Month: May 2021

One of the most highly linkable assets in digital marketing is “Tools” Bloggers creating “Free Tools” blog posts and “Everything You Need To Do XYZ” love to link to tools such as “Privacy Policy Generators” and/or “SaaS MRR Calculators” — I’m pretty confident (research underway) that this is the case even outside of the wonderful world of digital marketing.

What’s a tool? Tools are typically an interactive experience that helps your audience do or learn something specific. A few examples:

> Email Signature Generator
> Privacy Policy Generator
> SaaS Metric Calculator
> Blog Idea Generators
> Invoice Generator
> SEO Checkers

But it’s not always easy to come up with these ideas

One of our favorite techniques is to use reverse engineering to figure out what tools will work best for our audience. A great way to do this is to leverage a site like Product Hunt where tons of Free Calculators & other types of tools are shared daily. You type in “Calculator” or “Generator” in the search and will be met with a plethora of ideas:

1. GSC: find keywords with the highest clicks and impressions. In both cases, we were average position 2-3.

2. Google the keyword and open all 10 pages in separate tabs. Note the headings (I use SEO Minion to scrape them).

3. Dump them all into a spreadsheet, filter by H2 and H3.

4. Now compare them to the headings you already have and select 3-5 topics that you haven’t covered (check the volume and/or use intuition).

5. Rephrase those headings and write 200 words for each of those topics, I make them H2s.

I even stuck these new sections at the bottom of the article and it still worked.

Scholarship links are dead and here is another way to get Edu backlinks.

1. Search for US universities that have a “Directory” page on them. Usually this directory is the list of alumni, present students, and teachers.
2. Filter out current students and scrape their emails.
3. Almost all university students have access to university blogs and you just have to tell these students that you’ll pay some $$ for posting an article. And make sure you write something useful for the people and no BS.
Works like a charm! Give it a try

Wanna know what’s even better?

Scrape Ahrefs for Edu sites with broken links OUT sites, then sees if they are available to register. I have about 5 domains of students that had to register it as a project and abandoned it after graduating. The domains all have a direct link from the university lol.

Any site I link to from these domains is a grandchild of an edu link.

Content Explorer has a searchable database of 404 pages that have backlinks. If you add the right filters, you’ll find tons of opportunities pretty fast

Just do this:

1. Enter a keyword into Content Explorer
2. Filter for “Only broken”
3. Set a referring domains filter for a minimum of 50

This will show you some 404 pages that have at least 50 Referring Domains pointing to them. Then you’ll have to find the emails of the websites and use a template from many that are out there for broken link building.

I always have a VA of mine doing this regularly for sites of mine and I get some pretty good links for a cheap price.

After I’ve been asked multiple times from members here to continue my Interview series with successful BHW members, I decided to give it a go and ask @MisterF who gladly accepted to answer my questions.

I know he is a very busy man because he runs multiple businesses but he took no more than 1 hour to give me the answers which I highly appreciate.

I’ll continue to do other interviews as well, so you can go ahead and suggest other people in this thread or by PMing me.

Without any further ado, let’s see the great answers that @MisterF gave us.

1. Can you tell a bit about yourself? What do you do and how did you get started in internet marketing?

I’m David. A couple of interesting facts: At 17 I got my gliding licence, and then passed my

driving test 6 months later. So, I could glide solo before I could drive solo. I enjoy travel, have

been to Dubai over 20 times in the past 10 years. I’ve taken a shower at 40,000 feet while flying

with Emirates. I have a close friend in the States who was a personal advisor to President

Obama, so the 6 degrees of separation thing is another claim to fame. It’s rather

interesting when he was across in the UK, we’re having dinner, and he gets a phone call from

the White House.

I live in Spain along with my partner and 3 dogs. Love the life put here and having a swimming

pool helps in the heat of summer.

I’m just into my 50s and left school many years ago to join the military. There I was a police

investigator undertaking counter-intelligence work. I also did close protection, including

guarding some of the UK and Saudi Royal Families.

I’ve run businesses since 1991 and love the freedom of being my own boss. My first business

was selling office supplies. I’d never done it but knew that all companies needed envelopes to

send out invoices and mail, paper to print on and pens or printer ribbons to create them with. I

borrowed £1k off my parents as a loan, bought stock and went door to door in my van selling

and handing out my business cards.

I paid my parents back pretty quickly. My first 12 months turning over £130k on a 25% net profit.

I love doing a deal, both as a seller but also as a buyer.

Around 1998 I was heavily into matched betting/sports arbitrage. Through that, I met people

building websites and cashing in on affiliate programs in the betting industry. Then 10 years

later, I found BHW when I needed scraper tools and people to build websites for me.

I’ve always been fascinated by SEO and keyword research; I love that I’m continually learning

new and more effective ways of doing things.

I’m fortunate to personally know some of the top players in the SEO industry. There are some

brilliant people out there who don’t promote themselves enough. People who work on

technical SEO etc. really fascinating stuff.

2. Tell us a bit of your current projects, what are you working on?

Along with my partner, we run or are partners in 3 different businesses, none of which are

purely IM based.

1) Firstly, we run conferences and seminars.

2) Then we have a specialist store, and we sell mainly through FBA. < That’s as much as I’m

saying

3) The third business is just being revamped. We’re moving and setting up our own

manufacturing operation. That’s as much as I’m saying

As well as the 3 businesses above, I am a partner with @WebMinati within an SEO agency.

We’ve had great results with clients of the forum, so we decided to open up a BST on here for

one of our services.

I also help manage my partner with her content writing business. She’s busy with that, and we

have a great team of writers. We deliver 350k+ words a month to clients.

3. What do you think the future has prepared for SEO?

SEO is ever-evolving. Quality over quantity still matters, as does relevancy.

I’m really interested in how BERT and NLP will become more significant considerations. If you

ever get chance to meet or listen to Dawn Anderson, do so she really does dig deep into this

type of stuff.

4. Do you do any other businesses besides the online world? How important do you consider

having something on the side?

My IM ventures have just been side projects over the years, to be honest. I have around 8 test

sites for assessing SEO strategies on, and then 6 or so affiliate sites too, which bring in a healthy

income.

Our FBA Amazon stuff is a regular income method. What we like here is we signed a couple of

manufacturers up, so we have sole UK/European rights to market their products.

As I mentioned, we are just opening up our own manufacturing operation too, which will help

with our bottom line.

The old saying about not having all your eggs in one basket applies in most things, from

business to investments.

5. What are the steps you take to optimize a website?

Clean structure, fast-loading theme, not too heavy with plugins and fast, secure hosting is

essential.

6. What are some books that have changed your mindset?

Key influences have been –

The Art of War by Sun Tzu ( hence the name of our SEO agency )

The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson.

7. What’s been your biggest regret since starting out and your biggest lesson?

Biggest regret: Not focusing enough time on some projects that went by the wayside.

Biggest lesson: Don’t be afraid to jump into something, but make sure you have the time and

resources to commit fully.

I taught myself to trade options many years ago and was going to sell my office supply business

and go into trading full time, but sadly my then-wife and her family talked me out of doing it.

Could I have been the UK version of Warren Buffet had I had the bottle to do it? We’ll never

know.

8. Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?

If I’m still alive, doing pretty much what I’m doing now. Having several income streams serves

us well. Selling into different markets and countries means we’re less vulnerable to economic

downturns.

We tend to have 2-3 weeks away end of November or in December somewhere nice and hot,

then the same January/February. We might just do a solid 3 months away.

9. If you could give some advice to people that are just starting out, what would it be?

Research your plan, do a SWOT analysis, look for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and

Threats. Have confidence in yourself. I ‘d never sold office supplies, but I researched my local

area for competition negotiated prices with suppliers and went out selling from the back of my

van. The first couple of months it was tough, so I took a second job working the doors at a

nightclub 3 nights a week. You have to be prepared to put the work in.

STAY FOCUSSED. It’s so easy to get distracted or to throw in the towel too quickly. Shiny object

syndrome is a disaster.

Treat your clients as you’d expect to be treated as a buyer.

Finally, it’s better to under-promise and over-deliver, than over promise and under deliver.

Search for a broad topic in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and apply two filters:

Referring domains < 5
Organic traffic > 1,000

You’ll get a list of relevant pages that get lots of organic traffic while having few or no backlinks.

You could also add DR as a filter so lower-quality sites will show. <20 is what I prefer to have at the DR filter.