’s the same people who love writing these eight-page emails that just go on forever. When they communicate to people like them… great, they love it. But if you’re communicating to someone like a sales guy, they read the first two lines and they’ll run out of energy. So, their ability to learn to communicate both verbally and written in a way that’s effective is important. Particularly for data-driven people and for very detail-oriented people, it is probably the most valuable skill. I would say from public speaking, that’s probably the number one thing.

It wasn’t as much standing in front of an audience, it was much more those sorts of subtle skills that you learn. So, you learn a lot about body language, you know how you actually use body language within conversation. You’re not just sitting here with your arms crossed and being super…

Nick: Being closed.

Mads: Exactly. So, learning body language and learning really to hone in and very succinctly make clear points. That was probably one of the key things that I got out of public speaking, besides the fact that it pushes you. I mean it pushes a lot of your natural limits and so on.

Nick: Well, but you were also young, traveling overseas, meeting new digital nomads constantly etc. So, would you say your social life was kind of groomed as well?

Mads: So, honestly when I was 18-years old, I was probably the most introverted person you would find. So, when I started this game, what I did was, and it sounds ridiculous, I started learning about this management and I started learning that you should be networking and stuff. I’m like… I’m not good at this stuff and I literally set myself a challenge every day where I take public transport to and from work. I walk in and I sit down next to another human being. I say, “Hi.”

Nick: Right.

Mads: Just “Hi.”

Chris: Right, its huge.

Mads: For over a month, I literally just sat down next to 60 people or 50 people or whatever, and I said hi. Now a few of them started talking back to me but very few. But even for me, getting the courage to sit down next to a human being and say hi was frightening as hell.

Nick: Yeah, it’s an exercise.

Mads: After a month, I then upgraded. In the UK, they say “Hi, how are you?” And you can kind of say whatever… you don’t have to answer. So, I really like that point about the phrase. So, basically, I upgraded. Tor another month and a half I would sit down next to people and say, “Hi, how are you?” A little bit more, people started talking back to me, and that was really my start into networking and meeting people and so on.

Nick: That’s awesome.

Mads: When people see me at conferences nowadays, they can’t imagine that. Again, I’m not comfortable the way I am now when I’m in conferences. I’m not comfortable, but I’m a lot less uncomfortable than I used to be. I know from a business standpoint that it is by far the best thing to do.

Chris: Yeah and your method of getting over it. I think a lot of people make a little bit of a big mistake and they go down the self-improvement book hole without having any kind of actionable steps.

Nick: Right.

Chris: I guess all these books are pretty much telling you to take some concrete steps as well. But that’s why I really like your story.

Nick: I mean, I can relate to that. For a while, I had this exercise where I’d even go on a run and everybody that I passed on the trail, I’d have to lock eyes and smile at. Then, not look away until I’ve passed them. It was just like this thing having to do with looking somebody in the eye and creating some kind of emotional influx and being polite that just lasted a quick second. But I feel like it really changed something in your psyche… your ability to interact with other humans whoever they are. Especially, behind the computer we’re so detached a lot of times.

Like right now, we’re looking at each other, we’re having a conversation, it’s very fluid, very natural. But a lot of times if I consider picking up the phone for a client… no way in hell. Just email me. We get complacent in these scenarios. I probably think I was more outgoing before I started in this industry.

Chris: I was for sure; I think I was.

Mads: So, smiling was something I learned when I was about 22. It took me about five years to learn to smile. That also sounds horrible. I can promise you every time you see me smile; I’m faking it.

Nick: You seem like a very jovial person, so it’s great acting.

Mads: I am exactly like you, what I would literally do is go to the city center and very similar to what you did. I’ll walk down the street. I would look at people and I’ll smile at them.

Nick: I love that.

Mads: But the problem is… I feel like I’m the Joker. I feel like it’s up here, but it’s what most people would not even call a smile. So, it took me a really really long time. I would say smiling is still one of those things that I have to think about.

Nick: Wow, you’re talking about age 18 to 22, practicing these micro communication skills. Do you have any that you practice today?

Mads: Yeah, I’d say I’ve learned a lot of the basics. I’ve kind of gotten to a point I’m quite comfortable. I would say that the things that I practice a lot today are… So, naturally when you communicate with people who are very assertive, they don’t like it if you don’t look at them. They feel like you’re not looking that you’re not listening. Whereas when you’re talking with more introverted people, they might look at you a little bit and then look away. But a lot of assertive people feel like you’re not listening when you do that.

So, that’s one of the things that I’m still trying to get a little bit better at particularly in one-to-one conversations with various sorts of people.

Chris: So, do you try to maintain eye contact like 80%, 90%, 100% of the time?

Mads: Yeah, I try to go to their level. If you’re talking with someone like Steve Jobs who’s not here anymore, but people like that like you want to be staring at them while you have a conversation with them.

Nick: Have you read Daniel Pink’s “To Sell is Human” by chance?

Mads: No, I have not.

Nick: There’s section in there about communication and your ability to mimic what the other person is doing. Even as simple as something as slight of hand or touching my chin when they touch their chin and what it does to our psychology. I think some of these micro things that we do actually hold a lot more power than most people want to believe.

Mads: 100%, and honestly this is a lot of what’s some of the stuff that’s in my course. A lot of the stuff round Disk it’s about these sorts of things. It’s really about how people behave differently. You don’t necessarily need to become totally extroverted. But it’s a good example, like a lot of these extroverted people, every time they meet, they’re like “Hey, high-five buddy!” So, for a lot of a SEOs they’re like what the fuck is that?

But the thing is, when you’re meeting people who are like that, it helps you really take that relationship to another level.

Nick: You have to play the game. I mean otherwise you’re not the part of the pack.

Chris: It’s good to at least be comfortable with it to reciprocate a little bit.

Nick: A little fist bump never hurt anybody.

Chris: So, communication was one thing that you really had to work on and continue to work on. What are some of your other things that you see as weaknesses that you kind of hire people on to fill that gap in a sense?

Mads: Yep, so generally when I build up, which I do quite frequently a new business, I basically always need to partner with someone who’s got a strength in marketing and is the type of face of the company type person. So, someone who is again very extroverted and very good at building these relationships. I have learned to build very strong relationships one-on-one, but as an example, for both my coaching business and my outsourcing business, the first four years we were in business I didn’t even have a website.

I didn’t need it because I got a lot of clients. But when you run a business with over a hundred employees and you don’t have a website in the online industry, that’s kind of fucked up.

Nick: Are you dealing with a hundred people under you right now?

Mads: Well, so now the outsourcing business has about 130 people.

Nick: Wow.

Mads: Then I have a few other people in the other businesses.

Nick: Okay, wow.

Chris: Are most of these people based out of the same location you’re based out of? I know you have the Filipino office.

Mads: Yes, so we do actually have a lot of home-based people. I’ll say 130 people are all Filipino. So, I have a few people in like UK, Eastern Europe, and Africa in various places. But majority of the 130 – that’s all Filipinos based in the Philippines.

Nick: Look him up people, you’re going to want to know about this.

Mads: So, I started an active outsourcing business really because I work with so many clients that were bad at hiring to put it politely. I saw a big gap in the market. They’re all looking for Filipinos and they couldn’t find good ones and so on. So, we started an outsourcing business. What we then realized later is they’re both crap at hiring and managing. So, we started an outsourcing business and we started supporting it with management. Really what we do now is we find the people. We help make sure that we deal with all the personal stuff, we deal with all the cultural differences compared to Western countries.

We help take care of all the personal stuff, make sure people have the right hardware, the right internet. We take care of all that stuff so our clients really only have to tell people what to do and how to do it.

Nick: So, you’re eliminating these common variables like “my Internet’s out sir,” or “You can’t make it today, see you next week.”

Mads: I mean, it obviously can still happen once in a while because there are earthquakes and typhoons and stuff happening sometimes. But let’s say we eliminate 95% of that sort of stuff. Because again, very often when people work with a client abroad, they’re like “Oh, they don’t know what’s going on, you know what I want to go out with my friends, I’ll just tell them. That’s alright.” All my managers on the ground are Filipinos. They have a little bit different way of dealing with this.

Chris: Okay, so you have Filipino managers on the ground in the Philippines. No foreign managers on the ground in Philippines.

Mads: No, so we do have one foreign manager in the business but he’s more doing the sales. He’s basically talking with a lot of our new clients and figuring out their requirements and stuff. So, I have a management team of three guys that are managing the highest-level managers of the outsourcing business. They’re basically taking care of that.

Chris: So, they manage them remotely.

Mads: Yeah, some of them are office based some of them remotely, but yeah.

Chris: Gotcha. So, I think we’ve been going about a little over an hour now. Do you have anything else that you want to ask?

Mads: Honestly, I can go forever.

Nick: Well, what are some of the main points maybe we missed that you would really like to get out there to the audience? Anything in particular?

Mads: I think talking a little bit about delegation could be very interesting. I thought a lot of people, when it comes to delegation particularly in the SEO industry, really struggle. I think the pyramid’s like a whole mindset of how much is your time worth. When people are sitting doing copy-paste stuff that other people could do for $2 an hour… if you ask them, “Do you want to work for $2 now?” Most people give you a pretty clear “no.” So, I think that sort of mindset around delegation is really important.

What I also try and go through a lot in the training is giving people the mindset of “what do you have to do.” Most people in the SEO industry think they have to be the mastermind SEO for the rest of their company’s days. If that is what you want to be, you need to hire a CEO for the company. Because the CEO of a company is generally not the expert. If you want to build not just a five-man company, but if you want to build a real business, you generally don’t want to be the expert in delivering the end results.

So, really learning to let go. I generally say there’s about two things you have to do as the business owner. One is hire the people that work directly for you, and two is doing the one-to-one meetings with those individuals on a weekly basis. That’s really the only two things you have to do as a high-level manager. Now, as a CEO… as a business owner there’s definitely a bunch of sorts of strategy things… setting mission values and things that you want to do as well. But on a day-to-day level, recruiting the people who work directly for you and meeting once a week are really the only two things that you cannot delegate.

Everything else that you’re doing today can be delegated. The most successful people generally don’t do them. I mean they let go of 80% of what they do today compared to next year to grow their business. If you can manage to do that, your business will grow really quickly. The people who keep holding on to keep being the experts… those are the people that become the bottleneck in the business and slow the business growth.

Chris: So, I think this is a very relatable topic to pretty much anyone who’s growing a business. Especially with SEO, most people start on their own, I think. So, they kind of become an expert and they trust in their methods… they know what’s working for them. I think the problem comes to be that they don’t want to let go and they have a hard time drawing the line between the quality not being the exact level that they want. You know… not being able to pass these duties off to somebody else. Do you have any advice on drawing that line?

Mads: Yeah, so one other thing is I’ve worked with a lot of people who build authority sites. The question that I tend to ask them all the time is the same which is, “Would you rather have one site that’s 100% the way you like it or have ten sites that are 90 to 95% there? What do you think will make you the most money?” That’s the fundamentals. What SEOs are generally really bad at is 80/20. The problem for most SEOs… say they have this 85-step checklist. The problem is again, even when you work as an agency, you have to be able to prioritize and say what is going to give the clients the biggest bang for their buck.

Where you go to make the client the most money with the least amount of effort, right? Because at the end of the day, if you’re following your 85-step checklist, that might take you a year to get through it. If 40 of those steps make incremental changes, you’re not changing the game.

Nick: So, in essence, in order to grow you’ve got to learn to let go a little bit of the idea of perfection, right?

Mads: Yeah. Actually, let me go back to Kurt’s business I know his business, CRO. But it was worth working with him… it was a great example because when you do CRO, you can test every freaking thing. When we worked with him, he basically starting saying we guarantee… and giving guarantees in a business like this is difficult. But he basically made a commitment to his customers to guarantee at least 30% improvement.

Nick: Wow.

Mads: Now, that also meant that instead of actively testing every single thing that you can possibly test, it was easy for him to say, “We will test until we hit a certain level. If we deliver 200% improvement, there’s no point in us going in to tweak words on a page.” You make a very clear deliverable, and when you deliver that you say, “Okay, great, that’s done.” But the whole thing is, when you enable yourself to go deliver great results in a good way, that means it makes it much more scalable. So, let’s say from a SEO standpoint… translating that and saying, “Let’s say to customers that we have a commitment to you that we will triple your traffic over the next year.”

Now, if you know that your commitment is tripling the traffic or tripling the leads or tripling the sales or whatever, that’s a commitment that makes sense to a client. Honestly, they don’t care how many h1s you should have if it just gives them their actionable results. If instead of focusing on making sure the schema on this page that no one ever visits is perfect, you focus on the 80/20, what makes the difference… and if you focus on delivering that traffic, those leads, and those sales. When you get to that point, you can say, “Great, we’ve done what we need for the year.”

It makes you able to scale and grow much faster because you focus on the 80/20 and you get those big wins quicker. It makes you able to deliver a lot more results for a lot more customers.

Chris: Would you say that making a guarantee and having this goalpost – having a finish line for yourself… Would you advise people to make guarantees like this as a way to, in essence, keep them from doing stuff they don’t need to do?

Mads: So, I work with customers doing a lot of things, and one of the things that I try and push them to is getting to the finish line. So, for me when you do SEO, the problem is most people sell SEO. That sounds silly but that is really the problem. The thing is people don’t give a shit about SEO – they give a shit about the results that come out of SEO. So, they are either buying leads or they’re buying sales.

So, basically three fundamental questions you want to ask people are – One, “Can you afford to grow significantly?” That’s a relevant question to ask. If you’re trying to pitch someone who’s running a one-man copy company and they don’t want to hire employees, they probably don’t want to grow that much. They probably won’t have a budget to pay you a lot of money. If they can’t grow… if they’re not interested in growing, don’t work with them. Number two is, “How much money on average do you make per sale?” Number three is, “When you get either an email or a phone lead, what percentage do you close?” And that could be broken up because maybe by email is less than by phone.

The last two questions are fundamental because if people tell you every time they get a phone call they close 50%… If they say, “Okay on average, I make two grand per profit per sale I make.” Now that tells you that every lead you bring them is really worth a thousand dollars – or every phone call you’re bringing them. Now you can then work back and say, “Okay, I will charge you $3000 a month and I guarantee you that I will make you 10,000 for that money.” That will put you in a situation where you need to bring them ten leads every single month above what they have right now. So, if you look at their site right now and you see an average of five leads a month, that means you need to bring them 25 leads a month.

What that does is it gives you a very clear goal post. Now you can even say, “I’ll build you the first invoice up front, but I won’t build you the second invoice. Also, I’ve gotten you the first ten leads.” Now I’m not saying that’s the right thing to do, but it’s an option. What that does is, they don’t care how you deliver it. Now if you go and do Facebook Ads or PPC or whatever, you can do it. But really your commitment to them is not SEO… your commitment to them is – I will bring you ten leads.

If you ask most people and you say, “Is it okay if you pay me $3,000 and I give you 10,000 back?” It’s a good deal, and everyone says so. So, if you can make deals like that instead of selling SEO, you can do that. What that will enable you to do is first of all – you can definitely play this game and that’s where you want to stop. But sometimes, for example, it might take a while before you get there. So, you could actually compensate, for example, by doing Google Ads. Now, even if you don’t make a lot of money… when doing that, if you’re proving to people that they paid you three grand and you’re making them ten.

That enables you to do something that no SEOs do with this. Go back to the customers, and I advise a lot of agencies to literally send customers one slide every month. Nothing with keywords, nothing with volume. Send them one slide that says you paid me three grand and I made you 10 or 12 or 15.

Chris: Here’s your monthly report.

Mads: … and you say, “Hey, okay last month you paid me three grand and I made you fifteen. Do you want to continue?”

Nick: The argument’s simplified; you know where they going to go from there. Well, I don’t know… that’s a lot of money. Maybe fix my margins a bit more.

Mads: But what happens here is, it enables you to do the one thing no SEOs do with his increased customer budgets instead of decreasing. It’s like, “Well right now you’re paying me ten grand and I’m making you ten, twelve, fifteen or however many leads. Do you want to spend more money with me so that I can make you even more money? Why don’t we double this thing? You make me six grand a month and I’ll make you at least twenty.”

Chris: Right, it avoids the whole situation of, “Well, hey you ranked me, well now I don’t have to pay you anymore, right?”

Mads: The thing is, every agency I work with with this model who executes it well significantly keeps increasing their monthly retainers. Now, most agencies out there are happy to keep monthly retainers. But also, what happens is you can then do their SEO game to start – you can push that to the limit. So, maybe you want to bulk up with some ads in the beginning. Then when your SEO game starts ranking, you might even get that to the limit. When that gets to the limit you can start doing ads again. You can even start Facebook ads.

The whole point is if the pile of money you’re getting on a monthly basis is big enough… yeah.

Chris: Right. There’s always something you can do with a little bit more money.

Mads: The whole thing is customer satisfaction. People raving about you, people telling people about you. When you sent them that one slide compared to when you’re doing SEO and you’re getting some rankings and they don’t really understand how rankings translate into money. Because, you know, they can feel getting more phone calls, but they don’t really know what part of it happens because of you and what part just happened. Because they’re a great business. So, many companies cancel the contracts and three months later they realize, “Oh, that was stupid.”

But the thing is, it’s mostly because the SEO’s don’t communicate in an effective way what they’re actually doing.

Chris: Like you said, most SEOs might not be the best communicators.

Mads: But the fundamental problem is most SEO’s are SEO’s. They’re so passionate about SEO. They’re like, “Yeah, I’ll build you some backlinks, and if you pay me a thousand more I’ll build you some more backlinks.” The clients are like…

Chris: I mean, they make the mistake of thinking the client will remotely understand.

Mads: The problem is that they’re trying to educate the customers on SEO. If I walk into a shop to buy ski boots, I don’t really care what material they’re made out of and all of this stuff. I just want ski boots that get the job done. I don’t want to be a ski boot expert when I’m going on my third skiing holiday. Most business owners don’t want to be SEO experts because they actually… I know SEOs think people don’t have businesses to run, but they do. What business owners want is leads and sales… most of them don’t give a shit about SEO.

Chris: So, this would be like the simplification of the product… a commoditization of the product, or just kind of making into something very packageable, easy to look at, and digestible for the end consumer.

Mads: Let me ask you the question. How often do you increase the retainers people are paying?

Chris: Pretty often.

Mads: Good. That is the success of great agencies. If you have a good agency and you managed to increase retainer. So, even adding more services to increase retainers like business is all about customer lifetime value, right. If you’re running agency if you’re running service businesses, if you can increase the customer lifetime value. That means you can pay more money to acquire new customers. Which put you in a much better situation.

Chris: For sure, awesome. I think we start kind of winding things down a little bit here. Let’s see I’ve got a few outro questions here. So, how long did you say that you’ve been involved with SEO specifically.

Mads: So, I actually built my first SEO site in 2007.

Chris: Okay, you’ve been around for quite some time now.

Mads: I have to admit that a build a site… I had to be ace in the Philippines at a time. They were spitting out about 3,000 words of Philly-English content every day. That worked really well for a while. I made about 20, actually got up to 25 grand a month. Then all these exotic animals like penguin and panda started happening. I had a couple of years of SEO depression. I literally went from 20-some grand a month to $200 a month.

Nick: Those were the outlaw days of SEO where you could do any kind of tactic. You know, knowledge was really power then.

Mads: It was a lot of fun as long as it lasted. I can tell you, I definitely spent about 2 or 3 years hating SEO after that happened, and I swore I would never touch it again. Obviously, just like drinking, that never happened… so obviously I got back in the game. I haven’t been doing that much SEO myself. But as a fellow nerd I would say I love SEO. I probably know more about SEO than most people. I love management more which means that’s what I do.

Chris: That’s awesome. So, as someone that’s been around for a little while, where do you see things going in the SEO or internet marketing world as far as how people can basically be prepared… or you know, keep an eye looking forward?

Mads: I mean this probably sounds silly. Most people hate hearing this phrase, but “Great content.” I think, fundamentally, not just because of Google, but I mean Google will keep changing. Fundamentally for the last 10 years, SEO has less and less space in the SERPs. I don’t think the SERPs will disappear, but I think the percentage of traffic you keep getting from the SERPs will keep decreasing. Now that doesn’t mean it can’t be extremely valuable for some businesses, but it will happen.

I don’t think we’re in a game where the SEO real-estate on page 1 is going to grow at any point. Besides that, I think SEO is probably becoming even more interesting because it’s got to go down more avenues. So, when you start out looking at great content, you start looking at different kinds of content. So, you start looking at image SEO, you start looking YouTube SEO, video SEO. You start looking at SEO having much more than just SEO on a web page kind of thing.

So, I think building amazing, valuable content that people actually want to consume is important. Because again, in most industries there’s so much content out there, right? But building content that people actually really want to consume… things like these podcasts that are super valuable to people. I think they’re going to be worth even more. Now, the whole point is that, for example with podcast – more and more people start doing podcasts. Therefore, the competition will be fiercer.

But again, if you can level up your game… if you can be in the top five or ten percent, you have a huge opportunity. I think that’s the case with content all over the place. If you can stay in the top five, ten percent of written content, you also have a huge leverage. But I’m not saying that you need great content to rank because I don’t believe that’s the case. The more advanced the internet gets, the more advanced people get with the internet, the more critical they also get of it. Therefore, having great content and putting yourself ahead of that game is, for me, when we look five years ahead as the game changes.

I think when we’re looking a couple of years ahead, I don’t think there’s a lot of changes. So, I still see definitely a couple years where there’s a huge room for growth for the current model and the current framework of SEO.

Chris: So, keep focusing on the end user experience as the algorithms and whatever else continue to get smarter… and yeah we’re losing SERP space, for sure. So, as we were about to say goodbye, do you have one single parting piece of advice you could give to someone that’s kind of newer… who’s just getting into SEO or internet marketing? Just one little tidbit to live by, maybe.

Mads: This is difficult for me. I say, generally, just get in there and get it moving. The fundamental problem for most SEO’s is they’re people who love learning, and you have to have this balance between learning and action. Most SEOs sit out here and learn, learn, learn. The whole action piece is difficult. You will never build the perfect site; you will never plan the perfect site. Set an amount of hours and say, “By this time, I will start taking action.” I think from an SEO standpoint, that’s probably the best piece of advice I have.

Chris: It’s extremely solid. Well, Matt, thanks for joining us. I feel like I’ve learned a lot.

Nick: Yes, same, and I feel like we should be paying you right now.

Kalin Karakehayov is an entrepreneur and founder of Seo.domains. In this installment of SirLinksalot’s SEO Podcast, we dive deep into Kalin’s extensive knowledge on buying domains for SEO, getting started with and running his business, and much more.

Think you’d be a great addition to our podcast or have a request for someone to be featured? Head over to our podcast discovery page.

Watch the Podcast:

Read the Full Transcript:

Chris: All right everybody. We are here with our first-ever podcast. Today we’ve got Kalin, and I’m not even going to try to say your last name. Maybe you can help us out with that.

Kalin: It’s Karakehayov, it’s a difficult name, quite hard to pronounce.

Chris: Karakehavov.

Kalin: Yes, you did a good job.

Chris: Yeah, I’ve got a pretty weird last name too. So, I know what it’s like to mess up people’s last names or have them messed up. So, I’ll just stay hands off. But we’re excited to have you here today. Maybe you can tell everybody a little bit about yourself, what you do, and that kind of thing.

Kalin: Well, I run a company. I started actually at about 50 people, the company is called E-Doms but it’s probably more known to the SEO community as SEO.domains because this is our branch turned to SEO to provide good expired domains with links and history. I have more than 10 years experience in SEO, but the last few years I’m mostly doing domains because this is how our business evolved.

Chris: Yeah, I saw on your, I think it was on your Facebook. I saw something else that was maybe ‘Tool.domains’.

Kalin: Yeah, this is the company that is now being rebranded as E-Doms. So, this is the model company.

Chris: Okay. So, I guess you pretty much stay busy, your day-to-day just doing company stuff, doing stuff with SEO domains.

Kalin: Well, yeah. I have a lot a lot of responsibilities, mostly managing people these days because I care for about 30 people under my direct management. But I also do a lot of technical stuff, a lot of evaluation of domains in regards to SEO, backlink profiles and also a lot of things in the domain industry about domain catching.

Nick: Right. So, you’ve been in SEO for about 10 years, about how long before where you jumped from. I feel like whenever we jump into SEO, whenever we’re getting started, we start to branch out in a bunch of different directions. What we come to find is we specialize in one specific thing, and then we kind of run with that and build a business off it. For me, it was PBN building. So, for you getting started in SEO, what kind of drew you into the industry, and then how did you end up getting into procuring domains as your main point of business?

Kalin: Well, I started in SEO about twelve years ago. It was really fascinating because I was really free to find a an industry, which is not zero sum. So, when you put a website with content, you get constant traffic from Google. So, you put a one-time effort and then you get constant returns, which is something like most things in the economy work. Also later I discovered that when two websites link one from the other that one the website that got a link takes a lot of value out the other loses nothing, so again nonzero-sum. A lot more opportunity for creating value. So, after this I was hooked up into SEO, it was my thing. I was always very much focused on link building because on page SEO, I find necessary but boring.

Chris: I wonder if there’s anybody who likes it.

Kalin: In link building, you have much more opportunities for both, for scaling and for more creative opportunities.

Chris: Sure.

Kalin: So, I’m a fan of scaling. I did a lot of PBNs but six years ago, our PBNs about 2005 sites got massively hit by Google. It was back in the days where people didn’t protect their PBNs a lot with different, who is an IPS and all of that. So, we didn’t take the necessary precautions and we got hit. But this turned out to be quite a good thing because then we decided, okay if PBNs are not for a lifetime. Maybe we should have a constant feed of good domains. If we got hit, so we can replace them easily with new ones. That’s how I started moving into domains. The idea of that move was that before we did some scraping about seven, eight years ago that was just found in broken links using a tool.

Nick: Okay, sure.

Kalin: We did find some domains but never super good ones. Then we started thinking in the direction of what if we knew from advance all the domains that exists that we won’t have to do all this exhaustive crawling only to find a very small part of them. So, I started learning about domains basically from scratch. About the different extensions where you could find lists, what are the ways to compile a database, how you could maintain it. Basically this lets in to us turning to a different direction more technical one. It’s your aside and started digging into the domain industry to find out can we really build this database of domains. Then we built it in one or two years, we had very good coverage of the existing domains.

But then the problem was that when domains expired, we couldn’t catch them. So, the next few years were building up a catching system, building up monitoring systems, buying servers, buying accreditation, partnering up, integrating API’s. This continues to this day, and right now we are sending I think about 20 million drop kitting queries a day via API.

Nick: Wow. That’s amazing, that’s wild. Now you seem like a very technical guy. Do you mind if I ask what you did before you jumped into SEO, and then in aspects to procuring those domains, you were talking about learning different techniques to gauge the value of those. For everybody, it seems to be different especially on levels of technicality. Was there specific schools you went to or were you just kind of searching all over the internet for these answers, and then testing what actually worked whenever it came to procuring these domains.

Kalin: Well, before starting SEO, I did a little bit of web design so that trying to learn HTML and some really basic stuff. Before this I was a professional chess player and chess coach.

Nick: Really? That is awesome.

Kalin: It involved a lot of traveling, like it was clear that it will, I couldn’t sustain my life all my life doing that. So, it was more like youngster thing. It was when I got out of university and decided to settle down a bit. Then I started doing the web stuff quite quickly turning to SEO, and so I basically self-taught. I learnt everything online testing. I had a few websites, so I had a material to test with. The first web site I ever did SEO went out of Google for six months. I did over optimization or something.

Nick: I feel it’s very important, early educational stages of learning SEO. If you don’t completely tank a site, you’ll never know exactly where that line is. I think personally I say, it is important across.

Kalin: I was quite practical, just testing different stuff, building links, trying to rank projects and clients. I got involved into an SEO competition in Bulgaria, and yeah this was the first years and I was always more interested on the technical side.

Nick: So, Kalin is like a brain, like a massive brain. He entered this and then just figured it out on his own basically, which is amazing.

Chris:  So, you were doing web design. You started building websites for yourself in the beginning.

Kalin: Yeah, myself then some clients. But I was never actually a web developer. I just used to WordPress and had limited knowledge of HTML and just a tiny bit of CSS. But it was good that I worked for a while with clients because then I go to more experience to selling stuff and communicating with people.

Chris: So, then SEO was just something you found yourself from building his web sites, you were just thinking okay what’s up what’s the next step the website is here, now what?

Kalin: Yeah. I heard that it exists from a friends, and I got interested because I wanted to bring traffic to my chess websites, and organic traffic is the most usual one. Because I couldn’t find any targeted traffic for them but there was a large search volume for a lot of phrases. So, I just tried to do SEO for each one of them. I had a lot of time back then, I had basically the most important thing for an entrepreneur which was a lot of free time. If you have a day job, you’re basically squeezed into just your evenings time. But if you don’t have to do all day, you can be you can grow up amazingly fast. You feel optimistic and you don’t feel any constraints. I think three months after I first learned what WordPress is, I started making trainings for beginners about how to install WordPress and create their own website. So, it was a quite fast process between learning it myself and then doing it for clients and training it to people and creating a team, all of this took only about two or three years.

Nick: I mean you play chess through this business basically. What things have you learned from chess that you can apply to what you do now? Because it sounds like you find these natural progression that you can kind of jump to, and in a short matter of time, you’ve been able to build what I consider one of the better SEO domains kind of registrar’s empires so to speak.

Kalin: Well actually, my approaches to chess and to this business are quite different.

Nick: Okay.

Kalin: In chess, I recognize my limitations that I’m talented but not super talented. I am smart but not super smart. I’m prepared but not super prepared, and tried to play to my advantages. But also I realized in chess that it’s after all kind of a sport, although a mind sport but still a sport. So, the most important thing is to be optimally prepared for the for the game in a sports world. So, like it should feel good, you should be positive. You should be concentrated and all of this is really the most important thing. You can prepare for years but if then you go to the game, and you haven’t slept in at in or you’re not feeling well then you will still play bad.

So, the most important thing is to have your peek at the game itself. While, in the business it’s different because in the business you working 24/7, you don’t have some super important moments, you just have to give your best constantly. So, it’s a bit different playing a sport to building a business. You need a lot of consistency in the business, and this kind of comes naturally to me, the consistency I think I’m just stubborn and I push forward. So, from chess, I think the most important thing is strategic thinking trying always to see the big picture and always trying to make sense of stuff. But also a very important thing is that chess is extremely complicated game.

Very often you have the best moves to be completely illogical once. So, it’s when you play chess, you try to make sense of things but sometimes you should accept that you cannot find the best move, it should just settle with something okay. Because you feel that the position is too complicated. So, you are not afraid of making mistakes in chess because even the world champion makes the best moves only 70% of the time. This is the world champion, so it’s the perfect combination of talent, hard work, preparation everything. So, basically I’m not afraid of making mistakes because in chess mistakes are just human nature of things. You shouldn’t expect to play the best move more than 50%, 60% of the time. So, I’m not afraid to test stuff to try irrational experiments or just try everything like my dignity says try everything.

Nick: That’s awesome. Something I’d like to jump back to that I found really interesting, and it made me cringe a bit just because of the fact that I’m on pretty heavily involved in PBN as well (see Nick’s PBN Checklist). But when you say you had 2000 PBNs at that point in time, was that your main business focus, was the PBN and monetizing that?

Kalin: Yes, it was PBN selling links, ranking clients, ranking some of our own stuff. Selling links, I really like because it’s when you have an SEO client of course you overcharge compared to the value of the links. But then you have the clients calling you why did my audition for which two places and what can we do. You always have to monitor the website and your own page of what silly things they might do. Basically it’s a lot more work, it’s let’s say three times more money but ten times more work.

Nick: Sure, yeah.

Kalin: Link selling is very scalable. I always liked it, people just buy for the link as long as they have nothing to complain about so you can scale indefinitely, if you have a lot of websites and a lot of buyers, I really like that. Also link selling, I like a lot because let’s say you rent a link out for a year, and all of the money comes beforehand. Basically, no year-long services that work like that, I like that because it’s very good for cash flow. Yeah, so it went perfectly good, selling links until the Google penalties came.

Nick: So, at that point in time, did you have like a team working with you on this PBN because I mean a PBN is typically a ton of work.

Kalin: Oh yes, I had a team of seven or eight people.

Nick: When the hit came, about what percentage of the network did you lose overnight?

Kalin: We lost not overnight but over several hits, I think we lost about 60%.

Nick: Oh wow. I mean, what did that do. I mean, that had to have been some sort of low point in the business. I would assume like a stressful point. How did you bring yourself out of that?

Kalin: That was a very long point. It lasted about maybe six months to one year because we lost more and more. The thing with that is when you go down like this and you don’t really want to quit, you want to up either in the thing you’re doing or something related to it to make the most of what you have left. But psychologically it’s hard because you see that you’re losing and you’re going down, the trend is down. So, you should somehow find a way to get a positive trend again. For me, the way to do this was really a non-conventional one. I wrote an open letter to Google.

Nick: Really?

Kalin: Yeah, you can still find it on karakehayov.com. But I didn’t write it right away, the thing with it is that so we try to fire reconsideration requests for the penalized websites after removing links and so. But Google still didn’t approve that. Then we tried putting normal websites and they still wouldn’t fix the domain, and then we say okay let’s just hit into Google in a PR way. So, we put the best causes you can imagine, like for the poor people, for the oppressed woman, for the sick people, everyone who people empathize with in society, and we put like videos and like nice stuff about those causes online. Then we submitted about reconsideration but Google said it still think it’s pure spam, so then we make screenshot of what Google thinks is pure spam, and we put on an open letter that Google thinks that protecting woman’s right is spam or helping poor people is spam.

Nick: it is un-conventional, it’s awesome. It is really neat.

Kalin: So, we put a big open letter and in this open letter, we said that Google is a very dangerous monopoly. Basically they have no rules, which they abide by and they’re very dangerous. Everyone who cares about keeping Google as a monopolist, should install Ad Blocker and tell all their friends to do so, and make this pyro. Say if only one percent of people in Stalin Ad Blocking the browser, Google will lose one billion dollars a year.

Nick: That’s very methodical, that is awesome.

Kalin: We made that not viral but it went like semi viral. We’ve got maybe about more than 10,000 views quite quickly. It got some shares over social media, especially in Bulgaria it got shared everywhere in social media. Because here everyone knows and really respect me and my team. So, interesting thing after this, there were no more penalties, I got no response but there were no more penalties. It may have been accidental, I don’t know, I would never know but still it was very important psychologically that instead of Google hunting me and ours, it was now me hunting Google. I am trying to hit them so I felt a lot better. So, it didn’t actually matter that much if it helped or not but it’s the important thing was that me and my team felt a lot better. So, that was when the upwards trend started.

Nick: That’s awesome. I’m getting goose bumps about the story just because it’s so exciting to hear somebody go after the big guy like that, it’s a David and Goliath story, I love that about SEO.

Kalin: It was definitely fun, and there were tweets like wow this guy just declared war with Google. Despite the difficult otherwise, financial situation. After that basically, we saved part of the link selling business. We were motivated to start the domain finding business.

Chris: Okay. So, your team is with you in Bulgaria.

Kalin: Yes.

Chris: Were you able to I guess, I you kept the same team and just move them towards the new venture, which was domains.

Kalin: Yes. My team back then was about only eight people. Then I met with my co-founder Matodi, he is a very good developer. So, he started to, before this we didn’t have any developer in the team, we were just spammers. But with developers, it was different. We put all domains that we have into a database, started monitoring them. Opened a company officially because before it was just a bunch of freelancers, then we open the company. Amazingly with the idea of finding domains for SEO, basically for spamming stuff, we managed to get small seed investments from a fund that invest into stocks. Because we managed to convince them that the SEO industry is super profitable, and a lot of the competitive niches rely on links. We have a way to produce a commodity that produces links much cheaper than the market prices. Then we showed some case studies, real case studies with clients. The investors were convinced, and they gave us 15000 euro of initial investment.

Nick: Awesome. Do you mind discussing that a little bit? Maybe, because I feel like in SEO or at least within the niche that we’re in, which is these small kind of private SEO groups. We don’t hear a lot about going after venture capital or getting funding from somebody. So, in aspects of that did  these people before or did you just hatched a plan saying we need X amount of money in order to grow to a certain stage, and we’ll execute that and see who we can get on board.

Kalin: Well, it’s a small seed in the Bulgaria that use SEO money, everyone knows that. One year before I had tried with another project but failed because they decided that the space was not, didn’t have much perspective. But this time, it was different because we already had some revenue, which is very rare for start early phase because most startups try to build some product. Often have the product, we even don’t have the product finalized yet, they may have some user, so don’t have some users but they very rarely have revenue, which is the best proof actually for anything. Because the VC world is used to startups just burning money, building users for free service maybe with the idea of some free user switching to paid.

All of this is very hard stuff, most startups fail. So, if they get introduced to the SEO industry where basically everyone is making money. I think they will really appreciate the cash positives that the SEO industry brings.

Nick: Correct yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Chris: So, this might be prying a little bit. But when you approach the venture capital company, did you have to offer them part of the company or was it, how did it all work?

Kalin: Yes. We gave them 12%, and then another 10% for another investment one year later. So, basically our small company that was barely covering its cost gotten an evaluation of 1 million euro, which was quite soon after the second investment. But actually then it seems a lot to me. But now when I look back and I see that we already had a lot of potential that we actually didn’t develop in the fastest and best way. Because we didn’t know what we’re doing of course like most like founders.

Nick: Like all of us, right?

Kalin: Yes. But the investors put a lot of trust into us and they didn’t understand anything about the industry. So, it was just pure trust and basically with this, it’s always like this, it’s a trust thing they. They cannot understand your industry, so it’s difficult to grasp how little they understand about it. But if they trust you and if they get positive feedback from the other people they trust. In our case, they asked very good developer about the technical side about our project and got positive feedback from him. That’s technically good, so we know what we’re doing at least on the technical level.

They trusted in us and they gave us this funding, and this put us in a very unique position because most of our competition in people who try to get domains with SEO value. They don’t have an initial capital to invest into adding a database, into accreditations, into catching partnerships because our initial investment into domain database in catching was six-figure for sure, and now it has grown to 7 figures.

Nick: Right, wow.

Kalin: So, it’s really a lot, it does come back because we are chiefs care, we catch domains in a lot of different countries. We don’t catch the SEO domains, we catch premium domains, we catch traffic domains that don’t have good links but have a lot of traffic, let’s say former on a pirate websites or this kind of website. So, actually it does come back but the process is long, and if you don’t have at least six figures in capital to invest or if you don’t have, if you are very good developer yourself or you have a team of good developers. This may be lower but you need some, and the other two. So, it’s a lot of work and money to be invested.

Nick: Of course. So, you said it was initial investment of 15,000 euros and then one year later 1 million.

Kalin: It was 50, a 100K then second 100K for another 10% value of the company at one.

Nick: Okay. Well, so when you’re talking about taking in that kind of money via what you started off with. What was your mindset on at that point time, management specifically bringing more people on the team or procuring more domains? Because when I consider spending a 100,000 on domains worldwide. I’m thinking of just a whole lot of time and a whole lot of energy that has to be spent procuring the right domains. So, in aspects to that how do you, where was your focus? Management or just getting inventory, so that you could push sales?

Kalin: I would try the different things, and some of them were not good choices. We try to open a software as a service that you can use to search different things about domains and their owners like an investigation tool. A bit like domaintool.com but it was not a good idea because we didn’t have the right concept, I think of how we’ll sell this and also then GDPR came, with which the main basically vector of analysis. So, it was a killer blow for such project but the thing that worked before like selling links and basically getting easy cash. It worked after with buying domains and then selling them, buying and selling, catching better domains and selling those. In country-by-country, we discovered that the competition is not as big as it seemed when you really got into how the things work.

So, for example we would say okay let’s today investigate Serbia, domains they have good domains that drop with good links, they drop in this day, this hour. How can we catch in real time, what investment do we have to make. What partnerships should we make for the most important? Best domains, other local websites that offer back order services. Is there anyone who needs such domains from our clients, and a lot and a lot of different stuff? Now we are building a wiki for the domains for internal use, and we have 80 field for each TLD. So, there are 80 things that we research, and say for each TLD, from very stupid stuff like do they have one or two-letter domains, which are obviously variable, to Really complex stuff like who is limit, and how can we get all the data, is there assess to the complete list of domains.

So, a lot of really annoying technical domain knowledge that you cannot, there’s no one to ask basically. You can ask different details but there’s no one to ask all of it, discovering, compile your own. But this is really a great space to be because it kills the competition because if you need one thing with which you can kill all the competition in space is when things are boring and uncertain. So, they’re the two killer blows, like make a field uncertain and boring, and there will be no competition in it even if it takes you an hour 200,000 bucks.

Nick: Right.

Kalin: So, the domain names are extremely boring. I think, most of you would agree on this.

Nick: The names themselves, sure yeah. It is the hunt behind the domain itself that I always found interesting, kind of like archaeology.

Kalin: The hunt is interesting, but when you get into the technical details, it is supporting stuff again.

Nick: Sure.

Kalin: It’s like how many checks can you make against an API if you get blocked and stuff like that.

Nick: Is your hunt primarily software based or do you guys do any map like manual review teams or anything like that for what you’re looking for on the back end?

Kalin: It is software based but we mostly work with country domain, CCTLD that are quite messy. So, sometimes they don’t follow their own rules, for example domains may expire early or later then it should be officially. So, we have a lot of like QA work going on checking if the software works, if everything is okay, people comparing list to see if everything is planned. But we have a lot of manual work with evaluating. Because evaluating cannot automate.

Nick: Well, you’re hunting a bunch of different CCTLDs. So, how do you go about like with the language barriers, do you have different criteria and different languages that you’re looking for or how do you do about that? Because I know you’ve got like Greek domains, Serbian domains, any number of different places.

Kalin: Yes. We work in every country that is profitable. Actually the interesting stuff, it’s not about language that much. It’s about internet culture. So, for example an internet culture comes from a lot of things, the mindset of the people, the online community, the cost of the domains. For example in Bulgaria, the local domain .bg cost me 30 euro, which is a lot. So, there are no spammers in .bg and other domain. So, the .bg space is quite clean, there is not a lot of spam. But if you’re going into the Czech Republic where the domains cost 4 euro. You will find that there are so many directories, catalogs and other parented websites made by SEO spammers. So many exchanged links between websites like huge footers with a lot of exchange link and stuff like this or link pages where people exchange links.

So, you find that you cannot really trust your instincts because you can see, for referring domains 550 trust flow 20, but then it so exchange links.

Nick: Right.

Kalin: So, it’s all about culture. The link building works differently in different local markets, and in some places they use a lot of directories in the others, they sell a lot of articles. Some spaces are quite clean, and there’s no actually SEO spam at all. Let’s take Ireland.

Nick: Sure.

Kalin: In Ireland, it’s quite regulated to register your domain. So, in Ireland you don’t have spam almost at all. So, basically you can trust that all links that you see are genuine links. There’s a lot of different things in different countries, different kinds of spam basically you should understand at least a bit the language to see, well what is an article, what is a classified ads website. What is a directory? You should know these keywords in all the languages because you don’t want to buy a domain and anything else that only has directories or paid articles.

Chris: So, how are you going through these backlink profiles on, there are languages that you don’t speak. How are you doing that just initially, like when you’re trying to determine if the backlink profile is spammy or not and you’re looking at all their links and it’s in a foreign language, how are you making the determination?

Nick: Well, you develop a feeling after some time but basically before that you need to know a few different things. In each country, you should remember the website that have high DR, high DA, high metrics but that anyone can put a link into. So, like blog platforms and all of those. So, you don’t value them highly, if you see a DR 80 link coming from one of those, it’s just a blog platform so you ignore it, you should know those. You should know, like typically spammy anchors in each main language. But basically you don’t need to know the language because a good website has most of the rink with brand URL, and if you have a good feeling and instantly let’s say from the name of the domain or the first links, you know this kind of domain. What it was, let’s say it was a news website and you just seen this for first five second. Then you know how a news websites link profile should be. It should have a lot of links without pages from other news websites from blogs, diverse link profile. Then some links of course with the brand, so if you see that let’s say all of the links of the website that was supposed to be a news website lead to the home page then something is off. You do this small checks, internal checks all the time to verify actually if this is natural link profile or if it’s not natural.

Not natural doesn’t necessarily mean spam, they can be mirrors and websites that just are lists of websites. You can get a lot of links that are not beneficial but also not harmful. But your main idea is to see if there’s any really harmful links like anchor spam or if there are neutral links and positive, how much are the positive and how much are the neutral. Because you value the domain only based of the positive ones.

Nick: Okay right. So, maybe since you’ve been in this industry so long and so much data is passed through your eyes essentially. You seem to take a much broader approach to looking at the internet, and what that’s going to create as far as like domains go from specific countries. I find that really interesting because typically in these circles, we’re talking about kind of micro ideas of what makes a domain relevant. I assume you working with hundreds of thousands of sites all over the world, it’s really interesting to hear that you’ve got this broader viewpoint on what makes something natural on the internet versus unnatural. But would you say that now your approach to finding a good domain versus one that’s not so great is very simple at this point in time, which I know you’ve developed systems, so it’s kind of.

Kalin: Yes, if you take a thousand random domains. You have only something like ten or twenty, which you actually have to think more about before the evaluation. The other, a lot will be just bad because they have no link, so just spam links. Some would be good because they all have all nice natural links, and just a beautiful link profile. There will be very little middle ground cases. So, basically the challenge from one point is not how well you evaluate because you have to think only about one percent of the time actually if you experience. But how fast you evaluate. So, we have built a system, I can share my screen and show it to you that we do for extremely fast evaluation.

Nick: That will be amazing.

Kalin: Yeah. It’s an internal system, so I can share my scream and show it just for a few minutes.

Nick: Sure. If you don’t mind, I’m sure people would love to see that. I know I would.

Kalin: Okay. So, that’s the system basically. It has metrics and the point is that when you want to access a domain, you want to have it everything you want about the domain on one screen. Then only if you have to look at individual links, you open Ahrefs in another screen, which can be another monitor. So, you can look at the two at the same point. But basically these are the Majestic anchors pulled from the Majestic API. Majestic metrics, this is if it’s indexed on Google, it’s green so yes. It has GA, Google index and Alexa for a traffic indicator. If it’s not indexed, a good thing to save you time, not to dig in our key fork is the archive last date. So, if our archive last date is say six years ago, it hardly was a PBN. Because that’s just a long dead website that still has good links. Here you have Ahrefs metrics. Here you can leave comments and stuff or, here you have groups and tags and other internal stuff. Here you can put the price, and you can save it or you can put next domain in your trash. So, for example this domain, I just check Ahrfes to see how good the links are, and we find that actually this domain has not a lot links but good ones from top Brazil media.

So, this domain is good for buying, and let’s say it also has DA 35 which is quite nice. It has trust flow 1 which you can see how bad trust flow actually is. This domain had three or four top media links right from DR 80 links. But here is trust flow 1. So, let’s say that because Brazilian domains here have high demand put this domain at 70. I save it, and I moved to the next one. Here this is a domain in Peru, which is not bad, it has like maybe $50 evaluation. But because Peru is expensive, it cost about $40 to register per year, this one is not good enough. So, I trash it, and move on. Then we have a typical spam domain, you see like because you know something, so you can just immediately trash it. You don’t have to look at it, and see how fast it goes.

Nick: That is beautiful.

Kalin: This one is too weak, this one is too weak, has DA 5. So, see that this is the speed that we evaluate domains in our company. Without the speed, we couldn’t cover basically the volume that we have.

Chris: That is very fast.

Nick: When you’re talking about having 30 people in office about how many people do you have working with this software particularly to hunt your domains all day long?

Kalin: We have 10 people. 10 people who only evaluate, and then help with the catching. We try to give the evaluators like not too diverse work. So, let’s say one evaluate UK domains, another evaluation German domains and so on. Because if you try to cover all the aspects of a country. Well, I do it but I have a lot of SEO experience well if you have someone one or two years of SEO experience or even people without any SEO experience. We will train them SEO and evaluating domains at the same time because we cannot find enough people with SEO experience. Obviously those are hard to find. So, you have to teach people what spam is, and it’s easy to teach people what spam is in one country because it’s more or less falls around the same trends. But to teach them of all the world spam, which is completely different.

Nick: Right.

Kalin: It would be hard and also for us we have another challenge that is we don’t use the domains for ourselves but we seldom, which means that we also have to think of the buyer. We always have to make the balance of the domain is good but will the buyer like it or this domain is bad but maybe some buyer will still want it because maybe a spam casino domain but it will have small leftovers of casino traffic, which are extremely valuable for some buyers of course. So, it’s always a trade-off between quality of the link profile, sometimes the name can be not so bad, so it can have value too. Sometimes the traffic can be more valuable than everything else, and sometimes it’s all about the buyers what they want because if they want to buy a stupid stuff, I cannot stop them. We try to make the price adjustment in such a way that people buy good domains but they still buy the bad domains. Even I make a casino spam domain ten times more expensive, still someone will buy them.

Nick: They want it, of course.

Kalin: People overestimate the nation, the country relevance, so they will pay ten times as much for a casino domain then let’s say a game domain which can be repurposed to casino domain quite easily. They will pay five times more for Swedish or Finnish domain compared to another country although if you take five domains from all over the world, and cook links to finish website. It would be better finishing but they want the right thing because especially gambling companies, they have a lot of money. So, they think they can buy their way in. But actually from non-spam because domains almost don’t exist, no money can buy your way in into one of those.

Nick: It’s over now right. So, something I’m interested in aspects to what you’re talking about is how you price domains in and of itself. So, these ten employees that you have do they price domains or is there like a management team that’s in charge of that? Then it seems like we talk about it, it’s so just out in the open what domains are worth or how you’re gonna purpose them or what somebody is willing to pay for them. So, how especially since you’ve got this giant list of like 10,000 plus domains. How do you go about deciding this one’s gonna be priced at $70, this one’s going to be $10,000. What’s the main things you look for?

Kalin: Well, before we had a very simple approach to pricing, we tried to price according to the value that we thought the domain cost. This link, so this price and in times we realized this is wrong business-wise. Because if you look at domains that are unique, each domain only needs one buyer. One buyer may buy many domains but each domain will be bought only by one buyer. So, it’s like a hitchhiking, you only need one. Thousand cars may go past you but if one stops, you are good because you only need one. So, that should be the approach of selling domains. You want most domain sold but you only need one buyer. So, if you have a domain at a price where two or more buyers are ready to buy, you already lost the price, should have been higher.

Nick: Okay sure.

Kalin: So, the way we do it now is we price each domain at the price where we hear that the chances of it being sold in reasonable time like one year are at least 50%. But not much more than 50%, so we try to be around 50% because what will happen then is that we won’t have domains that have too low prices where people get them very cheaply. Of course everyone who buys a domain from us extracts much more value. If you think about it, you buy for five hundred dollars, so domain with three hundred referring domains. So, you can put let’s say eight site-wide links on it in theory. From such a domain, such a link would cost let’s say a $100 per year at least. You already have eight hundred dollars in value by buying a $500 domain. Ideally next day, you can sell the eight links and already have a profit of 300 and still have the domain. So, our domain though some may seem expensive, they are always cheap compared to the value which you can extract from them. Either from selling links all from ranking your product. If you rank your own projects, lets say good money-making affiliate website then you can get even more.

Because imagine if you sell the links for $800, someone revive them and takes the risk then makes even more, they make 2000 ranking an affiliate website. So, you may set the basis of the of the supply chain and they are always cheap. So, our prices even if sometimes they seem high to certain buyers, they are actually less than the actual work then you can extract from.

Nick: I think your service brings for like just tremendous value especially in this industry where things are kind of convoluted with, for lack of a better word ‘bullshit’. I think your list is always getting very straightforward and awesome, doing business with you has been great. That’s cool.

Chris: So, I think a lot of people that are watching this video might be a little bit new to domain hunting or might be a little unsure about the methods that they’re using for hunting domains. So, I was wondering if you could maybe provide a little bit of help to the new guy who’s looking to buy domains on his own. Of course, no matter how good your service is, no matter how good your prices are, people are going to want to try to do it themselves at some point too. I was hoping you might have a little bit of advice for someone who’s trying to go that route.

Kalin: Well of course, we don’t want to discourage people to try their own. I’m always a fan of people who are trying to at least try doing something on their own. So, they can see the specific of it the way it works. So, then even if you buy them then you know what you buy because if you just go into this, let’s say you start PBNs now. You start buying domains, you don’t know what you’re buying, you don’t know if you buy the right domains and considering that our prices, now do not exactly reflect the quality of the domains. Before we used to say to people, okay it doesn’t matter what you buy from the list because the prices do always reflect the quality. But since it’s not right for us to do it business-wise because we want the domains that people want more, we want to make them more expensive even if they are not better.

So, we cannot say this anymore. So, it will be great if people will just look around see what domains are available to you, the auction prices. Then they can, for themselves, they can build themselves a picture. Also I would always recommend to look at the domains. Go to the auctions, and the other auctions are super public, so you can just look at all the sold domains and check them after one month, two months, three months, what’s going on with them. Are they turning to PBNs to many sites, are they being used to redirect in which way, what are the money sites behind them. Because you cannot actually hide it, you can hide it from the bottom. You cannot hide it from a person entering a domain from GoDaddy option list three months after just curiously looking toward money sighted. So, you can do a lot of research on those and basically you can in time start to see what experienced people, who know what they’re doing. You can see the money site in Ahrefs, does it have traffic, does it rank.

If it ranks well, then maybe this PBN strategy or strategy to rank money sites with expired domains is good. Then you can actually see and investigate what domains there are that give the most value. So, basically it’s not something hidden, most of the sales of domains that happen even with domains with links that are public. You can actually monitor, you can see what’s going on, and you can make learn from other people’s mistakes, instead of making them your own. Because it will be quite expensive for mistakes to use an expensive auction domain in a wrong way and better up your money site.

Nick: So, I think it’s awesome. It kind of ties in to what you said earlier, once you have time, you can explore different opportunities. I see a lot of people that are new to SEO, and they don’t understand that it’s the inquisitive mind that figures out the solutions to these problems. Get out there and do simple things, like you said check out GoDaddy auctions, go back to them a month, two months later and see what they’ve been repurposed as, see what they’re doing with them. They give you a valuable insight without needing technical SEO expertise, it’s like put it in an excel file and then keep track of it, simple suggestions.

Kalin: While I do encourage people to like investigate and stuff, it’s depending on the TLD you need. So, if it’s .com, or .uk or some other country, there are different limitations about the ways you can get domains. So, then you’re going to really domain Industry limitations, and we are a huge company now, not huge but big for the thing we do, 50 people. We still don’t do German and French domains, and we are starting to Spain just now. We have a big doing in Spain, so why is that? This is because it’s hard, there are limitations in some countries, catching is very expensive. So, basically catching system is the main problem, you either have auctions or you have catching, there are no other models in the domain industry.

If you have options, then it will be hard to get anything below market price. You should really focus on doing good SEO with what you can get at market price. So, like choosing a good niche for affiliate and finding a good domain for it and stuff like this but you cannot really profit from taking a good domain cheap.

Nick: Right.

Kalin: When you have catching, sometimes there’s a low barrier of entry to catching in a certain country. Sometimes it’s high, and realizing if it’s low high is no small deal. I mean no one will really tell you that you cannot see this information anyway, you just have to try for yourselves and invest time and money to try it. We have done this investment in all countries. So, it’s quite a lot of initial investment and when people ask me how we do get a domain. There’s no magic trickery literally. It’s a mix of extreme accumulation of niche knowledge, how things work in every country.

A lot of time, a lot of developers a lot of money there is no silver bullet. We have only a 100k in deposits so we can catch. Because we catch in so many different places at one that only the deposit you need to have. So, you can buy basically pay with credit fold for the domains while you catch them. Because you don’t have time for payment you actually have, prepaid took for the API’s and everything to work. So, we only have 100K in deposits.

Nick: Okay.

Kalin: So, it’s like the most primitive barrier to entry but, and also when you owe the other stuff. So, it’s easy to imagine that’s a small guy who a good developer can try catching domains. It can be the case in some rare cases but mostly it’s not easy.

Nick: Right.

Kalin: The scrapers don’t want to just go for broken links that they think is mostly dying. Unless you search something, you’re on a very very specific niche, you want just to scrape your niche website. Because otherwise all the domains that the scrapers find are domains that we have decided that our below, our floor that we don’t buy or catch. Because we already know all domain. So, every time a scraper find the domain we already know about this domain that it exists that it’s available.

So, if you didn’t get it, well of course sometimes we’re just lazy and because we cannot cover. But if it’s a good domain and we didn’t get it. It probably not that good.

Chris: Gotcha. So, going back to domain a little bit, you had mentioned that there is no silver bullet. I think a mistake that a lot of people make when they’re hunting domains and might be new to hunting domains is, they put too much emphasis on looking for this one metric. That they consider a silver bullet. You had said earlier you’d mentioned that how bad trust flow is and how bad it is at judging the value of a domain. It’s so true, but I think it’s probably the most common mistake I see people making with domain hunting is that, they’re looking at these metrics and they’re making horrible decisions based on this information.

Kalin: This is true but you need the metrics because our database has 300 million domains. So, the only way you can solve any domains with things is by metrics. So, we need metrics we pay Majestic, we pay Ahrefs for, we pay Majestic High Plan for API and then we pay Ahrefs Agency plans. We have a lot of manual checks. But metrics is not everything but metrics can help. Actually, I am a fan of metrics contrary to popular opinion about metrics. But metrics should only be looked at in the context of what the website is.

So, if the website is a news website in a country that, where the structure of the news websites which are the main donor of links to other news websites. It’s such it then don’t have good internal linking so their interventions don’t have high Majestic trust flow. So, basically you can have a domain with quite nice media links which Trust Flow 1 even zero. So, it is a logarithmic zero, so imagine how low. It’s a logarithmic scale. So, just trust flow it’s a very bad metric because it’s the normally such as crazy. You can have a shitty domain with Trust Flow 30 and a great domain trust for one or even zero.

So, you cannot ever rely on trust flow, but you can rely referring domains for your initial filtering. You can realize that if a domain has Ahrefs, they are zero. It’s bad, this is sure. If it’s one, it’s almost certainly bad and from two and up you can have some that again with media links. The Ahrefs algos, I used to like it more before the massive update. The switch but after the switch I learned to interpret it again. The key thing about the switch is that, Ahrefs gets the following idea. Most spammy websites like directories, hacked websites, forum, unprotected block comments and all of those, what is the common thing they all have a lot of external links across the whole domain.

So, not necessarily the page, a directory may have a single listing page with only one link to the website. But the domain, across the domain they always have a lot of outgoing. So, Ahrefs said, okay let’s divide the power of the link from this webpage to the number of links for the whole domain the outgoing links. Then we kill off the stems, stem will never again increase the app. Okay, smart idea but then the media also have a lot of outgoing links.  That’s a BBC has links to ten million domains or something. So, then they also kill the value of the media links and all of the domains that you search for we trusted media links like BBC.

They have very low they are now if they have only those and no else. So, you should interpret the metric according to whether the website has mostly media links or mostly all the links. Or of course if it’s a web design that makes free small websites but they are only outgoing link is the footer link to the web designs to do. Then you have the authority which basically almost zero value. So, you’ve always remembered what you divide by, and then you can get back to looking at Ahrefs DR.

Because if you look at out of context it may seem a mess. But if you look at in the context of what the website is and its main link sources, then you can actually look at metrics.

Chris: Gotcha.

Kalin: But Trust Flow is really messy like nothing will help you interpret Trust Flow or motive on context. So, if your main sources should be DA which is quite stable DR in context and referring domains and Trust Flow you should never use unless you see if it’s a ton of referring domains and Trust Flow one then it’s bad. But if it’s Trust Flow one in fifty domains it may be good so it’s a bit paradoxical.

Chris: Sure awesome. I think that’s gonna yeah, I think there’s some people for sure. Yeah, we’re a little bit in the same boat. A lot of our links are priced by referring domains and people always very commonly want them priced by something else and wondering why we’re pricing them by referring domains. So, we always tell them, once you determine everything else to be quality then referring domains tends to be a very strong determiner of value.

Kalin: Absolutely.

Chris: Yeah and so you’re saying that you think DA is also a very stable metric for people to look at like DA, PA.

Kalin: Yes, mostly well up here I don’t look at because it’s more like a paid metric but not domain level. But DA we look at into and sometimes it happens that after the most updated their index; I think it was earlier this year. After this update, it’s happens that website that are not so good get between DA 25 – 30. But it’s hard to get more than 30 without being a good website. But most importantly it’s got to be below 15 and not be very shitty.

Chris: Gotcha.

Kalin: So, this really helps evaluate, because sometimes you know there are mirrors and sometimes they confuse Majestic and Ahrefs. But if the DA is below 15, then basically it’s a weak domain.

Chris: Gotcha. One more question about, when you’re looking at the backlink profile of a domain. We’ve talked about referring domains and some other metrics and I also you know you showed us that you’re looking at the domains that are linking to that domain. But do you aside from looking at the domain that the link is coming from? Do you look for relevance in any other way? Are you looking at keywords and linking page titles things like that inner-page URLs, or you mainly just looking at the domain that the link is coming from?

Kalin: We try to look at the links mostly to determine what the website was about when we evaluate the domain. Because actually it’s easier to see what the website was about based on the links than based on something else, which is super slow. So, the links you look at anyway so you can check the links. But as domain is kept for almost entirely natural links, it’s actually they’re always relevant a natural link is always relevant. There cannot be a natural link that is not relevant. Because someone put it there as a genuine recommendation for something.,

So, it’s always relevant even is the website is about something else there’s always some connection. Because it’s a natural link. So, the domains, so with natural link they have 100% relevancy. Because it’s how it works.

Chris: Gotcha. Got any more questions?

Nick: Well, basically I think I’d like to hear and I think the viewers would like to hear a little bit more about SEO domains as well. You know we’ve covered the fact that you’ve got do you say 300,000 sites on inventory.

Kalin: We have 300 million websites in the real database. We monitor those and when they go near expiration, we do the evaluation process. We decide after which we are after which ones we are going to catch, then we do priorities. Because sometimes it’s worth bidding in an option and other times. It’s not sometimes it’s worth placing an expensive back order and not other times it just worth trying to catch the domains yourself were cheap. But catching ourselves for cheapest. Like one second or something related.

Like it’s not, that we leave it to the scraper. So, if we want if you want it and we are they get it or someone with better technology or more investment get this. But if domain that we chose to catch will never get into scrapers cans ever.

Nick: So, in aspects to being a registrar, I would say you’re probably pretty neat you down as a registrar. Correct? You’re the only one really basing this off metrics that apply it to the SEO community. I mean there’s not many of y’all out there at this level. Is there?

Kalin: We are registrar actually in some of these we have registrar more than once. So, we have I think about 50 accreditations across different these mixes. We, I can registrar so theoretically would be should be able to change .com. We have very very limited chance. So, we haven’t tried that drop catch .com has a thousand registrar nickname scales about 500. So, imagine the competition for catching .com. Each way this track goes to cost like an $8,000 initially and 4,000 each year only in fees.

So, imagine the cost of maintaining drop catch .com, it’s 4 million annually in fees, that’s why. So, that’s a very very big industry of course the main focus is not the SEO names but the good names that the good .com’s that may be worth five figures a lot of them. But we are good with catching in UK, we are good in catching in a lot of small countries. We do with Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland, Romania, Ukraine and a lot of other countries Denmark, Finland.

Nick: Currently, it’s 50 employees hunting worldwide. It’s hard to even imagine like room for expansion on this, but do you have big plans for additional things. You’d be moving on with SEO .domains.

Kalin: We met all domain; the first step will be to right now we have a bank account where people can search a future domain and order them. So, we’ll build, it’s already built but we haven’t sent the users their credentials. We’re building a user account system, so everyone can account with their orders and everything. Then at some point people will be able to pay online instead of just ordering. We don’t want people to pay online right now because sometimes the stuff can happen with people buying a domain. Then deciding to they don’t want the exact domain because of all the CCT of these restrictions.

Yeah, you know there are some cases, but after we get a good process, we will have online payments. Then we have an affiliate program I’m sure that this will make a lot of people happy. The next big step is that we’ll have a domain management system. We are registrar so when we get the right software in place and the right processes. After you order a domain, you will be able to just receive the domain in your account, without having no castle, no bushes, no transfers. Just immediately being able to manage your name servers. In this case, it will be just as seamless as buying a .com from GoDaddy options.

It will be the same, actually better because it will be made without the wait. So, you buy and immediately you have access to the domains in your account. They may be 50 different TLDs you want in different registrars. You don’t want to need to worry about anything you just pain you get the domains, so this is the final goal.

Nick: That’s very cool.

Kalin: Also, will start a cost price registrar. So, then everyone can have the domains with us at exactly how much it cost with the register so .com for $8 and everything super cheap. And apart from the cost price register will always also open a marketplace, which will be great for someone who has domains with good names. But doesn’t know the right way to put them for sale.

Nick: Sure.

Kalin: So, right now there are a lot of such domain owners, who don’t really want to go through the hassle to list the domains and marketplace and so on. So, we’ll make up registrar marketplace hybrid where you just transfer your domain’s in. It gets listed in our marketplace in every other marketplace and you just get offers. You can counteroffer accept and so on and you can say, we all domains with basically doing nothing.

Nick: Very cool.

Kalin: The nice part will be that since there are with us is registrar after you sold the domain you just get your money. We take care of the transfer because domains are already with us.

Nick: That’s great. So, you said that’s what the plans are for SEO domains. Correct me if I’m wrong but it seemed like maybe Kalin’s got some other things up his sleeve in aspects to other companies or other ventures maybe you’re working on.

Kalin: Yeah, basically SEO domains is not a company, it is just a brand of feeDoms. So, some of the stuff I told you is related to E-Doms. But for SEO domains the best thing will be that people will be able to manage the domains they both with us. Because right now they are often buying the domain, then they use bad registrar, CCTLD. These are kind of a mess. So, if you use bad registrar it’s never good.

Nick: Right.

Kalin: So, it’s a very important that you use the best possible registrars. If we are registrar, we can provide a great service that bypasses all the problems that CCTLD of these are not always for.

Chris: Understood. So, I guess we’ve been going a little bit over an hour now we don’t want to steal all your time. So, I guess we will start wrapping things up a little bit.

Kalin: I think someone in the audience might fall asleep.

Nick: No, no. Sure, in aspects to wrapping it up, just some basic questions.

Chris: Yeah, I guess just a few last questions for you. If you could give someone who doesn’t know much about domains, that’s looking to purchase domains for whatever reason PBN, 301’s money sites whatever. If you could give them one piece of advice, what would that be?

Kalin: Oh, just one.

Chris: Yes, one concise piece of advice.

Nick: That stepping in right direction.

Kalin: Well, if they are starting now, I would say I’ll just start slow and learn from your own results and mistakes and so on. Or if you wanna start big because you’re under pressure for some reason. Let’s say you work in a company and your boss say, okay we’re starting doing a thousand websites, PBN. It just ask people for help, so there are a lot of people who have some experience in this. So, ask people for help that are actually doing it. Don’t just read stuff online because especially about picking domains the stuff that’s online is mostly either nowhere. Or it’s a very shallow.

Because let’s take one of the most popular PBN guides, the Darryl Rosser’s guide last year.

Chris: Well known.

Kalin: So, it has a ton of useful helpful stuff and when it gets to domains it goes like. Oh, you should pick good domain that I’m not spending basically that it’s like a few lines. Okay, but where do you get them for cheap? How do you save your time from bidding 8,000 options? What should your expectations be about getting a domain with certain power for money? Like you cannot read about this anywhere. Everyone just keeps this and it’s quite a big part of building a PBN or choosing a domain for 301, or choosing a domain for a money side.

It’s a big part because basically you should, okay now you understand that the domain should be good and not spent. But what about the cash and the time you can invest for each domain and what are the right places to buy. All of this is not too discussed a lot. So, the best place to learn it is from other people that are doing it. If you cannot read it, then I’ll try to learn from experience. Go to other big PBN or affiliates and okay, how do you approach this problem this problem, what should I expect from certain situations.

Chris: Right, cool thank you. So, everybody watching this if you have PBN domain questions go ahead and send Kalin a message on Facebook.

Kalin: Yes, bro. So, I guess that you have experts for everything. I can tell a lot about CCTLD domains but for let’s say if you want to do auction domains only for some reason. Then basically you should go to someone who is experienced with GoDaddy auctions.

Nick: Oh, do you want to touch on that real quick? I think it’s a very hot topic I’m sorry I know we serve a winding down. But auction domains vs expired domains, your honest opinion on what you think about it?

Kalin: Yeah, this is then unfortunately some technical stuff coming again. I keep answering this question but no one ever remembers the answer because it’s very technical. So, basically there are two kinds of domains and then one kind falls against into two kinds. So, you had country domains and you have dot-com net for the global ones. So, with the com or the global ones Google is a registrar and also, it’s super easy to check that the creation date. But if your registrar it’s super, super, super more easy. Because we have an internal channel for who is queries which is unlimited.

Google is a registrar for .com Network because they have Google domains, they sell domains. So, what happens is that every .com that Google sees Google instantly knows the creation date., It’s super-fast and easy to check and they have implemented this into the algorithm. So, when a domain .com expire so it expires and it’s called by drop catch com net domain. So, the notorious expired domains, Google sees that it changed owner. Even if it had links, if it the creation date is yesterday or one month ago it did change on and Google knows this for sure.

Nick: Right.

Kalin: Well, if a domain goes through GoDaddy Auction, NameJet, Dynadot, or another auction, it doesn’t expire. Because the registrar’s holds it and then sells it to another user. So, it actually doesn’t expire. If you keep the Registrar the same day Google doesn’t know it changed owner. So, that’s the difference between auction and expired domains. But these differences only apply to this com network. So, on the other side the CCTLD is UKD all the CCTLD of these Google is not a registrar. It’s extremely hard to get the creation date for a lot of domains.

Some domains they don’t have a creation date they don’t have a creation date in, for domains in Germany, for domains in Spain, for domains in Greece, for many other countries. So, basically the Google approach to creation dates in country domains, its fuckin. It may see it some bands because some here and others don’t have so we just don’t do it. So, in this case Google doesn’t know that the owner changed because they don’t check it they don’t even try to check if the owner change.

So, every domain that is a country domain by defaulted Google doesn’t apply the did owner change or not. So, it Google implies that the owner is the same right just like .com’s from auctions. So, basically .com’s from auctions which are good and CCTLD of these which are also good and only the drop domains from drop catch and snap names only. They’re the only ones that get developed, not 100% a bit develop. But there’s also another thing to this. The country domains they have no auctions and no big public lists.

So, GoDaddy and name jet have a very public list remember what I told you that you can investigate what people are doing with those domains. Because the lists are public. Well, they have actually very public it’s a huge one-click downloadable list and it goes into all the aggregate it goes into don’t cope, goes into expired domains dotnet. It goes there because it’s public and it’s public for Google too. So, every domain that ends will go to the auction. Google for now doesn’t put this as a flag that the owner might have changed and it might be a potential PBN in the future.

But in the future, this may change, because you never know. It’s too easy it’s just as easy as the creation that day they all are already implemented. So, we never know, actually the auctions might want one they get flagged of course not only because of this but with other combined with other factors. Let’s say if it was in GoDaddy auction and if it’s a WordPress. If it has let’s say gambling content and if it gets outgoing links. Then maybe a Google editor will come to check what’s going on in all. These kinds of scenarios are possible.

So, I can see that CCTLD domain safer because Google doesn’t have a lot of data to start any investigations from there. Everything is super messy and super hidden. So, that’s why one of the reasons why we massively put our CCTLD of these in regards to catching and selling. Of course, the other reason is that CCTLD we can get cheaper compared to auction domains which go for market price. But I think that CCTLD of these are friendly to the US market. .IO, .me, .to, .la Los Angeles.

Others can be used in the US market, so still you not only title .com’s forever. There are options and I think that this dividing into sectors is crucial to understanding the expired domains industry that you have country domains. Which are good, you have auction domains which are good very good for now but we don’t know the future because Google can actually see what domain was an option quite easily if they want it to. We have the drop domains that Google already took the steps to develop.

Chris: So, as far as .com’s go for your own business you kind of see it as a pretty risky investment for the future.

Kalin: We don’t do auctions but we do set here some .com’s that you can find on SEO domains. This is there where a private partnership with the registrar. So, they are actually technically absolutely the same as domain single GoDaddy auctions, the name jet and the other auctions. But with the only slight difference that they were never in a public list. Because we have a deal with the registrar can we just buy out private with a good domain from you, because then you won’t have to build options and stuff and they were fine and we do this. So, these are actually another very good type for the future.

Of course, you can do this with all domains. You can just go to the domain and say, oh man I say your domain is expiring do you want $500 because I find the value more and then you get an amazing domain for $500. Which may get thousands of links people have been doing this and they’re still doing it and this is a very good approach of course. I can only say that this is one of the best ways you can get a domain. We’re not doing it because we’re too lazy basically. But it’s a very good approach that you can do to get something below market price.

But apart from this the .com’s in the future may become more risk in than there are now.

Chris: Yeah, so I guess people might rely on companies such as yours that are buying them before they go on any kind of public list. So, could even end up being good for you, good positioning.

Kalin: Yes, we feel that we’re well positioned. But only the future will tell.

Chris: Well, I think that’s about it Kalin. We really appreciate you taking the time.

Nick: Do you want to end on anything? Would you like to say anything particularly to the viewers?

Chris: Anyone you want to shout out or plug?

Nick: Yeah, Hi mom.

Nick: Well, I was just at Chiang Mai. I would like to care to say great words for my, you organizer all the people who took part and all the attendees. It’s an amazing community that’s forming there. So, I hope to see you next year there.

Chris: Sure, will be out there.

Kalin: And hope to see you there too.

Chris: Where we’ve got it all next year.

Nick: We do have it.

Chris: We’re doing it next year, it’s happening.

With the coming of the holidays, it’s time for us to show you how greatful we are for your continued business and support. And what better way to do that than by giving all you lovely people some more free backlinks!?

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I’m particularly excited to talk about this today because I think anybody, whether you’re completely new to SEO, have been doing it for a long time, or don’t even know what SEO is… probably could benefit from this. It boils down to controlling and dominating your own SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

This is something that I see a lot of people ignore, and it’s something that I think makes an excellent starting point for any newbie SEO or anyone just messing around.

I’ve seen countless gurus say:

Hey, I’m going to teach you the keys to success. Go out and get yourself some clients, and you’re going to do fine.

I think that’s asinine, I think it’s irresponsible. What I’m going to show you today I think is a good starting point for absolutely anybody.

It’s going to give you the confidence that you need to see and understand that there is opportunity here and you, no matter how new to SEO, can execute plans of attack that are going to resonate positively within a search engine like Google.

And we’re going to do that by showing you how to easily get your name on Google.

1. Exact Match Domain, WordPress, and Plugins

When you type “Nick Altimore” into Google, it’s a search query with its own SERP. Anybody reading this has a SERP for their own name as well. It’s just what Google shows you when you make the search.

There’s a bunch of different ways to manipulate this, and I’m going to show you one of the easiest ones in my opinion (that’s also very cheap to execute).

First, I went to a preferred registrar (ie: Namecheap) and bought nickaltimore.com.

This is known as an EMD (Exact Match Domain) because it exactly matches the search query that I’m targeting. This is a very powerful tool when trying to rank on a particular SERP.

If your name is taken, you can add something to the end of it (ie: nickaltimoreseo.com).

This should cost about $10.

Next, install WordPress on the domain after buying it and getting it hosted (many registrars like Namecheap offer hosting as well).

After that, you can add some plugins to your WordPress site if you’d like. Some of the most common plugins are SEO plugins and caching plugins. These aren’t really necessary for this project, but they can’t hurt and are something I naturally do on every site I create.

2. Title and Content

Once WordPress was installed (very easy to do, just Google it), all I did was write “Nicholas Altimore” which is a broader version of the search query (my name) as the title. Then I wrote, “If you ain’t trapping.”

There’s literally nothing on the site except for this – just the title and the URL. That’s it.

Within three to four days, you’ll notice that this website is going to pop up onto page two or three for the SERP for your name (depending on how popular of a person you are, how much press you’ve had, any other people with your name, etc).

This will show you how potent URLs (domains) with your keywords in them are for going after those keywords.

Domains name and title are two of the most important factors for on-page SEO (see: on-page SEO guide).

Within two days, we’ve got this site on page two for my SERP.

All I did after that was add about 300-500 words of content about myself. As a joke, I just added some stuf about loving to party and an image that Chris made about me a long time ago being a jerk.

And then I decided to go ahead and attack Chris a little bit too while I was at it. You guys can find out all about why I’m better than Chris if you just dive in here a little bit (disclaimer: Nick is not better than Chris in any way, shape, or form).

The point is that I did this literally overnight. If you go to my SERP, you’ll notice that I was on page one within one night of adding the content to this URL. There are no outbound links, inbound links, or anything else.

All that’s here so far is basic content. It’s just a one-page website, and it’s already resonating in my SERP with almost no work at all.

Some other things you could add to your site that might help are:

• Outbound authority links to things like your Facebook, Twitter, etc
• Videos related to you
• Images of you

These things aren’t necessary but will 100% give you a boost.

3. Backlinks

The next thing that I would want to do is to get some links to the website. Backlinks make the world of SEO go ’round and will help to push the results for your name on Google to the top if you still need it.

For this project, we don’t really need anything fancy or expensive. We can just go with easy stuff like directories, blog comments, forum links – stuff like that. They are all very white-hat, free (or cheap), and accessible to anyone.

For more information on types of backlinks and how to get them, you can see our link diversity article and our how to get high quality links for free article.

You can check out the link building services of a company like ourselves for most of the easy stuff, or you can just build them yourself with a little reading and time invested.

3. Connecting the Dots and Ranking Results

Okay, with that, I would expect, I’m talking about minimal effort, right now I’m on number six for my own search. I would expect that I could get number one or number two just doing basic pillow linking, right? Stuff that I’d be using are things like Nicholas Altimore or Nick Altimore as far as anchors go, nickaltimore.com, HTTP, whatever. So use variants like you would in any pillow linking strategy.

Now what’s important about this, (a) you’re guarding and manipulating your own SERP, very important, especially if you plan on devoting yourself to something like SEO. It’s a selling point; consider your SERP as a resume, one that you can manipulate. No matter how new you are at SEO, I think it’s very easy to say, yes, you know how to buy a domain that’s associated with your name, you know how to install WordPress, you know how to put up a post. That’s all you’ve got to do to get started realizing what kind of variables go into manipulating a search query.

Now say you’ve done this, what does that give you access to as a newfound entrepreneur or somebody who’s interested in doing this? What is a business model that can work with this? Maybe something like reputation management, I think that’s a lot more accessible to the average SEO that just got started versus going after clients after hard targets, etcetera. Well, with something like this, you might do a little bit better.

If you’ll notice there’s a bunch of different ways to get different pages up in the SERPs as well for yourself, so you can do this with press releases, you can do it with Web 2.0’s, and any other kind of press or posts that are associated with your name or heavily associated with it.

Now interesting to note here is I’m going after Nick Altimore, but I’d like to see it for Nicholas Altimore as well, so I’ve tracked just like for two days now what’s been going on in the SERPs with this domain. So for Nick Altimore you’ll see over the course of the last two days jump three positions, that might be just for the content resonating a little bit better. Like I said, it jumped up to page one just with slight content, but you’re going to see this continually move up, especially as I add those basic pillow links.

Nicholas Altimore at number 30, we’ve jumped up 11 overnight to position 19. So imagine if I hit it with like a PBN or some niche edit, something like that, depending on how gray hat you’re getting with your work. Very easy to manipulate my search.

So yeah, now then let’s jump into what else I added in there, right? I mentioned Chris. Google is associated with us, you can see in his SERP and my SERP that pictures of each other pop up. It’s associated, our businesses with one another. So I figured just by adding his name a couple of times it’ll start resonating.

And if you’ll note, page three to page two overnight along with that content too, and so hypothetically there is a chance that if I wanted to be aggressive I could go after his own SERP for his own name. This is not something that I would recommend anybody doing; it’s a very nefarious practice. I’m doing it here just to outline the fact that just adding slight content can manipulate the data enough to resonate in different places.

And that being said, I think I’ve given you enough to kind of just play off of here, it’s a very simple strategy, it’s something anybody can do. And I know there’s a lot of SEOs, including me, who haven’t been very serious about their own SERP, but it’s definitely worthwhile to get in there and start playing with it. And then as you go on in your business strategy, etcetera, you’ll want to heavily guard this as it is your reputation, right? You don’t want somebody able to put press out there or anything like that and just tie up your SERP with crap. This is a brand protection type of strategy, but it can also move a lot of you towards new business ventures.

So I hope this helped. Nick here, signing off. Good luck in the SERPs.

Getting Your Name in Google Search Wrap-Up

• Directories/Business Citations
• Blog Comments
• Forum Links
• Social Profiles
• Or just a couple guest post etc

Watch the Video: