Canva's $26B SEO strategy, Communities gaining SEO traffic, & A cautionary tale for affiliate sites

Do you know how much Canva is valued at?

$40 billion or did they drop the valuation?

Canva, last I saw was $26 billion, but I think you could be right. So when I type Canva valuation, the information says $26 billion as of March 2024.

Which means—

I'm not seeing the $40.

It probably dropped. I believe Canva at one point was worth $40 billion.

Oh yeah, you're correct. So 2021 it was valued at $40 billion and then it got adjusted to $26 billion, but still a lot of money, right? I want to give you guys the Canva SEO strategy here. So just for context, they drive 209 million visitors per month. The traffic value is $41.5 million per month if they were to pay Google for that traffic, right? And by the way, they have 290,000 referring domains. So their domain rating is 92 out of 100. So what their SEO person started to notice, and this was a long time ago, is that if you search for Halloween template or Halloween posters, He noticed that a lot of people, there's a lot of search volume. And then you realize for every single holiday, every permutation, all these things, there's templates, there's posters, everything, right? So they just started going hard on all these templates and posters. And then they would just make sure that they had, I think they have a product-led growth motion where like a freemium option people can sign up to and people got the templates that they wanted and that's how they grew. Workable does the same thing too. They do job description templates. So oftentimes templates, will work really well because a lot of people just want the— there's a lot of search traffic for those.

It's an amazing model. What you'll find though is when people type in like these template-related keywords, they don't convert as well as people just typing in like photo editing software, right?

Yeah.

But you can get so much volume and it's cheap traffic, especially if you can rank organically where your conversion rate may not be as high to paid because they may just download the templates and then they don't want to pay for the product or use anything. But it's okay because you're getting A, brand awareness, B, a portion of those people are going to sign up, and C, a portion of the people that sign up will eventually pay, even if it's a smaller percentage than the person typing in photo editing software.

Yep. By the way, on that note too, so when people try to push lead magnets, let's say they're running traffic from Meta or LinkedIn to these checklists or templates, they also don't convert as well because people just want the template. And oftentimes when I used to download templates in the past, I just download it and then It'd feel really good that I downloaded it and oftentimes I wouldn't even open it. And so you're actually better off giving like a how-to because then you can build like a VSL or like a webinar because you can actually build a relationship with them. That's going to convert a lot better. You might get more drop-off because people aren't going to watch the whole thing, but still you're qualifying the traffic better.

Yeah, no, and if you want to grow and you want to grow to be a big company, you're going to have to take multiple angles to generate signups and revenue. Not all of them are going to be equal. Some are going to be amazing, some of them are going to be mediocre, some of them are going to be crap, but it really is a numbers game if you want to scale to become a large company like a Canva.

Yeah. By the way, I mean, I've been sending you these text messages, but this guy that's going after Cody Sanchez, Sahil Bloom, Nick Huber, Andrew Wilkinson, and more, this guy's name is Horny Adolf Hitler. And so just for context, everyone, so Neil and I are friends with some of these people, but this guy is growing his Twitter account. What are your thoughts on horny Adolf Hitler?

So I didn't read most of them that you sent me. My bad.

I did— Wow.

I did see the Cody one. He was making a claim that she didn't go to Goldman Sachs for 7 years. She went for 2 years or 1 year or whatever the number was, right?

Yeah, that one doesn't matter as much. I think he's— I think the ones where he's hitting pretty hard right now is Andrew Wilkinson, and he's a mutual friend of ours, right? I think this hater approach, this anonymous hater account approach, I think it's interesting, right? It's kind of like that guy Coffeezilla on YouTube who has like a ton of subscribers. But the problem with that is you're not making any friends. And it tends to generate, when I look at all the comments, it's the schneidenfreude in people, right? It's like wanting to see other people fail. And then you see all those people in the comments. Yeah.

So just to give you context for Andrew, he's just saying that what, like his company isn't worth as much?

And so he's okay. What he called out this morning, and we had a mutual friend that sent this to me this morning. And so, you know, Andrew reported $46 billion or $46 million in EBITDA in 2023. And he's saying, dude, he's saying like $42 million of that was added in from another company and it's a non-cash thing and it shouldn't be counted as an EBITDA. So really the EBITDA is maybe $3 or $4 million or so. And he's like, how is this thing worth $600 million? And the guy that sent it to me, he's like, this guy seems really smart. I want to know who he is. So because this mutual friend— actually, no, we'll just leave it at that. I don't want to reveal anything else, but continue. Okay.

And then what is he saying about Nick? Nick is like the guy who does— I follow him on Twitter. I think I believe he's the one that does like storage, public storage type business.

Self-storage.

Yeah.

Yeah. He's saying his portfolio is underwater and it's only like 67% occupancy. And then like when he has to refinance, everything's going to go underwater because of the rates. The interest rates, right? And then like Nick responded, I think he responded with his own thing saying like, no, this is where we're at. Like, we're going to be fine. I don't know enough details around it, but basically it's like real estate, right? When you have to refinance, it goes underwater once the interest rates go much higher, right? So it's a little— you would know more than I would because you used to invest in real estate.

The big thing that I don't get is, all right, so forget whether this What is it? Something Adolf Hitler?

Horny Adolf Hitler. He actually has like other accounts like Horny Joseph Stalin and like all these people that were terrorizing the world.

All right, so whether he's right or wrong, what's the point of just releasing all this stuff? A, he's not going to end up making money out of it. It's not like these are publicly traded companies that you can just go and short. And B, the other problem that you end up having is, all right, let's say he builds up a massive following. How do you monetize a hate account? Those are really tough to monetize and make money from. So you're spending all this effort to put out information, and if you just want to do it for shits and giggles, by all means, do whatever you want. But if you're actually trying to build a business, hating is a terrible way to monetize. It just doesn't convert too well in the long run.

It's a very short-term strategy. And if you want to do something for long-term, same thing what we said in the past, if you're going to do SEO, do things the long-term way, right? And usually that means it's the white hat way, right? In this case too, you're better off building relationships with people and taking the time to build people up versus tearing them down. You know, I don't know if he's right or not on these things. I think he's— I've seen him wrong on a couple occasions, but nonetheless, it's interesting to see that he's been growing and we'll continue to monitor this over time.

I used to have a blog back in the day called Pronet Advertising, and I would release a version of hate articles, but not like this, more so productive hate articles. So I would release articles—

What does that even mean? Productive hate articles?

Yeah, so I would be like, let's say there was a company called like.com. I think they eventually sold. It was like a picture site. I think they changed the name to Raya or maybe it was Raya before and then like.com. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'd be like, I would create articles. I'm making it up. It was something like this. It was just too long ago for me to remember. But like, why like.com is not liked by Google. And then I would end up breaking down everything that they're doing wrong from an SEO standpoint and what they can do to fix it to get more traffic. and grow their business. And some of the people didn't like me writing an article about their business, but when I say it was hate, it was productive. I wasn't saying crap product or you guys don't know what you're doing. I was talking about, hey, you're not ranking, you're not doing your marketing right, this is how you fix it. And a lot of those people would call me up, be like, hey, I don't know why you wrote that article, but I want to fix it and how do we hire you? And it was a great way to generate revenue.

Yeah, that is a productive— that I don't even see that as hating. So if you're talking about websites like, hey, this, you're doing this wrong over here, that gets people interested because they don't want to do things wrong. And then also if you show their competitors too, nothing riles them up more than seeing them do worse than their competitors.

And then what I would do after I wrote the article, so I'd go after venture-funded companies, I would then email the board members and I'm like, hey, you may want to send this to the founder of like.com. You know, so then they would get emails from their board members just forwarding it and they're like, yeah, X and Y VC sent this to me. You know, I want to get it fixed. Because if your board members, a few of them send you something.

Yeah, they have to listen to their board. It's like, whoa, where did this thing come from? It's like, whoa. And then the CEO will then send it to the decision makers on the marketing side.

Yeah, it was really effective strategy to generate revenue.

All right everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And we hope to see you inside. Dude, you know what else is effective right now? So we've talked about the rise of Reddit and Quora, right?

Yeah.

Now, so check this out. Kevin Indig wrote this. So the rise of communities, not only Reddit has gained a crazy amount of visibility on Google now at the level of amazon.com since the hidden gems update in May 2023, small communities have sprouted from search soil too. So you can see in the black over here, This is the HubSpot community. It's gone up and to the right. community.zapier.com, it's gone up, not necessarily as hockey stickish as the other ones. And then Shopify has gone up, right? Both HubSpot and Shopify have very strong domain authority. Same thing with Zapier too. But Zapier has, I don't know, they have such a strong programmatic SEO strategy that it might be diluting this over here. That would be my guess. But this is interesting. School.com is growing very quickly too. Yeah.

Community-generated content is a great way to grow. You just got to make sure the community isn't putting out a ton of spam content because it can hurt you, or they start putting in keywords like gambling and Viagra and all this kind of stuff. But what's funny, if you think about a lot of the sites that are community-based like Reddit, Remember Reddit has a deal with ChatGPT. I think Google also has a deal with them too, right?

Correct. There's a lot of these licensing deals. I think there's like 2 more that's popped up for OpenAI this week.

What's funny is, is someone pointed to me that isn't it funny how Reddit's going public and as they're going public, all these announcements came out about partnerships like ChatGPT is sponsoring. And I'm like, oh yeah, Sam Altman does, you know, he's involved in both of them.

And, uh, oh yeah, yeah, I was like, he has a big stake in Reddit.

Yeah, I was like, oh, that's a smart move. I'm not hating him for that. I would do the same thing. And I'm not saying he did the deal just for that, but you know, if that's extra cherry on top, why not?

Yeah, he's good on money. He's way smarter than us. Yeah. All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people, and this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We do this event in Beverly Hills, and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders if you want to hang out with amazing people. Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more, and we'll see you inside. By the way, um, so this actually ties in with, um, these, these affiliate sites too, right? So here's a cautionary tale for affiliate websites. So This tweet comes from Lily Ray. And so you can see the site bestproducts.com and its trajectory serve as a good summary for what happened with SEO in the last year. So let's just look at this over here. This is the traffic we can see for best products, which is like best blender, best ice cream machine, right? Just writing reviews on these things. It was going pretty well. 2021 is pretty good. 2022 is still pretty good. And then after that, it just tanked. Like you look at June 2024, It's like maybe the search visibility index was a 20 before. Now it seems like it's like a 1 out of 20, right? On this graph over here. And by the way, this website, they've done everything pretty well. It's like, hey, here's why you should trust us. The articles are very high quality. They follow all the Google guidelines. But the reality is Reddit, e-commerce, other forums now, they own the top positions for these comparison type keywords because People do tend to trust communities or like reviews. Reviews are also user-generated. Communities are also user-generated too, versus just one blog post that tends to just favor itself to generate more revenue for the website.

My favorite is, my favorite is those sites that review others and other companies. And we've gotten them where like people will review my company and be like, Neil Patel's company scammed me. We gave him $200 to do SEO. And I'm like, we don't do SEO for $200. $200, we would lose money.

Oh wait, where did it show up?

It didn't show up on Google. It was like really far down. And then those people, and then I get emails from those website owners who write the reviews and like, hey, we can get this removed. We know the website owner for $20 grand, we'll remove it. And I'm like, you know what? You can keep it up. I'm not paying you your $20 grand. And at the beginning we used to pay and we're like, well, we never did. I'm like, show me what the website was because we never took on anything for $200. And we would just say it's false and we send legal letters and all this kind of stuff. And when we started looking at like the hours that we're spending in legal, we're like, if someone actually only wanted like $2,000, it would be cheaper to do that, give them the $2,000 than pay the legal bill. And funny enough, what we found is you pay them and then another similar looking site with the same template just pops up within your view. I'm like, oh cool. This is just a scheme where these people are making quick money.

So it's like, it's again, it's To me, it's kind of, it feels the same as like making a hater account. It also like, to me, this is such a short-term business model and you could feel it in your guts, right? If you feel it, just don't do it.

Yeah.

And it feels like it's going to be work and it feels like you're doing the right thing and people like your product, then yeah, probably keep doing it.

No, totally. And like we had all that kind of stuff. Like we even had people write reviews and be like, yeah, I was paying them month to month. Well, technically we don't do month to month contracts. All our contracts are annual, has always been that way from day one. We do have, Out clauses after a certain period of time. Let's say if it's a really long-term contract, like a 2-year contract or 3-year contract, etc. But still, I'm just like, you just know some of these people are lying. They're just here to make a quick buck.

Yep. You got one on interest rates over here.

Yeah. Did you see the European Union cut the interest rates?

I think Canada did too.

Yeah. European Union, first time in 5 years, I believe it was.

Yep. What do you think that means?

Globally, hopefully things start going better because the world is tied together, right? Whether the US has a higher interest rate or Japan or Brazil or UK or Europe in general, all the companies in the Eurozone or whatever leveraging that currency, a lot of them are buying for companies like America stimulating economy. So Hopefully if their rates start going down, it starts stimulating the whole world economy. And you're spot on. Canada reduced their rates. Europe reduced their rates, or not the eurozone reduced their rates. And I'm hoping over time the US starts reducing their rates and UK and others follow. And I think that'll start stimulating the economy and it'll start creating a better 2025 than what we're experiencing in 2024. But I think most people forget When the economy is bad, whether you want to call it a recession or not, when the economy is bad, it just doesn't flip a light switch like we had in COVID and it just turns around. COVID only hap— the economy only boomed during COVID because they took down rates and they pumped a ton of money into the economy. A lot of countries did, right? Like PPP and all these other programs that just gave businesses millions of dollars. They're putting checks in people's accounts and it was causing them to spend more. This all stimulated the economy. But normally when the economy is bad, for it to recover, it's not just in 1 or 2 years, bam, everything just goes back to where it was. It takes a long time and it's a slow and steady recovery and growth.

All right everyone, so that's it for today. Speaking of which, the Agency Accelerator, Or sorry, Agency Owners Association, I should say. Neil and I will both be doing a session this week. And so we do these group coaching calls every now and then. So that's happening. You can learn more about this group, marketingschool.io/agency. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps this podcast grow, and we will catch you later.

Bye.