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- Nov 16, 2015
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Just a thought here as a lot of us are reinventing ourselves, exploring new revenue streams etc. I thought I was clever being broad and general.
It seemed to make sense at the time. Lots of people want links just do links for everyone.
But most of my market was niche affiliate site owners (experts in SEO spamming? lol). People smart enough to know what moves the needle and evaluate our work etc. That market as we all know got hit hard.
Most agencies don't care because their clients churn a lot anyway, and they struggle a lot anyway with tight margins, so they just want to buy cheap marketplace links and be done with it. They don't care that what we do is different or even what a natural link is as long as it hits their client's silly KPIs.
I kinda regret not being 'the SEO agency for ... i dunno pest control' or something. You get the idea.
Then when the 'new shiny thing' comes you can easily be the 'automation implementation guy for... pest control' and already have the customers and mailing list. Even past customers might come back to you for the new shiny thing because their SEO they left you for 2 years ago doesn't do it etc.
But when your mailing list is 'random' and 60% of them went out of business since you started over a decade ago and had to be leaned out... building those coherent upsells and pivots is a lot harder.
So yeah I was wrong about that for sure. I know it's 'guru' advice so I could easily have listened to any one of all our 'favourites' lol but for whatever reason I was blind to the obvious.
It seemed to make sense at the time. Lots of people want links just do links for everyone.
But most of my market was niche affiliate site owners (experts in SEO spamming? lol). People smart enough to know what moves the needle and evaluate our work etc. That market as we all know got hit hard.
Most agencies don't care because their clients churn a lot anyway, and they struggle a lot anyway with tight margins, so they just want to buy cheap marketplace links and be done with it. They don't care that what we do is different or even what a natural link is as long as it hits their client's silly KPIs.
I kinda regret not being 'the SEO agency for ... i dunno pest control' or something. You get the idea.
Then when the 'new shiny thing' comes you can easily be the 'automation implementation guy for... pest control' and already have the customers and mailing list. Even past customers might come back to you for the new shiny thing because their SEO they left you for 2 years ago doesn't do it etc.
But when your mailing list is 'random' and 60% of them went out of business since you started over a decade ago and had to be leaned out... building those coherent upsells and pivots is a lot harder.
So yeah I was wrong about that for sure. I know it's 'guru' advice so I could easily have listened to any one of all our 'favourites' lol but for whatever reason I was blind to the obvious.