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A little over 2 years ago I asked you guys regarding starting my own firm, and last night we signed our first 1-year 6-figure contract which will take us to 1M ARR next month even after losing clients to an accident and COVID. Thanks for the help, and feel free to AMA about backlinks.
Posted by on September 9, 2020 at 12:50 pmHey guys,
So, a little over 2 years ago, I got off Tinder and decided to post here on this sub that I will be launching my firm. Last night, the very agency of the first person who contacted me on Reddit (Cam, hope you are doing well mate), decided to sign a 1-year, 6-figure contract with us starting next month, thus pushing our ARR above 1 million, and helping me in starting off our new service line.
It hasn’t been a smooth ride either with an accident early last year, and then COVID this year causing a few stumbles and lost opportunities, but here are some of the most important lessons I learned over the duration:
1. Never bite off more than you can chew – It happened a couple of times that due to our greed last year, we took up clients that were beyond us from a manpower perspective. Unless you are a Hoth or a FatJoe who have thousands of websites in their kitty and an already built reputation, Outreach campaigns, especially those in a new industry can be a pain in the ass. We delivered late and lost clients on a permanent basis. This is a definite No-No.
2. In the initial days, never start off with your team remotely- I started the firm while living in Munich, and for the first year, I traveled back to India to our office sporadically. This meant my first few hires were always grumbling about me not being present and not being a proper mentor. I ended up having to let more than 50% go since their performance wasn’t up to scratch and there didn’t seem any way in which they were ready to reconcile. I started a new office where I sat full-time and coached the new hires, who are now the best team I have worked with.
3. Unless you have writers coming in from that specific industry or if the client is unwilling to share their data for content, don’t pick up a Content writing job. Optimization will always work better
4. Don’t run into creating backlinks straight away- Over the last couple of years, I observed extensively on how backlinks were impacting a page. Earlier, getting new relevant links to existing pages would almost always result in a rankings bump. However, in the last few months, optimization of the pages to which we are building links to has increasingly become a huge factor, and this is something that should always be done prior to link building for the best results, and helped us with quite a few clients
5. Never hesitate in calling off an engagement- As in every service industry, there will be some toxic clients who would want to control every narrative of the engagement. Make sure that if the client becomes too much of an issue, you are ready to let them go for the sake of your sanity
These were some of the biggest SEO related takeaways for me. In case of any other questions, especially about backlinks, feel free to ask.
Edit: Spellings
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12 Replies
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It takes courage to jump in the entrepreneurial bandwagon. Kudos to you.
Liked your takeaways, filled with good learnings.Congratulations on your deal as well.
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Hi, what’s your strategy for getting backlinks?
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Nice one fella.
12 years into affiliate marketing and I now know what I’m doing.
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Hey i need some help in email templates for backlinks.
I am good at finding the bloggers but the response rate is low
Could you shed some light on how you approach people ?Can I have a look at your email structure?
Is it okay if I DM you ?
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Can you talk a little about page optimization?
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Life’s good here mate. Taking a break from new SEO clients for a while. Probably getting back into it in Oct/Nov. We’ll see how I feel.
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Hey man great job and congrats on the success!
Any tips on hot to get those first few clients?
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Could i interview you? Or set up a time to chat….honestly you are where I want to be!
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Is your revenue coming from strategy, optimization, or link building?
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Regardless of the tools, which one you’d recommend most, no ads here, thanks!
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Hi! Thanks for sharing your experience.
Do you use link building automation at all for your clients? Are you focused on local or international audience as clients, how are you promoting your business(especially interested in when you started and didn’t have any clients)? Do the other seo businesses that you promote have you sign NDA’s to do so? -
I’m currently in the process of creating content and building links to a new site of mine (only a couple of months old). How many links should I build to the homepage over the first year? How many should I build throughout the lifetime of the site? How big of a percentage of the total referring domains should the homepage of a site have in general?
I ask this because I keep reading that it’s important to have most of your referring domains point to your homepage, but I still haven’t read any sources that support this claim.
Thank you!
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