Debunking Link Building Myths: Rethinking Metrics and Relevance

Yeah, sure.

So first of all, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure. I start I try not to do that many podcasts but I just couldn’t say no to you cuz we met for the first time in Brighton, s e o right? In yeah. In England, right? And yeah. Then you found me again after some time and then I said, Oh, yeah, it’s always good to come back to those relationships that you’ve made them offline and at the conferences. And then suddenly you get the invitation online. So it’s always nice that people remember you. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. So what I can tell you about my You know, not to make you bored. Probably like everyone else I was doing. Nothing was connected with digital or SEO. I just completely find out of nowhere out of the blue. I am I’m a sound engineer. And when I was at work at this. At the recording studio and I got a job as a sound engineer and my boss told me, look we need to start doing marketing just to market ourselves a little bit as our record label because we were doing the sound engineering for old records.

And, sound engineering, music, like Frank Sinatra, all that stuff, nothing to do with SEO. He goes we’ve got a website. It’s called something like WordPress. And he was at that time he was 60-something, a very experienced old guy. And then he said in marketing is very important.

Yeah, sure. And then you’ve got a brain because you are currently in junior. That’s how he approached me. I said, yeah, I can try. I’ll try to see what I can do. And he said, so we’ve got a WordPress and then we have something like Google Analytics. But this, these two, they have to be connected. And I’m thinking like, okay, sure, let me have a look.

And then I realized how easy to do this, I just read the manuals, I just got into that, it’s like a. If you have this engineering mind, you go through step by step, right? You’ll get there, right? So it didn’t take me a long next day. I just realized how easy is to make WordPress. You’re just buying let’s say WordPress theme, and then you can start, getting clients and saying to them, look, I can get you a website. I can do WordPress within one day. I can just, I need to buy a good theme and good hosting. And That’s it. I’m thinking that was like in 2010. I’m thinking so good analytics, WordPress, and getting clients.

It’s much more exciting than just looking at the waves, and sound waves, and then removing noises. I’m thinking like, no, this is completely wrong. I’ve lost my five years. I started in sound engineering as well. I’m thinking like, no, this has to be changed. And that’s how I started. And the next day, an old friend asked me, what do you do these days?

And then I, and I said, I’m doing the websites. And yeah. So do you need a website? And she said, Yeah. My mom needs it. If you can come to London on the West side, I’ll tell you the address tomorrow. You meet her. And I did that. And I went there and I showed her a few, WordPress themes and she didn’t know what’re WordPress themes.

She said look, these are the money I have. I just need the website. You just take care of it. And I said, I don’t need to, you don’t need to tell me what’s WordPress and what’s themes. Just get the website for me right up and running. Great. Yeah, sure. Okay. So here’s the money. And I remember that was like a first 500 pounds, like as fast as I could earn.

And it was the first time I got money up front, so I just realized I must be good in sales.

And that’s how I started that, you carry on and you carry on and people asking you, okay, we’ve got a website. But we need to be visible as well, yeah, we can do this, we just need to find how to do this, and I didn’t know even what doesn’t mean SEO. So that was a WordPress.

So it was the 1st thing. Hosting was the 2nd thing because it’s recurring every year. You can up, you can do some updates. You have to do the updates on the hosting. You can charge customers for that as well. And then as you came in as well. Realize, wow, like what’s SEO, people need to ask about it.

So we started optimizing our clients that I have as a freelancer first, luckily, and then just realized like, then, oh, you need this and then you need that. And it took years and years. And then I found myself in the link building because I figured out that this is the most difficult thing to get and to get it done, correct, very easy to do this you can buy or build chip links and all that stuff. It may work, or may not work, but if you’re a specializing, and then you do this for years, you understand the game that it’s all about partnerships. And it’s all about having connections with other people.

So you can get links on the website that no one else can get it. And then I just realized, wow, this is like trading, you can get shares of the 1 company that no one can have it. And you can have something that, you build those links and they become digital assets for the company on the Internet.

Yeah, and then, yeah, basically I could go in and go, but I think you just got my start of the career, and that’s how I took off that just naturally, you just meet people, you get clients, you do some speaking engagements. You see where I come from naturally, by the time you’re getting better and better, you’ve got results, people talking about you, you’ve got referrals and that’s how I grow. I haven’t done anything particular to become, as I said big or famous or something like that.

Yeah. Just by doing good and getting better at being specialized. I think being specialized and I choose that path. And obviously, then you become very good at what you do.

As well I got excited about this link-building as well. It comes easy when you do this. Then I find out what is HARA, what I found out was digital PR was different. And then what’s a good link, what’s a bad link, what’s paid link, what’s not paid link?

Okay. Nathaniel, who started Chili Fruit web consulting, was a very good friend of mine, but at that time, he was making WordPress websites.

Okay. And I was still into music. He was also still into music, but once we met once, then we forgot about ourselves. And then our friendship came back. I think I, I called him, he called me and then he said, look, mate, what do you do these days? And I said hosting websites, stuff like that, digital, generally speaking.

And he goes so you don’t do music anymore. No, I knew now. No money in that, so I said, what do you do? And I got my like a boutique London-based agency that does the little bit of social media, a little bit of everything, in 2010, you could do whatever, right? Because it was easier.

It wasn’t that many. Competition and people were wearing them as they demanded, it was the websites were in demand and he said yeah, I’m building WordPress websites as well. I’ve got a few clients, but then he said, after that, look I don’t want to do this anymore.

Do all my clients, it was just like that. It was that kind of conversation. And I remember he called me and then I want to build my app. The last guy does but that was years ago. And then, yeah, he did it. He did it exactly like you would read it from the books, you learn fast, and you did a unique proposition value to investors.

He got his first round from angel investors, and then he set it up the actual application. Which that time I was I knew about startups. I knew about SAS. I knew what he was doing. I knew that you have to go to Google. I was attentive to Google Place in London. I forgot the street, but that was like every week there were meetings with some investors and some founders and some SAS people.

They just. Started, and I was like, the ideal way to get into that specialization, like a SAS, then I just connected the dots. Okay, link building. They need link building. They need the SAS, I found out, find out through this way and once he grew a little bit, then I helped him with link building a little bit. So for his plus guidance, he got acquired sooner or later. In the same way, I acquired some of his clients and took over everything and I have, his website, which funny I haven’t done anything for the last five years on his website. And this is why I think it’s going to be a very original approach because I just put like one page.

One off-page about myself on the right-hand side. You saw it.

So I just, I’m going to carry on like that. Yeah. On the right-hand side, it’s going to be a picture of me, but I will not say my name. So if you go to the chillifruit.com, it doesn’t say what it is. It doesn’t say it’s digital marketing, it doesn’t say it’s link building, and there’s no my name.

So with that, I got into the Hara as well, and I just realized that, let me pitch all those queries, all those journalists, and then I will be like, I will be putting my website and I’ll see if they will link it to a strange website that is just the one like a landing page. And it doesn’t even say what it is about.

And they’ve been linking it. Yeah. And so they were linking one, second, third, fourth, fifth. And I was thinking like, wow, something is on. But you get the links, when you get links, you become addicted. It’s I don’t know how to say, addiction is like in a good way, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

So I keep doing it and realize, oh, how is that just another layer of. Building links. It’s very interesting for let’s say, specific clients. They just looking for different stuff. Yeah, so I keep, I still have this website and I still build links from time to time.

So I have a. It’s like a case study. Sometimes when I speak, when I have a presentation and I talk about it this is my one, Look, this is my website. Just check by our seminars. Just check the backlinks, they’re not perfect, but I. Can prove that with no one being nobody, you can create a picture of yourself.

You can create a website like an empty domain and you can build links like that as well, for free, because all you need to do is take your time and then. your creativity, and then you know how Harrow works, you just have to pitch, and then Harrow is a different subject, how you do it, but just for everyone who doesn’t know Harrow, Harrow is like a platform where you sign up and then you pitch a journalist, the journalists have queries.

Right 3 times per day, you choose the query that you like, and then you pitch it. You just send an email. I just wanted to give you some folks on your query that you’re looking for. This is my answer. And then you just say that this is your bio, your link to your LinkedIn. You don’t even have to do that.

But yeah, it started working like that. So it was a kind of a good addition when it comes to SAS. I was always naturally interested in that sphere, then that changed when I met Maciej Borkowski. It was a guy, it’s an affiliate guy, really one of the best SEO in Poland. And he, yeah. And at the conference in Krakow in Poland, he said, you need to speak with this.

Another guy, they do casinos. So maybe you might be interested because they’re looking for creative, creative people that they can do something for them. And I got hit with the casinos, something like SAS casino. So I’m trying not to talk about it, but because it’s very specific, and it’s only, we have even a specific team for that.

I just, found it to love with betting and casino websites because it’s a very different way of getting links. So that’s the journey. Yeah. And, that’s how I’m still there. And I, I still analyzing links, I still analyzing what is going on, and then yeah. People keep talking. Oh, link-building will die maybe.

Yeah, sure. Maybe, yeah. Same with the crypto. They’re saying, oh, cryptocurrency will die, but so far beat I didn’t invest in the beat Bitcoin. And you did or not? I did not. Okay. Okay. And I wish I could buy it 10 years ago, correct? Yeah. So you see where I come from? I keep talking to the clients.

The people. It’s the same way. It’s just new technology. Link building is not new. It’s not anymore sexy. It’s not the latest trend. , it’s. It’s been that it’s just part of your strategy. It has to be the, you have to keep investing in that, but the thing is with the link building, when you get links, good links on a good website, so now operating domains, they won’t disappear.

So it’s a good investment, can I say that, right? Absolutely. So if the domain is growing over time, then that link that you got it, it’s also getting the value.

Yeah. Same as crypto, right? You remember Bitcoin was like 10, 100, then it was 200 and now it’s 20, 000 per one Bitcoin.

Come on. Yeah. Think about it. It has logic.

believe when I met my wife, she was helping me with outreach, building the actual list. She did understand what is ARFs, and SEMrush, and we were doing it together until we find out that we want to have a son. So obviously because of that, she couldn’t work any longer. But yeah she started from the very beginning and she said I like this work. I want to work. Like that. I like this casino and everything. And I think she was very into negotiations, so when she said Oh, I can get publication for this, how much money, but maybe I can negotiate a little bit lower?

So that’d be a little bit something for me, and she realized the value of negotiation and realize the value of how much business you can do. By just keep asking people, what’s your price? Like per link or whatever or per publication or yeah. So she was outreaching constantly every day.
And then I think, it was new to her. So no, she wasn’t probably jealous of that statement that I was married to the link building because she knew that it was just a marketing kind of statement,

There are many ways how people look at the good domains, good links that they can get from the nine. So I just realized few things one :- I don’t know from where did it happen? Where does this come from? Then a lot of website administrators or providers or owners. If you speak with bloggers, they keep asking, Oh, that domain that we have to link it to you does not have, it has a most spam score of something.

And I’m thinking like most. MOS is such an old tool. It hasn’t been updated, I think, cuz I don’t even hear that people still using it, I know that’re still using it, but think about it. We’ve got some, we used to have Majestic, it used to be Popular Majestic, but these are the old, very old days and people keep asking about it.

They still using metrics from mos and I’m totally against that. I don’t believe that MOS is, Rational or any sort of good metric. I, that’s what that’s all the thing back

was, it was a good, very good. It was extremely good. He went back on the 1015 years ago, I will, I could say before SEMrush takeover and with A Refs.

So yeah one thing, do not use Moz. I don’t know. I know I’m doing really bad marketing, but I just don’t believe in those metrics anymore. I don’t know. I just found them very outdated. So I’m sorry if I break the heart of some people that are… Most believers, which is fine completely. But in my opinion, personal opinion, I just don’t believe it.

Second, what makes a good, what is the challenge is you would have to speak with those guys and try to, tell them why you use Moz and then for some reason, they just say look, I don’t want to. Any link exchange with you or I just don’t want to link it to the people to the websites that are they have a spam score of 5% 5% Come on, like even the Moz it says that zero to 5%is quite low.

It says that. Yeah, I think it’s just the reminder, of some people and that it’s okay. I don’t know, but I still don’t get it where does this come from? Anyway what makes it,

what makes a domain very good is the number of incoming domains. To that domain from which you want to get the link and the number of outgoing links from that domain.

The ratio of incoming and outgoing has to be positive. More incoming, less outgoing. If there are more outgoing links from that domain, take them, but make sure that you have that in the back of your hand. You know that domain might not have enough linkages because If let’s say you have a domain like my one chili fruit calm.

And you have only incoming links. Because I don’t have any I’ve gone right. So the entire link juice stays within that domain. So if I could do that 301, or I could give you a link on my homepage from our landing page to you your podcast or whatever, that will be probably the most important like the juicy Domain or link you could cut.

And I, yes. In reality, it’s very difficult to do right? This is why people can see that the PBNs are very good in the black half-world. They do I think there is a renaissance that people coming back, but what they do is they’re buying are buying all the domains with, let’s say, 10 years old and that works.

We don’t do that. Also, unfortunately, maybe because it’s not our specialization, but I saw the. good effects of this, if you can mix it up, a black hat with a white hat works so well. But yeah, take the risk, right? It depends also on a niche, niches like casinos or betting, have no way, they only have to do this because the problem is that, there are not many ways you can get links to the casinos.

Let’s put it this way. Same with the adult websites, all those difficult niches, same with that. Probably back in the day, there was 10 years ago, Viagra was very popular, but it was like a big scam as well. But you see where I come from. There are some niches you have not like.

You would have to go this way and then try to differentiate your links and your profile links. So yeah, again, my belief is to stop believing in most as I’m also scoring. That’s one thing. And the second try to get as many links as possible from either a homepage if possible, obviously, or if from the blog post, make sure that blog post has a lot of incoming links. And ideally, the domain has a very positive ratio. So less outgoing domains, let’s say, I don’t know, let’s say thousand outgoing domains and 2000 incoming. That kind of, that would be the ratio that, that would be my belief of that. If we are going to see websites, What is the actual link choose and link the theory you know that’s what Google has made it you know then it’s just like for it you know that you can say so right authority link choose it’s all connected this way so there has to be something correct about my statement, incoming and outgoing links. That would be a lot of people that kind of disagree with me, but the majority would say yes, it’s just basics, but those basics are many guys, just completely forget about this by basics that are just religious right now relevancy relevance is very important, but what if you have a relevant website and you get a link from it, but the juice is not there?

Nothing will happen with that, you can get the link, you don’t get any penalty. That’s for sure. There won’t be that much value in that thing. Not that many linkages. You see where I come from. It’s just okay. It’s, but it won’t do like magic. You see where it comes from. Better to be specific. And then looking for very good ones, rather than having, rather than having lots of links from other domains but those domains, just, they don’t have that positive, in my opinion, and link juice.

So yes. And I also, I cannot see any correlation. I know it’s also another strange, but I don’t see a correlation sometimes with more links, incoming links that have something to do with the traffic. I think the traffic is completely different from how Google kind of gives you points. If they think that you are relevant, if you, if your search intent is good, you answer the queries, it’s like what the actual user searching for.

If you have some authority, then they will put you in that space for, those keywords, so then you can cover them but that’s, and this is why you get traffic. But yeah, surely, yes, the more links more likely you get in rankings. That’s true as well. But in terms of ranking and link juice, I cannot see that much correlation. So I believe that you could have a domain that has no traffic at all. like my one, chili fruit. com, and then you can redirect it to somewhere else, and then I’m sure you can get much more results, because we’ve tested that, and we saw that you can even manipulate the DR very quickly.

But again, manipulation is one thing, but that doesn’t mean that you can get traffic.
So the traffic is a little bit different from what I see. I don’t know about you, but these are my opinions as of, I would say, last. It’s been two, or three years, but Google has changed a lot.

Difficulty. The more difficulties to get something, it’s. It’s like gold. It’s it is very expensive, right? It doesn’t, it’s not cheap as I’m talking about.

Let’s say the gold that you can invest that it has to be certified, but you would have to buy it from the official place. And over time, the gold sooner or later doesn’t lose any value. Not that much.

Gold doesn’t lose its value, to be honest, but there is inflation that all the time grows year by year. But surprisingly, gold stays always quite high, above the inflation, I would say. So it’s good kind of, it’s not necessarily good investments because people don’t refer to gold as an investment, but more as insurance.

So I would say if you have something rare something difficult to get, then this is a good investment. Because if it’s rare, difficult, says Forbes, fast company, I don’t know, it could be, it doesn’t have to be that big media outlet, but it could be even a getting link from a homepage from your company, let’s say from your website, I would say, but from a homepage, you see where I come from, it would be very difficult because I would have to, I don’t know what I would need to do.

I need to talk to you. It’s can you get me a link from your homepage? I would say why, you wouldn’t be that wouldn’t be happy to do that? Because it has to be a reason a good reason why you want to give a link. So I’m thinking about the difficulties. The more difficult to get a link. More likely, it’s a kind of it’s more secure because think about if the guy or the website the guy is running the website and he’s very protective about his outgoing links and you did get it from him.

I don’t know how, but you’ve made it something that means he’s. He’s not gonna give links so easily from this domain, so you’re gonna be one of those very few.

And over time, his domain will probably become more authoritative. You see where I come from, like the domains, usually, they grow. If you get more links than usual they grow. So you see I had a situation where we got the link from a Haro, from a blogger.

who just started his journey three years ago was zero. Now he’s the R50 within three years. So it was a good investment to spend some time, give him some reply, good reply at the value of his content. That’s what he did and he accepted and but his domain is all the time growing.

So same with our link and it’s not easy to get a link on his domain. So I would say, look for the difficulty, look for something that is rare and I’m not talking about huge domains that could be even an agency, like a homepage. It’s very difficult to get it. It’s unusual to get it from the homepage, right? That’s my advice. Try to get something that is more likely is more secure because you know that you’re going to be one of those very few people. Got the link from that.

most?

I don’t know because I cannot find the logic behind. Why would you believe in one software that it’s been good now and then, according to most? You cannot, you say that this is a spammy link. I saw very spammy links, but they also have link juice, so you can have a spammy and you still can have a link juice.

There’s a risk associated with that, but that doesn’t mean that those spammy website does not have a link juice, they have. And that’s another thing, so you just have to live a bit and be very careful about the percentage of spammy websites in your link-building profile, because surely you’re going to have spam comes in and comes out naturally as well. You can disavow, which is another thing. So for example, this is what I don’t understand.

We’ve got tools like servers and errors. When you scan a domain. Oh, and then SEMrush or A Ref says that 20% of links coming into this domain are spammy. But A Ref doesn’t know whether or not you disavow them. He doesn’t have access to the disavow text right file. So he doesn’t have, he doesn’t know whether those links, they pointing in they, because the links, spammy links can point out to your domain.

But if you disavow them, no one knows this, only you and Google. So the tool doesn’t know that. Isn’t that? Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, so this is the wrong metric. Very wrong metric because I can say, be CNBC I take CNBC. com or something, or like any big domain, I put in the same rationale as refs.

Okay, surely there’s going to be a big percentage of the spammy traffic. Surely there’s going to be maybe from China. It does happen quite often in China. I don’t know why. But you can disavow them. And you don’t know whether that The actual, administrator has done that. You’re looking at the wrong metrics.

It’s true though, so be very careful when you do the link-building analysis and competition because you can be thinking like, oh, there’s got they’ve got a lot of spam. They might have it, but you don’t know whether it has been disavowed. And also Google hasn’t been very clear about whether you should be about it or not.

It’s also very debated very debated. So it’s up to debate, whatever you want to do. Some people believe that you don’t have to do anything. Google will take care of it. There is agreement. Maybe. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, because I think they a quite a. Slow, in what they do, by the time they will update something.

Think about it. If they are, they would be so fast, we wouldn’t have any black hats. Good tactics and some of them were used to work very well. Time. But it’s like a Google Penguin that’s right. We’ve got a big Google Penguin and Panda. So till 2014, everything was like yeah, true. It took them 10 years so Google started in 2004 and in 2014, they finally, made it.

That period become very rich of that because of they when they knew how to rank websites by using spam. So you see, you have to protect yourself and you have to be a little bit like. Okay, Google is Google, right? But they won’t take care of my website.

If someone will want to spam me, for example, they will do it, right? And by the time will Google says, Oh, you have been spammed. Maybe you did it to yourself, right? You see where I come from. They’re not going to help you with that.

There are many variables, right? But first, what I would do, I wanted to find out how he’s going to monetize what he wants to because he needs to get something out of the traffic or out of the SEO. But by the time he will get that it will take a while. So what I would do is. I would show it to the client. Okay. If you want to be in that space for this, let’s say a certain set of keywords for this space, people asking about this product services, whatever, let’s put it this way. Let’s say you just want to become a new casino. It’s a simple good example.

Okay, so you build the casino, the guy has got a casino website, and everything is in place. Okay, we just need the ranking. Cool. Let’s check who is in sales. For the last 12 months, for the last 24 months, 36 months, 48, 60 months, and let’s see how many of those disappeared from the top 10 and how many of those stayed and for how long, if they’ve been for last five years in the top five or top 10 chances are very little.

You’re going to get there. You can see where I come from. It makes logic. I think it does sometimes make sense because it’s too late. That’s what they’re saying to you. It’s too late to do this because they also have an advantage. After all, they have already authority. They’ve been doing this for the last five years.

So you would be either, you would have to be twice as quick or three times as quick to do something about it. It’s true. Think about it. Like someone is running or doing gym for five years and then you want to be, you want to be fit. As this guy who was doing the gym for the last five years and he’s fit, he’s got like a six-pack. I know how difficult it is to get six packs because I’ve tried and I’ve failed.

It’s okay. It’s just natural because I don’t know how difficult it is to get a proper six-pack. I spoke with these guys and I said, oh wow, that’s not for me.

Yeah. It’s, it is about diet. It’s about being diet strict, but you do look a lot more leaner.

No, I don’t do the gym, but I, I try to make a compilation of how difficult it’s to get there once you get there.

I also know how is difficult to maintain that’s crazy how, and then we had the situation with the client. We got him to the top three, and he just realized, wow, great, let’s open the champagne. We are happy as well and then he goes once we have achieved that, why can’t we just move the budget from those target URLs, we can stop linking them because the job is done now let’s go and look for something that has the opportunity. Maybe it is a URL, but this blog post. Yeah, sure. Why not? But hang on. What we’re going to do if those guys in that space for that URL that we already ranked in’s top three now? Okay, what we’re going to do with that, we just leave it. They will see that we don’t build links or something, nothing stays forever.

It’s not like you’ve built it. Yeah. And it happened. So he said okay let’s take a risk and let’s see how it goes. Okay, sure. Just write me anyway. So I know that you’ve agreed to those risks, and yeah, after 36 months that the URL that was the blog post that was running was bringing a lot of traffic. It was a top-three dropped. And then, when something drops, it’s big, like everyone is just Ooh, oh my God, it’s dropping.

There are quite a few. I have to say the best person to speak with is Chris Pantelli. Chris Pantelli is a very good friend of mine. And If you do, I suggest you watch his course, just search for Chris Pantelli on his website. He’s got a Haro course. He’s very good at what he does. And I had the pleasure to speak with him in Thailand. Thanks to Charles who organized the Thailand. It wasn’t a conference. It was like like a secret meetup, like a mastermind or something is a mobile.

It was a mastermind. Definitely. And I said, Chris, let’s go. You and me, so we can talk about the Harrow only because I do the Harrow. I did it for the last two years and I just wanted to find out how you do it. So he also audited my pitches and he said, this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong.

This is how can so if you can find a mentor before you’re going to do something about, let’s say the new idea of getting links. That’d be great. Because you can save your time. So I find out Haro a little bit painful because I didn’t have good guidance. So for the last two, or three years, I had to, keep testing, keep pitching, and lost a lot of time, which I could do better, but I didn’t know, but it’s also numbers games.

It’s a numbers game. So keep pitching. Correct.

I would say there’s a lot of trash out there as well. There are a lot of people, who’re pitching whatever they don’t take a time, and which I believe makes sense because it’s all about how quick you are, how quick you reply as well. It’s very difficult to say because if I compare this with Chris and also with other people who are using Harrell they say that They cannot tell what is the actual factor behind its numbers games.

That’s for sure. And try to be relevant as, as much as possible. But again, there are not many relevant pitches. So you have to have that in mind. It’s I’ve gone with equality, then you have to miss other queries because it’s going to be very difficult to apply for equity and then you want to, write 500 words.

I know people who write arrow for 500 words and that reply works sometimes, but yeah, I know that people are using open AI. Be careful because it’s quick and it’s good. But people with media outlets, they’re looking for actual examples, stories. So OpenAI cannot do that.

Jarvis cannot do that. You have to tell me the story. How did you get into the SEO? Tell me a very interesting story about yourself. How did you get into that? My story cannot be written by open AI. Absolutely. If you have that, and you say, I’m a sound engineer guy who started because of this and that.

That’s a story. If you could put it in 300 words, you need to have someone good. I’m not good as a writer. I used to do this by myself, but I know how difficult is and it’s a great game, but it requires a lot of time. But as I said, you need to come up with a lot of examples, sometimes out of your creativity, out of your mind, like they have to be someone that like, how would you deal with a drama queen in your office?

I saw that last night. I saw the query. Okay. It was a, yeah, you could positively answer those questions. I used to have a drama queen guy, but we’ve done what we did in this and this is a creative way. And this is how. We made him a little bit aware that, sometimes he dramatized, but it can be this, we can take it as fun right as well because It depends on how what’s your sense of humor, right?

If you take it live seriously, you’re going to be very drama as well, but yeah, you see where I can track what I tried to say that you have to give them something like examples they looking for examples they don’t look for. Tips. Real stories. Yeah, real stories as well. And that’s hard cuz you need to be creative. You need to be.

I have an answer for that. As long as you write. And you use those tools and you have content that has been written by AI, OpenAI, chat, GPT, whatever, and it answers that query and serves the user and helps to, and you’ve got the actual reply to the search intent, the actual user search intent. I see no problem with that. As long as obviously, it’s grammatically well-written. So let’s say where is. I don’t know where is this and that, for example, I don’t know where is New Delhi. Correct. New Delhi is based in India. It’s a capital or something.

It’s been written by my machine. Okay, but is it correct? Yes, it is. Did you find out what you wanted to find out? Yes, you did. Yeah, find out. Okay, cool. If you want me, you need more such as doing the more searches you look for. You’re not going to have I get like 3000 words, a blog post about New Delhi, right?

Because the users look for quick answers on the Internet as well. It depends obviously on the buyer persona, on the persona. It could be a doctor. Who is looking for a white paper or the future of cryptocurrencies? They are now doing ai cuz there are a lot of cryptocurrencies in ai, for example. That is a very complex subject, so obviously that might be more steps to this, but if you see where I come from, it all could be written by ai. Fine. Sure. As long as it helps me, I see no problem with that.

Yeah. Surely, as you said, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but, we just got this that stories and quick answers would be very different, looking for stories and users on the internet depends on what they’re looking for. So sometimes they might look for the stories just to get I don’t know inspiration, right? Good advice based on actual life examples and some users that just looking for simple answers and evergreen content. Got it.

SEMrush, A Refs are always good to go. And again, you need to have access to those too. Why? Because there’s sometimes data discrepancy. I see sometimes see when I analyze, let’s say, I don’t know, 400 blog posts that those amount of blog posts have been published for the last, let’s say, five years on one SaaS company. What are they going to do with that? They’ve invested 500 content, 500 pieces, right? So you analyzed A Refs, via SEMrush and you see the differences. So it’s always good to compare that. Yeah. That’s one good reason. Now the other tools are Surfer SEO. Yeah. Greetings to Tomasz Niesgoda, Lucian Suski, and Michał Suski, because they did an amazing job. Yeah. Surfer SEO is beautiful for optimizing content.

The other tool is for searching emails. Then you have a for example manual way is very good. So when we search emails manually and then we also have to verify them. So for the verification, when you want to verify your email. We find out that using a bouncer is the best tool at the moment.

Yeah, so there are tons of other tools, but, use bouncer has been for a good few years and we’ve been using them since the very beginning since the inception.

Okay. Yeah. And they have also happy, so we can connect up you can use it up for that as well. API. So it’s good. What are the other tools? Linkoding. Anything that comes from Francis. Francis is the guy who created Linkody. Linkody is a very good small little tool for looking for links. They also have IndexChecker.

IndexChecker is good if you want to see how many pages are being indexed on your domain. The index is a big issue these days, a very big issue. So the index checker is very good, very cheap. I like it. Relatively cheap outside of what you get out of this. And that’s it really, all the other tools are VPNs.

If you’re looking for a VPN, you need to sometimes check a website that is not in your country. Yeah, Anton Kachev has made a very good tool VPN. He’s got his own VPN so I will look for it. It’s BrowseSec. It’s called BrowseSec. Very good VPN. So my daily tool is as well. And the rest of the tools are like Slack, that’s a worldwide standard. But I don’t think that we do a lot of API sync Wave. Also, we use Sync Wave with the spreadsheets. Sync Wave is interesting like an add-on that you can buy for Google Spreadsheets. So look for those very little ones, not necessarily go for the big ones, but yeah, as I said, you need to have access.

There’s like big this big platform. That is even much more expensive than Ares and SEMrush. I forgot the name of it, but they can show the entire traffic of this domain from all the sources, from a PPC. I forgot the name of this platform, but maybe, it’s very expensive to have access to this. Yeah. The data is amazing. But yeah, it’s not the SEO industry, so yeah, who cares

Yes. Yes. It’s like a market marketing platform.

Yeah. Yeah.

There were so many stories that I’m sure there will be one. Yeah. We’ll do one story that’s okay. This is quite interesting. They said, okay, here’s the budget. We don’t know how to do link building. We are shit at that, so help us. Okay. And then we just had a normal conversation and let’s just build links, see how it’s going on.

And after some time we decide what direction you see where I come from just to get to know each other and everything and like, how is everything going on? And then we just realized, I think, I don’t know how it was exactly, but I said to them Rather than building links to the whole page, rather than building links to this just doesn’t make sense.

Naturally, you’re all well-performing mind. You’re very well-known people linking to you. So you don’t need that. You don’t need me. You need me for something else. Let’s come up with a URL. That is going to promote your new feature, the feature that is going to be soon released. So each SaaS product has its core value product, right?

I’m thinking, and then the rest are the features. These are just the features. Look, Semrush has got thousands of features. Aeris has got a set of features. So let’s focus on that one feature. Brought that feature to the top one within one year, because it’s going to be difficult right. Yeah, we did it that way. And I asked the founder, can you tell me out of the traffic now from this one URL, how many signups did you get for the last 12 months? And he’s got this and that. Sure. Fine. What’s the cost per acquisition? What was the cost per acquisition? How much did you like, did you spend on the link building for that URL?

How much did you get? And what was the cost per acquisition to get that one sign-up that has converted to an actual customer? He said this and that. Correct. Positive. And my last question is, what was the LTV, which is the lifetime value of that client? And he said, some of those they converted, become enterprise clients.

So this is the amount of money we’ve made and this is how much we’ve spent on the building. And then we had a clear ROI, and return on investments with actual metrics. And this is why I like to do this, but it took a very long time and he trusted that this is going to. It’s going to work. And still today, we’re building links to this URL just to maintain now the visibility. The changes were once we hit the top 10. I remember there were times when we thought nothing was going to happen. Then after some months. Top eight after some months, top five, then Google updates. So then we realized, okay, we’re doing something good. Whatever we’re doing, we’re probably doing enough. Because Google is recognizing this URL, but the other guys are a little bit dropping, so this is our chances that this is how we went to the top three, but then we stopped because we’re thinking like, okay, let’s stay there. After all, I don’t think that we’re going to be the top one.

It doesn’t make sense. I think he’s just It’s enough. It’s good. It’s good. It’s achieved. Let’s move further because sometimes you’re too focused on one thing and you cannot see other things. So that’s the story with the client. And we still have this client. It’s been five years now, five years.

yeah, no, it’s a flagship, right?

Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t go that far. I don’t go that far about what I’m going to do in about 20 years. Cause I got stressed very quickly when I think about the future, I just go to YouTube and then.

Just listen. Oh, what’s going to happen? Banks will take all your money. This is where I come from. There’s so much negativity. Focus on what you do. And then once you just, obviously you should have your exit. If by if something goes. Not necessarily wrong, something might be very positive, but I’m thinking like, maybe I will lose the patience or I will lose the love for what I do, and I would just want to do something completely new.

Maybe I will set up my own SAS or completely differently, I will go into Sustainability, so I would like to have a company that maybe does something with the plastic with the trash that we have in the world anything like that recycling. A recycling company, but yeah, I was thinking about it.
It’s nice to do that, but I don’t know anything about it.

Is, it’s different, we have a big problem with that, right?

We do that. That’s going to be in demand for sure. And then more and more. Maybe what water desalinization, there’s so much water that has a salt right so you can take the water, somehow, remove the salt.

What’s clean and you have water, you can be a clean water provider. I don’t know. It’s just completely different thoughts on SEO all the time, but I like what it is, I think now, these days, more. I’m more into team building, and speaking with a team, seeing like my specialization also, it’s not necessary. I would say link building because I also run companies. So I’m the CEO of the company or like a managing director. So I have to be with the Finance, I have to understand the people where are they going, what’s the direction, and speak with them or with the clients. It becomes less hands-on SEO, it becomes less hands-on link building, but more strategic and looking that.

looking where we are from where we are now was going to be the future. But yeah, I don’t want to predict that much. But yeah, if surely we don’t want to be like a massive big agency. I just realized that the bigger you become, the more you start editing. And sometimes those companies hit the level where they’re not.

They do not deliver as used to, they do not, they just go by the volume. What about the quality? We want to have that good quality, very good quality. So you know how it’s it’s very difficult to keep the quality also by being a big company. Yeah, it usually it’s as well. That’s a, it’s a problem. If you are a little company, more likely always specialize, come on, the goods there are very, there are goods in the world that you have to craft them. You have to make them manually. So there’s no way you can scale them. And I think this is also very cool.

I don’t remember. I just don’t remember. Oh, hang on, First salary. Yeah.

Yes. I remember. Yeah. What did you do? Did you make Alan and Heath, the British one, because at that time I wanted to be a DJ. It was my dream. So I went to London and I got the job and I, first what I did, I was, I bought a digital mixer, but before that, I also bought a case first.

It was like 60 pounds. So I put that case and I was dreaming about this DJ mixer. So I put that case. It was a silver case for the big digital mixer, right? It was empty. And I said, next two, three weeks, I’m going to get the mixer. And I was watching on this empty case and I was believing there’s going to be that.

So that’s how I was seeing my dreams, but I don’t believe in the dreams where I’m like goals. This is my goal. So let’s do this. Achieving goals. And then setting new goals rather than just dreams because dreams sometimes look to me it’s like they’re dreaming, and dreaming is no good.

You see what people saying, why are you dreaming, wake up. So it’s a little bit negative, so I’m thinking like dreams are okay but better if you’re If you see them as a goal as achievement, so one achievement, okay, done. Second, third. The more you achieve, the more likely, even if you fail, you will say to yourself, okay, fine, I failed.

It’s okay, but how many times have I achieved something? Okay, let’s set new achievements. Keep going. Good.

Thailand. Thailand. I was in Thailand. Yeah, that was my vacation. My wife said. Go to go to Chang Bai. To see Charles and to see other people.
Uhhuh, sure.

Yeah. It was nice because, for the last third months, I was all the time with my little son, so I could a little get. I can’t get a few free days for myself. So yeah, that was my last vacation. Yeah.

No time for it. Just family. Just now family for the time being. So no more hangouts, as they used to be. Otherwise

days. Oh, okay. Usually, we were hanging in a British pub and drinking Guinness. That’s what it was. I remember those times were good.

Armin van Buren and trance. But could be now anything could be even original music. Like from, I don’t know, music that can be from a specific country. Yes, I try to be open, and classical music sometimes, I don’t know, I diversify it myself as well. I used to be very into dance music, but no longer.

Yeah. And your character will change. And it’s I see myself sometimes, I’m surprised how much I’ve changed myself. And I think I’m thankful for those people that I’ve met. So I think the people you meet. And then they will tell you something.

Yeah. Some of them, they will be your friends for one year, two years, three years. Some, they become friends forever. Some of them are going to be, they will help you with something. I remember my ex-managers, they were very tough on me. Okay. And I remember I hated them, I’m thinking like, I should do it myself, I’m sometimes I’m also difficult to, if I don’t if I disagree with something I don’t like it, then I’m not, I’m, I will speak up. You see where I come from. Right now, these days, I like what they showed me and the way how they treated me. Because for example, if people are very hard on you, then you’ve got discipline and then you appreciate that someone was tough on you.

It will be like an asset for you.

good mentors, tough mentors, good mentors, they need to be tough. And then that’s what they say in the British saying toughen up. It’s a good saying I like that Man up, man up, toughen up you’re responsible for all your choices.

So you did it. Okay. Take responsibility. I love it. And that kind of spirit. I tried to also have my company, like guys, look, you build the links, take the responsibility for those links. You make a client happy. You make a team happy. So you make yourself happy and myself happy. I’m the last person.

Sure. Fine. Okay. But you need to make happy everyone yourself as well. So make sure that you’re in the actual space or position or that you understand that you need to do all of those things, so the client must be happy. You need to be happy. Your team members need to be happy and the company.

So we grow, you grow, clients grow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For everyone.

Thank you.

You too. Bye.