EP 334 // Scale And Flip Affiliate Marketing Websites For Six Figures // Matt Diggity

back in the day we were like okay we’ll build 100 websites we’ll each get them to make anywhere between 1 000 and 10 000 a month something like that and we’ll be rich right but there’s so much problems that come with scaling a portfolio of 100 websites so the thing that changed everything for us is we learned that you could just sell websites super easy hands off for a high multiple and then so everything changed so we don’t have to worry about running 100 sites at a time we can focus on five we can keep our staff down small we can focus on quality which is the way seo and website building is trending towards these days the quality of the quantity what’s up everybody you’re listening to the hustle and flow chart podcast with your boys matt wolf and joe all right everybody how you doing matt doing very good very good thanks for waking up a little earlier for us yeah i appreciate that seven in the morning it’s a good excuse to start the day and get started yeah you wake up the brain there huh so um yeah you came super highly recommended we were looking for affiliate marketers and you know after we were telling you we kind of reshifted the show a little bit the focus of it we’re getting a little wide on mark digital marketing and when people were just like affiliate marketing like tactics strategies all that stuff they’re eating it up so um you became recommended i don’t know tons of people like talked about talked to matt so we’re here and then we started nerding out on you and we’re like dude he’s like the best affiliate model and just scales too and it doesn’t require necessarily you doing it you know the processes and whatnot so i think we’re just going to nerd out on that yeah so thanks for being here and um i guess yeah give us a little background because you come from what uh being an engineer at first you have this kind of mindset going into things so take us back a little bit and i know you travel everywhere too so maybe a quick backstory there yeah so let’s see um i went to uc san diego so in the woods and studied electrical engineering and then as soon as i graduated just started working for all these like san diego businesses qualcomm and broadcom they all got offices up in sorrento valley and stuff like that and i was working for a software company and their job was to sell them some software that enables them to do what they do make microchips and stuff like that so um as glorious as that sound it was actually freaking terrible there’s like the culture in the engineering scene if you ever ran into any of these guys is like if you’re not working 60-hour weeks you’re one of the lazy guys to not promote this person is just holding us all back let’s just keep him at the bottom kind of thing so 60 hour weeks with a minimum so naturally i’ve had to start looking for other ways to make money and one of my buddies named david still lives in san diego he gave me the four-hour work week and he’s like oh check this out i’m like oh this is insulting i threw it away later probably like a year later i was like okay let’s read that book and let’s see what it’s all about and i ended up liking it so much i went to up to a meetup.com that was completely for reading and analyzing the four-hour work week and having kind of like accountability with the other people there on your projects and stuff like that so that’s what i did everyone there was doing seo at the time there was a course called the 30 day challenge so i was like okay i’ll just do that too and then that was all about affiliate marketing make a website sell something on on there and get a dollar in 30 days and i just fell in love with it and absolutely just fell in love with it and haven’t stopped ever since was that was that ed dale was it ed dale who put out the 30-day challenge yeah that’s the guy was it yeah i think i remember that yeah we’ve hung out with ed a few times yeah and i mean i think he’s still doing the 30-day challenge in some respects still yeah so it works it’s got to be a 300-day challenge now man that’s true oh yeah maybe not for seo yeah something else so when you started uh learning seo did you jump straight to affiliate marketing with it was that like your first venture down the seo path was start promoting affiliate products with seo it was almost like affiliate marketing came first and just the modality of the day to get that traffic was seo right so uh i don’t know i guess they happen concurrently but the third challenge was you use seo you rank a website you build some links and then you’re going to sell whatever something on amazon in less than 30 days yeah and then you figure out on amazon then you move somewhere else to make even more commissions so yeah and you have it like an interesting evolution so it seems like you figured that out you got really good at seo and then you started what you the thing that caught my attention well hey you’re about page everyone should read it because i think it’s freaking amazing like the way that you just outline your entire story but uh yet adventure i think it was the first one was like you and three people or three partners i believe and what the goal was to essentially make these sites these affiliate sites and each you know you knew exactly what you needed to do to get it done um and then it was like you just had this like really well engineered sounding plan for that and it seems like that’s what’s carried on into what you’re doing still and it is that kind of true or yeah it’s definitely mutated like when we thought we had it together back in the day like when i when i created that about page and started describing our lead spring process and i’m working on seo he’s working on conversion the main thing that’s changed is that we completely changed our model instead of building a gigantic portfolio like back in the day we were like okay we’ll build 100 websites we’ll each get them to make anywhere between 1 000 and 10 000 a month something like that and we’ll be rich right but there’s so much problems that come with scaling a portfolio of 100 websites i don’t know if you saw what happened to income store but they imploded right so the thing that changed everything for us is we ran into the empire flippers guys this is back like seven years ago something like that we ran into these guys and we learned that you could just sell websites super easy hands off for a high multiple and then so everything changed so we don’t have to worry about running 100 sites at a time we can focus on five we can keep our staff down small we can focus on quality which is the way seo and website building is trending towards these days quality over quantity so so when you start building a new website is the intention you’re going to definitely sell it or do some of them you keep and some of them you decide to sell how does that work well they all will definitely sell some data never build something that i have to manage when i’m 70 or something like that i won’t even understand this stuff in 10 years but the uh yeah like everything is made to sell so to speak but certain ones are we definitely want to hold on for longer and take things to a different level especially if they have a nice branded name that we we can we can see becoming some kind of household name right we got a couple of these right now that we’re we’re aiming for the stratosphere well i i think there’s a lot of directions here and maybe i mean you mentioned numerous times about seo how it’s changed over the years and i know you you literally like on there you call yourself seo like i am seo that’s awesome so i know it’s complicated you said it’s more complicated now than ever before um and we’ve had previous seo folks on but like from your perspective if we start there like what are the core things that i guess the principles to you that you should always know about seo maybe when you’re creating an affiliate type content uh site or anything around that online like do you have some guidelines to follow yeah i mean it’s it’s at a very high level you could just say seo and ranking websites boils down to two things content and backlinks right then you can take each each one of these categories and break them off into a hundred different things all right backlinks you get what types of backlinks you’re getting how fast you’re sending them what kind of anchor text you’re using what are the what’s the metrics behind them where are you sending them to like the details along each of these trees get pretty hardcore the content side of things is not only do you need to be able to write compelling content that that does what you wanted to do to get someone to read a review and purchase something but it’s got to be optimized for the search engine so it has to have the key words and entities and the right frequencies in the right places this is called on-site optimization and then on top of that like it needs to match the search intent so if someone’s searching for best routers right they’re most likely looking for a roundup list top five routers or something like that if you serve them up a piece of content that says the router plex 500 is the best router it’s not going to ring it’s just google is looking for a different type of article and that’s search intent and so all this stuff i mean the devil’s in the details like you can use software for on-site optimization you need good copywriters that can research or the conversion aspect in terms of search intent that’s just kind of like where your seo chops come in to be able to identify that and you can either do this yourself or get a project manager but that’s that’s where the project management comes from the seo project management yeah and then just more more just more and more more content more links and keep feeding the machine kind of thing yeah once you set it up that’s what it seems like you have a good framework to not only build all this but really feed that content machine so when it comes to traffic so yeah obviously you have seo all that stuff um i guess maybe i’m diverting a little bit but seo is the number one traffic source to all these content pieces you create right yeah but eventually when you get the website to a certain point you want to start to diversify away from that so any business doesn’t want to stack all of its risk into one single category so at a certain point when you have enough seo traffic i highly recommend you like at least set up like an email marketing system you do retargeting ads to get leads in there so then you build up email lists that’s a source of traffic you got your retargeting ads that’s the source of traffic uh as soon as possible and that just kind of protects you but also it’s more scalable like if you can pump money into something and you get more money out that’s called an atm right do you think maybe you can walk us through i i know a lot of this is in your courses and you go into a lot of depth in your courses but maybe like at a sort of high level can you sort of walk us through the process you’d go through from like you know how do you decide which niche you’re going to create and then you know some of the website stuff and then the initial stuff you do to drive traffic maybe we can kind of start to build a little bit of a framework for the listeners yeah yeah that’s a good question so most of the time and i recommend this to anybody i would not go into any niche that’s like hyper focused like uh best routers for gamers or something like that just because it’s just too small you’re gonna cap off at some point you might rank pretty quickly just because there’s not that much that there’s not many websites that are hyper relevant like that and you’re just gonna cut through the butter so to speak but you’re gonna hit a cap and whenever you go for like a hyper niche you don’t really know at the end of the road how lucrative that niche will be you you can assume like okay everyone needs a router in your home but like you don’t know do people really need to like buy it online can they just walk into their fry’s electronics or something like that so what i recommend doing is either one of two things you either shoot for a higher level umbrella type niche like fitness or like technology or like education or something like that and so then no matter what if you do get into routers and it doesn’t work out you can get into hosting you can get into video equipment and stuff like that that kind of protects you and it’s it’s you can scale that pretty big as well the other option if you want to go hyper niche is if you have the opportunity to look at the marketplaces and you see another website selling and you can see its profit and loss sheet you can see proof that okay here’s this website on the internet it doesn’t have that many backlinks it’s making five thousand dollars a month that’s something that would make me happy let’s go for this that’s the only time i would just say let’s go niched out is when you can see the end of the road here so let’s say you decide to start a website right so the first thing you need to do is of course keyword research and for that i use this world called daytress hrs is pretty much like the swiss army knife of seo they’re also the sponsor of this show so thanks for helping us with our sponsorship [Laughter] yeah so uh there’s a few different ways to do keyword research there but i find the easiest one is to just reverse engineer other websites in the niche so you can just plug it into ahrefs and it’ll dump out all the keywords that that website ranks for and if it’s in within your niche or you just add these to a list once you have a huge huge mess of keywords it’s time to assign keywords to pages so okay i have a bunch of keywords on routers this is going to go to my best router page i found a bunch of keywords on how to install a router and that’s going to go to a different page i have another set of keywords on i don’t know how to troubleshoot a router that goes to a different page you can see that each of these pages have a different search intent it answers a different query so we assign these keywords to each one next is you got to get writing so you got to get the writers writing you can always write them yourself and that’s going to be the cheapest way it’s also going to be very much the most time-consuming way so what we do in terms of finding writers is we go to a facebook group called the cult of copy c-u-l-t like right you go there you put up an ad and you say i’m looking for a subject expert in this type of niche you must have experience and i’m looking for someone that pays between four to eight cents a word depending on your experience so when you go when you guys find uh subject experts like this it you’re gonna you’re gonna get there you’re definitely gonna ask for any kind of um example that they’ve written in the niche so you get proven that they’ve done this before that’s very important you also want a native english speaker so one thing that we do is when we make these application forms for these writers we’ll have a quiz we’ll have like a google form or something like that we’ll say something like what’s your english level on a scale of one to ten eight or higher is required for this job so people feel like okay i’m an eight you know i’ll be honest i’m a native english is my second language but you’re not gonna take the eights you’re only gonna take tens so this really helps you filter out that list get the writers on board they start writing i would say you want to launch with about i don’t know 15 to 20 pages of content good homepage design good interlinking i mean we can go down a whole rabbit hole but yeah i want to stop here yeah you want to interlink everything together and then launch the website and then um now you’re in the next phase cool so with that so the next phase would be starting to drum up backlinks for it is that would be that be kind of the thing that’s the content side right like so for going back to that tree i guess from before yeah yeah so we kind of skipped a significant part on like site architecture like how are you going to build everything and link the pages together is your website fast enough does it load good on mobile versus desktop like these this is what’s called quote unquote technical seo right and look at that sunlight right tuning in right now i’ve moved into a new house and i obviously haven’t sorted through here’s a window with all that morning sun coming right at you right laser to the brain [Laughter] okay so technical seo it’s that’s like site speed it’s um everything’s interlinked properly you don’t have any orphaned pages like that’s a page that just exists without any link to get to it so once you get the technical seo set up it’s time to start the backlinks the first backlinks you want to build are the backlinks that any normal business in the real world would build which would be like your social profiles you build a facebook page you build a twitter you build a youtube channel you build a linkedin all these kind of guys and then those are the first links that you build a second set of links that i like to build is typically not used too much by affiliate websites but i like to use business citations so i will go to business directories if i’m in the technology niche i’ll go to like technology directories and stuff like that to list out my business my name address phone number i actually make a fake name address phone number i’ll go to local directories so let’s say i decide to make this website’s home-based business in san diego i’ll find a local address that no one’s using and i’ll use that in the directories to give it a little bit more substance a little bit more of a realism right google tends to honor businesses that have physical locations or at least it’s more of a sign that this is actually a real business and not just a rink and league website so after these two sets of links we did our social profiles our our directories then we get into uh the first set of links that i outreach for which is guest posts does your do your readers know or do your listeners know what guest posts are i’d imagine so yeah yeah kind of like pot we call about you know podcast guesting often so very similar yeah yeah offer offer some kind of content get a link exchange like exactly right here i wouldn’t be talking to these guys otherwise [Laughter] truth no just kidding no that’s that makes a lot of sense so yeah the business directories and so that’s basically it with and that kind of what just gets the traffic kind of moving or at least you’ve done what you can right yeah like at the beginning you it’s called the google sandbox you’re not going to get much traction at all like yeah there’s a holding period where you just need to do the right things build trust with google and eventually you’re gonna jump out of the sandbox and you’ll know that because your rankings just start to go from page five to page one two and three it just happens in single jump mm-hmm yes trying to avoid the light over here that’s great so yeah like when you i guess for the seo side so once you get that crank in um are there some ongoing optimizations or what’s your plan look like for content after that are you still developing more or less yeah so content’s always always turning out but in this beginning stage i kind of like the the analogy i like to use is like i’ve planted this tree and i’m just going to give it a little bit of maintenance right now i’m just going to water it every day maybe two or three pieces of content per month a couple backlinks every week something like that until i jump out of the sandbox after you jump out of the sandbox it’s like this little sapling has proven to itself or proven to me that’s ready to grow up and be a big boy so that’s when i start churning out more content and links then at another stage when it’s considered an authority site then you really just want to give it all your attention possible publish every single day as many backlinks as you can if you don’t have that backlink already then you want it like that’s the different you get more attention to the sites that are given back to you yeah so every so if you’re posting every day is every piece of content pointing to an affiliate link or is it just helpful content that may point to like a different money page like how is that part structured really good question so there’s two different types of pages we call commercial content which you’re describing with the ones with affiliate links this is your best router roundups and stuff like that that’s your commercial content and then you have informational content like how to install a router or how to troubleshoot a router which would link to your best router roundup as supporting content there’s a there’s seo value in that but no matter what if you’re making commercial or informational always just make sure that it has keyword volume don’t write something obscure like uh should what should you buy a chocolate covered router or something like that there’s if it if a page doesn’t have keyword value volume it’s a liability there’s no asset value to it it’s just a liability that that exists on your site so um to answer your question we try to keep them blend so we’re not going 100 commercial we’re not going 100 informational we like to keep it about 60 40 but we also tweak this to see what’s the sweet spot in this niche what does google like the best is it 70 commercial content 30 informational is it on the other on the other side we play around with it that makes sense and then as far as the actual affiliate offers that you pick how do you how do you go about selecting which offers to to plug in there of the big the biggest criteria is that not amazon affiliates so it’s just i mean i just don’t trust that program not only are the commissions low but in my lifetime doing seo they just cut it twice for no apparent reason right once their stock surged more than it ever has before so i mean there’s just no rhyme or reason to it but um either way like sometimes you can find affiliate programs uh depends on the niche of course but you can get up to 40 commission rate which is almost like you you own the product right this is the margins that some product owners have so that’s a big uh that’s a big deciding factor for me the commission rate but also conversion rate like this landing page look good does it look like a decent product does it have good reviews already am i the only weirdo on the internet that’s reviewed it prop uh positively when everyone else has said this is a complete scam you can’t you you don’t want to go against the grain on that sense too yeah are you more of a like a physical product guy it sounds like uh over like digital stuff oh yeah mostly i mean i’m in the hosting niche i’ve in the uh online gambling niches so i mean that’s i guess that’s digital i guess it would be yeah but everything should apply for the most part i guess it just depends on traffic how you’re getting that in certain areas you know the restrictions and whatnot right but we do a lot of supplements supplements are great right because margins on them are usually awesome and like this is one of the the health wealth relationships like the big three that even in a recession people aren’t going to neglect their their desire to meet a partner or lose weight and stuff like that and recurring offers too i’m sure is that part of the criteria is you do the work once and you keep the you know retain the client hopefully sometimes that’s more like in the hosting and software niches yeah yeah do do do you mess around with like the cpa offers at all where it’s like drive to an opt-in and we’ll pay you five dollars per opt-in or because i remember when our first experience into affiliate marketing was 12 13 years ago cpa and it was we were actually driving traffic to cpa offers where all we had to do was collect like a name in a zip code and we would get a commission off of it so i’m curious if you ever play with that kind of stuff yeah um in the sense well so like we call in in our circles we call it lead generation so um i’m not using a cpa offer but i have partnered with the local business and different areas and we just worked out our own like ad hoc commission so yeah we do a lot through there but i i have tried we were in the auto loan niche in san diego we said we did that for a little bit but it didn’t work out too well so it sounds i mean yeah i mean you really cover anything it’s really it’s the framework right like what you just described that is the thing that’s gonna sell whatever offer it really doesn’t matter then right the structure doesn’t really change at all yeah i mean the only time it really changes is when you get into like local seo and you need to rank for cities states neighborhoods and stuff like that then your site architecture needs to be more thoughtful and you do a little bit more different optimization to optimize it for locality rather than just a industry topic gotcha so so when you’re when you’re ready to let i might be skipping a step so you can um you know stop me if i’m going too far but when it comes to like actually selling the website what sort of like milestones do you need to hit before it’s sellable well uh the first milestone is you need to get to make at least 500 a month so that’s the the minimum that most brokers and marketplaces will list something for so that’s that’s pretty important right you can always try to sell a website yourself but once you hit this 500 dollar mark now you’re eligible for these marketplaces and the marketplaces this is just very very recent we’re seeing multiples go up to 40 45 and excuse me so 40 45 x monthly profit that that can be your website if you get a website um 10 000 a month you can sell it for 450 000 right now that’s insane so is that a new thing like so it’s gone up a lot recently then yeah like a couple weeks weeks ago it was like first start started seeing i think it was empire flippers like everyone’s like what the heck’s going on multiples are like 40 plus right now and and they put out a notification saying like yeah the market’s demanding this this is what people want it’s probably passive income right you know buyers just want or maybe passive or at least a new business to start i think it’s also like what’s going on with the economy stock markets through the roof okay that’s probably and there’s everyone’s super nervous about putting money in the stock market i don’t i haven’t been to the states in a couple years but i mean what’s housing prices like in san diego right now uh they are going up and i hear that the um but the yeah people aren’t really selling the value is going up but i don’t think it’s moving that much i’m sure demand is uh i don’t know about california people are leaving california california yeah we’re an anomaly right now migrating away like crazy right now but yeah um but yeah i could see the need for high you know it’s just a high demand thing right now these digital assets especially if they’re they’re bringing in income is monthly there’s traffic seo traffic going to them yeah do you know some of the criteria to kind of hit those benchmarks for multiple like that uh so i mean yeah obviously the brokers are going to like bet the site make sure it’s not a house of cards right so sure clean backlinks i mean you can use gray hat backlinks quote unquote pbns um but they will disclose that in the listing um they’re also just going to look and see like is this entire website just making its money from one single page that’s a house of cards right or one if it’s like one traffic source and one monetization source all amazon affiliates might get a smaller multiple but in on the whole like they’re just looking for good websites with good brands makes it oh yeah that was actually one of the questions um i was thinking of his brands like d how does that or do you think of branding when it comes to all these different sites that you create like is there a persona or is it how does that look for you guys yeah so we always try to go for like a branded domain name just because that it just makes it more scalable right like if if i’m bestrouterreviews.com guess what i can only scale up to routers but if i’m techguru.com then i can really really get big and when you’re doing outreach for backlinks it’s much easier to get a link to techguru.com then best router reviews that’s true yeah you’re just obviously going for the affiliate player some kind of your broker in a sale somehow yeah just to touch up on something else there’s a new i don’t know buzzword or movement in seo called eat expert expertise authoritativeness and trust where google is telling everybody that it needs to have these three factors on the website in order for it to rank how they they identify that algorithmically is up in the air but the the moves that people the seos are making right now are just doing their best to kind of show that a website does have a brand it does have ownership these are the authors on the website there’s some kind of credibility that can be attached to the words that are being written there so that’s that’s a big part of it too i would never like just make uh like a website with an about page that says nothing we review routers done like to try to go into making at least an effort on the brand just for the algorithm’s sake these days yeah interesting i never heard of a brand and algorithm go together but like i mean it makes sense yeah that’s what they’re yeah i mean it’s it’s picking up everything else so yeah well also a lot of times google will tell you they want one thing in the form of seo but then your results will actually prove something slightly different but yeah that’s a whole different uh rabbit hole yeah that’s why you test everything that’s why the only in seo is what you see in actual results yeah yeah so i’m curious about your team like how many how many people do you have like helping you run this stuff and and build it out and grow it out and i i know you’ve got your writers you mentioned that but beyond the writers who else is helping you run all this stuff right so this is another really great thing about the pivot that we made from when we when we started flipping so as whereas before if you want to have 100 websites you probably need like i don’t know 25 operators these are 25 skilled seos that know how to manage content writers that know how to like do on-site optimization that can fix a hosting problem like like experts right how hard is it to find 25 experts and keep tabs right instead when we started flipping we keep a small amount of sites but instead of growing horizontally we’re growing tall right so we’re small amount of sites that can just grow super big and the teams we need for these is we we just have about three project managers right now actually two project managers right now which are our key seos these are are the best of the best these are our a players right but underneath them they have huge supporting staff so they’ll have general vas that can just do like handyman type stuff they’ll have content writers they’ll have an outreach team they’ll have a content editor that make sure that the writers are getting all the like the throughput is good and the content quality is good and so they have when they have this well they have devs they have designers and stuff like that so in this sense it’s really scalable because the project managers are hard to replace and hard to find hard to motivate but the supporting staff these are plug and play like and if a website gets from i don’t know 10 000 visitors per month to a million per month it’s easy to scale up because we just need more writers those are easy to find cultural copy right discuss this et cetera so we find that this is a godsend like this kind of structure is godson so when you find uh do you call them your project managers or seos sounded like yeah you call them yes we call them seos i’m trying to get normal not nerdy terms i love it i love it so like they sound almost like they’re an agency more or less or do you like do you find someone with an existing team and you’re like cool now we can partner plug or like do you actually like architect that team along with them like what’s the relationship there we architected because we got different ways of doing things and we’re looking for different personality types and different positions yeah i mean i would love if someone we could just absorb like a full set and just right so i was like i don’t know if this is like maybe you’re just plugging yeah getting some agencies acquiring them and then you know training them on your processes and then boom cranking out more sites but it makes sense if you have your own system so i’m kind of curious i guess we’ve kind of covered it but you’re like your business model in a nutshell we’re kind of like curious about that because you know like there’s so many ways that you can you know connect what you’re doing and scale that like we have our own way that we do that through this podcast email list retargeting you know there’s con written content as well on video so what is your like maybe in a simple sense your business model look like because you have these assets like what does it look like you have a training area which we want to talk about affiliate lab there’s a lot of it sounds like you deep dive there but what does it look like if you kind of pan out a little bit and how are things connected right so we’ve really took a deep dive into lead spring which is basically the affiliate agency build or buy websites scale them up eventually exit them so that’s the bread and butter business but i got some other stuff on the side so i have a client-facing agency called the search initiative and um yeah we do your seo for you and i have a backlink service called authority builders i have a course called the affiliate lab which you’ve mentioned that’s just where i train people to do exactly what we’re talking about with affiliate websites and then i’ve i’ve used to run a conference before covet called the chiang mai seo conference um over here in chiang mai yeah what’s uh so hold on so seo uh affiliate seo agency is that what he called it the the lead spring yeah i feel like describing that a little bit that sounds interesting yeah i mean that’s what we’ve been talking about so far some people call it media group you know just like you’re you manage content websites and you monetize them our particular monetization of modalities affiliate mostly but we also do display ads and stuff like that that makes sense okay um what’d you get man i mean i think we pretty much covered all the stuff that we had on our notes this is like it has exhausted uh everything that i had and it’s amazing i mean i i i kind of want to hear um what you got around like affiliate um affiliate lab and and what you so it’s basically it’s a bunch of walkthroughs it looks like templates and frameworks everything what you just described what in detail because i don’t know matt and i were nerding out on that and this isn’t a sales pitch for it but like we were like holy crap like if we can go back in time and kind of architect and even maybe if there’s something we can optimize with what we’re already doing we would follow that and it looks like it’s the most comprehensive way to kind of do it all like this whole process and actually go to the selling of a site too so i don’t know if there’s any other way you would set that up or maybe tell people or say who it’s best for is it like a beginner is it someone that’s trying to add another you know passive income stream sure so the affiliate lab came to fruition because when we were trying to build a model of running 100 websites we and you have to hire 25 different project managers we were hiring fast and firing fast and so we need to kind of a system to train people up that we didn’t didn’t have to be hands-on so me and jay my business partner we started just filming like these really really good modules that take take you from nothing to all the way to the end of the whole entire process then at some point i guess we just like okay people talk about info products and they make money and it’s a good way to help people out like yeah i get all that stuff um so we decided to make course god it’s so much work you guys ever made a course yes yes and we no longer sell courses because of how much work and upkeep they were when i saw on your sales page your thing gets updated all the time which was why we stopped selling courses [Laughter] so we ended up jumping in and making this course and it it’s so from the beginning we pledged because seo changes all the time like every single month like this eat thing i’ve told you about like that’s only a year old like the backlinks you need to build this year are completely different than last year so we made a pledge that it would be an evergreen course anytime something new happens then we’ll update the course turns out that something new doesn’t happen every single month so we decided let’s just keep adding on different modules completely let’s teach them email marketing let’s teach them how to scale a team let’s teach them how to buy websites uh let’s teach the beginners how to install wordpress so it’s just gigantic now it’s like 30 hours so answer your question who’s it for like if you have no experience you can start with beginner’s lab and then work your way up to the high level stuff if you have a lot of experience this is where we get into like my seo testing stuff engineering backgrounds we try we try to test and see if new techniques will start working and work for us and then we disseminate that to the affiliate lab very cool well i do have like a couple like little rabbit holes that i think might be interesting to go down just based on some of the bullets that are on your sales page one of the things that you mentioned on your sales page is how to is how to make in a about page be more effective maybe you can talk about that for a second what are what are people doing wrong with their about pages right well this goes back to that whole eat thing right like google’s not going to give expertise authoritativeness and trust to a website that they have no idea who owns it right like no idea who’s behind it that’s the opposite of eit when there’s nothing accountable to it so with your about pages let’s go above and beyond and show that there’s a real business behind you so let’s put your writers on the pages like they become your your editors and your editors in chief and all that kind of stuff but yourself or you can put a persona as the owner of the company you can have different departments so here’s an email address for general inquiries here’s the feedback here’s for returns here’s for media inquiry so this is like how normal businesses look you have different departments here right then we can have um like for each of our authors or for each of our contributors we link out to their business profiles their linkedin their instagram whatever that might be kind of ties this all together and then even so we talked about having a name address phone number so let’s let’s embed the google map there let’s embed the phone number let’s embed this address like if you think about this like affiliate websites they try to make sure you don’t contact them because they don’t care about contact real business they’ll do anything they can to get you to contact them so they’ll list out 45 different ways to do it so true that’s part of the difference here and then this is getting a little bit geeky but one thing you can do in the background the code is use google or use schema markup schema markup is just kind of some code that tells google it’s just like a little bit of assistance it tells google exactly what your web page is about at least allows you to do stuff like uh add a same as property same as what that does it says this website is the same as this facebook page this youtube channel this instagram this pinterest so it kind of ties everything together and says i’m not just this website i’m all this stuff don’t consider me a little rinky-dink website anymore that totally makes sense i love that so basically look like a real quote-unquote real you know brick-and-mortar website or company online and uh google will favor you yeah do you do anything else with the with the specific with with different types of schema like you you know with with google there’s now like if somebody asks like a direct question to google you don’t even need to click into the links anymore right google will just show the answer for you based on the schema that already exists do you play around with any of that stuff as well yeah like featured snippet optimization yeah i mean like it’s a necessary evil right like a lot of the time when google can get the answer right there they’re not gonna click on your website they’re not gonna buy anything but if you don’t take that featured snippet someone else will so you gotta optimize for it and yeah we do a lot of that and that’s covered in the affiliate lab as well nice very cool just kind of curious like if you get selected as the featured snippet would that affect your rankings from what you found or is it just like an extra incentive so the way it works right now is if let’s say you’re ranked number five and if you stole that featured snippet slot you’re gonna get the featured snippet and then you’re gonna get deleted from the rest of us so you kind of just got warped to the top position and i mean is it is it better than being number one position with no snippet no because people have to click on that number one to see the answer but it’s still better than being number five so that’s why you optimize for it gotcha interesting well my last question would be um to maybe talk about your tool stack a little bit i know you mentioned ahrefs that’s what we use for our seo as well um what other what other tools are are you digging into that that you like use a lot in your business right so i’d say ahrefs is the number one number two would probably be surfer seo surfer seo is basically an on-site optimization tool and allows you allows your writers to not know anything about seo and then turn out a piece of content that’s perfectly optimized for it so that’s that’s definitely necessary for us on top of that we use tools like screaming frog for technical seo we use the hunter io for outreach and email finding then a lot of like just knickknack tools like rank trackers and we use clicky analytics google search console like there’s a lot of other stuff like supporting cast but i would say the big ones is ahrefs and server seo those that’s what we use on a daily basis gotcha do you have any like any specific like wordpress themes or anything like that that you always work with are you kind of always just playing with different ones we’re either building an elementor but these days we’ve got a nice dev team so we’re making custom templates that load faster exactly how we want them to look gotcha very cool i like it did you have anything else no i think that’s i love the the deep technical talk like that i mean surfer seo has been coming up a lot like hrefs but like yeah seo the way you described it i think that’s super fascinating if you’re hiring content writers it’s like boom here’s your hit list you know here’s your topic i guess go make magic happen and right that’s it yeah it’s game changer that’s pretty cool awesome man well um i think affiliate lab would probably be the most so that’s your your training it seems like the most relevant like extension if someone’s excited you know about this so yeah we have a link hustle and flowchart dot com slash affiliate lab sweet uh anywhere else matt you wanna go have folks check out i know you have a blog as well i forget the url but you kind of like update on the latest seo stuff there yeah check out dignitymarketing.com that’s like my hub between most of my businesses and you’ll see me blogging about these tested seo techniques like when i have new results from from the lab so to speak that’s where it gets published right cool man well thanks for the time and uh i think it’s fascinating we’ll have to dig a little deeper into the product itself and see how we can improve what we’re doing oh yeah for sure have a good one oh man it’s been fun it’s been a pleasure bye

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