SPEAKER_01
James, what do you think of the dude episode 50? That was episode 50.
SPEAKER_00
Damn, we're getting through these. That was a big one. Yeah. Yeah, that was awesome. James Doolittle, smart dude.
Dude, the rank and rent stuff is actually pretty interesting. Probably something that a lot of new site people could potentially pivot into, depending on I guess what you do there. Just could be a little easier to rank for, maybe a little more stable.
Who knows. But the fact that he owns race horses as well. I mean, if you say you own race horses, you're making a shit ton of money.
But what's kind of interesting as well is the manual penalties that he got for all of the transparency. I've never heard of that before. Have you heard of that?
SPEAKER_01
No, I haven't. But when he mentioned finance, I think that makes a lot of sense to me because there's some liability issues because if dude, if you recommend a CPA who's not a CPA, for example, you're.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Or even medical probably, I'm sure it runs into that too.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it was great insights. I tried to dig as deep as possible into his businesses.
I'm not sure if I went too hard though, but I think it was fine.
SPEAKER_00
No, no, you never go too hard on that stuff. That's what we want from our guests. That's what we want from our sponsors.
So make sure everyone support our sponsors of the podcast. Make sure you support SERP Reach. It's our same sponsor we've had for the past few episodes.
Essentially, you only get 12% off using coupon code indexy and these are niche edits that have rankings for keywords in your niche. So they're super, super highly relevant. There's also a case study down in the description that they did for Jackie that's doing very well for him.
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SPEAKER_01
All right. Yeah. And dude, I think it was a great episode. Give it a listen guys.
What's good everyone is Jackie Chow.
SPEAKER_00
And this is James Delacy.
SPEAKER_01
And you're listening to this week in digital marketing. All right. We have the infamous James Julian today.
When I first started the podcast, I think we had Matt Digity on the first couple of ones and he's like, we should speak to you. 40 something episodes later. Yeah. We finally have you on. So why don't you give the audience a quick intro of yourself? But I'm sure everyone's heard of you.
SPEAKER_02
I'm James Dealey. I'm a digital unload. Do a lot of rank and rem websites and basically building websites, ranking them and then renting them out to clients.
SPEAKER_01
That's pretty much. And yeah. And how long have you been doing this?
SPEAKER_02
I ain't talking now for about 12, 13 years. So there's a lot of failures along the way. And when we first started out, well, yeah, it's in the last probably six or seven years, it's become very successful.
And yeah, it's grown nicely from there.
SPEAKER_01
Really. Nice. Nice. So our conversation will have a lot of overlap with Kazra. I'm not sure if you've seen the episode.
It did really well on YouTube. But yeah, we spoke heavily on rank and rents. And I guess my question to you is how do you structure like deals with so many partners in different businesses? I don't know if you have the same partners in all your businesses.
I guess not. And like, how do you structure it? Because I find it hard to have operators, you know?
SPEAKER_02
In general, the way it works, we don't, I mean, when I say just rank and rents, we also make money from like display advertising and affiliate as well on the websites. But initially we start out by, we will go on a broad kind of scale of, let's say, plumbing. And then we'll start ranking for plumbing terms.
And then what starts to happen is we'll give the leads away for free initially. And then you'll start to get in with a few of the plumbers. And then the plumbers then will start coming back, asking you the questions.
And you start giving them away, some of the leads for free in the first instance, in saying, can you generate me leads for X, Y and Z? Now some of the niches or products or services that they ask for, I would not have found using traditional keyword research of Sam Rosh or AHRBS and stuff like that. So they come to us saying like the prime example, we do quite a lot in disabled wet rooms. So and there's lots of other kind of niches within, let's say the finance niche as well and stuff like that.
But initially you would not have probably started as being, okay, what's disabled wet rooms? You start with a plumber. The plumber then says that they do shower rooms. Then it moves on then to saying we want to deal more with industry or commercial clients.
And then it moves then into being wet rooms, generally half or commercial. And then further down the rabbit hole, you come, then you start to realize that actually the keyword kind of volume is still pretty good. But the kind of what each enquiry is worth at that stage is worth probably five times more than just the generic plumbing lead.
And it's actually easier to rank for as well. So that's kind of how we always go. We go broad, narrow it down, narrow it down, narrow it down.
And then kind of the some industries, like you said, we're in in total 800 different, I think 650 different industries, we've got 850 plus paying clients. But we've probably done over 2000 websites. Maybe 50% of them don't work on a rank and rent model.
But then at that point, then we'll turn it into display ads, whether it like is Zoic, AdFribe or Mediavine and stuff like that. That's kind of the model of how it takes. We go broad and then narrow it down.
SPEAKER_01
Got you. And how do you manage so many sites? Do you just have like a massive team? Because and like what's the average revenue per site at your scale?
SPEAKER_02
So that's a good question. When you first start, maybe some of the clients might want to be paying three, four, 500 pound a month to do the rental of the site. But then in time, like prime example, we've got and we're actually invested in the company now as well, a road markings company.
And they're paying in total 18,000 per month. Just now we've built, we've ended up building them four or five different websites, but we've capped it now at 18,000 per month of what they pay. And it's got to a point now where because it's in the local industry, there's not that much work we now need to do.
We've already built out the topical clusters. We've already done the backlinks and stuff like that. It's just in maintenance mode now.
So it might cost us three, 400 pound a month. And obviously then it's you're generating 18,000. But in answer to your question, it could be anything from 200 pound a month initially up to 18,000 per month is the highest.
I'd say on average, it's about five, six thousand per month, something like that.
SPEAKER_00
How do you decide whether you're going to rent out the site versus sell the lead individually?
SPEAKER_02
So when we first start, we give the leads away for free. And then from there, then it moves on to then a paper lead model. The issue is with a paper lead model is that you almost feel like you're employed by the client because they're ringing you up consistently saying, I've just had a lead and it's a fake lead or just like a leading.
It was my competitor. I've just had a leading. It was Donald Duck.
And they're coming back to your back and forth saying, I couldn't get older to the client. And what starts to happen is they spend more time moaning about the, let's say 30% of the leads are they can't get older them or the fake inquiries. They spend more time worrying about the 30% of bad inquiries than the 70% of good.
So kind of we get to a model of being normally after 12, 18 months of the client paying, let's say the pain on average six thousand pound a month, right on a back end or paper lead, we then say to them, no, I'm having me in the sales team. We've got like one of the questions earlier was like, how do you manage so many clients? Yes, we do have a large sales team. So we own a call center as well in Manchester.
So I've got a big sales team that deals with the actual clients on a week by week basis. But normally if they're paying six thousand point a month on average, we'll try to get them over to a rental in paying four, five, four, five thousand point a month. So they feel they get in some good value out of it.
We then know exactly what we're earning on the site to know what we can invest into the site to then start to grow it. And then you've then got a recurring revenue kind of stream that's coming in that you it's predictable that then you could grow from there. And that's kind of how the business model works.
SPEAKER_00
So how do you how do you decide the incremental increases in rent? So you say you start four or five pounds or five grand a month. When does that start to increase?
SPEAKER_02
So so in general, I mean, I don't personally deal the day today. So I've now got a sales team in place on the sales team. Each of them earn 25% of whatever the revenue is of the site.
So it's up to them as the sales kind of manager of that website to try and get as much money as they can out of the client. But for long term kind of consistency and making certain that you're having long term relationships with the clients, the client needs to make certain that they're getting a return on investment as well. So there's a fine line between keep trying to up the price to being they're happier and we're happy.
And once we probably spend, I mean, on average, it probably costs about 50,000 pounds to fully rank the website, build the site, content, the bat links and to get it ranking. And after that, if we can get it to 5,000 pounds a month, we're almost happy because within 12 months, we've got our money back. And then we've just got a recurring revenue model of 5,000 pounds a month.
It's a great business model for us. So if they want to keep it at 5,000, even if we are growing it slightly, the sales manager, I'm happy as well. But it's a job, there's different nuances from niche to niche because some might be willing to pay more for more inquiries.
Some businesses don't want any more inquiries, believe it or not. They might only want four or five vans on the road and that's it. So sometimes you're at the limit of what your customer wants themself because they don't want to grow too big.
So we kind of make certain we don't, like an affiliate, you could scale, scale, scale, scale, scale up to half a million a month or whatever numbers that you want. And it doesn't really matter because you're not dealing with buying the product here unless you're doing dropshipping and stuff like that. But in Legion, the customers sometimes they do want to cap it.
So for that reason, if we get it to, we kind of say 4,000 to 6,000 pounds a month and then we're more than happy with that kind of price.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah. Matt and James, I'm like running into a bit of an issue right now. So what I notice is we have a bit of slightly different business model is like we rank for, I don't know, for example, best protein powder.
And then we ask protein powder companies to pay us a flat fee to be placed at number one. Similar, same direction, let's just say that. But what starts to happen is we start managing like 30 accounts, all paying like 500 to 5 grand a month.
And it's an absolute nightmare. I don't know how you deal with it. It's like everyone's complaining nonstop all the time.
And for some reason, the people paying 500 bucks a month complain the most. It's like the worst business model ever for me. I can't deal with people.
I guess you're pretty good at delegation then, right?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean, it all comes down to delegation. I mean, I don't deal with any client at all. So I'm not client facing.
I used to be, but I'm not at all now. So it's about onboarding the right staff, getting the right systems and processes put in place. I tried to make certain that each one of the staff only really deal with approximately 15 to 20 clients.
Any more than that then. And then they're starting getting burned out and they're not going to give the clients the best deal or they're sometimes a big client might want a meeting. We rarely do the meetings, if I'm being honest.
We try and do it on a Zoom call or something like that. But sometimes they want to show us their facility. So at that point, they've got to go out for half a day to see the client, to see the facility, to see what products and services that they do.
So yeah, it's difficult. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not like, there's been a lot of failures along the way.
There's been a lot of grievances with regards to staff morning, with customers morning. But I suppose that comes with any business.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Yeah. And I guess you have asked your team to probably put more time into the clients paying five grand a month versus 500, right? 500, they barely, you probably won't even hop on a Zoom.
SPEAKER_02
So once they're at 5,000 per month, I normally end up meeting them when they're at 5,000 per month. And the only reason why I don't normally get involved in client facing, apart from if they're at 5,000 per month and they've been with us for a while, normally they start to become a little bit scared because they've built their business on quicksand because they're relying on our leads. And if we wanted to switch them off tomorrow, then they're in a lot of trouble because they've got a lot of staff that are employed and a lot of vans on the road.
So normally they want to meet myself in being, right, can I trust this person that's generating the leads? And normally the saying goes to them, is that, look, I only want to speak to you once a year and that's you inviting me on your Christmas day. And that's kind of what I say to them. And then, and that's it.
And normally at Christmas time, I might go out with some of the staff and have a good time with them, catch up with some of their sales team. They might open certain bits. But normally they are my kind of account managers, we'll deal with each client.
The ones that are 500 pound a month, we're always trying to see, are they ready for growth? Can they pay a thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four and five thousand and stuff like that. So, but a lot of it comes down to, can you find the right, the most profitable service and product that they do? Because sometimes trying to extract what their most profitable service is, is painful. Like the business people will like trying to get that information out of them.
It's hard. But once you've got that information, then it's pretty plain, plain sailing after that.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, gotcha. And earlier you mentioned that your team would invest like up to fifty thousand dollars or pounds. Yeah, yeah.
Ranking the site. I'm guessing it would be something competitive in like a tier one UK city. How do you run projections on that because there are chances, there are scenarios where the site just won't rank, right? Like or do you launch multiple sites that target the same keyword?
SPEAKER_02
Generally speaking, if you're going after, let's up for some examples out there, invoice factor is quite a big finance kind of industry. It's about hundred and twenty pound pay per click. If you go after invoice factor in Manchester, that might cost you eighty, ninety thousand pounds to rank for it.
But some of the others, let's say like accountants are mortgage brokers in Manchester, that might only cost thirty five thousand pounds. But generally speaking, even if we couldn't rank for the primary term, there's so many secondary keywords that you can rank for, you're still going to get inquiries that are probably going to earn you one thousand, two thousand, three thousand pound a month. And then you're always going to get a site that's going to earn you something or it's going to earn you display ads.
So but generally speaking, these times like we, one of the worst ones that we ever did and we must have put nearly two hundred thousand pound into it was dental care. So like teeth implants and stuff like that could for some reason on a dot or Y in the UK. So loads of them are willing to travel to Turkey to have a new set of teeth, but they won't go traveling two hours down the road to down the train station to somewhere else.
So I don't know what it was and the dental practices didn't want to take the inquiries unless it was specifically local within ten miles of them. So that was one where we just did media vine and just did display ads and it indeed like teeth whitening and stuff like that. But and that's going to take maybe 10 years to get our return on investment back.
But it's one of them. You've it not every niche you're going to enter is going to work. But because of the profits profitability of the ones that when it does work, it's just worth keeping reloading the gun and going again.
That's kind of where we're at now that it's not we don't overanalyze. We kind of think if we think it's going to work, they've got the financial backing to say let's just go for it. So maybe when I first started out, I probably was a lot more I don't want to enter that market might not work.
But nowadays it's like knowing that some of the most random niches make the most money. Sometimes I'm like, who am I to say that that's not going to work? And then some of the most random ones seem to do the best.
SPEAKER_01
I see. Yeah. So I mean, what you mentioned is pretty much saying like your outsized winners covers like more than covers the losses and returns. Exactly.
Yeah. Like massive profits. And then you just keep rolling it in or so do you just roll all your profits back in and like you just keep going.
SPEAKER_02
So like we ended up as well. We I invested in it. So I own so I own pattern search route.
So I am one of my biggest outgoings was I was spending 45,000 pound a month on content and links for a lot of these websites. So naturally I'm thinking that's a massive expense to what we're spending out. So at that point we was like that I need to buy an agency that does content and links and a new Carlton and Tom Phillips pretty well.
And we was using search route. And I mentioned it to Tom Phillips who was 50% share old and he was more than interested in selling his share. Now for me it was an amazing deal because it was just going to save me so much money just on my own stuff.
Never mind the business growing. It was just going to save that much on that. So we consistently bit buying we own a disavow agency.
We own an EAT agency. But this is mainly for our own stuff. We own search route which does content and backlink.
We part own a SaaS product that does AI content and stuff like that. So I'm consistently looking for digital assets and services to see where naturally we can grow into. And then obviously I don't know if you know but I own quite a few resources now so I have some fun as well.
I don't need to I don't mean it in an arrogant way but I don't need to work another day in my life. But I just love what I do. I just genuinely love the hustle and the growth and the success.
Not for money. And I always thought I was doing it for freedom. But I've got as much freedom as I want now but I still go again.
You know what I mean? And I just I feel like I just love networking with people like you guys who are super successful as well. And it's just nice to kind of get out there networking and continuous, continuously grow. I think that's what a lot of male like I'm built to go out and hunt.
And I don't if someone said to me is a billion pound but you can't hunt anymore. I think I'd be sad. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
I think a lot of people who like retire after they retire they like lose all purpose in life. They like maybe sit by the beach for like three months and then they're like, what am I doing right? Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. I mean the racehorse thing is pretty insane.
Is that just like purely out of passion? For you, I saw that you have like your hands in some gambling businesses too, right?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So I own a bingo and casino and a sports betting website as well. Like affiliate on that front.
But the resources is not for profit. It's just for just I mean, don't get me wrong. We've had a lot of success in with the resources.
But it's not something that I would I would recommend anybody to do from an investment standpoint. It costs a lot of money to train them and feed them and stuff like that. So but it's just it brings all the family together.
I've got two older brothers that in my opinion from my success has been a lot to do with my two older brothers. And the reason why I say that is because when I was younger, I used to play them at sport all the time and because they were older than me, they used to always beat me. And then I jumped back up and I'd go again and they beat me and I jumped back up and I'd go again.
And I feel like resilience now of my two older brothers in beating me all the time has given me the bounce back ability to get up and go again. And I feel I use that now in work and in business that gives me that a thrive on failing or being out my comfort zone to then go again and go again and learn and develop from there. So I think I owe a lot to my two older brothers for that.
And horse racing is something that brings my mum and my two older brothers together. So I thought why not buy some race horses?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that's an interesting play actually. Never heard of anyone buying race horses as like it's considered an investment, right? Or is it more of like a hobby?
SPEAKER_02
It's more it's more for fun. But I mean, we've got we've I say it's for fun. We've probably spent about 1.
5 million on the horses in total. And the asset value now of them is probably worth about 2.2. So it has it has made profit, but I didn't do it for the profit. I didn't like I'm not selling them.
I'm holding on to them. They're still racing stuff like that. At some point they're going to retire and be worth nothing.
So I'm not doing it for for any sort of profits. It's just there for family, bringing everybody together, having a good time. And and it's something that experiences and memories that we have together that's like I can't buy elsewhere.
It's brilliant.
SPEAKER_01
Gotcha. So interesting that your tribute your success to your two older brothers. Are they in the business? Do they work with you? Do they have their own business?
SPEAKER_02
So my help is now is in the sports betting affiliate business. Yeah. I said it's probably two years old the side. So that seemed like the eye game.
And so it's American horse racing football betting, horse racing betting and stuff like that in the UK and in the US. He's he's a phenomenal writer, way better than I am. And he fried he loves the industry.
So he runs that and he's got six other content writers that do it for him. And then he's got like a link building agency that's attached to that as well. And in the eye game space that that that was pretty well as well.
SPEAKER_01
Nice. It's in the it's in the family. Interesting.
And with all these assets, are you guys building them to kind of hold and cash flow forever similar to like what Warren Buffett does? Or are you guys in it for the exit at the at the very end?
SPEAKER_02
That's a great question. Every asset I build, I build out to sell even if I'm not wanting to sell it. So every single asset that I have is built in the way that it's a saleable asset.
If I ever wanted to sell it, it's it's own entity. But at present, why would I sell? And sometimes I can ask you this question. Why would I sell when someone tells me that the maximum you can get is up to maybe 60 months worth of revenue? Because for what? So like that's 20% yield for someone's buying it out.
You tell me any property in real estate where I can make 20% yield. I can't like in the UK, maybe yield is six, seven, eight percent interest over a year that you can make on buying a property and renting it out. So then why would I sell at 20% to only make 6% if I'm going to put it in real estate? I just don't know.
I don't get why some people would say sell some of your assets and put it into housing when they only make 7%, 8%. It's just it's just commercial suicide.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Well, I guess to take the other side of it, the risk is priced in, right? Like with Treasury bonds at what is where they are in the UK, I don't know, like 7%, 8%. Yeah. So your risk-free benchmark is there. Yeah. 20% doesn't seem as interesting when the risk-free rate is at like 8%. I guess that's my counterpoint.
And man, some of these assets, you see these niche site people on Twitter with a million dollars in a single niche site and they get hit by the recent update and they're down like 80% and they have like a whole family and it's just like, you know, they could have sold. But I think in your case, it's very different because you're very well diversified. You have like hundreds of sites.
So I think you're also balling out of control. So it's like, I think you'll be, I think you'll be fine, you know? But some of these other guys are very concentrated.
SPEAKER_02
Well then Jackie as well, though, on that, when I said 20%, that's if you get five years, like you're going on Flippers or you're going on Empire Flippers or FE International at present, you're only getting 30 months. So then that's only a 40%. You're the only, then it's 40%.
So then at that point you're going, I don't know, like within two and a half years, I could have got that money back for keeping it. And the only that is I get the risk that's involved. And do you know what? Maybe five, six years ago, I used to worry a lot about the risk involved.
But I feel Googles aren't very, very predictable nowadays, very predictable. And I know I'm saying that now, where someone's just been hit now, everyone's been hit with a helpful content update and these loads of niche sites that are going up and down. But the, some of the businesses that I bought was because I was scared myself.
So I bought a backlink doctor, which does disavows. The only reason why I bought that was because I had two websites hit with a manual action link penalty within Google search console. I then started speaking to Rick Lomas, who was the Godfather of disavows.
He then was looking to some of the retirees. So I was like, I'll buy your business, train us up and let us be the people that do the disavows. So if I ever get another unnatural links penalty again, my team can get out of it by doing the reconsideration request.
We know exactly what a good link and a bad link looks like with a guy so a trusted link and a toxic link, not just looking at DR and traffic and relevance. So we kind of looked down that route. And then I used to always think that EAT, I thought it was a complete myth.
I was like, anyone who preaches EAT is just there to sell you something. They just, it's a myth. I'm not buying into this until I got hit on three of my sites last year.
And I don't know if you've ever heard of this with an offer transparency penalty. So it's a manual action penalty within Google search console. I can send you through the, I'll send you the screenshots of it.
A manual action penalty in Google search console for an offer transparency penalty. Now what's really strange about this is, I mean, I've got over a thousand obviously different sites, right? And every one of them that got hit was in the finance sector. So I don't know whether it's only in the finance sector that they're doing it or whether it is broadly in, it's going to roll out to other industries, but three of them in the finance sector and offer transparency penalty.
We didn't know who was behind the article and it was a manual action penalty in Google search console. And then that's what then got me to think I need to make certain eye brush up on my EAT. And that's when then I started to go, right, okay, I need to maybe look.
Now I go over the top, I go belt and braces now. I make certain I've got about us and meet the team, everything like privacy policy, cookie policy, modern slavery policy, everything I can think of just to make certain that like they can't come after me to say you're not a real business. And then when you start ticking all the boxes of what they want, is it high risk? Is it just a lot of these people, the majority of people that have been hit when you start looking at them and digging deeper, 30, 40% of their site gets no traffic.
So then at that point you're wasting Google's crawl budget, the cost of retrieval of their website costs a lot more. Actually, I'm not going to do this, but somebody should go out there now and create a content pruning agency. That's what they should do.
Someone's obsessed with topical authority and the scaling shit content. And a lot of this content is wasting Google's crawl budget. And what they've done is to put a benchmarking now saying, if more than 25% of your website is getting no traffic and not ranking, we're going to put a classifier in place.
And that's what's happened to a lot of these, not not seeing all of them, but a lot of these sites have had the classifier here because they've too much thin content and you have any thin content on some parts of your site and it can affect a whole site's rankings. And that's where people have got to be now worried a little bit about AI. I embrace AI, but if you're just scaling out chat GPT to write your full article and there's no uniqueness, there's no anything in there that's information gain, well, at some point you're going to tip over the mark of a lot of sites not ranking.
And at that point you're going to get hit site-wide. So it's not that they're going after AI, it's just they're very clever in the way that they've built the new algorithms now and the helpful content updates had that release that's come out.
SPEAKER_00
So what are you doing with all your author personas then obviously you have thousands of rank and rent. Are they all personas or have you got actual people front of them as well?
SPEAKER_02
So at one point we was like, what are we going to do here? We're going to have to fake faces and fake names and stuff like that. And I was like, do you know what? To fake it that much, it's going to be a ridiculously big task. And not only that, I don't know if you've seen the other month someone got done for rank and rent and what they were doing, they was faking profiles, but then there was editing in Photoshop like bank statements and all sorts for the address, for like GMBs.
SPEAKER_01
You got a shoot by Google, right?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. We, the companies we work with, we will only start sending them leads if they're willing to put their face on our website. So and the reason and what we say to them, the way we kind of sell it to them is we need to make certain that they know they're inquiring with so that when they inquire and let's say James, you pick up the phone, they know who you are because you're on the meet the team page.
So they already know who you are. They already know that you were an expert. You've probably already got a Twitter profile.
They probably already got some sort of recognition online that you might have won some awards in that industry because you're the expert at electric gates. Do you know what I mean? And that's what your background is. And it says that you work at this company, but as is just the trading name of your company, if that makes sense.
And that's kind of the road that we go down that way is we do tick the boxes for eat with real people because and it's a message match as well. So they're having a good user experience by us, adding them onto our site.
SPEAKER_00
So you just, you just reduce registering something like electric gates, Manchester.com. Yeah. And then you're having their team on the page and then their business name on the page as well because they're not electric gates, Manchester, etc. They are, you know, whatever their business name is.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So they could be called James's Gates, right? Yeah. James's Gates limited, but I want the exact match demand of electric gates, Manchester.
But a big loads of businesses have got 50, 60, 70 trading names. They might be just called James's, James's Gates, but you could have lots of different trading names. So electric gates, Manchester is just a trading name of James's Gates.
Okay. And that's kind of how we do it. We'll put their company registration number on, we'll put their directors on, everything on the site because we want to do everything we can to look real.
We are real. If someone comes in and inquire, not only that, is that if someone does legitimately comes and looks at our site before they inquire, they probably want to know are these a specialist in what they do, have they won any awards, have they got this and have they got that. So it actually improves your conversion rate of your website by having it and your clients are happy to have it on there because then there's no like, excuse me, who are you, James's Gates? I inquired with the electric gates, Manchester.
Do you know what I mean? It's like, no, yeah, that's one of our websites. And that's all that needs to be done on that.
SPEAKER_01
When you got your manual penalty, was it across all your finance sites at once? Or was it like a couple of days after, I don't know, Raider Hub visited you?
SPEAKER_02
So that's exactly what it was. It was three different websites at three different times. And that's when then we realized when we started digging deeper, Raider Hub, it hit our site 48 hours before and they'd come visited the site.
They've got like Lionbridge and Raider Hub. I think there's like seven or eight different ones and the Google quality rate has come. Get going to your site.
And what was strange as well about it is Raider Hub only hit the site when we jumped onto page one in the top five rankings for a really big term. I don't know whether this could be completely made up, but just from the small bit of data of the offer transparency penalties that we got, Raider Hub only hit the site and we got hit when we only started ranking in the top five for a search term that was over 30,000 month searches. And it was quite a big keyword that it was ranking for.
And I don't know whether this is some kind of once you start ranking for a big keyword at that point, Raider Hub, come have a look at the site. We're not happy with it. You're going to get it.
So this is where I maybe I was a bad SEO and I wasn't ranking for good keywords. Previously, when I didn't believe in EATS was when I hadn't had Raider Hub hit my site and it was only when I got the penalty, I was like, shit. And the point is, is that I then did like an article that I put out there and saying that it's only a problem when it's a problem and then it's too late.
So be reactive, not be proactive, not reactive. So now I just like for the sake of you think of it, for the sake of writing seven or eight articles, like a privacy policy, a cookie policy and about page and meet the team page, having a contact page, renting a telephone number for a dollar a month on Twilio or whatever you want to use, having an email address where you can just forward it on to whatever email just do a you don't even need a G suite, just forward it on Cloudflare or something like that. It costs about 50 pounds to tick all the boxes.
Just tick the boxes. Do you know what I mean? It's like just I try every website that we build. I just try and make certain that the foundations of every site is built like a real business would build that site.
Just so I don't get hit with something stupid to say, why didn't I have an about was even if I didn't believe it, why didn't I not have about us page? It costs 20 pounds to set up less than that. Do you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, that's fair. Yeah. I'm pretty sure Raider Hub has like certain keywords they monitor like for sure, Viagra, is one of them. I'm sure some casino terms are or like super high risk, high, you know, might be an issue for liability, hence why the finance sites were hit.
So I'm like 90% certain they do monitor certain types of keywords. Yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Probably why I'll write.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure.
All right. Well, I did. I was wondering something else.
I don't think you've ever talked about this, but I was wondering how you, how do you split your profits with your operators? Because it seems like you have your hands in so many businesses. No chance you have, you can incentivize your operators to operate at such a high level like Kazra who's like smashing it with his businesses with you. Yeah. How does the ownership structure work? It might be a touchy subject. I don't know.
SPEAKER_02
But no, no, no. Yeah. So when you say operators, do you mean like employees and stuff like that?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, or partners. I don't know what Kazra is.
SPEAKER_02
So everything I do, I've got a mission statement out there on the Fat Rank website that says everything I do is with honest trust and integrity. So I believe that any time you look to set up any sort of partnership with someone, right from the word goal, you need to set the boundaries and you need to set exactly everything that's going to go on because if there's a gray area at the start, trust me, it's going to be a problem further down the line. So I try to make certain that one whoever I partner with, I look at them straight in the eye and I think to myself, when things go wrong, which at times they will do, is he going to have my back? And that's a big part for me for choosing.
I've had some people come and the ridiculous like data scientists who are like on another level of education than what I am. And I won't partner with him because I just don't feel that connection in when something goes wrong. We're going to roll past leaves and work together.
So that's the one part of choosing the partners. And then we've got to the partners. A lot of it depends on what they're going to bring to the table and what am I going to bring to the table.
And it's not me personally. It's what my team around me or my connections are going to bring to the table. So right at the very start, let's say me and you jacket and I thought you're a legend, you're a brilliant, let's do a 50-50 partnership.
I'm happy because I know that you're going to bring a lot to the table. I know I'm going to bring a lot to the table. Let's do a 50-50 partnership.
And then that's fine. But it's time to have a look at someone and I think I'm bringing way more to the table than you are. I'm going to bring in the 100,000 pound investment.
I'm going to bring my team. You're just going to bring your knowledge of that one industry and we might do a 70-30 split on 80-20 split or a 60-40 split. But we just have a genuine, honest discussion at the start to say, what do you think's fair? And we'll thrash it out right at the very start, like, of being, this is what I think it should be.
I might say 80-20. They might say it should be 50-50 and we might meet at 60-40. The majority of my partnerships are 50-50.
I try not to be like, I'm better than you, so I want the highest split and stuff like that. I generally just kind of go, let's go in it together. Let's both work hard and let's go in it together.
So that's on a lot of them that I do. But if it's the ranking rents, then I generally do it where I pay for everything. It's my team that fulfill everything with regards to the content and links.
The sales manager deals with the client and the sales manager gets 25%. Well, from an employer's point of view with myself is that I've got nine middle managers now that all started out as being apprentices. So they all started out of knowing not one thing in SEO and six of them, they were directors of the company.
So they've grown within. I'm a massive advocate of empowering other people from within the team. So as far as someone wants to take it, they can grow.
So prime example, Kazra, two and a half years ago, was a web designer. He was a developer on web designer working in an agency. We came to a meet up, I met him, I liked him straight away.
I thought he's got, at the time he was like an intrapreneur, so he was working inside of a company. But I knew he had this kind of mindset that wanted to go and do crazy things. So I initially employed him.
He was just an employee to start with. The first six months he needed to brush up on a lot of his SEO skills. He was working within an agency that just did a local and wasn't not a suspect, but there wasn't that good at SEO.
So he learned the ropes for maybe six, 12 months, started to realize he could rank websites and then in the last 12 months now, he's just grown. So now I don't, he's not an employee anymore. He's a partner in a lot of different businesses that I do.
He's built a lot of his own assets up. He kind of goes out and does his own thing. He flops the nest so to speak, but he lives local towards, he comes into our office maybe three times a week.
And yeah, he's a prodigy that's worked well. He's still only young and I still think he'll go on to do massive things. And I wish him all the best.
I think he'll, he'll be one of the most successful digital, digital maxes that there is in the next 10 years.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I'm pretty bullish on Casar as well. You mentioned something that I wanted to touch on.
You mentioned that you trained up a lot of apprentices from zero. I wanted to get your insights because I feel very strongly about this. Do you prefer hiring people who know nothing about SEO and training from scratch or like an in-house, like a three, four year in-house SEO who knows something?
SPEAKER_02
So, so in my experience, people have got different experiences and I get asked this question a lot and in my opinion, right, there's this classic saying is you can't teach an old dog new tricks, right, and when you've got someone who thinks they're an SEO expert or an SEO guru and they've been doing it for five, 10, 15 years and they know everything, but they know nothing. They're almost untrainable. So for that reason, in my opinion, and from my experiences, I would always want to go down the apprenticeship route.
I always go after when I'm looking to employ people. I don't really look just at education. I always look at, is this person going to be willing to train and develop every single day because these algorithms are changing on a week by week basis.
So if this person is not willing to learn and develop on a week by week basis, I don't want them in my team. I want them to embrace failure. I want them to have that bounce back ability that I add for my two brothers and I want them to have that attitude.
I want them to have an attitude that graphic designer that they're going to expect that the client or one of our staff is going to come back and say, that's crap because of X, Y and Z. Can you fix this? And then we're going to go, oh, thank you so much. Not going to take it personal.
They're going to embrace that feedback and that criticism and embrace it because then it's going to improve them as being a graphic designer or videographer or a web designer or whatever it is, a content creation. If they write in content and they're ready to says, this wasn't good enough because you didn't get these entities on the page, instead of sulking, you say, thank you very much for educating me on that. And now I'll try not to do that again.
And for that reason, I think apprentices and people have got no kind of, they come with a clean slate, but you know that they're going to have them, the mentality built into them right from the start that they're going to work hard and develop every single day. And that's when you get the culture right in the business that people are wanting to learn and develop and have new things. And I mean, it now with them, they come in, you tank on one of your sites, they're like, oh, yes, we've got something new to learn and develop on.
They're not like morning and being, oh, we've been here and stuff like that. They embrace it. And I think it's important to have that of wise, you're always going to struggle with keeping staff motivated because it, like success is never linear.
It's always like this. So on the peaks and on the troughs, on the peaks, don't let them get too carried away, but on the troughs, don't let them get too disheartened. And I'd say probably my role now within the company is being a cultural architect.
It's just motivating staff, keeping them up here, keep saying well done and just trying to elevate and educate because there's a classic saying in business and if you don't innovate, you're going to evaporate and you've got, you've consistently got to keep innovating and you've got to have the right staff that's got that attitude. But what's your, I mean, what's your experiences with regards to staff and employee?
SPEAKER_01
Oh, man, you put it way too nicely, man. Fuck hiring SEO managers. Fuck those guys.
I would, no, probably mostly from zero or people who have built their own businesses in the past. So like I'm bullish on Acre Hire. So people who, if you acquire the business and then you hire them, you can probably give them way more work and they'll step up to the challenge.
I've never been more bearish on in-house SEO managers in my life. They're probably, oh my goodness. Like imagine hiring the head of SEO at Apple, like how much work have they done in the last two years? Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. They can write anything and they'll rank versus some guy who's, I don't know, out of Southeast Asia making 5K a month on their niche site. Get me that guy.
Yeah, I own the business. Yeah. I'm sick of tired of people moaning and groaning on Twitter. And yeah, I think you put it in a very nice and diplomatic way.
Hence probably why you're such a good people manager. I'm just not.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we should keep an eye on the time. James, thank you so much for coming on today. It was fun to chat.
Great to finally meet you. I know you're going to Chiang Mai. I did my research, but unfortunately I won't be there.
Are you going to be in Saigon next year?
SPEAKER_02
I'm actually talking in Saigon. I'm only doing a Q&A. So previously when you spoke about interviews and stuff like that, you would never have seen me.
Up until the last three weeks, you would never have seen me on a podcast. You would never see me on an interview. You'd never see me up on stage.
I travel the world doing a lot of masterminds throughout the world. So I kind of very selective with who I speak to and who I'm mastermind with normally. So I kind of go out my way to travel to, let's say, where you're based to come and go, you're a great guy and I'm going to come and see you because I know that it's going to be, we're both going to level up if that makes sense because I've been to so many meetups and it's just people like leeches that are sat there that don't say anything and just trying to get all information and just not share anything.
And that's always been a bit of a pity, but nowadays I'm happy to build a personal brand. I had a couple of big sales on a couple of NDAs where I couldn't speak about them, but now I'm open to doing podcasts and stuff like that. So it's been a pleasure.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So where can people find you? You want to send them to Fat Rank? You want to send them to Twitter?
SPEAKER_02
If you go on to JamesDooley.com, that's got all my social media profiles on there. So it's on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or you can go over to FatRank.
com, which is more of a, FatRank.com was built for just being a mindset type blog. So like get up, stop being lazy, work hard.
It's not going to be on the duo on a play and then some life lessons and stuff that's on there as well and stuff like that. So I don't really SEO optimize that site, it's just more for sometimes me getting stuff out of my head into a blog of just being, this is really annoying me from staff or whatever. And that's kind of where that kind of evolved.
SPEAKER_01
Perfect. Well, I hope I see you more on Twitter. You got to be more active, man.
Dude, that. Yeah, I am going to start, you know, more active on social media. Okay, perfect.
I'll see you in the on X then. Thanks for coming on, man.
SPEAKER_02
Perfect. Thanks. Bye.