What's up everyone it's Greg aling here the host of the opportunity podcast and today I am talking to a very very very cool dude I've been friends with him for roughly seven years at this point I first met him way back in the day at the very first Chang my SEO and I knew of him before then too a bit of a legend in the SEO space kind of an under the radar Legend like any of my SEO friends who know a lot about SEO they all know this Guy but maybe some more people who
are just getting into the industry may not and that is my friend James duly so James is a wild businessman he's done all sorts of cool stuff I believe he says in this interview has over 800 rink and rent clients which is about a third of his kind of wealth machine he has built here but one of the things I really love about James is like one he's really good at building a team culture which I believe a lot of entrepreneurs Genuinely struggle with keeping High talented people working for them is often not the easiest
thing and James makes it look flawlessly easy in my view at least from an outsider looking at the other thing that James does that's quite interesting and I think is a really big opportunity for anyone that understands marketing to a very specific degree and you know it can actually scale your marketing prowess is investing in businesses so James any expense that his Marketing company invests in such as backlinks or content they'll eventually try to invest or buy the company that they're getting those services from he mentions I believe one of them search a re that
he spending $60,000 a month on links he ended up becoming a owner of that not completely he ended up buying Equity into the business from what I understand but this is brilliant and he doesn't just do it with internet marketing companies he also does it with Some of his local Leen companies that he's serving as well which I think this is an amazing way for a marketer to grow equity and in fact we had Roland Frasier on this podcast not too long ago where he often talks about Consulting for equity and this is exactly how
you can do it James has a proven system he's an expert he drives massive leads where companies that had two Crews now might have 25 truck instead of two Vans they have 25 trucks right that are driving Around the road because of his lead generation and he's able to get these sweet sweet Equity deals because of that skill because of that Consulting for Equity or you know this for that type of trade with probably not that much Capital going into some of these deals so we don't really get into that aspect of it but that
would be my assumption but either way whether this capital or more of a Consulting for Equity kind of setup I think this stuff is brilliant And I think most of you listening to this podcast with your marketing skills with your entrepreneurial skills could probably do something similar to what James is doing and I would especially recommend you listen to the tell end of this conversation when we talk about the team building aspect some of the stuff that James says there I think is extremely crucial that the majority of my entrepreneur friends just simply don't do
when it comes to team building All right enough of me ranting and praising James duy let's get into it or you can meet the man the myth and the legend see you on the other side [Music] hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the opportunity today I have my friend James duly here who I have had the pleasure of knowing for over half a decade I think over seven years now I've known you and like I knew of you before I met you and I loved you Even more once I did meet you
so you you are like a legend in the space I'm really glad that you're on here I'm actually shocked it's taking us this to get you on here but I'm glad we're remedying that issue but for the rest of my AI who doesn't know the legend that is James dly why don't you tell my audience a bit about who you are and where you're at so I've been in the industry now for 14 years we've got quite a diverse Profile some Rank and rent models some affiliate and then a lot of time we try to
invest in the businesses as well at some point normally takes three or four years before we've grown the relationships with the businesses but if it's a good business and they willing to scale sometimes cash flow can become problems for the business as we start generating too many inquiries for the business so we tried to come in and start helping the sales generation Employing a few members of Staff like sales team within the business so that they can run it operationally and then we'll kind of run the sales side but yeah it Al kind of stems
from trying to generate a consistent flow of quality inquiries nice so that's the rank and rent model but you're going a step further where you actually have a sales team that is Fielding the leads or how does that work in certain industries yeah so in the like prime example in Like the finance industry if we can generate the height of the seasons there sometimes we can generate over 600 inquiries in a single day so that say a mortgage broker or a financial advisor can't deal with that volume of work so we'll then change it to
being a bit more of a fact finding exercise from being a cold web lead to taking the call getting certain information trying to get like three months bank statements that affordability checks get more Information from him and then pass it on as being a hot lead as opposed to just being a cold web lead but we only do that in certain industries we won't do it in all Industries it has to make certain that it's financially viable for us to do that and then we've got like you said we've got the affiliate side in the
casino market and the slots Market betting market and stuff like the I gaming industry we do quite a bit in that as Well well I have a bunch of questions there but before we do let's back up just a little bit here tell me a bit about your origin story like how did you get into this wild world of SEO how did you start I was a project managera at trade and we've still got to this day we've got a playground construction Sports pitch construction business so it builds like the artificial football pitches netball Courts
tennis courts basketball courts those type of facilities in the UK and we realized that we needed a consistent flow of quality inquiries inbound for us because initially it was me doing the cold calling and trying to speak to councils and schools and colleges and it became hard work in trying to do that as well as then dealing with the leads doing the quoting and doing everything else it was only a small business at the time so like there must be a way for Them to be contacting us and then we I realized they needed a
website and then we built the first website it didn't rank we didn't know how to rank it and then we spoke to the web designer and said why is it not ranking and the guy says I'm not an SEO I'm a web designer and I was like what is seo seo and then it just grew from there so I think to start with we was trying to back then we was trying to do like what people would call White heart so it Was all about content and stuff like that and then we quickly started to
hear about B links and blackout techniques and back then to be honest with you anything worked as long as you did something it works pretty much so if you keywords stuff did white text on a white background if you put your keywords in your title tag pretty much that was enough back then and if you did any back links she was pretty much 100% ranking so they were what people call like the Glory Days and then from there then we started to realize there was obviously these different elements to SEO there different nuances we something
that I would like to say is that all the first four years we failed miserably like we failed so many times there's so many different techniques that we were when I say failed they actually all back then the worked we was very slow at adapting what we needed to do and there was a lot of information out there that was Misinformation so one of the first things that once we started to make a success of it was build an in-house like testing team and R&D team now we've got quite a large I don't know anybody
in the world to this day that's got a larger testing team than what we have we on a consistent basis day in day out now try to break the Ser see what's going on with the Ser see where basically what doesn't work so if someone tries to tell us something that works we'll treat it That it doesn't until we test it and see that it does if that makes sense so that's kind of helped us a lot because there was so many courses and so many SEO myths in the industry that was like I don't
we need to test this in house we need to do this and because we've got that many different Industries whether it's Finance Casino whether it's like a local Le gen site in total I think we've got over 800 paying clients on Rank and rent in probably 650 different Industries so wow I don't really know that many people that's got as much data than what we can have in the different Industries so that kind of works well for us and then obviously we can just test stuff and we've got like if a site doesn't work like
I mean we normally rank every site that we go into our issue is we enter certain industries and the the monetization is just not good enough like we might enter a Micro Niche that just doesn't really take off like We thought it might do and then gets put into the testing team they can run display ads like eoic or ad FR or mediavine and they can just test things on those sites but we're never really going to make money from a lead generation side of it if that makes sense and yeah that's B so it
started from we needing inquiries ourself we what with class is being like shouldering niches or neighboring niches we started to try to build websites for Who was we doing work for could we get them busier and if they got busier we got busier indirectly because we started ranking for all of our terms but it was like what do they do so like prime example we do a lot of the playground surfacing but we don't really do the equipment but we realized if we ranked for the equipment and give the equipment manufacturers the inquiries we then
on those jobs would do the surfacing so we just built it that way and then it just Kind of I didn't mean to get I kind of fell into SEO as an industry as a trade I mean it's unbelievable now of how it happened but I didn't set out to be an SEO we just built a website we built a second website a third website a fourth website that all fed into the same company and then before we knew it five six years down the line we was making more money outside of the actual business
we was working in on like fencing leads roofing leads cladding Leads leads construction leads tat leads Road markings leads and we're like this is its own business so that's kind of how it all evolved and how it all started that's brilliant man your story reminds me a bit when I was 18 I really didn't want to go in the oil field so I tried to sell life insurance and they give you like a memory jogger right like who do you know and like I know 17 year olds I just graduated high school so like no
one interested in life insurance Right I tried cold calling and it was so brutal man I was like there's got to be a better way so I end up getting my 30 names to them and like oh how did you do this like oh I ran a Facebook ad like whoa no no you can't do that like what that's [ __ ] why can't I do that so I feel you on the legion stuff I think that's really cool and the misinformation stuff with SEO that's still a huge problem in my view I see it
all the time especially on LinkedIn Where you know you have these white hat Knights that are like proclaiming stuff and they have like a sample size of one that probably works mainly because of the authority of that s yeah more so than anything else so I think that's cool you have a research and development team I know probably like five seos who could say that so you're definitely one of the rare few tell me a bit about how you do that like how did you structure the research the R&D team like what's their Frameworks like
how do they know to go about breaking something and with like Leen for example like are they setting up like a puppet Leen website how does that work with things like gmbb I know that's important with local so bunch of questions there it kind of It kind of fits into models of where like do we think it's a false positive do we think it actually works because if we think that it actually works I know that's a Good idea and I can see why Google would do that we we won't build a new site and
do like single variable testing like let's say like what Kyle does and stuff like that we'll test it on a real site we'll test it on a site that might be earning 10 15,000 pound a month that might be ranking for 30 40,000 keywords and we might go I don't we think this is going to work let's test it the new es and and stuff from one Niche to Niche a different Niche is difficult to track so We use like seot testing.com as being like we set the test up and then we check in a
month three months six months the issue is that it is a live ser and sometimes within those testing dates an algorthm update comes along and it's kind of skewed the data but we kind of look long term as well of like what's happening so like something there's not many people talk about the random rank ing Factor so when you first do something let's say you go and build a Really strong link when you first build that link your site could go down before then it jumps up or if something happens where they don't really like
it could go up before it goes down and it's called the random ranking fact they've got a Google painting for it and stuff like that so it's so difficult to look at it short term you've got to be looking at things long term and these times where we've kind of we don't really like single variable testing we don't really Like just looking at one individual thing we kind of look because we' got that many sites we look at that plus that plus that plus that equals success okay why is that not working as well as
that one because we've got certain sites in certain industries that compete against each other so we might like why is that site beating that site when this site's got a better backlink Authority or like higher Dr why is this site winning and then we might go ahead we Wrote all this content in Market M we wrote all this content in Surf we wrote all this content in page optimizer pro or we cover the topic in its entirety using keyword Cupid or keyword Chef or HBS for keyword research and what gaps are the in the content
and what internal linking structure we done a reverse St or done a physical stle like we go deep into what's working looking at a lot of different factors CU it's just strange that it's sometimes the what a big bug Of my which what you mentioned before was in this industry what's frustrating for me is the people that are very very good at content try and go down the route of saying you don't need links content works right and the people that are really good at links cheap out on the content and you're like you need
quality content you need quality links stop arguing against each other it's really simple these free pillars of SEO build a site technically well do good Quality content cover the topic in its entirety and build links stop having this argument that links don't work and you don't need good quality content just H it with links you do need good quality content you do need topicality you do need a good Silo structure but then you need B links now yes this caveats in certain industries in an easier Niche you might just need content and you might not
need the B links but some people write good Quality content they naturally start to acquire links and stuff like that so I've seen a lot like I'm a big advocate of let's say Nick Jordan and stuff like that he builds a lot of sites my issue sometimes with it he's building it on an existing domain that's already a dr60 and he's then going writing a lot of great quality content but it's already on a powerful domain so he already got the link yeah what I mean so it's like so this is kind of the pain
Points for us when we say no I don't understand why people need to have this argument is it this and is it that and another one is what's a stronger signal I'm not bothered what's a stronger signal is it a signal if it's a signal I'm going to do it just do all the signals holistically do everything right as opposed to but is having this key word in the H1 more important than the H2 or in the introduction if you get it in all three as long as you're not over Optimizing it get it in
all three do you know what I mean like it's like some people try to over complicate things to be well this works better than that I'm like yeah if you do that that it works even better again yeah I know but that works better I'm not bothered like I just want to get to the end goal of ranking number one in Google and don't over complicate it and that's kind of our model within the business is basically let's get let's get it done as Quickly as possible and get the number one rankings and then move
on to the next site and then just speed's important especially because the amount of sites that we have we need to get as quickly as we can to that number one site to the number one position for the keywords that we want to move on to the next site we'll track that if ranking start to drop we'll go back to it if it doesn't and it remains number one for majority of the keywords we want it to We just keep it rented out and that's fine the client's happy to rent it we're happy with the
rental we don't really it's in maintenance mode so there might be little bits of they might have an occasional backlink here and there they might have a new article being done but it's just going through the motions it's already got the back links it's already the strongest demain that there is and yeah that's the model but there's still a lot of myths out there where there's Still a lot of people been been honest with you Gregory that are selling back links that are toxic people don't even understand what toxic means people just talk about traffic
and hi and I'm like right okay you want traffic and IDR I'll tell you what I'll do so we had a really big client and he was obsessed with traffic and IDR So I says give me a domain name for me to buy so you give me the domain name I'm not going to share it publicly but you give me a domain Name and we went and got written 500 AI content 500 articles that was all error codes on cars right and telephone numbers and we got the demain within six weeks to a Dr 72
right this domain is it's crap I would not want to link from this side 72 and it got a load of traffic and I showed him it and I showed him what we've done and I says now will you stop OB assessing over traffic and Dr because this is what the guest post providers are doing a lot of them are Manipulating the traffic and a lot of them are manipulating the Dr stop obsessing over it and he was like right okay well tell me what we should do he ended up spending links and was getting
some there was some links that we' done was like dr25 but it was really relevant and it was a trusted link did get natural traffic that did send traffic through to his site it was ranking for certain keywords that he wanted to rank for and he seen massive games and he was Like I cannot believe for so many years I've chased Dr now don't get me wrong I love HFS I'm not talking badly of HFS it's it's a good metric to look at as well as other metrics but when some people just solely look at
Dr and traffic as being this is my goalto for links it's like well that's probably why you're not ranking so that's kind of yeah that's great man I love that I agree I think Dr should be a starting point but yeah a lot of good stuff you Just said there I feel like SEO is one of those things as people learn more about it they over complicate it like I was in a mastermind at the Saigon Summit earlier this year and there was this lady she's in the make money online that like one of the
most competitive spaces out there right and she's making like $188,000 a month from this blog she knew nothing about SEO like the only thing she knew about it was I need good content and I need relevant backlinks And that was it she treated like a normal business like any of our SEO friends would walk circles around her and she would freely admitted that's why she was at the event trying to learn but I do feel like a lot of seos as they learn more they over complicate it like you said you just need good quality
content and honestly if you don't care about making money you don't need good quality content like in the example you just gave with the with the Dr site but And then good back Lings right so I agree wholeheartedly let's talk a bit about the rank and rent model so I'm curious on how you I have a suspicion on how you do it but how do you go about getting your clients and then maintaining them so you said you have about 800 clients walk me through a bit of that sales process how it goes so it's
not as complex as what people try to make out so many people when they ask me the question or so many people when They're trying to get into this model over complicated it now a caveat to this model that we do is that it costs quite a lot because we enter a lot of niches that don't work but our model is or how our model started was when we used to do a lot of works for for schools and colleges and universities so we started to look what does a school pay for like what do
they need a service for it could be Windows building a classroom Roofing Tac fencing plumbers electricians Joiners we started just kind of thinking all right what do they want because we wanted to stay in the commercial Market not in the residential what is Home Improvements now we have moved into Home Improvements but initially we wanted to start in the commercial Market in the commercial Market you generally get paid a little bit more than when it's somebody's house when it's someone's house a lot of it is about price and they like quality control needs to be
Absolutely but more quality control obviously I want all my clients to do amazing jobs but when it's someone's house they want it to be absolutely perfect and they want it really cheap so commercial Market I would recommend getting into the commercial Market to start with but we go broad so let's say a plumber and we build the website going like okay let's go and build a plumers website we know that everyone needs a plumber Throughout the UK so we'll build a site out and we'll try and build a very big site on Plumbing right knowing
that further down the line we're going to be building micro sites out after it so we build the site out and then all what we do is we go anyone who's paying on PPC so they already know the value of marketing so anyone who's paying on PPC let's go and reach out to them and say we're generating leads for what you want are you interested in taking the leads Completely for free or what you need to do is give us a kickback if you secure any jobs if you don't secure any jobs you pay us
nothing well who's going to say no to that no one everyone's going to say yes to it so our success rate of when we start speaking to him is like 98% success rate of everyone saying yeah I'll take the leads all day long so then we've got them on board it's almost like the trit wre marketing technique so you've got them on board you send them Through the leads and then they start to come back and have a bit of a moan about the quality of the leads because the the leads might but the leads
might not be specific for what they do so it might be like oh we go fix a tap and it's up in Scotland and they're based in London and they've got a 4H hour drive and they're like this isn't kind of what we want we're not competitive enough for this so then we start to say where do you make your most profit right because it's fine People doing the traditional keyword research that doesn't tell you where they make profit and it's fine looking at stuff that get search volume but that doesn't tell you where they
make profit so we speak to them and say where is it that you make profit so we start building then we try and build a site that was more local to them because we're going on these These are on the ball these are speaking to the clients these are dealing with the inquiries Let's build a dedicated site room for products that they make good profit on and then they start then looking to go okay we're interested but we want exclusive leads because initially when we're saying you can get the leads we'll send it out to
20 different companies we've never once said it's exclusive we send it out to as many companies as we can because we want the cream Rises to the top so we want like two or three of those 20 to come back to us with like Reports of where it's all up to some of them just don't even respond to you so you're like we need to get rid of these right but then we might then from the 20 that we've about weeks two start dealing with two or three of them they might be in different parts
of the country one might specialize in one part of Plumbing let's say it could be boiler replacement and they might specifically do boiler replacement where another one might be really good at let's say building wet Rooms or shower rooms right so we built a a site out for a shower room and what happened was the plumber was doing these jobs and he was paying us like 22,000 a month and he was happy pays him about £2,000 a month and then one month he came to us and says here £4,500 I was like who what's this
for and he says we've just that's a fantastic thing yeah yeah yeah we've just done a wet room for a gin and it was 16 different wet rooms that we did and I'm like what's a wet Room I don't even know what a wet room is it was like it's a shower room but commercially so like it's like a big glorified shower so I was like right okay I didn't even know you did them so let's build out a site for that specifically if they make more money let's build out a site specifically for that
and what you find is like wet rooms like I'm giving a Nish like they're commercial shower rooms so a plumber generally gets more money for it so then Further down the line we started to realize that these was very good at DDA compliance like disabled access compliance and stuff like that so it led them further down the rabbit hole then we built out a site for disabled wet rooms which need like a pull card and they've got a few kind of hold on and it's got to be a wider door or I know they're the
experts at doing that so what you start big and Bit by Bit You Niche down Niche down Niche down but you Niche down when you've already got the client knowing that they're good knowing that they deal with the leads knowing that they're wanting to grow with you and they're happy to pay like a back end and that's kind of how we've grown the business so we start Broad and then bit by bit narrow it down too and here's something for you Gregory if you ask me now the top 50 the top 55 niches that we
get paid on I would not have guessed one of Them way goes they so like I would have started out going Roofing Heritage Roofing fencing joiners and I would electricians I would have gone down that route which is what we did and it's until you start doing it over a long period of time you start to realize where is it that they make money it's normally a sub Niche within what they do and then when you can micro like Niche that down all the videos are about that all the images are about that everything Is
about that one single product that when they actually inquire with you as well if there's a plumber and there's a disabled wet room supplier and they want a disabled wet room if they close on price they'll go with the disabled wet room supplier even though the plumber just does exactly the same job because they feel you're an expert at doing just all your videos about your images about everything that you're saying is about we are an expert disabled wet rooms we Don't do anything else we just do disabled wet rooms and then they go we
want to go with you because of the expert and it allows you to actually get away with charging a bit more as well it does I like this because uh I'm sure you've heard this in the agency space but the way to build an agency is Niche down right yeah I have a friend he niches down to dentes and you know you think D is like all right free teeth cleaning or whatever but he refuses to Do anything but one service for dentist which is I think it's like all in four or something like that
that were like it's a surgery that costs like 105,000 so his Dental client like hey would you yeah yeah yeah it's like implants in the teeth his D be like oh why won't you run this teeth cleaning ad for me and he's like nope I only Ser one client and one service of that client and is the thing that makes you the most amount of money if you want to do a Teeth cleaning ad go hire someone else that's not me so he like forces his clients to also Niche down with his paid media which
sounds similar to you so let's talk this so you start big you start with one big website is this website kind of like a directory website like what's the composition of this website that gets things going how's that set up that's a great question because we actually start we initially just started as like a big informational Article to see like so obviously there's a lot St off at se notbook talks a little bit about zero search volume keywords yeah and it's probably one of the most under talked about things in the SEO industry in my
opinion like we bu bu out certain sites and we've got certain keywords that get two 3,000 monthly searches that don't even show up as a keyword in s and you're like this is crazy like when you start looking at when you prop And Niche down you're like wow this gets way more search on than what I ever thought it could get and some of my sites that are earning 20 25,000 pound a month you'll load it into HRS and it says it's got zero search traffic value zero and it's like a dr10 z will search
traffic value but like I won't buy that site for1 pound do you know what I mean like and it earns some of them earn like 21 22 G a month and you're like what know what I mean so If you see we use that at EF actually one of my our director of operations he looked at a new keyword research thing I came up with he's like this looks good but I'm bit concerned about all these keywords with zero search following like trust me man if it's bists in Google's mind there is search volume yeah
yeah yeah yeah yeah so but now we started to do the directories as well so what we'll do is we'll load them all because with the Directories you can start ranking for the plural like best plumbers not just like the singular of a being best plumber or plumbing company you can rank for the companies which also gets quite a bit of search volume so you could rank for like best plumbing companies in London and like clutch do a good job of it and a few of the directors and stuff they do a great job of
it B do a good job of it and some of are earning eight figures a year do you know what I mean So I mean Home Advisor Angie's List is basically just a fancy directory website right same yeah a lot of people I hear like oh directories are dying no one goes there anymore but I like I mean Home Advisor and Ang's list are massive companies they're still doing really crazy num what I would say on that is that again we got told don't do a directory it's D in and like no it's doing almost
better than ever but here's caveat when we did start to look into it Certain very broad topic directories they are dying so the ones that like let's say like a Yellow Pages where they do everything but then they're not really a master of anything and the topical Authority is not great they are seem to be dropping down the ones that literally just say we are a brick laying directory they're flying a plumbing directory they're flying when you start going like we do you list your site it doesn't matter what your site is you can Be
an SEO agency or or an electrician it's too difficult for the site to have enough backlink velocity going through to how many for how many pages that they have and it's so broaden all over the place those sites do seem to be dropping slightly but the niche down directories then yeah they're doing better than other that makes sense I like the directory play because one of the issues with Rank and ren like with the individual sites like there's a bit Of that income ceiling so when it comes to like trying to sell the asset like
really the only person you can sell it to is another rank of rent person which they're often like suspicious of I'm sure you've seen seen that or the actual end client right because like that's the Strategic buyer and like the new buyer can't exactly like I'm going drill up these leads way crazier unless they have some kind of other offer but a national directory like that is like no real Income ceiling on how you do it right so like that has some real valuation value there in this model yeah talk to me a bit about
how you do the directory in terms of like okay I got this National Plumbing directory in the UK or you know whatever it is are you selling like direct listings on that to the end buyer or are you using this as just kind of like your top of the funnel lead generator that will eventually get those guys that come in to build a more Specific Niche site for to start with we don't give that much time and effort to it so we've got our own in-house GMB scraper so it goes and it scrapes every single
gmbb that there is for the keywords that we want our Niche to be in um the industry to be in we're going to extract all that information like the opening times the telephone number the address the name of the company and the last three reviews if they've got any reviews if there's any photos we'll pull The photos in and we just do basically pull all the information from the GM the Google Business profiles we create a dedicated listing for every single one that there is in the UK and then wherever they're based we kind of
categorize it underneath the counter so right okay they're in greater London all these are in greater right okay they're in Essex all these are in Essex we don't do any unique content it's just 100% just scrape data and put onto the site But then what happens is we've kind of set up our own kind of display ads type market like advertising on the platform of being do you want to add your personal bio to this page and which obviously then adds unique content so it's good for us if they do want to do that and
so once the that part and would you want inquiries for and then we find out what their main Services it could be Plumbing our electricians do you want Free inquiries on your page for plumbing would you want us to send it through to you now obviously they're going to say yes of course we want you to send it through to us because we know we end up it's called like brand jacking we'll now end up ranking like number three or number four behind the brand so they'll say yes we'll write the bios so they write
the bios so now we're getting unique content and then this sales team then are going back and forth saying all Right what else is it that you want is you got any newer pictures of you got a video and then some of them start saying they're all like no follow back links or can you change it to a do follow and you're going well we can't no but why do you need to do follow back link you're looking for strength and then we can then try and cross sell them back links to our one of
our link building agencies and stuff like that but then from there then it just gets the foot in the door To get speaking to him and then what we do say is look I tell you what if we build you out a lead generation site we'll make that a do follow back link and it's kind of incentivized in him to say right okay but then also on that page we'll link to this other page as well then we'll use that g&b listing on the site so all of our Rank and rent sites are legit businesses
that are on the site we've got a real we don't fake any address we don't to fake any Telephone number a real business is put on onto the site so whoever is going to get the exclusive leads we want to use their address or the home address or sometimes they might have three or four different offices we want to use one of their off is we want to say this website is going to this company and we put all their so we ticking all the boxes for eat if they want to complain about anything on
the website they can complain it's going to go directly Through to the company if the company don't like yes the wording is incorrect you shouldn't be saying this this is Miss selling or whatever obviously we'll change it straight away but then we ticking the Box a lot of people try to build lead generation sites there's no offer there's no company behind it there's no no address there's no telephone number there's nothing and Google Now is starting to clamp down more and more on the eat signal so years Ago we went down this route of being
we need this to look like a real business like you've got to treat every single website like a real business and to be honest with you we didn't do it from a Google ranking point of view we did it from a conversion would you would you inquire on this website not knowing who you're inquiring to no would you inquire on this site you've got all the information yes you've got previous jobs that they've done testimonials case Studies yeah I'm going to go with this site not this site so that's the kind of route that we
went down and yes it St is in good stad that's awesome man I have one more question on this business model then I want to move into a bit about what you talking about with investing and team building but you mentioned earlier that you have clients are doing like this paper performance thing like they you only get paid if they make a sale I personally love this model but I've always been curious on the logistics of how it works like I've I have a friend he does e-commerce like he's an agency owner for e-commerce businesses
and for there it's very clear with the data of like how many sales you're making it's all in the dashboards but with these more local businesses who often aren't good with sales and their own processes in general it's often chaos like how do you go about tracking that how do you build the trust with That person that they're going to pay you because I have another friend he had a a rank and rent website and he generated this massive pool deal that it should have been like 150k to him personally and the guy sent him
like $2,000 and blocked him never talked to him again right so how do you go about securing these kind of deals in a way where you know it works for both parties so believe it or not it's not like again it's not as complex as what people think Now I'm not saying this is the right way by the way as well Gregory because some people can bite the hand that feeds them right so like you're saying there how naive of that from that swimming pool surround company is it the lead generation company just got him
a lead that he made 50,000 he could generate that every couple of months so why is he paid him 2,000 and then blocked him his commercial suicide do you know what I mean like why why would you do that like You only have to pay on a back end paying what he's worth and that's the kind of route of what we go down is being when we first start we go out to 20 companies maybe even 30 companies all 30 companies get the inquiry right and it's at that point where we start to realize who's
the best company at the conversions because we might speak to the 30 companies as being did you secure it where is it up to and if someone turns around saying no they've gone Elsewhere we'll try and fact you know who they went to because then we know which one within the 20 won the job yeah and then and then we can ring them up and say oh how did it go and if they say oh yeah we didn't win it on this occasion you're like yeah you did you know what I mean then we just
going to switch them off but do you know what it's so very rare very very rare that someone doesn't pay you what I would say is this is the main argument not that They don't pay you but they want to pay you obvious the least the possible can right so some might say we'll pay uh we won the job with 00 pound and you might go you've just made 10 grand on that job like 10 grand net profit I think you should be paying us two three th000 pound you're still making 7,000 pound that you
would not have had I don't feel that that is is right and you want to pay us that that's fine but we're going to switch you off and now we're going to Just now send all the leads and we'll try and look at the two closest competitors to them and go we're just going to send it to them and then straight away they're like oh no no no okay yeah I so the sales good at making certain that we get the most out of them but what's important is that we get a sensible figure that
it still keeps them hungry to want to work our leads so if we say let's split profit 50/50 sometimes they're doing more work than what we had I mean they still got to do all the work in the Trad yeah a lot of them do a 60 40 70 30 kind of profit share split because they're still making 70% of something that they wouldn't have had right and a lot of them now start to understand that they happily pay it but the ones that don't are only like small clients that we've not really got the
site built up yet to a stage where because what normally Starts to happen is it's a pay on performance model until they've been with us for a while and then what we end up saying is look in the last 12 months you've paid us 50,000 pound right the year before you paid us £40,000 I'll tell you what we'll do to keep the model really easy pay us £33,000 a month as a rank and R so it doesn't matter what you convert pays £3,000 a month that saves you £14,000 If you do the same as what
you did this year next year and I'm hoping you're going to grow again and then obviously they snatch our hands off and say yeah that's fine now we've got them on a monthly recurring Revenue stream so we know exactly it's predictable of what we're going to get paid and it works well for them because they can budget in knowing what they're doing and it works well for us and then it's Best of Both Worlds now obviously some might say well Why would you do £3,000 a month when you made 50,000 it's just the model of
being it's guaranteed need monthly recovering Rue because sometimes you can have it that you don't get paid don't get paid don't get paid you get paid 15,000 you don't get paid you get paid 20,000 and it's difficult to know what we can spend on the sites to keep growing it or build a second or a third or a fourth or a fifth site for the client when we've got a monthly recuring Revenue model it's Like right okay everything's predictable we can now move into this yes if they pay in five six 7,000 a month we
can build them a third a fourth and a fifth site and it works well for them it works well for us we make certain that all of our clients are getting a return on investment they have to get a return on investment because if they're not I don't want to work with them I want them to make certain that when they ring us they enjoy working with us that it's a Good business model for them but then we know for us that we're good at what we do it might cost us let's say it cost
us £50,000 to rank a website in total is gemly where it's at if we can get free a month well you tell me any other business model that's going to get you 80% yield and within 14 months you're going to get your money back and then after that you're going to be earning 33,000 pound a month there's not that much work after it that needs to be done It's one of the best business models that there is I've ever come across if not the best business model I've ever come across there is one better business
model and that's when you decide to spend all your wealth buying a business R Empire flippers but we'll get yeah yeah I'll get Caster on the sales call with you yeah I like that man I think that switching from performance to retainer makes a lot of sense just from like the logistics With like 800 of these clients to track down all those leads seems like quite the hurdle so that's cool man I want to switch gears because we're getting towards the tone on the show I still have so much to ask you you said you
often invest in the businesses you work with I know you've done that in the internet marketing space I do are you doing that also with the more local Leen clients as well tell me a bit about that side of your business yeah so anything That's an expense to our company from an SEO standpoint of building the content and building the back links and Technical and stuff like that I want in on that company so we were spending I think it was like 60,000 pound a month with secho we went out to Market and we was
using get me links and a lot of other link vendors and stuff like that but we were spending a lot with search true because I've invested in him I'll only Invest in a company that I feel generally are the best and I generally mean that so we was using them and spending a fortune with him and I was like Tom Phillips at the time was like I'm all right kind of having out so I bought his 50% share with Kyle Hudson I wanted to improve quite a lot the quality control inh house because then it
meant that I got better back links for myself and they still use that model we still spend 60,000 a month on content And back links but now I feel like the content and the back links are better than they ever have been and I get a cut of the profits of what that business makes as well so that model works pretty well and yeah these like Auto blog we've invested into a lot of like other SEO related industries that we've invested into that we use so that's on the Acquisitions from internet marketing side of things
and then what starts to happen on the lead genen side is the Business owners start to become a little bit uncomfortable because they feel like they've built their business on quicksand and I can kind of understand it because I own the website that's generating them all the inquiries and at any point I could if I wanted to switch them off so I've started to get a little bit of a problem where one or two clients have started to come to me and I've started to realize that with a lot of power becomes a lot of
Responsibility and it's not about me and the way I work it's me instilling into my team the way they work that have to do business with honest trust and integrity you can't just expect because someone comes along and says I'll pay an extra2 200 pound a month and someone says oh well they're getting 3,000 I give you 3,200 to switch them off when they've been with us for five years and they built up a big team relying on them Inquiries so what starts to happen is some of these starts come a little bit uncomfortable they
might have gone from two vans on the road to 25 vans on the road and they might have 60 members of staff that they would need to get rid of if we stop the inquiries and that's 60 potential mortgages families that could would be destroyed so a lot of the time they end up saying would you be interested in becoming being an investor or shareholder within the business as Long as you give us exclusivity I'm like we already give you exclusivity of the leads I mean like that you won't switch us off I'm like I
told you we're not going to switch you off and they're like I know but let's just get something contractually down so I'll look at their business model and that's sometimes then when we start to say yes I will as long as I can employ someone to initially deal with the leads because something that we've got within our businesses When an inquiry comes in we have kpis to get back to that inquiry within 23 seconds and that's what I want for the businesses so we own a call center as well like in the finance sector so
like an inquiry comes in 23 second if we do not get all of them within 23 seconds and let's say it's a mortgage broker and they're speaking to somebody else that lead's gone we run our test on it the minute goes past a minute this isn't for all Industries obviously but the minute Goes past a minute for financial advice or mortgage brokers and stuff like that you've got 50% less chance than what you had to convert that inquiry that's so wild it's so true I see it with leads like lead forms for example like if
you don't call that person back right away they have completely forgot they even filled out a lead form they have no why are you calling me like you literally the form yeah also what happens as well is that Let's say in PPC they'll fill out the form three times and once you've spoke to if I've spoken to an independent mortgage broker that says to me I can go to any lender you want and I can get you the best rat and I've been speaking to you for 40 minutes when the next mortgage broker Rings me
up I'm like I've already had it sorted mate I'm done so the first person to get hold of them wins now there's times that we might not want to on on the bidding process this Is a away from Messi on PPC we might want to be showing position number three or position number four because it's cheaper for the clicks that we might be want to be on there but then try to go soon as that inquiry comes in we get it and we kind of get in touch with him before the number one company who's
ranking number one in Google so we're all we've got him on the phone we've won it and we've realized if we ring him within 23 Seconds nine times out of 10 with the first person to ring them white bid to be number one in the Surs like on paperclick PBC is funny in that way it's like one of the rare forms of marketing you don't want to be at the top of sometimes yeah yeah that's cool man about the call center and everything I feel like that opens up a whole new can of worms but
we're coming up on the final about 12 minutes or so and I did want to talk About your team building structure so I've met a lot of people over the years in SEO with my time Empire flippers you know most of them are really bad at managing teams like that's the number one advice I always give to entrepreneurs get better at managing teams but you you're like the outlier like I don't think I know someone who has so many talented people working for you so talk to me about that process how did you do that
how do you incentivize Them to stay with you and all that good stuff so I've had some very very very good mentors over the year so let's say like mad singer mad singer is a great manager and sometimes I'll speak to him and he might only to be different conversations he could be in the pub when we're talking and he could be saying you should be trying this and you should be doing that but in my opinion the best investment you can do the best investment I have done is in the people That work with
me that's the best investment I can do forget the content the back links the websites the businesses we work for if you get good quality people around you are encouraged you give them enough space for them to kind of grow and feel like they're growing and they're doing their wrong thing they will do everything for you they will honestly they do everything they'll work 14 hour day seven days a week if you ask them to now I don't Expect that but if they wanted to do that if there was something that like an algorithm update
comes along that's what they'll do and investing in that in the people around you in my opinion people like you were saying in the indust they don't do it enough so when we first started out rolling back and now try and do it as quick as can so when we first started out we employed SEO gurus SEO experts nah it didn't work the um you can't teach an old dog new trick it's a Classic saying they think they know best you try and educate them they don't listen no didn't work so we started out with
just hiring apprentices that didn't know they knew very little but they listen to you like a sponge everything that you said was driven by data that we had from testing and we said you do it this way and when they seeing results happening they don't need to spend loads of time doing research himself or watching videos and because so many SE Still to this day waste several hours a day watching other people's videos with how do you rank and it's like we don't need to do that we're telling you we've got the blueprint this is
how you rank I'm like right okay so at that point then my kind of role now within the business is being a cultural architect so keeping the culture keeping the people around me happy making certain that if they're too busy they've got enough vas or staff that can fulfill The day-to-day jobs to do the work let them blossom let them build their own assets any B within the company that comes up with a new idea that builds out the site they get 25% of the site even though they don't pay anything towards the site and
the content and on the links so they're growing their own asset value up and yeah that's kind of the model between it and would I have been different 14 years ago when I was skin in doing this model I might have been a Bit like oh I'm going to give you 10% or something but I feel like now I've made a lot of money in this industry and I feel like I am a little bit of a philanthropist where I'm giving back to others and I want to elevate others and I want others to do
well and sometimes I get more of a kick out of one or two of my directors or one or two of my members of Staff or one or two of my business partners growing out of sight with me as well but gr out site and then being so Happy makes me even happier if you get what I mean now I don't that being grained in the heart and the way being brought up I don't know I don't know the psychological mindset behind it but it's almost like when you're at Christmas I prefer giving a present
than receiving a present if that makes sense and it's the same kind of model as that and I love seeing the people around me do well I love elevating others as best I can that was another reason why I Didn't always like going on to podcasts and doing stuff like this because I wanted to make certain before I did anything I elevated my own team and my own team they won't go anywhere they might go and do their own things as well but they'll always work work with me and I know that they always work
with me because they're well looked after they can do their own things if they want to they can go flock the nest and do whatever they want to do they're happy They understand that money isn't everything and it's more about the journey and the happiness that comes with it but they do want to see growth and they see growth every single year that's kind amazing man I'm also very similar to you on that front like I loved seeing from my own perspective like as when a seller sells like a seven figure business with us like
the lifechanging story that comes with it's amazing I'm also like you in terms of I Prefer giving gifts at Christmas than receiving to the point now where like my sister she got a brand new iPad for my parents and my parents gave me a pair of doublea batteries because they're like well we know you just don't care like oh thanks I love these batteries I actually needed it for for my remote controller so thank you yeah so I'm very similar in that regard there was something you said there that I think is extremely important to
kind of Double click on which is letting people feel like they are growing and I think part of that is having that feeling of agency so like at EF for example like obviously Justin was my mentor I was his apprentice and a similar setup of what you guys had going on eventually though like just kind of backed out not that we don't talk anymore he's like one of my best friends but like he just kind of lets me do my own thing and I think that gives me and probably other people in Your team that
sense of agency of control which is way more valuable as as far as like management studies go for retention like employee retention like you found compensation is like good but it's like brushing your teeth as long as the hygiene is good that's all that matters anything over that is kind of like Overkill usually but that sense of agency is really important I think a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid of that though like an entrepreneur who's say He's building out an affiliate site or e-commerce or whatever yeah this wants to go do their own project I
think their General tendency is the entrepreneur is like no I need to stop this from happening like yeah what do you recommend to the entrepreneur to get over that kind of anxiety of letting their employees kind of I think the hard thing is I think it's ingrained into certain personality traits if I'm being honest certain people are better not Having a team and people might not like me hearing that and some people go oh like you need to have a team to grow big and stuff like but some people in generally speaking the people that
feel when I speak to people majority of the time when they don't want to elevate others within the team is they're worried that they will go off and Nick all the processes and system and go and do it himself right that's what they're worried about MH but They're worried about that because that's probably what they did and it's like kind of if you keep claiming that your m is cheating on you it's probably because you're saying it because you're cheating on her do you what I mean kind if you actually educate the people if they
are let's say you're apprentice and you educate them about honest trust and integrity and look if you want to go and do your own thing at any point go and do it but the grass isn't always greener Why Don't We Roll as Le up together and why don't I do everything I can for you to do better and it means that the business will do better and it means that everyone does better and we enjoy the journey that's what life is about you g do your own thing and make five million quid that's fine but
you know what in 10 years time you'll regret it because yes you've got a lot of money but you'll start going do you know what I trampled on a lot of people for me to Make my money and I've known some people sell up for 30 40 million and within six months they've killed them themselves because they've realized it was almost like dirty money of what they made and it was like and they didn't feel proud of it they felt a massive hole in what they was doing and and it's sad because certain people chase
success from a monetary value and it's the worst thing that you can do because if you try and Chase success by money it's just wrong Like you need to enjoy trying to achieve goals and just keep celebrating those little mini wins and that that's what the team do as well now the team do as well go s oh yeah I 100% agree I think chasing money is kind of a Fool's game it's the Newbie starting out like oh I want the lambo versus like the richest people I know like I have a friend he sold
his business was 200 million completely bootstrap no VC Nothing and the dude is just like a really chill normal guy like he was like I man I thought I was going to get into Wicked shape once I sold 200 million turns out I can just go to McDonald's a lot more often yeah you know like really just a really cool dude but it wasn't ever about the money for him like obviously that's great but it was about the value and I think that more artistic side of Entrepreneurship is probably the healthier side versus Our grind
set hustle core culture that some our entrepreneur friends have like you know these people too because I know we're mutual friends with them I won't bring up their names but I'm sure you met many people like this but I have friends in our space who won't even like go see a movie or play a video game because like no I have to be productive all the time like well you know you're telling me this right now at 2 am in a bar in Bangkok right what do you mean Like go enjoy life like what are
you talking about so like this quest for money is sometimes a foolish errand versus a quest for Value I think is more important all right James we're at the very end so I have three quick fire questions for you are you ready yeah let's go for it all right man in your view what are the best hidden growth opportunities for SEO today I'd say parasite SEO is great if you get instant wins quickly get a site Done on a high drr site hit it with a couple of tier two back links and that's working the
best at present it might not do in a few months but at present that's the best way of generating quick traffic a quicker side on are you using parasite for your local Legion as well or more for the other nor like what we end up doing is doing like a best plumbing companies trying to rank for that term like almost like the directory site and we link to like five of our different Sites so we'll put us number one US number two Us number three Us number four five and that's kind of on that and
you getting five lots of B links to different sites as well and stuff like that so there's a very smart way to do that I like that what tools or resources can entrepreneurs Ed to help them improve their SEO just the basic ones that everyone knows about screaming frog Market moves Surfer SEO we use Auto blogging I've Invested into it for Mass scale of AI content for like supporting documents and stuff like that they're the main ones really you don't really need many after that like s Rush ah stuff like that it's just the generic
ones we needed yeah I hung out with one of the founders of Auto blogging last week in Manila so yeah that was cool to see them there so very cool guy yeah when I first invested into the business I knew the tool was amazing I was a little bit Worried I knew him I didn't really know his work ethic or anything he grafts the minute something he's changing and improving he wants to improve every single day so yeah great mentality he's a really really cool guy B bada I'd recommend some people people following him he's
a cool guy very cool dude all right my final question for you and the hardest question this doesn't make me laugh James I might not publish this episode so be careful what has been your Funniest moment working with an SEO oh God there's too many funniest moment with regards to rankings of websites or ranking of stuff that I've done either it could be both you can tell to I'll you we went down a rabbit hole and we had a big site absolutely the tank we Al him up there we went out to every man in
his dog we was like literally every single person I could speak to that was high level I'm speaking to him what's going on here the R&D testing team are on it and kazra set the site to no index oh that was KRA I he thought it was on a stageing server for some building another site and he set the sight no index and I'm running around all over the place I can't believe it what's going on and then yeah might bad to set my sight to know next after justs on this I'll just throw Cas
oh that's what really why I brought You on here to see if we couldn't insult Cas in some way so that way I could tell him like yo James was just on the podcast and we talked about you and you'll have to listen to the very end it's it's just us making fun of tell him where it is he'll wait right till the end oh sometimes do that with people that come on the podcast like who do you know that a social influencer so we could bring up their name like once and I could reach
out to them and let Them know we talked about but yeah that's great we actually had a very similar thing we had this big issue where we saw this drop in in organic rankings very briefly we figured it out quite quick but we were looking everywhere man and then we realized what it was our developer had accidentally no index like 2,000 Pages we asked him to like d list or no index these certain types of pages so he did this like Mass de- indexation but included all this Other stuff like oh [ __ ] no
no don't do that yeah that's definitely a mistake that could happen to even season Pros right sure awesome man well this was an absolute pleasure I'm so glad we finally got to do this you know you're someone I've looked up to for a very long time in the industry I first met you way back in ch my SEO I saw you post that video the other day on Facebook I could see my young self in the background just like oh man this guy's cool [ __ ] so it's always been a pleasure my friend for
anyone that wants to follow you and connect with you where's the best place for them to go do that I'm on all the social networks so mainly Twitter Instagram or Facebook you can find them all on James d.com so that's all the profiles are on there and stuff like that so I'm going to be doing quite a few more of the personal branding side of things now so yeah I'm quite active on social media so Great I will start sending you like a few hundred Empire flipper shirts every month so every video podcast you do
just always your shirt for me give me some I in I'll wear it awesome I'll give you a few hundred in sh don't you worry about all right man take it easy great cheers mate [Music] cheers there you have it I hope you enjoyed it I hope it got you inspired at all the different things that are Happening in this industry and of course if you just want to buy a highly profitable business you can always go to Empire flippers.com Marketplace or maybe you want to make an exit of your highly profitable business and you
could go to Empire flippers.com sell yoursite I've been your host Greg if you enjoyed this episode make sure you leave a review give us a like a follow share it across social media talk to you all Soon see you on the next [Music] episode
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