Interview: Tom de Spiegelaere on 3x'ing Income by Switching from Client to Affiliate

Key Takeaways

[Music] hey guys thanks for tuning in today I'm going to be interviewing Tom from Brisbane Australia when I first met Tom he told me he was running an agency out of Brisbane and he was doing quite well I caught up with him last month and he said hey guess what I don't run my agency anymore I actually switched over to 100% Affiliates so I said hey Tom tell me about what that's like I mean how's everything going for you and he said I 3x my income in just seven months so I got him to sit down and tell me the story and I just thought dang I got to get this on an interview so I convinced him to come on the show and here we are we're going to hear everything about how this experience was for Tom and in true fashion of how I'd like to do interviews you're going to get everything he's going to spill the beans on how he does all his rankings where he gets all the services from how he buys his links why social signals onset SEO everything so tune in this is gonna be a great interview all right so Tom how's it going today hi mat good good how are you good thanks for coming on the show or this is not really a show this is just an interview but thanks for coming on anyways that's all right happy to do it yeah why don't you start off just telling us um first your name and how old you are right my name's Tom uh I'm 31 cool cool and where you from um at the moment I'm living in Brisbane in Australia but originally I'm from Belgium I moved here in 2011 okay and tell me well I know that you're an SEO because I met you before but before you were an SEO what what is your background and what was your education like well so I grew up in Belgium I I went for a bachelor in um graphical and digital media with a specialization in multimedia production which is a really really broad sort of Education covers anything from basic drawing to design both for web and and print uh to 3D animation special effects video editing and of course a bit of coding so yeah very very broad um and then I guess my first real job background wise my first real job was as a consultant in a global consultancy firm doing a flash animations back when that was still a thing MH um and graphic design for web um and I don't know after a while didn't really feel well I needed more of a human connection so I went and do sales um earned a lot less money actually in that second job but I was a lot happier yeah got it and so and I think eventually you know when I met you in changai you told me that you're living in Australia and you started working for yourself over there how did that happen well so when I moved to Australia initially I was doing a few few years of sort of like bits and pieces not earning that much money but everything I was doing was mostly related to building WordPress sites and ranking them using SEO so in the end when I actually got good at it um I ranked a web design agency side because well by that time I made so many WordPress sites and I knew how to SEO so I just ranked a web design sit and then I started becoming a web designer for myself okay right on the interesting thing is like most people that I run into move to a third world country or like a cheaper country like Thailand in order to bootstrap and get on their feet doing their own solo gig but you moved to one of the most expensive countries on the planet what was that like bootstrapping in Australia uh I was nervous uh anxious it was the first time I was actually working for myself uh didn't really plan that much so in hindsight I should have planned it way better I did have a few things that helped uh one was I was living with the in-laws which means so sort of cuts rent in half and the second point is I well I drained my savings coming over to Australia and paying for living expenses for me and my now wife uh for the first few months I paid for the wedding Etc but in return Jessica my wife um said all right I'm going to work from now on for like a year or a year and a half while you figure out what to do with your life which was the perfect time for me to basically skill up on SEO and then in the end become a web designer that's that's really good so it's like the family took a gamble with you but it was a very good Gamble and that's awesome you had that support going in yeah cool man uh so let's see so you decided or you started building um web design sites when did you make the switch over to doing SEO and like you must have I don't know learned SEO somewhere right how'd that happen yeah that was really random um I think around 2009 or 2010 a friend messaged me on Facebook with this super course called internet secrets and basically um basically taught how to build really low competition Niche sites on emds um the course was crap uh the concept was working at the time but the course was really really crap but it did it did sort of spark something and I I I went with it MH um yeah that's basically how I got into SEO I started building more and more Niche sites just to see if I could actually rank anything MH yeah pretty cool everyone gets their start on some weird course mine was uh the 30-day challenge and um it was the ranking technique was based off of just make as many easy and article submissions as possible and of course it worked right yeah those days yeah those days uh next question so since then where have you learned your SEO from any like courses you've taken or any mentors you've had or anything like that well most of the SEO I know well let's say 70% of the SEO I know was mostly self-taught and sort of I don't know reading be between the lines on on places like back then Warrior forum and blackhead world and stuff like that mhm um the thing is most courses came across just LED you down a wrong path and you you'd lose like 6 months and $22,000 doing the wrong things uh which is why I started sort of testing myself and in the end I figured out how to rank a side that to actually that could actually survive a few Google updates uh they eventually crash crashed of course uh because I was still way way too aggressive um but as for now the actual courses blogs and people that I um yeah that I actually um suggest to follow would be aside from you obviously uh Charles float Daryl Rosser Brian Dean he's really really white hat but I think if you sort of I don't know you you you can you can change perspective on his stuff so you can convert his white hat stuff to a more gray hat sure thing which is which is yeah good um gotch SEO has a really good blog and of course the local client takeover crew they really good for client SEO and how to rank locally in the in the maps mhm and then um actual courses would be lion Zeal scientific rankings um and then I was really surprised by tongue TR Amazon course I think was it called AMZ affiliate boot camp because it goes from really A to Z from from choosing your Niche to keyword research to content creation how to create content to link building to just basically everything it's really good one for beginners um and then what's another one I think Charles float's recent onpage course with Daniel cutd had some really good gems in there uh definitely regarding link sculpting and stuff like that and oh actually I think I heard you saying you're making a course too so that's going to be on the list oh yeah yeah yeah working on something right now there's just something's more complicated than sharing on the blog and it's a lot of things I wanted to share so thinking about putting a course together it's not it's not promised yet that'd be awesome man that'd be actually that'd be awesome yeah Okay cool so like most of the people you mentioned were gry hat seos and there's a couple white hats mixed in like Tong uh gch and Brian Dean Brian Dean yeah Brian Dean um so would you consider yourself being normally a gry head SEO with streaks of white in it uh yeah pretty much if if you put it into numbers like say 70% gray hat 30 white hat something like that mhm okay cool um I mean that's pretty much like what I do too there's um pluses and minuses of each side and comboing together is like the best result that I've seen far definitely definitely cool um tell me about your agency like the agency that you told me about last year rest in peace how did you get started in that um how do I got started it mhm um well that was back in 2013 when I finally figured out how to rank his site still way too aggressive of course because links were super cheap back then 201 yeah 13 you could rank anything within a week almost um so yeah I I just popped up a site I ranked locally really really quickly and then started getting clients and because of my sales experience back in Belgium I could uh convert those clients into actual sales so that was that was pretty great um yeah and then um so what after you built it up what finally made you decide to can it yeah so I I'd heard about this affiliate SEO and i' I I've I did affiliate SEO in the past during my sort of my upscaling period I always wanted to go back to it but I thought it was too difficult until I started seeing results and then if I wait the pros and cons of agency versus affiliate SEO it's it's to me it's no-brainer and and for me really it's it's the clients that were a bit of a bit of the hassle I mean some people could handle it quite well and they can scale agencies very well and can can handle the clients very well I'm just maybe I was just going after the wrong Market but I felt seriously under undervalued and even after raising my prices cons considerably I always had the feeling I'd get way more out of my own skills by actually building my own sites instead of building sites for others and yeah and it didn't help that you if if there are web designers out there listening to this you probably notice some clients they they they feel like as soon as as soon as they've got a website they're going to get leads and and even though you you might tell them in in the meeting up front like you know getting a website it's great but you need that marketing sort of budget behind it to to to get it to get it to generate leads and a lot of clients didn't really get that um so that that's yeah that's why I really wanted to sort of get out of the agency style and more to the affiliate style and also man I recently read or listened to Tim Ferris is 4H hour work week and he talked about the disconnect between time and the amount of money that you can generate yeah it's arbitrary right yeah that that's exact actly what I wanted to achieve but it's while you're supporting a family and two kids it's difficult to make that switch and and like you mentioned it doesn't help that Brisbane and Australia in general is is pretty darn expensive um so yeah my my main issue trying to switch was while I had recurring Revenue coming from hosting clients and I was having I had some maintenance packages with most of the work automated which was great it wasn't actually nearly enough money to allow me to create more time so I could actually make that switch got it so yeah I mean you really struck Accord with me you know I don't have a family yet but I'm already like a conservative businessman in to begin with right to add a family on top of that like I would need a certain amount of padding in order to make that switch from having x amount of money per month moving on to potentially losing that and trying a new business venture completely may I ask how much uh recurrent Revenue you had coming from the agency well if if you're talking passive occurring Revenue not much at all um but on a month-to-month basis I was I think I was averaging 10K in profits but that was well pretty much busting my ass off doing web work um and of course the hosting uh packages on on top of that mhm um yeah about 10 grandmont and and while that might seem a lot in in Brisbane while supporting again while supporting a family with two kids and a wife uh that doesn't actually get you that far uh yeah so yeah the difference between now and then when I was actually having to work that much is just it's insane the amount of freedom I have now it's the real Sur Real how long did it take you to get to that 10K a month profit level three years okay so yeah and it took only six months to replace that with actual passive affiliate income yeah if only I started sooner it's just Fu man it's uh what hindsight is always 2020 that's what they say right yeah yeah yeah so what kind of fears went through your head before you made the leap and actually just started firing clients all right so the anxiety was mainly related to to the family of course because well they're always they're always the main priority so I needed to make sure that the cash flow is there at all times um that being said it did help a lot that almost by accident I was actually working part-time at another agency as SEO manager helping to replace their processes and increase margins and efficiency Etc and this created sort of a sort of a a buffer and we could lower our standards of living just a little bit um while I was making the switch and then that gave me that nice buffer that nice time to sort of make that switch happen and it actually it it it worked out which yeah okay so um how did you start firing your clients like what was that like um very slowly I still have a lot of them um on my sort of Hosting plans and maintenance packages uh definitely the sort of the low maintenance ones where most of it is automated um and then um I started forwarding all the new leads to that agency I was working at and all the leads that requested sort of random website tweaks I forwarded to another agency um to deal with those MH so at the moment yeah at the moment I've virtually have no client work anymore okay uh so you probably making Commission on those leads as well right yeah so um I think it's 5% commission at the moment cool okay so made a little money out of that too all right all right so now you're client free um what was it like okay so have you had experience with the affiliate SEO before you just jumped into it yeah so like I mentioned before when I was upscaling an SEO I was creating a whole heap of um Niche sites excuse me I had to try and rank them in Google and they were all sort of Amazon affiliate based mhm um so so really the really the big switch to affiliate SEO happened around M 2016 but I was dabbling in it for a few years between 2010 and 2012 mhm um and actually at one point I was first in the US for uh how to make ice cream so informational keyword but massive search volume in the summer um yeah and then I converted people on site to buy ice cream makers because it's really nice price point I think uh yeah that was a really good summer actually but yeah anyway uh eventually all those Niche sites got hammered by Google updates because back then again 2010 2012 you could just links were super cheap and you could just churn and burn uh as you pleased uh and then around 2014 I think I switched to uh paper lead because I what was what's the guy's name massive and passive or passive and massive Brian right yeah Brian Brian yeah so I started following him and I thought oh yeah there there's something into this so I started making paper lead sites um going after the usual verticals like plumbing and airon and P control Etc and I used uh what did I Ser Shaker I used Ser Shaker to dominate yeah MH sort M MOS poster m page creator right mhm and I used it to dominate a pretty big city and I was tting the individual suburbs and then one of those actually made me around a grand a month for 6 months before the company I was working with pulled the plug so I found a bit bit too much of a hassle in the end as well because I had to sort of screen the calls unless I hired a VA but at that time I was screening the calls myself making sure I wasn't charging for calls that sort of weren't viable for them um so I dropped them the the sites themselves are still alive generating leads and they're actually being answered by real companies but I'm not charging for the leads anymore and instead those sites are now um part of my pvn oh okay so they had some link Equity obviously Google liked them for some reason so then you just said okay you guys are now pbn that's awesome yeah pretty much pretty much and they they they work they work awesomely actually so wait so they're probably not in the same niche as your affiliate sites you just don't care no okay uh yeah no I really didn't care okay I just put put a blur on the front page sort of morphing the topic a little bit link to an inner page that's all about the new topic of the target side and then just link out yep that'll do it that's awesome man cool so how many like different affiliate experiments did you have in the past that prepared you for the switch recently oh at least 20 man at least 20 that's just yeah a really low low low competition stuff and using a whole heap of really aggressive strategies again because low cost of links back then mhm yeah okay and then this time around with affiliate did you go with one Niche or did you like try 10 of them at the same time what that look like um I at the moment I have multiple niches going but when I made the switch I I actively focused on a single Niche uh just because I I wanted to do it right and I knew the niche itself was insanely competitive but I thought well just why why not go all out basically mhm um yeah so at the moment I've got multiple niches on the go but only one of them is making the majority of the money and the others are pretty new yeah that's pretty much what I do like I throw stuff against the wall I see which one sticks and then go hard in that one and then you know continue to throw a small amount of the profit from that one against the wall again so you can scale somewhere else it's it's a smart thing to do it's pretty much yeah me it's the only model cool um yeah so let's see um did you use a brand new domain or an aged domain for this uh aged non- dropped I think was two and a half years uhuh um and in a very closely related Niche okay um I don't expect you to tell it straight up but what Niche is it or what category of Niche is it is it health or is it um Beauty it's it's it's Tech okay Tech got it okay Tech yeah don't share more than that yeah I want I want okay um let's see so you said you use an age domain what I typically see when I use an age domain for a money site there's kind of like a well Charles calls calls it the repurposing sandbox but basically what happens is you have your old domain and even though the old domain might be also in the techn in your case there's still a period of time where it's kind of stubborn it's like a a Sandbox again did you experience that kind of thing um I didn't really took much notice of of of sort of the B nich I went after but I I think when I look back I think there was definitely about two and a half months where not much was happening and then suddenly I saw I saw a nice jump in rankings so that might have been that repurposing sandbox that must have been a huge relief for you right like oh my God what did I do I fired all these clients and then hockey stick that's awesome yeah well luckily it was sort of a little bit the other way around like I I prepped in advanced I prepped in advanced so I didn't actually fire the clients before I knew something was going to happen good man good man conservative approach I like it yeah uh let's see what else um okay let's get into actual SEO technique how do you do your keyword research all right well the initial keyword research back then um with with the big one was a combo of keyword finder to check the competition and then I used um SCM rush to pull all ranking keywords from the top five competitors then merge everything remove all the duplicated ones and then basically I had every keyword I needed to dominate mhm yeah yeah and right right now I think I've replaced everything with HRS like I don't need anything else yeah I just love it just love it yeah for sure it's it's becoming quite the Swiss army knife of SEO right yeah totally yeah uh what else so all right did you go with a small Niche site or did you go with a large Authority site how how big is your site first of all um that's that's good question I think must be at least 200 posts on there maybe 20 money Pages yeah 20 money pages is Right H so Authority side yeah absolutely and I'm guessing you didn't write all that content yourself no no um I yeah when I started out I did because I could sort of react quicker to Industry changes so if something big happened in the industry I could could write a massive blog about it that was bigger than the other guys were doing and I was ranking for it and gaining traffic M so that was that was good um but at the moment I yeah Outsource all my content and it's usually uh pbn Butler mhm they're Pro and expert content yeah it's really yeah a lot of people uh think that pbn Butler is just used for pbn type content maybe because of their name but I use them a lot for moneys site content they're actually quite good quite quite they're yeah they're they're awesome it's they don't need much tweaking once they get back mhm it's great absolutely and let's see do you have any vas working for you or did you use any vas for this project no I just use sort of established teams I found either through the forums or through the Facebook groups so that that would be like yeah pbn Butler of course and pbn fox just love those guys um Ser Focus also for Content MH um and a few others yeah so teams M mhm and how about how long were your articles like how many words were your body articles I think if you look at the average would be 1500 words but if you look at the money page average probably add another thousand on there so 2500 words okay that's pretty solid and uh like what was what was your frequency of new post like how often would you push something new out oh in the beginning not not often at all I was doing like one or two posts a month uh just because I was maybe doing one manually and one sort of outsourced and really occasionally I I'd add a money page to Target a new category of of keywords uh of course now I've got a Content team on the job writing actually three posts a week consistently to boost topical relevance for the harder to rank keywords MH um but the earlier stages where I wasn't actually doing that much was sort of before really decided in my head I wanted to switch to fulltime affiliate marketing right okay and okay did you do any uh people call it I don't know link sculpting siloing uh link juice management did you do any siloing yeah definitely man uh and and a lot of it um and mostly using strategies I actually learned from you your on page SEO guide and Charles's on page good uh course yeah um don't I yeah I wouldn't call it Silo anymore I think maybe strategic interlinking or like you said link sculpting Yeah so basically just linking pages with traffic and or link juice to other pages so you can funnel both the authority and the relevance to sort of the right places you wanted to end up at MH and then well while we're talking about link sculpting because I know a lot of people haven't really delved that deep into it I haven't really gone into it that Advanced but I I do like to do a bit of it so basically it means minimizing useless interlinking um I'm not talking about o I'm not talking about outbound links but actually sort of on page interlinking so you minimize the minimize useless links like uh non-relevant menu items um privacy policies terms and conditions etc etc so every link that leads to another on page uh page that you really don't need linking to either remove it or turn it into a no follow yep yeah I kind of think of it kind of like Plumbing right like if you don't want the link juice flowing somewhere you either remove that pipe or if you want to leave the pipe there the link then you know follow it it's like you turn off the valve on that yeah that great analogy man yeah sometimes good things come out of me uh let's see uh what other do you have it okay before we tidy up the on-site question I'm going to ask you any other onsite tips and tricks that really got some gains for you um so yeah definitely the interlinking a Conant stress that strong it's it's yeah it's so important uh together with having massive content with a lot of structured sorry something fell there yeah we're good with a lot of structured data um like headings and bullet points and images and videos um and also things people sort of Overlook like if you're targeting different locations actually add different pages as subproperties in your Google search console and tag them with a different country and if you have duplicate pages that that talk about the same content um maybe add HF LS um sorry add yeah HF lengths to those pages to those headers basically so Google doesn't mix them up stuff like that yeah very nice okay um that's it for the onside let's ask some offside your questions what were the first links you sent to your site um we we toos press releases um and citations together with social signals um I'm pretty much say anchor wise all generic and branded to the homepage and my most important money pages and all of these were done in the first like three weeks so basically sort of a bulk package right and you could go aggressive on that because you were an a domain and yeah you could just hit it hit it hard in the first three weeks that's perfectly fine but definitely would you do the same thing for a brand new domain would you go as as aggressive actually I I did and it I think it landed me in this the sandbox um yeah that was definitely too aggressive because i' I've got a public sort of case study going on my blog um and and yeah I talk about I'm trying to rank in this pretty competitive Niche and I go through what I'm doing at the moment and I did the exact same thing with that sort of bulk link push and it definitely landed me in like a six seven eight month sandbox okay so maybe that with a new one yeah all right and you mentioned okay Web 2.0 press release social signals where did you get each of them from like um so Web 2.0 is I I um I ordered from a service called whad Buzz I don't know if a lot of people know this one but it's it's it's pretty darn good you can Google it um and the others are basically all pbn Butler so social signals uh press releases um and citations well no press releases and social signals pbn Butler and citations back then was loganic okay cool and at one point did you start hitting with the good old pbns hell yes about three weeks in all right and okay and then okay so you set it everything up your base you got the web 2.0's and the social signals then the pbn started rolling in what did you how did you determine your anchor text selection um I basically look at sort of the top five so I get an idea of what they're doing on a page per page basis rather than a sort of domain overview I I usually look at page per page and then I try to use a little bit more parti partial keywords or partial anchors than they do but still not too much so it you know still looks natural basically mhm and were you let's see were you assigning a certain type of keywords like most people like to say okay pbn these get my target anchors and then you know you your pillow anchors will go to your Le least important um link types like we maybe your web 2.0's in this case were you doing something like that yeah definitely definitely so the Web 2.0 and the press releases were generic and branded and then the uh guest posts I also did C posts but that's later when the pbn started guest posts are uh partial and branded and then the pbn's partial and exact uh although I rarely rarely use exact match just because of I don't know it seems too aggressive to a natural mhm okay and then how about social signals how did you do the timing or how did you determine the timing on those you said you're using pbn Butler but like were you just randomly sending them in or you dripping them in what that look like I pretty much use actually your blueprint so every every few weeks you just uh push out a batch basically so definitely not every week but i' say maybe at first every month and then every two months something like that mhm yeah yeah it just works um what else do you use any other links that we're not thinking of besides the press release citations uh Web 2.0 is anything else that we're missing I don't think so so guest posts definitely I don't use Forum links or comments and I definitely stay clear of tier 2 spamming now um no that's it I think that's that's that's pretty much it okay and did you okay you mentioned guest posting so did you do the Outreach yourself or did you Outsource that no that's that's something I Outsource um and at the moment I try to a few in the past but the ones I like right now are definitely love to link they're really good and I recently started testing got SEO guest posts and they came back uh pretty good as well actually so I'm definitely going to keep ordering uh boat services cool both awesome guys Dan Parker Nathan got shout out to both of you guys good uh service providers as well cool um any other offsite SEO tips for the viewers here today so yeah basically offside tips um your blueprint pretty much gives everybody what they need the only thing I would I would say is they they'll have to replace a lot of the links that you use as pbns with just different links because we don't really all have thousands of pbn lying around um we all wish we had uh but but really your blueprint your blueprint is the perfect route to to to clean rankings and I think also keep in mind that in my opinion the only links that really make an impact are the ones that have juice rankings and traffic going to the actual page that links out to your site so not domain but the actual page so for example guest posts they're okay they're good but would be a lot better if those posts actually got traction and links and rankings and traffic Etc which is why pbns are so powerful because they already have authority so it doesn't take a lot to create a simple post that starts ranking for longtails and starts getting traffic um so yeah that that's pretty much what I suggest is trying get links that actually get traffic aside from the link juice and use those links um for your partials and your exacts and leave everything else for the Gen generics in the brands yeah exactly I just want to touch upon a really good point that you made there and and uh elaborate a little bit so you mentioned that links on uh properties that have traffic that have some kind of juice there are the ones that kick in and give you a good value there there actually is um a way to get Outreach links that have value like this too which would be a link insertion into an existing article that has links and it's popular for example uh a little bit harder to do you're going to have to do the the Outreach yourself and negotiate it yourself but definitely a good way to do it as well I just wanted to throw that in there yeah I've seen the services and I've used like James Gregory's links as well which is I think what he does and so links and aged posts and they they work they work pretty well um but I don't know I somewhere I switched to a mindset that that I sort of want more control like for example pbns wise I I never I never Outsource sort of the pbn links themselves and I never rent pbns I just I only buy them myself mhm so I've got full control cool but yeah control freak I like it yeah a little bit all right cool all right so let's talk about the money um if you're comfortable uh answering this question go ahead but okay you said you were doing 10K with client what's affiliate life looking like for you now all right before we head to now let's sort of go back in time to pre the switch so last November um I went to changai pre changai I was doing at the height of it $500 a month in sort of affiliate passive income which at that point was I was so happy that's like two weeks of kindy for my kids woo for free um and then I went to CH my and Man by the time I got back from Thailand I was making three grand mon what and I was only there for for like five days yeah I know that was really quick what what happened I have know well yeah I do know what happened but it's it's the main thing was I met all you guys and really sort of gave me a kick in the butt to start changing stuff and of course I brought my laptop so immediately after like day two of meeting some of you I started sort of working on my site massively and doing a whole heap of conversion rate optimization of stuff that I sort of talked about with people and and the good thing about conversion rate optimization is once once you do it the gains are overnight right once you make a positive tweak suddenly you you wake up the next morning and stuff's exploding um and that that's basically how the majority of that that that gain from 500 to 3,000 happens in five days it was it was absolutely insane um so well for those of you listening if you haven't got your ticket yet to go to changai this this November really really strongly suggest you you get one now cuz it's going to be epic thanks for pitching that for me I'm worst pitch how I to do it okay cool thanks carry on and then if if we jump back if we jump to now um I just last month I crossed uh 30,000 a month so that that's like basically 10x in seven months yeah um and you tripled the agency that took three years to build yes and I did that yeah six months with passive income it's still surreal it's real that's awesome big congratulations man thanks how Okay so for your affiliate setes how are you monetizing like CPA or or um just affiliate offers really okay normal straight up affiliate any other monetization methods do you slap AdSense on there or like any no don't want to risk it yeah yeah yeah uh how about like are you building an email list no it's it's on a to-do list I yeah I'm not quite sure if I'm going to do it well we'll see okay yeah I everyone always says like okay the the smart thing to do for your business is build an email list it's for me it's a tradeoff between you know I always believe in one page one goal right if you have affiliate website and you're trying to sell an offer just sell the offer you's he's slapping a an email opt in on there and it's just going to distract people it's going to take away from that but of course there's a balance but I typically yeah yeah I typically don't put uh email stuff on an affiliate site like that but maybe with an authority site so keep me filled in let me know how that goes if you yeah actually I'm thinking of just slapping the optin on on blog posts and just leaving my money Pages alone yeah why not they're not going to convert anyways well no that's true yeah it's a good idea cool um so now what are you going to do I'm guessing you're not sitting on your hunches and just enjoying this 30k drinking coconut every day um are you scaling into other niches yeah definitely so um at the moment I'm reinvesting about 90% of what I earn uh back into the sits so right now I'm actively sort of partnering with with a whole heap of people in different Industries I either just don't know anything about or have no passion in and then I do profit share so they give me the wisdom and the knowledge of the market that they're in um and a lot of them actually write the content content themselves so I don't have to worry about that and they know the audience and then I just take care of the website and the marketing Etc and I just split the profits smart it's like a lead spring type of thing yeah yeah cool pretty similar and um can you share what niches those are no all right smart man all right uh any regrets moving into the affiliate world no maybe I got lucky a little bit but not not at all it's it's sort of I don't know it's sort of a dream I really never D to dream the potential is massive and it's sometimes really scarily overwhelming um because I don't know I can stop working at at any point and the entire system will keep earning well into six figures a year without me having to I know touch anything for several months mhm um I mean to be safe if I if I wanted to keep the system in pure maintenance modes like no scaling involved I'd have to work maybe two hours a week MH got it it's insanely cool yeah yeah you you nailed it you get the Home Run good job man uh any advice to any listeners that were in the shoes that you were you know they they have an agency things are going well but uh they've had these these ideas and these thoughts of mov moving into affiliate and getting some more passive income and living getting more time back in their life any advice to these folks it's not it's not easy but if if you can do it if you if you have your agency running smoothly enough that you can sort of cut down on your own client hours maybe you have enough stuff to sort of take it all off you if you can cut down on your own hours and still make enough to survive I strongly recommend looking into starting your own authority side and maybe grab a course to guide you to this sort of mind field that is the SEO industry I think yeah it's it's definitely a possibility just try and cut down on your own your own work hours and if you have enough to survive just go for it okay yeah good advice and how about some just general advice to beginner seos in general like what what would you say to a beginner SEO I've thought about this a lot actually but I sort of see the posts on Facebook Etc or just talk generally with people um I think I yeah I have advice it's if you don't have kids and you have a day job and you're earning money instead of coming home and watching Netflix or instead of coming home and and gaming or maybe going out Etc sort of maybe two times or three times a week instead of doing that actually get behind the computer grab a decent course like scientific R rankings or AMZ affiliate boot camp and and or the course that you're making and and read and learn and and most importantly take action like so many don't take action they just absorb and absorb and absorb information and basically never actually do anything with it and also definitely start with really lwh hanging fruit so you can actually um I don't know prove to yourself that you can do it because as soon as you get that confident confidence boost that you know you're ranking something that you chose and you worked on um you can you can you can basically scale from there yeah that's a real big part of it I I mentioned that a lot too because a lot of people learn SEO online and it sounds like it works the guy who you taught learned it from says it works but you never really seen it and until you have that experience of making it work it's not real and it doesn't make sense to go all in on it and another really important thing I heard you say is that um you know make some sacrifices when you're young you don't need to Netflix and chill every night maybe you need to do the chill part every once in a while but um you can make some sacrifices now but look at the result right now you work two hours a week or you could work two hours a week if you didn't want to scale that's the payoff you know you learn it now that's exactly right gotta yeah that's awesome man well I don't have any more questions I just wanted to give you a big thank you for being such an open book and coming on and sharing everything with us I wish you the best going for W keep me filled in on what happens with your life and I'll see you in shangai pretty soon oh definitely can't wait man can't wait all right take care Tom we'll see you around yo see you [Music] mat