(Step By Step) How To Analyze Your Competition’s SEO

Key Takeaways

um [Music] what's going on tim nothing here we are we hit record we keep saying that we want to record some of the casual conversation we have before we like get in the right frame of mind to actually do the podcast but uh well we had a good conversation going about about newsletters and and some of the production value of newsletters so well yeah so this thing the reason i was laughing right as we started the recording is because we were just talking about what are we going to talk about today and i said well you know i don't know if we want to record and as soon as i said record kim just hit the button so here we are welcome everybody and yeah as as tim mentioned uh we got a lot of stuff going on but one of the big things that we want to do today is talk about growth and maybe growth in a couple of different fields so people who know me know that one of my specific focuses is newsletter growth i'm getting ready to do a whole bunch of case studies on different media companies and how they've grown and one aspect of that is seo and i'm not really an seo guy so what i was hoping to do in this show obviously tim is i want to sit down and kind of interview tim and figure out how he analyzes the seo of potential competitors or like other people that kind of finds across the internet and use that to reverse engineer you know the process that i'll eventually use for these case studies but i thought it would be a cool way tim for you to share some of your insights on seo but and also for people listening to learn because this is really important i don't know if it's obvious why i'm kind of going down this path but like you can learn a lot and you can jump up the learning curve if you just take a little bit of time to deconstruct what other people in the industry are already doing you have any thoughts on that like doing case studies behind the scenes or or studying competitors i don't do a whole lot of case studies i obsess over competitors when you brought this idea um i think it was yesterday or maybe it was last last week we had the idea and then we decided to to go over the article that i wrote instead but i'm all for this because so much of why i like seo is because it paints a very very clear picture for me on like what i'm doing i personally feel like one of the things that holds content creators down a bit is just lack of direction lack of what i call like ultimate outcome and that leads to what i call feeding the beast it's it's like it's the never ending never beginning cycle of just tweeting and blogging and posting and emails and the problem with feeding the beast is that as soon as you stop feeding it nothing happens and so me and sean um purry were kind of going back and forth a little bit about this like look i'm all for people who grow newsletters and grow brands without search you know like i'm not necessarily saying that i have a monopoly on the way to do it but i just always advise people to be mindful just like ed lattimore said like that was one of the things about that interview that really stuck with me is that long-form content posted on an article or excuse me on a website that you own is like one of the only ways that you can have time work for you because the half-life of a tweet i mean i guess you can go viral but on average it's got to be two hours like maybe right but the lifespan of of an article can be ten years like there's stuff on copy that was written 15 years ago that i'm continuously optimizing so all of that to say is that the reason why i like to do these competitive analysis so much is because it paints a real picture and it lets me see like okay this is the opportunity like this is the opening and this is what i'm going for and then once you decide it it takes all of the doubt out of your mind and you just know like i'm doing this this is exactly what i'm this is this is the target i'm trying to hit and i think that's very important i've never thought of it that way but i i love that framing like uh this is how you avoid the need to feed the beast because it is it's it's a big task to continually come up with ideas especially if you don't have that direction and i'm keen to get into it i want to see what you think here so what do you think the best way to approach this is should i give you an example of just a random company and then you kind of walk me through how you would analyze their seo or is there somebody else that you'd rather just take me through no are you open to doing like a live case study on the work that that you're doing like i would much prefer to do it so that it it matters so that like the work that we're doing is actually gonna have an effect so the the stuff that we record now is actually gonna have an effect on something that you're doing in the future i suppose to me just picking a website for sure yeah so just so i'm clear the end use for this is i'm doing case studies of other other publications so i've had some people that i respect suggest a handful of publications that they feel are doing a really great job at seo and i'd love to maybe pick one of those and break it down because i don't know if you were thinking about breaking down trends but we actually know behind the scenes that we're not doing a good job at seo on trends partly because that whole publication is paywall exactly and so yeah so seo has been a priority there what i would love to do is take somebody who other people i specifically i reach back out to lexi because she's such a big proponent of seo as well yeah anybody who missed that interview you should go check it out we brought lexi on here a couple weeks ago to talk about acquisitions how to sell media companies but i reached back out to and i said hey who like who are some of the people that you think are doing a great job at seo so if i loft one of those names over to you can we can we break them down yeah let's do it this is fun this is the stuff i love to do i'm all for this okay cool so i should share my screen right yeah yeah yeah and then we'll talk through it obviously for anybody who's listening to this with just audio only the first one that i want to do may be the only one depending on how deep we get into it is gotta be pat walls with starter story you familiar with him yeah he was on my podcast i'm very familiar with him right on so he and i are set to talk coming up soon i know lexi considers his website to be like one of the examples just a great seo but i wouldn't know the first thing to look at when i i mean other than just google searching like origin stories of business and seeing if his site comes up i wouldn't know how to analyze what kind of job he's actually doing on seo so if we start here how would you how would you pull this off uh first thing i would pull off is i would go to the website and i highly recommend people watch this video when doing search i have learned this the hard way it can be tempting to be like too technical and too buried in the data but a lot of times seo is won and lost in the fundamentals so the first thing i would do is i would just go to the website and i would check out his fundamentals so if you ever go to a website especially on chrome on google chrome there's tabs up top right and if you hover over the tab it'll show you the h1 tag so the h1 it's a little different now because google has gotten smarter but when you search something on google and you know how there's like the link you can click on and then the little bit of text underneath it those are like you can assign those google doesn't just know what to put there what the links are going to be like you have to tell google and if you don't do anything if you leave the h1 tags blank then it'll just take it for you like in some like what google assumes the page is about right so it's it's just such a huge opportunity to always make sure your h1 tags are clean and like i can tell right away that he's obviously done his h1 tags this is the exact format i like to use so we're on the home page of starter story starterstory.com i'm hovering over his tab and i love how he put the brand at the front of the h1 and i'm guessing that he doesn't put the brand on any one of his other h1 tags because it's you only get 80 something characters on your h1 tag and a huge mistake people make is they put the brand in their h1 tag and it's like why because google knows that if you search for the brand you're gonna go to the home page so he's doubling down on his home page and he's doubling down on his biggest well his his fundamental keyword so learn how people are starting successful businesses and he uses the colon too this is like a perfect this is a personal way that i do it i just think that i'm getting a little nerdy here but i think the little colon is much cleaner than the dash and it makes it so that you can put your key phrase at the very very beginning and then colon and then like a little bit of a descriptor to make it like more incentivizing to actually click on okay so then next thing i would do is i would look at site structure seo is really three things like the fundamentals are so important if you can have good site structure so that google can easily index all of your pages because if google can't see your pages it can't index it so that just means links basically like if you can if a person can get to a page by clicking links in like two or three clicks then that page is is going to be indexed pretty well can i hop in just for uh to share a quick tip that i learned about this recently so we just did an article at trends about how like one word change in your navigation can lead to huge potential upside like especially if you're in ecom or something like that where you know you make it one step easier for people to find your product and you're gonna make tens maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars more in sales so i didn't realize this but there's actually a tab in google analytics where you can go in and it's the site search tab where you can click to see what terms people are actually searching in your site search uh bar so if you have like a search my website thing you can go in there you can see all the terms of people search on your website and then what this person recommended is he says you know go look at those common terms and kind of suss out any common themes among them and kind of work backwards to potential keywords because what what you're really learning from that information is this is what people can't find easily in your navigation and if there's any common ideas boom throw that up in the navigation use heat maps to see if it gets clicked and then keep you know moving things around until you until like your most common term is in that top left corner so i just wanted to pause there because you said site structure and i just learned that tip the other day that's very cool pretty neat right yeah yeah i didn't i didn't know that section of google analytics existed all right so now you're hovering over uh his nav menu it's there's a couple buttons here one is case studies one's business ideas growth ideas tools seo newsletter and then become a member what do you think when you see this yeah you know what i see this may not be right is i think that these this is just old school it looks like these are just categories to his blog so this is more of like a custom built database and yeah it's cool it's a really cool website like pat's killing it he's getting a ton of traffic and i know he's thinking very hard about how to turn this into a really viable business which i have some opinions about but i'm not here to uh tell pat how to run this business so so okay i clicked around for a little bit i got an idea the site structure i don't know exactly what database he's using here this looks custom but it also kind of looks like a plugin so i'm not really sure the next thing i would do is i would highlight the url and we're on my personal semrush account right now which is fine i don't mind if you guys see some of my stuff but here we go um so you just plugged the url into sem rushers yeah and just hit enter and so this is going to be a dashboard and you can get a ton of information here so 572 000 backlinks this is a real big one this is a lot of backlinks but here's what's really interesting not all backlinks like you can have more than one backlink on a website so the other thing you want to do is look at this referring domain so he's got 8.1 000 referring domains so that just means the the root domain has a link on it but it's got 572 000 backlinks so what this tells me is he has a real disproportionate amount of links where like some links are going to be on the footer of the website so every page on that website is going to have a backlink i mean this is just really disproportional and i'm not saying it's good or bad by any means i'm just saying that like he has a lot of site-wide backlinks somewhere because to have 8 000 referring domains and 500 000 backlinks that's a lot yeah that's really interesting that's like 40 to 50 backlinks per site what's a more what's a more typical ratio that you would see there much closer to one or uh no i'd say 10 10 to 1 you know so like let's see what copy vloggers got happy blogger's unique because copyblog has been around so long and i think i've told you this before that so many of the articles that get published are still connected to rss feeds so every time we post a new article the links just ding ding ding ding ding pour on because there's so many rss feeds that are still attached to it so we're going to be i mean geez we're heavily disproportionate as well yeah you guys are like so uh the numbers are 4.4 million backlinks on 37 000 sites so that's that's like uh a hundred to one or something like that yeah so i get that right you're brave enough to do math we don't do public math yeah we're not doing public lab but yeah we're spelling yeah okay but this is this is atypical because of how long this site has existed exactly is there every situation i guess there's never a situation in which there's more referring domains and there are backlinks because that would be impossible no i mean impossible wouldn't happen and is it generally accepted that the more backlinks you have the better from an seo perspective or is is there some version of that where it's like well not always not always it is the data shows that there's just such a ridiculous correlation between the amount of backlinks and the amount of traffic that if you can get a link you get it basically but not all links are created equal so backlinks the the best way to think of it is like when when we actually had to write papers in high school and do a works cited and like source our work backlinks are google's way of sourcing information so if you write something on trends you're gonna link to where you found that information so that the reader who's reading it on trends can click on the link and see like okay they pulled this information from a credible source right and so you know having cnn linked to you is a big deal having the new york times linked to you is a big deal having entrepreneur magazine linked to you is a big deal because those links are just so powerful and that's why people send so much money you know it's like 10 grand or something to get one press release put about you on entrepreneur.com they're not necessarily doing it for the exposure i mean they are but really they're doing it because it's just going to grow their backlink profile so much got it so we're we're we're still looking here at starter stories backpack profile 572 000 links 8 000 referring domains if you were going to try and deconstruct how he got all those backlinks what would your next step be because you've said this is this is a little there's something that's a little bit atypical about this maybe he's got a bunch of foot or back links uh what would you do next step he said what tim did was he clicked the referring domain so you're looking at referring domains now yeah and this is also pretty typical when sites get very very popular there's like a whole dark part of the internet that basically just copies and scrapes content from other websites and then tries to make their own websites about it so this is problematic there's a website called starterstory.herokuapp.com and there's 286 backlinks from this one root domain that might be so heroku i know i don't know much about it but i know that that's where people will typically build an app so that might be something that he owns that might be where he's hosting these databases or something yeah it could be i think this is actually just his staging site i think he's just has a staging site that he never de-indexed so that's interesting um names dash find dot com he's got 25 000 backlinks from and you can see this is a this is a 502 bad gateway page so this is a cloudflare basically means this is a spam site marketingz.info i've seen this thing a million times all right so like let's find the real backlinks right petgoodsfactory.com this is a giant this is a singaporean website i hope that's how you say it anyone from singapore i'm really sorry if i said that wrong this there's just a whole lot of like weird links on this site i haven't found one that looks super organic yet nutrition healthy.com this isn't a this is a real site so he he got a lot of links from something either he accidentally got put on uh some kind of pbn it's called a public display network it's basically like a network of tens of thousands of websites that all just kind of link to each other for these like little seo it's kind of like you know the russian social media rooms with like the spam bots it's kind of like that equivalent except for seo just these like rooms of uh of just black hat seo people that are trying to build backlinks yeah and just trying to hack the system okay so this is unique man okay here there we go this is going to be a good one oh no it's not because you see how it looks like it says search engineering jobs.com but it's siege engineering jobs.com this is just the stuff you got good at that's interesting this is definitely a pbn you know like this is a website that somebody made just to link and you can see it because the whole thing is like a really straight up link based database so i don't want to spend too much time here but my analysis here is that he either is on a pbn or he somehow just got put on like a spam bot circuit that built all of these links for him now granted let me also say you can't get this much traffic and be disrespected on google without having like real backlinks right you can't spam backlink your way to success it just won't happen so i'm gonna go to the 40th page here see if we find anything seotoolsall.com i don't know what that is it's interesting to do this on the air i've never seen a backlink profile that is so random like this sms bump.com this you know what's interesting too about everyone one of the things that's kind of interesting about pat's site in particular is that he's writing about other startups and so there's a part of me that wonders if he's kind of exposed to additional risk from these bot farms and stuff because like all startups i don't know i don't know if all startups are potentially exposed to them or if some startups use them but it's like it occurs to me that let's say there's one startup that he writes about that also happens to be using this pbn strategy it seems like his content could get kind of swept up in that too so is that possible that that's what we're seeing is just by the nature of what he writes about like and he also produces a lot of content like the more content you put out there the more like every time we post an article on copyvlogger i get probably 30 pingbacks from all of these different websites that just go like they'll take his art they'll take his article which naturally is going to have interior links on it where when you take that interior link and you put it on a different domain now it's a backlink right so i think he's just produced so much content that he's gotten in this uh like you said this this kind of pbn farm where anytime you post something new it just goes like over and over and over again wow okay so so that's one angle to this which is backlinks and that was interesting i'd be really curious to see i'm gonna have to plug the hustle in at some point because we write about a lot of startups too so i wonder if that same thing's happening to us but aside from backlinks what else do you typically look at i see a couple other things being displayed in this dashboard one is authority and so there is organic traffic so what do you think about when you see those i glance at authority just because it's a good metric authority score is kind of a made-up metric like there's no such thing as an authority score it's just something that seos like to use it's it's kind of like uh it's just a rating that collectively seos have decided is like legit so an authority score of 60 is really high that's a strong website and that matters because like if i were to be doing this i would look at past website and be like how can i get a link on this website this is a strong authority score there's no pan there's no penalties there's no manual action on it so the next thing i would do is i would scroll down to top organic keywords and this is just very interesting can i can i pause before we get to the organic keywords because you mentioned penalties and or and what was the other thing actual action yeah what are those and how would you see if there was any you would see it in search console so in the same way there's a google analytics there's also a google platform called search console which is is basically monitoring the health of your website if analytics is traffic and behavior that search console is like health and site speed and if you're just blatantly trying to trick the algorithm like you'll get caught got it so his domain score would never get up to 860 if those search console things had been flagged well no no i'm saying like in theory it could like maybe he has a strong website and then just tried something that was so blatant he got flagged on it you know and that google would basically like drop all of your rankings so like his authority score wouldn't change but his organic traffic would change very very quickly and then like you know you have to submit a whole whole bunch of stuff to google to tell them that you're playing by the rules again it's never happened to me by the way but i've seen it happen many many times with clients got it okay so when you see that authority score you're saying to yourself all right there's nothing shaky going on this web this is high this is somebody that's clearly doing a good job if you're trying to build your own backlink profile it becomes a potential target somebody that you want to be interacting with and linking to your website and then you before i interrupted you said the next thing you would go down to is the organic keyword so take me through this yeah so look this is gonna be really really interesting because pat is running a very very successful business and so like i am by no means saying that i'm better or that he's worse at all i want to use this as an opportunity to highlight one of the amazing things about search and one of the ways why one of the reasons why i advocate so much intent and about being specific and about knowing who your audience is because these keywords are all over the map they're all over so dining room instagram captions he ranks number one for that is about a volume of 50 for that search for for that keyword and that's a month by the way about about 50 people a month and this accounts for 0.01 of his traffic programmer bio for instagram cutting board business asmr channel name ideas i have no idea what that is affiliate marketing bio that's that's kind of good you know bio dancer alcohol ig captions utilities cost per month for a small business like they're all over yeah there's a lot of interesting stuff in here like similar to what we said before with the potential bot farms sweeping him up because of his topic there's a lot of stuff in here that seems like it's related to what he writes about so if you like best white label business is in here no best business to start in alabama there's a whole bunch of stuff but your point is like there's also some stuff in here that it seems like it's when you first land on this page you're not seeing a clear defined unified strategy here is that what you're saying well i'm not seeing a clear defined search target his unified strategy is to write about other startups and so like it's no wonder his keywords are all over the place because he's writing about startups they're in a million different industries right right yeah okay how to start a hard seltzer company like this is clearly a write-up about a hard seltzer company and i'm on the page now the article is how to start an alcoholic seltzer brand and it's cool like this is like really badass content i love what he does here he's got the the market size of seltzer but like if you see what happens there's no direction so the page is like really really cluttered with ads and in my view that that dampens the user experience so what's another one steam cleaning businesses and this is in his ideas section of the website which is on the navigation bar so we're going to look at this start a steam cleaning business like and this is really really cool you know like i see why google loves this website because this information data yeah it's like so valuable and even here if you're watching the video he didn't actually manually do this this title tag you can see here on the top of the page that google is just pulling the title of the page which is just defaults as the h1 so this this title tag in particular well okay can i ask you a question with that so for people listening the title tag on that page or sorry the um the tab title is start a steam cleaning business yeah hyphen business ideas yeah and what you mentioned a minute ago is that business ideas is a an item in the nav menu yep and start a steam cleaning business is the title of the page so is that part of what you're talking about in terms of site structure like his site structure makes sense to google so that they're able to like tag these things in a way that's still even if he doesn't manually fill it in still might grab eyes on google search is that what you're getting at that's exactly right yeah when when websites get big enough especially when you're so he's not writing all of this content this is getting scraped from a database somewhere it's it would be like impossible for one person to do all of this so he's he's probably got a python script that he's running from different databases across the web and just aggregating the data onto a website which by the way this is exactly what i do for sober nation like this is a killer way to programmatically seo a website and it's no wonder he's getting like three times the traffic that copy blogger is getting so it's crushing it and then the reason why i say that is is to go back to your point the site structure is so well organized that google can just easily figure out what is this page about well it's in the business idea section and it's information that would help people who are interested in starting a steam cleaning business like yes we love this page if somebody googles how to start a clean uh steam cleaning business this is definitely the best information for the user so this is this is great like i mean it's really impressive really it's very very impressive i gotta say even as somebody so we are i don't really consider us to be competitors but we write very similar content over at trends or we try to cater to a similar idea set and i haven't spent like i haven't really spent a lot of time on starter stories since he first got started so just seeing this page now it's it's pretty cool what he's doing i'm impressed as somebody who spends a lot of time trying to create like a similar level of value he's got key statistics on like the market size and by the way this is the kind of thing you got market size minimum startup costs and then you scroll down he's got like marketing ideas for this particular industry and this is the kind of thing that people pay a lot of money for i mean like there's these industry reports that you can buy they're like five ten fifteen twenty thousand dollars a pop i don't know so this is cool i didn't realize this is what this is the direction he had taken the site yeah and so if you go back to the keywords like this is a long tail website where most websites follow the pareto principle where the majority of their traffic comes from a chunk of pages and then it long tails the further and further out you go and that's just true with with basically anything i really like you know i'm a physics nerd to an extent and so like seeing the pareto principle all around me kind of helps me sometimes because it makes me realize that find your thing and then just double down on the thing and don't spend too much time with like all the little things that that can drive people nuts right but what's so interesting about his site is like it doesn't follow this pareto principle because there's just so many business ideas on it that the whole thing is is like like what's the opposite of death by a thousand cuts right like he's filling a pool drop by drop you know life from a thousand vitamins yeah exactly exactly okay so we've seen a couple of things now we've seen backlink profile we've seen keywords we've seen site structure is there anything else that you would look at right out of the gate to kind of assess how somebody is performing seo wise this tool sem rush seems pretty cool yeah you can do a lot of stuff on here real quick just to kind of double down on on the thing i was just talking about there's a tab in sem rush called traffic percentage where you can look at the pages of their website from which page in terms of percentage drives the most traffic to their website and like i have never ever seen this ever so this is fascinating you know even the brand only only the brand starter story accounts for only 1.26 percent of the traffic and then the next most visited page is 0.65 percent of the traffic which is crazy you know sometimes you see like like 80 of the traffic comes from one page so he is this is the most like long-tailed website i think i've ever seen that's wild well i guess this is a good one to start with because i know because i'm kind of perplexed like i've been doing this i'm like damn yeah so uh it looks like so you organize this from highest to lowest right so that 1.26 is the absolute top and then everything i mean it's 0.65 0.58 it drops all the way off to like point one eight percent within the top ten or fifteen results interesting interesting nft ideas i would have thought that would be bringing in a lot more that's a huge search term right now well and then even look at this she's got one 1 625 pages of this so that's 106.25 pages of i don't know what do you think this is 100 search results yeah and not a single only one of them generates more than one percent of the traffic on the website so wow so it's it's cool yeah so let me stick to my people a little bit let me stick to the copy bloggers of the world and explain why if this were my business it would be exhausting because this is like this is a tough model to hang on to because on one sense there's definitely a purpose to the website like the purpose is to talk about startup ideas but who is like the ideal user like who's coming to this site it could be somebody who is interested in starting a business and i could see how that would happen but even still the focal point of the content and the messaging is so broad that i would find it difficult to see how you could sell like a real real real cash generating product off of this yeah which is why you know there's so many ads all over here and it's funny as are all let's see i'm rushed because i'm on scm rush at the same time this is actually something that we struggle with at trends too and again it's because i think it's because our products are in a similar category so when you look at who buys this information you know it kind of breaks down into a few different personality types one of those people is like somebody who wants to start a business and is searching for ideas yeah and another is you know potentially somebody who has a business and is looking for like competitive research market information about the place the the industry that they're operating in and it is just just a very tricky needle to thread because the question that kind of like ultimately comes up for a lot of our users is how many business ideas do you really need once you get to a certain point you know you're either you're either starting a business or you're not and so for like this is a challenge that i see a lot of newsletter creators struggling with too they'll create a paid product which is just basically a paid version of their free product and the assumption is if i just start charging for this somebody's going to buy it that'll be true up to a point but the issue and i think this is what you're really getting at is like you need to be very clear about who is going to buy your product and what the benefit is they're getting out of it so in the case of trends we like to say like this is kind of a joke but it's also very true people come for the content but they stay for the community and so like we pull people in with all these cool stories about emerging business trends and stuff like that and to some extent some people just like to stay up on what the next big thing is definitely also yeah but we had to learn over time that like people don't want a new business idea every single week that would be insane well there's actually there's a very small group of like hardcore creators investors yeah yeah either that or like people who've got whole teams in place and they're they can just spin up products super fast but for the most part if you're going to be starting a business like this you got to be really clear on what that value prop is and oftentimes it's not really going to be the content beyond a certain point like the content is to draw and then there's got to be something on the back end that continues to deliver even as people move through different stages of their business and that's true for newsletter creators too like the biggest issue that i see on paid newsletters is that there's not a big enough difference between the free content and the paid content and the reason that's a problem is some people will pay for your paid content because they like you but that'll only take you so far and it's it's kind of like relying on charity right like it's like hey i'm a personality that you enjoy so please pay me for this thing that i've been giving away for free the real like if you really want to make money with a paid newsletter of any kind you gotta basically figure out how to make a product that helps somebody else make more money that's the only super successful version of that that i've seen so far and what i like to say is like the more direct the line is between uh your content and their earning the more likely you are to be able to sell millions of dollars worth of that email and i think that's um well that's something we think about all the time at trends yeah you're so right ethan and this is one of the things that out of doing this podcast you have taught me that's had a real huge impact where the three different levels sort of speak like you have the attention awareness and it's when you said this and you mentioned james altustra i spent like a week studying james altucher oh really and he he really is like very very very sophisticated on how he does this and so pat if you listen to this we love you i would approach this a different way i would use starter story as just the attention asset grabber much like the hustle is right much like jamesalture.com is should we we should check just to see what his paid product actually is because i'm not sure i'm not sure what it is that's a good point i'm a member yeah maybe we're uh because i'll bet that's probably what he's doing and and the reason i'll bet that is this is probably an evolution that everybody ultimately goes through like he's been making this work for several years now and i think at some point he probably came to a similar realization which is like that that content is the hook then you can add stuff in there that's like real actionable or something um i don't know does he have your uh would you mind are you oh shoot i'm not showing my screen anymore yeah my bad he does he has a become a member okay so what what is this i'm not sure exactly i it says enter your email and get 15 off should we just do it well i i uh it's the first thing you get is access to all the stories so he does pay while a fair amount of the content that is definitely one way he could pull in trials that's going to work but if we scroll down what else is there i'm sure there's got to be some kind of major community aspect to it um yeah so he's got for people listening there's this like big banner sliding by of all the different faces of founders who i'm assuming he profiled and then this is really like sharp next to their name he's got all their revenue numbers so it's like 1.2 million a year you know 514 000 a year i don't see any small businesses here nothing smaller than six figures so that's another great hook and i think boom right there a community of doers that's that to me seems to be the big sell which is like connecting people with a group of other people who can help them solve problems so yeah i i would assume i'm not sure how much of his content he's currently paywalling i'd be really curious i'll probably dig into this a little bit more yeah please do thank god you said that though i was about to give pat his whole like business idea and you're like wait a minute you might already have one yeah what do they call that man's can can you mansplain to another man how to run his own business no it seems like he seems like he kind of came to a similar conclusion that we did by the way when i had him on my podcast before we started doing this when i was doing tim scott's him he wasn't doing this yeah yeah part of our conversation was specifically about you know like how he's running the advertising game and how it's sort of frustrating him mm-hmm yeah i'm glad to see that he's doing this even even still and you know what let me know give me your opinion on this because i think about this a lot i think it makes more sense that your paid product is like a separate brand that can align itself as like a higher not just a higher quality but like like a mental level up because it has to be different than your free content and i totally agree you know like it's not patreon there are people it's not twitch like there are people that would just say like hey i love watching your stream here's five bucks a month there's there's two starcraft streamers that are friends of mine on twitter and i throw them five bucks a month each because i really like them and i want to support them but it's the same over and over again there's no like premier content so my question is i think it's a easier sell and a better value prop if like your media generates the attention gets emails and then upsells to a separate brand that has a higher level of of production and like i don't know what the word is kind of just like ideas it definitely can be so i'll i'll give you both sides of this coin because it could be it could be kind of interesting ryan dice who runs what is it uh digital marketer yeah i talked to him about this and the way he thinks about it is he's a good guy yeah he's awesome also in austin for everybody who's considering moving to that city i thought he was in arizona for some reason anyways he thinks about it like a solar system so he says you know you build kind of like like the central media brand is that sun and then you use that to colonize planets and the planets are sub-brands that are like your front and back end products so just as a brief point of reminder for everybody the three different ways to make money in media is you have free products which are monetized by ads you have front end products which are uh inexpensive paid subscriptions and then you have back end products which can which are expensive paid subscriptions and they can run all the way up into the like five ten fifteen twenty thousand dollars a year they can be very expensive so each of those follow-on products is like a planet and it's its own brand and then within that brand you can even have moons orbiting it and those would be like additional products in that brand so like if trends the example that i could use here is like the hustle would be kind of the main brand for us then we've got trends which would be like our next planet you know and it revolves around the hustle that's your upsell right and it's different it's paid and then if trans itself were to start launching sub products like you know guides paid guides to particular industries or maybe a second mastermind group and by the way we're not considering any of that right now full disclosure sec all that kind of stuff this is hypothetical if you were to launch those products those would be like the moons that revolve around that planet and then what ryan says is he says the real key to making media work is to continue moving out and colonizing new planets so you're spinning up new brands as you go and you use the planets that you've already built to help with those launches and the reason that that's key well it actually works in a few really interesting ways first of all each one of those brands has an audience right so boom you've already got a pre-existing audience but and this played out interestingly in our interview people don't always understand the link between the brands so you can appear to be in more places than you actually are which is not really the point but i had asked him i'm like i'd ask him about his podcast strategy because he had appeared on several different podcasts recently and he goes oh well this is a perfect example because we actually own those podcasts and like having you know had a guest cancel and that's why i got interview spots on them and so it can work out in kind of a funny way that way so i agree with you but here's here's the caveat if people do understand that your front end product is like a sub brand of the main brand they don't always draw that line very clearly in their head and the issue that we deal with at trends so trends is obviously it's our paid product it's a weekly product and you know we send one email a week but we'll ask people like hey how do you feel about trends and they'll go oh i love trends i read it every morning yeah and it's tough for us as a team to kind of get really good feedback from the audience because they're so ingrained in the entire ecosystem that they act they actually don't draw the same line between our products that we do and i guess that's both that's kind of both sides of the coin so from a business standpoint i agree with you and the benefit of launching those sub planets if you will is that a lot of them can share the same back office so you get like these benefits of like these economic benefits as you definitely roll new brands out but you may run into a situation where the the user doesn't realize that that's what you're doing and sometimes that can benefit you and sometimes it can hurt you so it really is a toss-up but generally speaking i agree with you if for no other reason then it gives you like flexibility to position a brand differently when you go to ask somebody to pay for it so those are my thoughts on it i think that's so insightful i love that idea and you you like really really after we had that podcast we talked about those three sections with the front end the the free media the front end product and the back end product and i was studying james alter it completely changed how i was going to do my blog i mean we talked about last week i got a little bit more free time i'm like trying to figure out what to do with my life right and uh this was one of the things where it's like wow i've always wanted to have just a personal media brand around me and so i'm building a newsletter with tim stodds i built my first like solo paid product it's called the bootstrapper and i'm just getting it started we got we got a thousand bucks a year so far um that was in two weeks man a thousand bucks annual revenue within two weeks so it's working and then the third aspect of that is i'm not gonna have like a higher level mastermind it'll just go to digital commerce it'll just go to the agency so like even my personal writing is following that exact framework that you put together and ideally like the dream is to do exactly what james altucher does where like his free newsletter has these advertisements which are awful by the way have you ever watched those videos and you can't fast forward them and it's so gimmicky i'm like how does anybody watch this but then his free newsletter goes to what he calls choose yourself right choose yourself financial and it's like a network of paid newsletters and uh and that's that's why i hope to go with it you know like have newsletters that are about like different different topics and and we'll see but it all started because of that insight that you gave me man so i i really think people should take that into account because it works and like everybody does it you just don't realize it that that's awesome i'm glad to hear it and then i guess just to double down on that whole concept of how these brands interact with each other sometimes without people realizing so uh what's interesting about james ulster and i keep in mind i interviewed him a couple years ago now so this may have changed but uh to my knowledge it hasn't his brand is that choose yourself is an imprint of agora publishing and i don't know if you've heard of agora but they are a they're basically a financial publishing uh brand they do more than a billion dollars in revenue every year just publishing media products like that yep through free front end and back that same model but they have all these different imprints so you would never know you'd never know they're connected and the advertisements that are in his newsletter those are affiliate ads for other members of the group no wonder they're so like they're like really well produced but it's like an infomercial i'm thinking to myself like out of all the things that james because i listened to james well i haven't listened to a while but his podcast is uh it's like laid back and like hang out and like yeah let's shoot the and tell stories and so it's like such a juxtaposition between those infomercial type videos he has on his newsletter but now that you tell me it's all part of the same network yeah so there you go that's that's that's the ultimate example and agora is the ultimate example i mean wow nobody's heard of them uh they do massive massive revenue and they're really good at what they do for as cheesy as their copywriting sounds and it does sound cheesy it works like there's a reason there always work yeah there's a reason that their writers do what they do but yeah man okay this was fantastic thanks for taking me through it i learned a lot i'm gonna shout out to pat we're gonna have to get him on here or what i'm gonna do is i don't know if he'll i don't know if if he's got time to come here but uh he and i are chatting behind the scenes and he's agreed to kind of help me understand seo stuff as well so i'm going to ask him some questions about what we found here today and just kind of hear his his perspective on how this worked out the way that it did it seems like he's building like what i what i'm interested in i don't know how he built this backlink profile yeah but i would love to figure it out because it seems like something that would help trends too just to be a little bit more seo conscious we're we're not really and i and and that's surprising because a lot of people on our team are like real seo whizzes i know it would like steph would love it if we were more seo conscious so so would my project or my product manager well if you have any questions about that just let me know but while you're talking to pat sure his insight but i i want to know the evolution of how he's monetizing cool because it was kind of tough to talk about i was stumbling through it a little bit and i had our previous interview in my head where like we talked about advertising and how he was kind of sick of it so like when i saw those ads i think i was a little bit um like it was imprinted on right yeah but i am really really interested in his product and i'm also really really interested if it stays within like the starter store brand because i've thought about that a lot like do i build another website like do we need to buy another domain right like that whole that whole joke like i bought another domain time for it to sit in my godaddy for another four years but i i have just personally found that it's easier like categorically to separate these different brands and create even if it's like very nuanced but create like a different point and meaning behind them so yeah when you talk to pat thank him for letting us use him as a guinea pig and ask those backlink questions but definitely ask him like the evolution of how he monetized because i i want to know personally for me yeah i definitely will one last thing related