Joe Troyer 0:58
Hey everybody, Joe Troyer, here from digital triggers. And today we have a very special guest, Gail Breton. And Gail is one of the founders over at authority hacker, and I’m super excited to have Gail on the line. Gail, you want to do a quick intro for yourself, brother?
Gael Breton 1:31
Hey, Joe. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. And yeah, basically, I run a business with my business partner Mark for almost nine years now. Actually, we’ve been working together for a long time, which is why you probably hear us bend to each other all the time on the podcast. And we were portfolio authority sites. And we talk about the stuff on authority hacker.com. Basically, a good stuff we do and the stuff we learn this stuff we test. We try to make it like down in the trenches, shut the actual stuff. Sometimes it’s experimental. Sometimes it’s not necessarily statistically significant or anything, we just started to talk about the actual stuff we do. It can be contested many times, but at least we try to, like, you know, it’s like when I read a lot of blogs, or listen to a podcast, I just feel like the same generic stuff just keeps coming up all the time. And you sit up at your computer, and you’re like, now what? So we’re trying to like, avoid that. I’m not saying we managed to do that 100% of the time, but we’re trying to just be like, Okay, this is the actual stuff in real life is happening, basically.
Joe Troyer 2:28
Big shout out to you guys. Definitely a blog that I follow, and one of the only podcasts that I listened to these days. So definitely guys check, check out the podcast, at minimum, I would make a suggestion there. So your guys’s big thing is really getting into building authority sites, right at the end of the day, that’s like your focus these days.
Gael Breton 2:48
I mean, we basically so like most companies are built around their product. Right? Right. So the selling products and like the website, the whole business based around selling the products, the way we build our businesses a little bit different, we build it around the topic. And then that site just becomes a platform to stop whatever business venture you want it to be. And many people are interested in making it like some kind of passive income, so usually is going to be affiliate marketing days or is going to be even advertising based advertising has been really good lately, nobody talks about it. But like huge networks, like media line networks, like adthrive, etc, have such high RPMs that it’s actually becoming quite competitive with lower end tech marketing. So a lot of people are interested in these in these business models, but really like, we like to do info products as well. We don’t really do ecommerce, but we have members that do that, like some members of our pro community, like they just do ecommerce, they take our stuff and they run e commerce, right. But basically what we’re doing is we’re building a site around topic, let’s say like gardening for apartments in season two, or whatever, like parenting, like parenting, when you have tweets or whatever you want to like, go into, like some publicity. And then based on that, you can just roll a different amount of business models that most people start with affiliate and advertising and then they just go up the ladder with what generates more profit, but usually gets more involved, basically. So that’s kind of like the bird’s eye view of authority sites.
Joe Troyer 4:09
Yep. So instead of picking one specific product, you’re going after a niche instead, you’re getting the traffic in for that niche, and then ultimately figuring out what is the best way
Gael Breton 4:18
to monetize? Yeah, you build a marketable audience that is that has a common interest and then you just build offerings for them, whatever it is.
Joe Troyer 4:27
And is the is the primary or only method that you guys are using for traffic these days SEO and organic.
Gael Breton 4:34
No, we have sites that get traffic on like Pinterest. We do we do more Facebook ads and people would think we do actually. So I think like really like definitely an effective ad spend on like need five figures for Facebook ads. Right now we do a little bit of AdWords but not that much. For info products. We have affiliates, they send us traffic so we kind of like on the other side. So there’s a little bit of everything. We’re not the best Because guys on social media, Pinterest is interesting because Pinterest is kind of like a search engine. And Facebook, well you kind of get involved when you do when you spend quite a bit of money on Facebook ads, and you eventually have to learn how to craft like engaging stuff, just because you’re gonna get more value out of it. So we are involved in that I would say in social media, but like, just me about Instagram, etc. I kind of want to get into it. But I wouldn’t say like, listen to me. I would say there’s probably better people right now to listen to. So yeah, that’s basically it for traffic generation.
Joe Troyer 5:29
So when it comes down to naming the site, how niche or how broad you go, what are kind of your recommendations there? The reason I asked, this just came up on a podcast that I recorded the other day with Matt diggity, and that was talking about when he’s buying sites and selling sites that one of the big criteria for him is buying something where he can not be to niche down, right, and he can expand. So when it comes into kind of picking a niche for you and picking that site name, and how do you suggest people do that?
Gael Breton 6:02
I mean, for Matt is a bit different, because he basically doesn’t start new sites anymore, he just buys them. Whereas we start new sites from scratch. So we have a bit more flexibility in the way we actually angle it. And I don’t mind going very niche. Basically, the only question is like, where’s the money, basically. And so like, you need to, I don’t care, I just need to have like a really good author I want to sell to people like, it’s like, here’s an email list of 10,000 people in the tweens parenting niche, how you’re going to make money from them. And so we answer that question and then ask the question, do we do parents is like, or twin parents site like that’s how like you want to niche down? Or do you want to go broke, right? The reason why it goes wrong is because he buys the site, and basically you just broadens up and it just has more like just pumps content on it ranks for more keywords, makes more money flips it for hire multiple, but it’s a lot, it’s very different when you’re actually starting the site from scratch, because you don’t necessarily have to have this massive uplift, the uplift is from zero to x, not from x to y, you know. And so like, you can allow yourself to niche down more provided you have the good offer, like the site we sold in January, like we had an offer that was paying us like we were making like 50 bucks per sale or something. And a lot of articles are really niche down. And to be honest, like you can, I can’t tell the Nisha not allowed legally for a year and a half. But like it was really nice down most of the content. And you could easily build a meet five figure per month site, just on that tiny sub niche just on that one affiliate offer. And so it can make sense to be really niche down in that case. Whereas if you’re going for like a really common use, where you’re just gonna do Amazon affiliates, for example, like Amazon affiliates just just pays very little, you need to be broad enough, you need to have hundreds of keywords you can rank for just because you will just not make enough money if you’re to niche down, and your only motivations and as an affiliate. Same with, you’re gonna monetize with ads, because if you’re gonna monetize as well, you need a lot of pageviews if you’re to niche down, you’re not gonna make a lot of money. Unless you’re like in like, like, like lawyer keywords, etc. And you’re gonna make like 80 bucks per 1000 pageviews. You, it doesn’t make sense, I really depends on your monetization, if you have a really good offer that’s really niche down. But we’ll convert Hi, I have no problem niching down because we buy tend to hold domains. Otherwise well, yeah, just how how what does it take to make, let’s say meet five figures a month, which is like kind of the goal for us, like we stopped basically.
Joe Troyer 8:25
Okay, so it kind of just your suggestion to people is kind of work backwards, from the monetization to figure out how broad or how niche down you want to go.
Gael Breton 8:33
Yeah, that’s basically it since like, if you go broad, just categorize, categorize your site properly, as you have a lot of subcategories very often what’s smart to do is brooding, branding broad, but then making sub categories, very small sub niches. And that can help a lot. Like, for example, like we had a camping site. And then I found like the sub niche, the RV sub niche was amazing, because like everything’s 12 volt, so when you plug it, it’s like it’s actually not the same HSC so like best Volvo TV best Volvo, fridge etc. These are 1000 1000 queries per searches per month words and they are low competition and the items are expensive. So like that is a great niche you can go into and like I was so chemists, I would make an obvious sub niche. And I would, I would just like hammer it, I would just hammer that Southern issue. So that’s the example of something that you can do when you start a new site basically.
Joe Troyer 9:29
Well, that yeah, thanks for the example. That helps. Cool. So the the main monetization methods that you’re focused on then you kind of said we’re Amazon, some of your people do some E comm what what are the other major platforms that you’re focused on these days?
Gael Breton 9:47
Now mostly, I mean, advertising I’m telling you advertising is completely underrated right now. But you know, it’s like so advertising with these networks now like you can make like 12 to 15 bucks per 1000 Doesn’t say Unlike however, it works for any keyword, including the easiest Q’s ever, so really like pick them whatever you can to 3x because it’s easy to get a lot of traffic from easy keywords than it is from like affiliate queries where you have like hundreds of athletes competing. So it’s like you kind of need to two 3x the RPM to be competitive. And it gets close enough to be looking at that. So I’d say advertising, media vine and ad Thrive they’re probably good at Amazon we don’t really do new Amazon sites anymore. Like it’s good for beginners but what for where we were at it’s it’s not hyping up to be frank. So that’d be like private offers meeting people like eventually like you get to that kind of like networking gaming affiliate where like you start with like the networks, etc. And then you just get to you get introduced people love that. Are you excited? Are you interested in companies who are kind of stuff and then you end up being better offers or higher payouts, that what is advertised publicly, all that kind of stuff and build these relationships like, same like the site that we saw in January, like, we literally had the CRO, guys from the company, we’re promoting literally consulting for our site for free, because we’re moving so much volume for them. So you can have like real business, real business relationships with the people? Yes, it was. And, and we run out on fanaticism.
Joe Troyer 11:16
Yeah. I mean, I can definitely say that the number one affiliate offer that I ever drove traffic to long term, you know, the way that it became number one is, is it was a private offer. Right, it was a public offer at first, and then they saw how much well, you know, traffic, we were driving and sales were driving. And, you know, we met him at an event and it was like, Oh, my gosh, we’ve been trying to reach out to you guys, like, you know, and, you know, we were trying to hide from right. To talk to us, right, like, you know, we wanted to hide behind the computer screen. And by meeting them in public, you know, we were able to come up with a much better deal together that made us a whole lot more money in the long term.
Gael Breton 11:56
For us very, very often, we managed to get to three times the Commission’s that are advertised publicly, provided we have some decent volume already, like don’t come to an affiliate program owner with no sales, no sight, no nothing. And as for 3x, but like, you know, if you’re moving hundreds of hundreds of 1000s of sales per month, then it’s something that’s very realistic for them. Like, if you consider like paying salespeople, like they get paid way more than most affiliates, so it’s like provided you a reliable source of sales, then it’s something that they will be considering, especially when they have competition.
Joe Troyer 12:30
Okay, cool. So you said you guys just ended up selling another website? And I didn’t know about that one. But you obviously can’t share a lot. I understand that
Gael Breton 12:41
legally, I’m not allowed. Yeah.
Joe Troyer 12:44
When when you look at like building another one right, now that you just sold yet another one of these if the website what’s on your mind, like what what are the changes? Right? Like, what, what’s the retrospect? Right? What’s the Okay, we did it again, right? What are the changes? What’s the feedback loop for you? Like,
Gael Breton 13:03
I mean, the approach we take to like building sites these days is like, very different from our differences feel because we’ve just planned the first 500 Pages for that site, like right off. Like, we literally have like a dyno, this was like the site, like the whole structure before we even buy the domain, right? So like, it’s all done, like, it’s just like, Okay, here’s the spreadsheet, how do we make it a website, but like, everything is just ready, before we even launch anything. So really, what we spend like two months was planning and thinking etc. Like, we tend to buy even multiple domains until like, we’re actually picked, like, we kind of like, you know, it’s like you pick something and then like two weeks later, you hate it. So yeah, that multiple times until you actually get the final branding that you like, and so on. But yeah, I mean, the thing is, like, most people just don’t even plan 10% as much as they should plan stuff. And that’s last night, we sold like we built in 18 months, we sold it for like make six figures. The reason why is because it was planned. And it was like a factory. Like it was just like, like we basically broke down all the keywords type of content. And then like we’d say, Okay, here’s like a T of these. And then literally, like, we’d have writers for his all at and like some like I was publishing every Friday, basically, I would just like have everything in draft and I would just go through the whole thing and publish 80 pages on Friday. Yeah, and get everything indexed. And then on Monday, I will check everything’s been indexed, and queued for link building and it’s like just building a factory basically and so but like it only works because everything was already in the spreadsheet in the beginning it was already planned so on if you just like starting like Oh yeah, I’m just gonna I’m just gonna like freestyle it and just like start a site on parenting or whatever and figure it out as I go. Usually there’s no that’s why I will say like when you talked about the name like Now where’s the money because like, I definitely want that thing planned before I even consider getting into a niche I almost will talk to most I say providers if you’re gonna do affiliate marketing before we even have a domain name, etc. Having it’s not something a beginner should do. It’s something that someone that has done this before should do because for us like we have all these history of sites that we’ve done, etc that we can show Case etc. So people know we service when we come into a market. And even though we don’t have the credential and so in that niche, because we have potential noticing people take us, like they listen to us, we were able to ask them information about how much they sell through the affiliate program was the average EPC, etc, etc. And that’s also part of the niche selection together with like, the planning, etc. And then we can project how much the second? So, yeah, new sites, just it’s mostly a lot of planning. And to be frank 70% of the brain just never ends up building being a site, like we always find a reason not to do it, you know. So like, for every site, we stopped, there’s like five or six, quite in depth niche research that are just thrown in the trash.
Joe Troyer 15:41
So when it comes to niche research, like what what are the things that you’re looking at? Right? Like, for me, I’m looking for kind of things that have already been proven like, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, right? Like, you just want
Gael Breton 15:52
to find people who make money already.
Joe Troyer 15:54
Yeah, find people that are making money already. And then those are the markets that we’re gonna go into it you you take a similar philosophy or kind of how do you approach niche research?
Gael Breton 16:03
Yeah, I mean, obviously, we have like a lot of criteria. So like, we only do, we only do non pay that we shouldn’t building basically. So we don’t pay for links. I’m not saying we will never pay, but at this point, we don’t pay. And if we ever do, we just let people know. So like, we’re trying to be honest with the audience. So like, a lot of things come into that because of like, we play on our strengths, we know what our process looks like. And so like, if we’ve been gambling, non pedaling buildings, just forget it, you know, travel, forget it, etc. So you kind of like know what process you already have in place from like, your previous projects, and then you just transpose them to what you’re gonna do for this one. And then based on that, you just have like deal breakers. And then as you just go through these niches, you’re like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then like, when you fix all these niches that for us, it needs to be family friendly. It needs to be compatible with doing the white hat outreach that we do, it needs to like things like we like when niches have like scientific terms and complex jargon, etc. Because these are keywords opportunities that we can take over. And like we tend to, like, be quite good at creating info content that explains clearly difficult concepts. And so like, it’s a great source of links for us. So like, when a niche has that is a plus point, etc. So we can have a spreadsheet with like, all these columns, and it’s like gains or loses points for each column. And then at the end, you kind of have a score for the niche. And that’s how you pick basically was like obviously sighs making money. Like we kind of have like big sites making money, small sites making money, like so we have Dr. ranges, like Dr. 60, plus Dr. 25, or less, like do they actually rank for some money queries or stuff so that we can monetize early, like rich breakeven, quick enough, all these things. So we kind of have all these things go through that. And then whichever niche has like the top three issues with the highest points, kind of like, get into a proper discussion.
Joe Troyer 17:50
So you kind of have like a whole grading kind of criteria, almost based upon your guys’s experience and kind of the assets that you have, so to speak, and your systems and processes to make sure you’re the one that is best suited for you specifically,
Gael Breton 18:05
yeah, we’re not reinventing the wheel every time we start a new site, right? So we need to, like use what we’re good at, we need to use our strengths. We need to like pick niches where what we’re better at than most people actually stands out and gives you a significant advantage. Otherwise, otherwise, it’s like you’re getting into a niche where it’s just gonna be a lot of hustle. And even if you managed to be successful, it’s just gonna be so much work maybe so much money spent that the profit in the end is not going to be nearly as high Yeah.
Joe Troyer 18:31
So how do you get your ideas for a niche though?
Gael Breton 18:35
Are these different areas so I mean, marketplaces are a great workplace to look at for example, like what Versailles has sold because people can’t can’t lie it’s like you know, it’s like you go to an SEO conference most most numbers people give you divided by two and then you probably get what they actually make inside sales it’s a lot more difficult to do that because you know you’re shooting yourself in the foot to actually sell your site so I quite like marketplaces just honestly going through affiliate networks as well so I picked it up offers look at the sites that rank look at what else they promote look at the angle look at all that. So affiliate networks became offers just even googling like you know, like we were in for it we weren’t following affiliate programs like googling food programs, etc look at all this stuff. And also we can have like between one and three so depends when it’s released and and just look at these and then look at the sites that promote these and look at what else they promote and kind of like you kind of can you can make kind of this graph is like circles that overlap each other and kind of get an idea where the center is or where like the sub issues are etc and then you get an idea there’s a cool site called like high paying affiliate programs.com I think as well that has like a lot of them. One more cup of coffee has a bunch of them. Niche hacks has a bunch of them. So usually just look at these. Yeah, and like look at these monetize these best careers. These are tentative queries. Look at the biggest effect size, I mean go on CNET go and look at look at all these things. Then look at their competitors on hrs and then like you find a small size that are comparable and so And so it’s really, it’s a mix of like, it’s not really something where we’re like, oh, we’re just gonna look for news right now we got to look around, but rather like taking note as we bump into stuff as we walk as well. And you just have like these giant clips that have like stuff that you’ve collected, when it comes down to like, actually make a list of things that you should consider, then you already have a bunch of stuff you collected over time.
Joe Troyer 20:19
So do you guys have kind of the same core team that you have working on all of your authority sites? Or do you onboard and train kind of for each site that you build out or tell me a little bit about how the rubber meets the road, and you actually get all the work done and all the content done and all the, you know, link building, and
Gael Breton 20:36
it totally is specific to each site, actually, editorial people actually know about the niche, and specific to each site. But like other processes, like link building, like even illustrations, and all these other things, like videos that we do other, like other types of media, like editing, this stuff, is cross site. So we have follow up stuff that is specific, when it comes to actually delivering knowledge, knowing about the industry, doing a little bit like putting actual content together. And then the people that are formatted, promoted, make the actual technical part of the site happen, that kind of stuff, a common tool to sites. So yeah, there’s two sides to him, basically. But like, it’s a bit of a pain to build on, God told him for each site as well.
Joe Troyer 21:22
What goes into an editorial team for you guys? Is it just a writer and an editor? Or yeah,
Gael Breton 21:29
that’s it. It’s like, there’s like one main editor and like, maybe two to three writers, obviously, depends, like writers, you know, writers, you know, the dogs eat their homework every second week, and so on. So it’s just, it’s complicated to maintain ongoing stuff. But yeah, it’s usually around that, like two three writers when editor,
Joe Troyer 21:48
so man, that’s, uh, that’s why your content turns out so good, right, but definitely problematic process, I’m sure if finding a new writing team and a new editor for every niche you go in, I hats off to you. It’s
Gael Breton 22:05
not just that, it’s like people will really suck at creating critical like critical, like whether critical tools, what they’re writing, like most people write shitty these posts and stuff like that. And the big sites get away with it, because they have so much domain rating. But to be frankly, a brand new site in an industry, you need to stand out to some extent, you need to create original data into like, you know, like science that we create, now we actually get the products we do real life tests with that we do all of that, like we have original data, original photos, original, all of that, that comes with these, and we bring something new to the industry, then we visualize it in a nice way, then we do all these things, etc. And so that’s why allows our site to like really come out, like, once again, the site that we just saw, like, literally people were asking to link to us to use some of the assets that were on the site, actually, like people would email us and be like, Hey, can we use your graphics? Can we use all that etc. So even professional writers are usually really bad at structure can even professional editors. So we need to input quite a lot of ourselves in in the size to actually get them to the level where we want them to be critical. I mean, if you read like reviews on AutoHotKey, or something like that, you get the idea that Greg tried to really push it use this thing in real life and be like, Oh, I wish this was better. Or this is kind of okay, but didn’t really work as intended or something. And most people just don’t do that. And nobody really asks them to do that. And therefore, they don’t, they just don’t have that experience in real life. Even like, I have people that I can’t really say who they were work for, because that would give the neutral way. But pool for really big funded startups as writers. And we’re like, 10 times more demanding than these startups that like really, really big ones that you definitely know about. And yeah, when I see what they’re doing there, I’m like, wow, that’s shit.
Joe Troyer 23:54
It’s, in my opinion, writing hiring writers and managing writers is a very, very difficult task. And I gotta say like, from everything that I’ve seen of your of your guys’s you guys have done a really good job with it. So hats off to you guys, for sure.
Gael Breton 24:11
Yeah, I mean, it’s time like sometimes, you know, like, like, once again, I’m gonna tell another service like the circus like the most recent big one. Like we like we literally had writers walk for two months where we didn’t look too much with Mark and we come back to the two processes were like, What the fuck is this and literally through two months of walk away, and just rewrote absolutely everything with these guys on full time salary, you know? And it’s like, these things happen and these things cost money. And also like, it’s not because you achieved high quality ones that it will stay that way you need to also enforce it regularly. And that’s even harder than achieve it in the first place. Yeah.
Joe Troyer 24:49
Yeah. Takes a lot of patience. I feel like everything else pretty much you can get away with being pretty impatient but content. You got a lot of work cut out for you deeper
Gael Breton 25:00
So what you want to do, right? I mean, you can do shittier content and do okay, like, it’s like Google will give you traffic regardless, like just you kind of put the same subheadings as the top ranking content, and you have a bunch of links to your page, and you still can’t rank. But these sites 2345 years horizon, they never do that. Well, like they do well, for Yeah, for two years. And then you rarely hear about them again. And magically, the person that was in charges has a brand new, exciting project. That basically means the previous one fails. Yeah, and and so like, that’s what that’s one thing we were seeing is like, the High Court first of all, you get higher multiples, like the site we saw actually sold for like 17% higher than listed price when most sites sell for like 12% lower than listed price. So but it seems like there’s a demand from buyers. So you can actually, you know, get your money’s worth for trying a little bit harder. And it’s like it, we’re actually doing this correlation study now on headlines. So like, we just clicked 1.5 million headlines from Reddit, Twitter and Google and just kind of like try to correlate like, which was get the most links, which was getting a shout, etc. At the same time, what we did is we did a correlation study between like social shares, organic traffic and backlinks. And they actually all feed each other. Meaning that actually, if you just create like cookie cutter content for Google, it’s like, you would never share the stuff like never ever. It’s just like how to pour a glass of water tutorial type of thing. Nobody cares. Like it’s a great keyword, but nobody cares. And and we saw that across the biggest sites, the correlation is incredible between like the sharing the links and the organic traffic. And so between that and what we’ve been observing from other sites, so like, we have another site, that’s like, pretty much that had been pretty much exclusively getting traffic from Pinterest. But like a lot of traffic, that site now ranks number one for so many huge queries, without ever having gotten any kind of link building. And without even having much content on the pages. Most pages have like two to 300 words of content, like almost nothing. So that really shows that creating engaging content that people actually do appreciate, pays, in the long run in the short run. Now just buy the two star Textbroker content, you can probably rank with that short term. If you want to do something that’s long term that is going to sell for high multiple and all of that, then you need to push the boundaries a lot more than most SEOs do.
Joe Troyer 27:24
So speaking of your of your website, sell again, did you go about building that site with the end in mind of kind of selling it? Like was that the plan all along? Or wasn’t shown unity? Just kind of pop? Not really? No,
Gael Breton 27:41
it’s just like, so we kind of reached that. We reached that ceiling where we bid all the small sites like we definitely like we were just exactly between, there was kind of a batch of small sites. And then there was the top players, the top players were still very far off. It was still like, two years of work and probably working less on on other projects, to get it to get in their range. But we had some quite creative like angles for keywords and content that to sell sold really well. So revenue was good. And yeah, it’s like there wasn’t much in terms of progression for the next few years. Just reinvesting most of the money to grow. So it’s kind of we kind of reached that fork where we’re like, Well, how much do we care about the other stuff we’re doing all day, we just want to commit to this one. And honestly, we just chose to do the other stuff that we’re doing as well. And so that’s how we just decided to sell it. It was it was the right time, we will have experienced a bit slower growth, although the site is growing quite nicely right now. But they’ve done some things that I would probably not have done to my site. And yeah, so that’s why we sold it. It was just a good time. We cashed out nicely, like it wasn’t 18 months old as well. We were already profitable just in commissions. Because the cell the cell, it was like it was nice, actually.
Joe Troyer 28:49
Yeah, for sure. So can you take us into a little bit of the sales process and talk about kind of where you sold it, how you sold it, kind of the multiple you were looking for any tips or tricks, like you guys have obviously sold multiple sites now.
Gael Breton 29:06
I can give them multiple because we give the revenue numbers on the blog. So it’s actually I know a lot to get the sale price. So you could actually guess. Okay, so I can’t give you the multiple, I mean, Mark did most of the sales, I’ll give you the this idea of it. That was quite easy. First of all, it’s like getting quotes from Most brokers. And doing Having done that, I would say get quotes from a lot of brokers, because it was amazing the range of prices we got from this, like, you know, it’s like, one very popular broker gave us a quote for less than half of what we sold the price for and and when they gave us that I was like, No way. Like I just I’d rather just keep it and then they were like, oh, you know the professional. Let’s see, like sell it and then we’ll talk about it. So we sold to this for more than double and then I was like let’s talk about it. And they were there We’re quite open to talk about disaster, it wasn’t that but still, like, all I would say, for like anyone that’s seen sellside is going off course, because the range is massive. And although it’s a very new industry, and honestly, you know, it’s not as professional as it’s going to be in four or five years, etc. And so like, it’s kind of like a lot of guys just becomes a site brokers overnight or something and kind of come up with their own process, but they’re so different at this point, that it’s worth experiencing a lot of them. So yeah, we got a bunch of quotes, and analysis, the most important like how they justify the quote, like, you know, they look at your links, they look at your content, they look at the size they saw before, etc. By far, the one that impressed me the most was international, like they really looked into our link profile, like they saw that we didn’t pay for links decide like which kind of links we got, they were able to explain that. They were like, well, you get a lot of gross recently. But honestly, like, given the way you do these things, and you didn’t know that and you’ve been stable for three months, we’re going to assume that’s the baseline for your site and extend a lot of things like this, it was really good. So we went with them. And honestly, like, that’s how I got started getting offers, like 48 hours after I got out for sell. So we had to first getting like all the documents, we had to prove the income we had to prove, you know, give access to analytics to a lot that I please go into Google Analytics, if you want to sell your site. I know it was like freaked out. But GA Google knows your stuff anyway, like people opening your site on Android or on Chrome or anything, they already get the data like, it’s already happening. So yeah, you will need GA used to you gave all that stuff, they put a document together with all this data presented nicely sell it to like a private list of buyers first. And just from that, basically, the site never hit the main marketplace. Just because there was like a bunch of offers pretty much right away. So we did the first one, we started doing due diligence for the basically we check everything with the buyer, the buyer does check everything. And in the meantime, people were starting to even like increase the bids. Basically, we got the first bid was like slightly below sales price. And then just like we’re like now let’s just see, like, we’re still within the range of sales. And then like people just like there was more and more offers coming up. And eventually a competitor actually came out and offered like a much higher price. So we’re like, well, it’s really a lot of money. Let’s just, let’s just do that. So if you can rush the due diligence, then we’ll consider it. So they did that. And yeah, and we basically closed, it’s something like two or three weeks after we actually did the Prospector. So that was quite close. But quite fast. Sorry. Transfer took like two weeks or something, it was over Christmas. So we were all on Christmas holiday just having calls every day. And, but it was pretty simple to be honest. Like I mean, I worked with the tech guy to like transfer like, you know, make sure the CDN images don’t break, transfer all of that. I passed the hosting to them really easy episode that domain name. And then there was money on escrow once they got all of that and they signed it off, the money got released. And I think we got like two courses then after that. And then that was it. Basically, all the writers came with the site as well. So they got the staff, the editorial staff was it, which is fine by us. Because anyway, the we have a sorting per site. So it was completely fine. That’s also why we build our team this way so that if you sell the site, you can sell the total team widget. And that’s one thing I’m gonna say as well. It’s like a lot of brokers will consider your editorial staff as a cost and reduce your valuation for it. And I was like, What the fuck, if you buy a website, and you don’t want the sales that you fail on day one, and this is not an expense anymore, I like content doesn’t disappear, all the content that was done, like we spent 1000s of dollars for one writer position very often. It’s a lot of x plus our personal time, like it’s, it’s a huge asset to be placed on an editorial team, like when I see when I see brokers penalizing you because they’re like, oh, it took us so like, now it’s an investment in growth and decide to make that investment or you don’t the content doesn’t disappear overnight when the writers are not around anymore. And so that’s part of the valuation process. We have like, well, the industry really is to start maturing in how they break down cost, because they’ll treat you like you’re hosting they treat your writer costs like they treat your hosting cost. Your site can’t exist without your hosting costs, but it can exist with your writers not being on payroll. And so like yeah, there’s a lot of things like that where you go through workers and you’d be like guys, that is you starting to learn your own business model basically. So that was one great gripe I had against against against brokers. Not all of them like that. But But yeah, it’s it’s something that you need to like negotiate bargain. And if you do if you push back, you very often especially high end buyers, man they do the same they spend so much money in hiring. They do want these writers if they like that site, it’s because they like the content. If I give them the writer this added value It’s okay for them for the bios, in our case, like they devalued this massively. They really wanted to keep the writers on board and it’s tolerating for that site. NASA is growing because it’s a NATO team itself. So it’s something that is the kind of thing that you can push back. And it’s the kind of thing that like people want to buy bill, Heiko this I get penalized for by a lot of side brokers. Well, really, they should be rewarded for it. Yeah. And so yeah, it’s, that’s, that’s how I say push back and beat and negotiate and try a bunch of site brokers.
Joe Troyer 35:31
For you, for you guys. How bad was the due diligence piece, I’ve had sites where I’ve sold them, probably not to the multiple that you guys have. And the due diligence has been like hit or miss. It’s either been like, almost none, or like, just a ridiculous amount, like depends
Gael Breton 35:45
who the buyer is, man. It’s like, it’s like, 100% customer to the buyer, like, what do you want to see? And it’s like, I mean, for us, it was good, because, I mean, this was a big buyer. He had like, multiple million dollars to spend on buying websites, like he does that regularly to get coupons besides. So he, he was fine. And he knew that he knew our site, because we were competitors as well. So it was very simple for him to see that. But I’ve heard many stories of, you know, like seasonal niches, for example, where like, yeah, sales go up and down. It’s normal. It’s the trend right? And it’s like, you know, in the buying process, you start getting into kind of like a period where the sales just go lower. And the buyers just freak out because they’re like, oh my god sales are dropping, the site is already fucked. And I’m about to buy this no food, no way etc. Now, seasonality. So when winter comes to go Finnish is not as popular as part of how it works. And ice cream doesn’t sell as much in winter, you know, it’s like and so like the I’ve heard a lot of these stories for us. It was easy, but I think that as variable as the way the brokers value your site, basically so the whole industry is just like Iconia still trying to figure itself out. And as a result, like pretty much every site sale is a different experience, from our experience, like every time has been different last time has been quite smooth, etc. I’m sure next time is going to be horrible, just because we had such a good time.
Joe Troyer 37:08
Yeah, yeah, I’ve only sold a couple of sites. And they were very vastly different experiences. So that’s why exactly, yeah, makes sense. You mentioned or we talked about briefly, kind of your team a little bit, but you haven’t talked about Mark, can you kind of talk about Mark briefly and kind of what you do versus mark and how you separate your rules.
Gael Breton 37:30
So complicated, because like, it’s like most people are expected. Like, it’s just for us. It’s like, it’s just we developed our skill set together. So we don’t necessarily have like a traditional breakdown, like most businesses have, like he does some of the marketing, I do some of the marketing, I handle the tech stuff he’ll handle by the tax and everything. Handle editor quality, but he’ll handle editorial process. So he’ll make sure people get shit done. And I’ll make sure they do good sheets. I come up with his link building angles, all that stuff. He also oversees operations. So I’m I guess I’m like creating tactics more and he oversees them happening. And I get more the I guess I’m like, a bit more creative. And he’s more operations but like, still within the same processes, like usually you just give all of the angles into one person or all of that. But it kind of walks in the sense that having both of us we can we push back on each other as well. So like, Oh, you guys are doing volume. But look at these shillings like say say like, is that going to move the needle? Or like Yeah, show you ramped up the content by 20%. But honestly, like, I would never read this. And it’s like, it’s like a just allow us to like, get that thing. And we talk like this feature because we knew each other for so long. But
Joe Troyer 38:50
I think that’s why your guys’s podcast is so good, right? Because I can see that banter back and forth and how you got yeah, great prototype very quickly, internally is also kind of the same environment. I feel like as your podcast.
Gael Breton 39:03
Yeah, pretty much is exactly the same. I mean, buckets is just us calling each other and just chatting. Yeah, that’s that’s what it is. So So yeah, it’s like the breakdown is very well. And you know that it’s kind of stupid in the sense that it would be very hard for us to work with someone else because it’s just like we’ve been working for like, it’s just like, shaped us. But like, if you work with anyone else that has been more like segmented in a traditional way, then we would be lacking some skills and we would have overlaps as well. And so like it’s, yeah, it’s so so far, so good. So it’s fine. But But yeah, so it’s good to have both sides on a part of things. So it’s not like if we do the work twice, but like we also get double the critical sense and feedback on it. And there’s two people that care right like nobody will care as much about your business as you and you know it when you hire writers. You know, when you hire lingo those you know when you hire support people that like you see it is just not as good as HR account managers when you have a service, you see it as Oh massively. And so like it’s even better when to have you look at most processes. And also when we have our weekly meetings, we’re able to really catch up in depth about each day.
Joe Troyer 40:12
All right, so the the big thing that I wanted to cover with you, and I’m cognizant of time, is link building. And we haven’t really gotten into almost any link building at all. So one of the things that that I’ve been watching and I saw you guys do was your, your shotgun skyscraper kind of roll out. So, I, I’ve been doing a ton of guest posting a ton of sponsored posts as well, I teach my students kind of my, my angles and how we do it. And it’s really simple. I mean, we go for volume over anything we kind of, then we do some quick quality checks, make sure the sites have traffic and stuff once they’ve said Yes, right. Similar, I think, to what you guys do, but we’re just doing guest posts, and we’re just doing sponsored posts. We’re definitely not doing kind of the skyscraper model. So could you talk about kind of the differences or plus or minuses between the both and kind of how you got to where you guys are at today?
Gael Breton 41:10
Okay, I mean, it’s Casper was great, because there’s no marginal cost of content. So like, whenever you do a pose, you need to get content. And I’m sure most of your writer headaches comes from that, especially when you’re dealing with a third party website that just wants the content right now, whatever, it’s not good enough. It’s really annoying. So skyscraper just kind of skips that just like pitches implementing a link in an existing piece of content. One thing that can be cool with skyscraper is you can get links from pages that have links, which, which can be quite interesting. You often don’t nearly have as much control on anchor text, though. Because like you’re not writing the content, they’re kind of like editing the content and adding the link in, I would argue, as well, that links added to old pieces of content, feel sluggish in terms of taking effect in your ranking more than, like a brand new page or brand new index page, etc. So But over time, it kind of catches up with like, you know, within the first two months, like sometimes it takes a long time. But But really, the big advantage of it is you don’t have to pay for extra content, which is kind of nice. And you don’t have to run that whole content process to get it. It’s really just a negotiation, a pure negotiation process with another website to be like, Hey, is my thing good enough to add on your page? The approach is similar to what you describe. So it’s like large volume. A lot of people like hate that, to them. I’m like, Does every single ad you see on Facebook, seem really 100% relevant to you. And yet these businesses keep spending money. And Facebook is the biggest social network in the world. Right? It’s like it’s, so it’s kind of like it’s kind of like advertising sweet. Now, basically, that’s kind of
Joe Troyer 42:46
Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve got to have the shotgun approach personally, on the front, just like I’ve tried it in reverse and doing highly customized pitches and, and lots of research on the front. And every time I’ve done it, and I’ve compared it to kind of have more of the shotgun approach, so to speak. It’s always not done as well, just personally.
Gael Breton 43:06
So for us, we actually split our prospect list into these days. So like the really ideal ones, we actually do customers average. So anything above the 65 usually goes into the stream, etc. And goes the old way. Because like well being that was like, I would say 10 skyscraper easily? Like, usually, anything below the altar, and yeah, we don’t even outreach to them. And then 25 to 65 shotgun. So we kind of like have this whole segmentation system that goes into that, and, and puts people where they where they belong the most like they it was, again, the interest group that got mad at me, because like, oh, you sent me a generic outreach, email, etc. I’m like, Let me guess you’re between 25 and 65. And you’re like, you have this and this? And this is like, Yeah, well, then the process works. But,
Joe Troyer 44:01
yes, you didn’t have quite the quality metrics that we that we need in order to do the research.
Gael Breton 44:08
I mean, I was like, I was like, no hard feeling. I don’t think anyone in the age group is gonna complain about optimizing your cost per lead, right? It’s like, it’s just like you’re doing marketing, you’re not running your charity. If you’re if you aren’t just make money with marketing and invested in charities, and then you will help the world better, you know. But, so yeah, basically, that’s kind of the main difference. I think the rest of your approach seems quite similar to what we’re doing. There’s a lot of like, small details in all these things like how to optimize your delivery, like how to AB test your campaigns, build your custom templates for each approach, etc. Like we cover quite a lot in the course and so on. It’s also challenges with scaling when you start sending a lot of emails like you will struggle sometimes reaching the main inbox, you will often get into the spam box, etc. You need to be careful. So yeah, it’s more of like a detail game at this point, as The main strategy is pre public, we have a full blog post on on how we do things in bird’s eye view on the blog as well, that we will use not that long ago. And
Joe Troyer 45:10
later in the show notes for sure for everybody. When it comes to content then for for the skyscraper, you say that one of the main benefits, right is that you don’t have to write a piece of content for every guest post. But you definitely have to write something that’s good, of course, to link so when you’re thinking about kind of qualifications for a skyscraper. What are you looking at? Like? How do you come up with a topic and idea for a skyscraper?
Gael Breton 45:37
There’s like a super easy way to do it. There’s like a, it’s typically it’s like so keyword research, keyword difficulty on HFCs. Single is only based on external links to page, like up to the top 10. So what you do you pick the highest Keyword Difficulty keywords in your niche. And that’s it. That’s your topics. Like, is that simple?
Joe Troyer 45:57
Okay. So then, what’s, what’s your writing spec look like for the writers that like, how do you come up with something that looks and feels amazing? Sounds amazing reads amazing on the other end. So when we’re doing guest posts, and sponsored posts, right, like, and we’re writing the content, we’re just going to buzz, Sumo and we’re finding, you know, good content that’s been written, and then we’re just rewriting that content. So like, we’re, I’m not reinventing any wheel, so to speak. So with that being said, how would you take my approach and actually end up with some good skyscraper content?
Gael Breton 46:32
Okay, for skyscrapers, we, I mean, first case cover we do differently for a lot of things I mentioned before, like, remember when I said like, oh, social shares feed, or get feed links feed or in traffic? Well, you can keep two birds in one stone here, like, Sure, you can make us Kekova, there’s just a rewrite of something that’s done. And panacea. If you’re a good headline, you can get decent shots, but like, it’s also your opportunity to kind of like make a mark in your niche and actually, like, stand out and build that real authority. So you might as well you might as well just do that. And so, the first thing we do is we find other pieces of content on the topic, the best ones, basically, we have the top three, we put them in a brief, writers have to read them. Second of all, we scan this piece of content, we find all the subheadings, we put all of them in a tool called analyst. And we start ordering all these headings to make sure we hit all the subtopics properly. And then after that, we will do things like searching on YouTube for like tutorials and actionable stuff, and like real life things on doing these things. And then just extract that information and put it under each thing. And usually, like you’ll make it usually it’s gonna be a nice post. So it’s gonna be something like this. So you write each subheading, that way. And you mentioned a lot of these external sources, etc, you just become the hub that restricts all of that properly and explaining concepts etc, we have illustrators that are illustrate this thing and just make it look cool, etc. And a lot of things that make skyscraper stand out is actually just your the way your site looks, your branding, your site template, etc, your site looks good, even, like, just copy paste content on the WordPress ID token quite good. So most of the time, the people that will listen to this podcast will have a shitty template on WordPress, and they will create something great, but when they put it on their site, it’s still gonna look like nice. So I highly recommend people spend time on their branding properly. It’s gonna help with this case cover process is gonna pay dividends eventually. i It’s kind of fun to do anyway. Yeah, we use the elemental team builder these days is quite good. Like you can really just like tweak pretty much any part of your site. Yes, it’s not the absolute best for PageSpeed. But I’m willing to sacrifice like 0.2 seconds page load for actually being able to change stuff on my site easily and if you use proper caching, etc. Like, you can still get like one second page loads.
Joe Troyer 48:43
Yeah, you guys the site is looking great these days as well. You mentioned dyno list. What is that?
Gael Breton 48:49
Dinah list is basically like a mind mapping tool. It’s kind of it’s kind of like bullet point base. So it’s, it’s kind of a there’s another tool called workflowy that does the same thing. But this one’s like is better basically, like the folder system is better, etc. It’s free. And like every single even the podcast when we do it. Like we’re not just like free talking. We actually have like everything in bullet points and following it through, etc. That’s what allows us to just not ramble the whole time. And so yeah, Dallas is where I spend probably half of my day easily, like half of all my days are spent on dialysis.
Joe Troyer 49:25
Okay, yeah, we’ll definitely have to link that up in the show notes. I’ve definitely used workflowy but hadn’t heard of Dinah list. Cool. Thanks for the resource there,
Gael Breton 49:33
north. All right, fantastic,
Joe Troyer 49:35
good stuff. So working on all of these authority sites, like how do you manage to run all of these like, obviously, it seems like you, you and Mark are very organized. Seems like you guys are pretty systematized process driven, but kind of what’s the what’s the structure that helps you guys manage these from project to project from day to day?
Gael Breton 49:58
First of all, we don’t walk on everything. In all the time, it’s not possible to do high quality work, and you just don’t have the mind space to just work on everything. We have a lot of sites on standby, like, we have sites that we’ve shared publicly that we haven’t touched in, like a year plus. And, you know, that’s kind of the point of building these passive income sites is sometimes you just don’t work on them, and you do something else. So like, we often have like one main focus, and we work on that. And then we have quarterly plannings. We meet up in real life, we rent like a nice hotel, meeting room or something. And we just make the list of every single one the next three months and like what we want to achieve, and just go through that and do nothing. And we use Asana for tasks. So like, we actually have like these projects with like older quarterly planning tasks, and then we catch up on them every week. And we derive smaller tasks from them, like, let’s say, one of our tasks, like redesigning a site, so maybe there’s like, we need to get logo done, we need to call colors, we know that etc. So like, these are some tests that we do, and we pick some of these tests every week, and just progress towards what we want to do for this quarter. next quarter, do it again. So like, we don’t work on everything all the time. Like it’s doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. We also don’t work on that new projects. To be frank, like, we tried to do things, right. Rather than, like, do a lot of things. I would argue that sometimes maybe we should try to do more things and be willing to sacrifice a degree of quality, that might be a weakness, but as I mean, our readers don’t complain. But But, but it’s true that sometimes we do sacrifice a bit of groceries for like, because we want to do things right. to, like, promote your business does. Okay, so decisions we can
Joe Troyer 51:36
make, you know, so on your authority sites that are kind of sitting in the background, so to speak, on pause is content being added in such or it’s just like sitting as is. Okay, so you, you’ll give the content team like 180 posts, like you did on last one. And when it’s kind of done, it’s kind of done. And maybe you’ll revisit it or?
Gael Breton 51:55
Yeah, exactly. So think about, like, every time like basically, when you do keyword research, when we do a keyword playing basically, from what I’ve said, there’s going to be like these low end like easy to like monetize keywords, there’s going to be this high KD keywords that are going to like build the topical authority and the links to the sites with skyscraper. So it’s kind of like the two ends that we have. But every time you add a piece of content each and the next keyword is usually if you don’t do keyword research, probably not as good as the previous one. Right. So like, the highest KD keyword in your initial is probably going to yield the most links. And then you go down, down, down, down down, once you have like hundreds of pages, the opportunity cost is actually not nearly as good as it was when you just started the site. Now how big the amount of pages is depends on how focused you are initially, if you’re on a very focused niche, scanning fairly small site. If you’re if you’re like a broad site, then you’re going to have a lot of pages that you can do that have a good opportunity cost. And so the way we look at it is we look at all the stuff that we have in our portfolio. And we like what’s the best opportunity cost right now. What are we going to look at right now. And so sometimes it was like, I mean, sometimes it would make sense to add more content, but we just don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it. Because hey, we’re not perfect, far from it. And so yeah, we just tried to basically maximize our time and money by just putting money and time where it’s going to have the best return. And so sometimes, and many times it means just like it’s not worth it to take it either going face to face with the really, really big sites in the niche, like the online keys, etc, which we’re not, we’re not necessarily ready to compete with. Yeah, all like maybe we ran out of kilos for that one offer that made us money or like that kind of stuff. It can happen, you know, you don’t really create like, you will optimize content, you will tweak the site, you will do SEO stuff. But like you don’t necessarily have to have content all the time. Like I’m really not a big fan of the blogging model anymore where you feel obligated to post all the time. If you check on authority, I have killed the blockchain. There’s no blog feed anymore. That’s all there is a kind of like stealing from Facebook, and YouTube, there’s like a notification bell and you click and you can find the latest posts. But there’s no blog page anymore.
Joe Troyer 54:06
Yeah, I see a lot of people move in that way. And we just, we’ve talked a lot about that actually on the podcast. Tim solo and I were discussing that. And speaking of Tim from H refs. You mentioned Dinah list, you mentioned H refs, you mentioned elements or many other big tools these days that like are making your life a lot easier that you would recommend.
Gael Breton 54:30
We like Sophos SEO lately, as well for on page. It’s really good. I’m sure Matt also talked about it.
Joe Troyer 54:36
Okay, actually, he didn’t. Oh, really?
Gael Breton 54:39
Okay, surprising. He showed it to me, actually. So yeah, suffice it was like an unpaid it’s like a conditional unpaid show. So it basically scrapes the top 100 results. And it looks at like what is the most common across all the pages that rank and tells you Oh, like this word, count these keyword density this stuff like that allows you to like tweak your pages. And most of the time we get positive results. Not every time These things don’t work 100% of the time and give this 100 reasons why. But overall, it’s been quite good. And they have like this content auditing, you put your url, it tells you exactly what to change what to do, etc. And it’s quite nice. It’s sorted like 29 bucks a month, and they’re adding a text editor as well right now. So you’ll be able to copy paste your content and just like you’d be able to edit at the tools in etc.
Joe Troyer 55:21
How’s that compared to something like Cora?
Gael Breton 55:24
I mean, Cora is the best on page SEO tool with like, how much time do you spend optimizing one page was Cora.
Joe Troyer 55:31
Exactly, yeah. It’s
Gael Breton 55:34
I said, it’s the smartest guy I’ve mentioned this you i 100%. Great guy. But in terms of usability, and in terms of like giving that to an employee? It’s complicated. Yeah.
Joe Troyer 55:47
Yeah, my eyes bleed looking at that tool. It’s amazing. But it’s an all day type of tool. It’s me going on a been on a bender for a day or two.
Gael Breton 55:56
Like extra resurrected? Yeah, it’s
Joe Troyer 55:58
Yeah, exactly. Those were the, I can’t
Gael Breton 56:02
give that to staff, like people are just gonna start rolling their eyes. And just overall, once again, the opportunity cost. Like, it is better by a fair margin, I would say than any other on Page tool 100%. But like, most for most quarters, you don’t need to go that deep. You just don’t. You just need to be good enough and like VA at 28. And it’s often the best opportunity cost as a business to do that. Rather than like spend five days on one page on the site was like hundreds of pages. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Troyer 56:35
I love you talking about opportunity. Opportunity costs, too. And that’s how I run kind of our quarterly meetings and 90 day kind of check ins on our plans is the same thing. And even from week to week, I catch myself just looking at the opportunity costs. It’s like zooming out. And it’s like, looking at the opportunities of things I could be working on. And it’s like, you know, how long is it going to take and what’s the payout and some things like they just get ignored. I mean, and people do get upset every once in awhile. But again, like we don’t run, like, we do it for a profit. So we’re going to focus on the things that are going to make obviously the biggest,
Gael Breton 57:12
you want to make sure you deliver a good experience to your customers, you want to make sure you deliver what you promised them. But it’s like, if you are perfectionist, then you will never grow a business because you cannot it’s just impossible. Like, unless you’re like a really well policed 100 years old fortune 500 company like Coca Cola. It’s not happening. There’s never you never put a bottle of Coke. It’s no good. It’s just the same thing. It always works. But to be frank, this has taken 100 years and like, millions of people if you can’t turn about people, you know. So it’s not exactly something that’s reachable within your lifetime. And always in the amount of people that you have available to so most people need to accept things on that. Okay, like, so many times, like it’s like, oh, yeah, something is broken on your site or whatever. Like, yeah, I mean, first of all, we taught we try stuff all the time. We just like yeah, we make mistakes all the time. Most of us have followings because we fucked up before. It’s like, yeah, it’s, we do a lot of things wrong, and it’s fine. What counts is like, your trajectory as a whole company, you know? Yep.
Joe Troyer 58:19
100% Yeah, we, we move fast. And we break shit. It’s okay. We’ll fix it someday.
Gael Breton 58:24
Yeah, no, I think I think there’s there needs to be like, as you grow, you should definitely allocate a percentage of your resources to like fixing things and optimizing them. But so that you kind of have a budget for it, you basically have a budget, right? And when it’s expanded, this is done, like you don’t have it anymore. And then you just work on progress in the like, for us, we probably spend like 15 20% of our resources in fixing and optimizing things.
Joe Troyer 58:47
Yep. 100% Yeah, that’s a great way to look at it to any of those maintenance tasks. Like obviously, you were, your mark shouldn’t be on anyway. That should occupy your headspace.
Gael Breton 58:58
Unless we’ll have to figure it out. So we’ve refiguring out a lot of like on page optimization right now. So like, yeah, do some just do like testing to see what’s working, what’s not working. And once I’ve found something that works, I just show it to someone and it worked for us, you know?
Joe Troyer 59:11
Yep. 100% Cool, man. I’ve really enjoyed having you on in the podcast. I got one more question but before we get to that, where should we link up to you guys in the show notes obviously, we can link already hacker into the podcast what are the other places for you guys?
Gael Breton 59:27
Yeah, I think we do a good job enough a call to actions on the homepage you’re gonna go for it. Now actually, I’m just gonna say the free webinar we gave on the homepage it’s like it’s quite in depth so if you want like a big training on like authority sites like it’s yes, we will teach your course at the end like but you can literally watch the free training this like talk for like an hour and a half or two hours showing all this stuff in detail and like I have the ability to like show screenshots and like show me doing stuff which plugins we use all that stuff so people want like more details on the how to and they really need to agree on I’m doing these things, then the webinar on the homepage is actually a good place to start.
Joe Troyer 1:00:05
Okay, awesome. Cool. So, instead of asking you to recommend your favorite book, or your favorite three books, I want to do something a little different. I feel like that’s kind of the norm podcast. I want to ask you what, what’s the one book, right? That’s made a huge impact on the way that you do business.
Gael Breton 1:00:24
The Lean Startup, I think this stuff is like I read it ages ago, but it’s my favorite. I think my favorite part of the book is like when he talks about like, sending 100 wedding invitations. And he’s like, Oh, how are you gonna do like folded? Like, fold all of them and put all of them in the envelope, etc? He’s like, Yeah, well, if you fold all of them, and you realize they don’t fit the envelope, like you just wasted all your time, you actually you it’s faster to do things small, one by one, even though it seems inefficient until you actually understand the process properly. And then after that automated, so you should run everything once from A to Z, before you build a process around it. And I think 99% of SEO peoples tried to automate stuff that has never made money. And and that’s where their waste most of their time. Yep. I
Joe Troyer 1:01:10
love that. That’s a great analogy. Yeah, we got to do it. First, we got to get a result first, right and then decide, you know, if that’s what we should be spending our time systematizing
Gael Breton 1:01:20
for sure. It applies to like building websites as well. Like I see a lot of beginners top five websites, you know, I’m like, What are you doing? Like, I don’t know, five websites at once. No way like building five editorial teams, etc. At once, like, no, no chance. Like people try to all the time try to do many, many big scale things, because they think that’s the way but they don’t even understand their own business yet. Yep.
Joe Troyer 1:01:42
100% couldn’t agree more. Awesome Book. Thanks for the recommendation. And everybody. Thank you for joining us on another episode of show me the nuggets. And thanks so much, Gail, for joining us.
Gael Breton 1:01:52
Thanks for having me
Joe Troyer 1:01:53
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai
