How Backlinko’s Brian Dean Used SEO Optimization & Skyscraper Technique to Grow His Website Traffic

Do you want to impact the world and still turn a profit? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to Growth Everywhere. This is the show where you'll find real conversations with real entrepreneurs. They'll share everything from their biggest struggle to the exact strategies they use on a daily basis. So if you're ready for a value-packed interview, listen on. Here's your host, Eric Siu.

Today's episode of Growth Everywhere is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a digital marketing agency ran by yours truly that has helped venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 companies grow their revenues online. Single Grain covers services such as search engine optimization, Facebook advertising, Google advertising, YouTube advertising, content marketing, and conversion rate optimization. To learn more about Single Grain, go to www.singlegrain.com/growth. to learn about 8 marketing campaigns that we've used in the past to help clients grow, including the one that helped generate over 1,500% return on investment. All right. So in today's interview, we are talking to Brian Dean of Backlinko. And this is a really action-packed episode that you're going to see in regards to SEO and list building. There's a lot of great information. Coming from Brian. And, you know, the SEO world, you would think that a lot of the information has gone stale, you know, everything's been covered already. But Brian's genuinely— he's brought some crazy results, especially in the last 2 years. He's really kind of come onto the scene. And, you know, he is getting— just to let you guys know, I mean, he's getting over 200— collecting over 200 emails a day, and he has an internet marketing blog close to breaking 100,000, you know, visits per And that's no small feat for an internet marketing blog. So without further ado, I will let Brian take it away. Hi everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we have Brian Dean who is the CEO and founder of Backlinko. Brian, how are you?

I'm great, Eric. How's it going, man?

Good, man. So Brian, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you're really good at and let's go from there.

Sure, let's do it. So my background is basically my whole life I was studying to have a job and be an employee somewhere because I never really had any entrepreneurship in my family, so I was never exposed to it. I always thought people that started businesses were superheroes like Steve Jobs and guys like that. And basically I was in graduate school trying to— I was getting a PhD in nutrition and I hated it. So, one day or one week, just everything went wrong. I just really hated it. My advisor was a jerk and my research was going bad, so I left and I decided to get a job. But I got hired to work for New York State, for the state being a nutritionist. But right after I got the job, the 2007-2008 crisis hit and they had a hiring freeze for the whole state. So I basically had to change plans and those plans were hanging out in my parents' basement, kind of waiting, looking for jobs. And I discovered The 4-Hour Workweek and that sort of like opened my eyes to entrepreneurship and then I started the whole niche site thing and eventually found my way to legit white hat SEO.

Cool, man. Can you talk a little bit about white hat SEO with the audience?

Sure. So I mean, at the most basic level, there's debates online about what's white hat and what's black hat and how you define the two. And I don't— I try to stay away from those debates because it's a huge waste of time. But I think it's important to have some idea of what these things are. So black hat is basically, I think, anything that you wouldn't want to show Google. So anything you're doing with SEO that if Google found out about it, you would be in hot water. I feel like that's a good definition. And white hat is the opposite. White hat is like, Google, look at what I'm doing and we're doing everything legit. It's very much like your taxes. If you're doing stuff that the IRS, if they saw it, you'd end up in jail, it's probably not a good idea. But if you're doing stuff that you could show the IRS your books and just be like, look it over, I feel like that's a good definition of white hat. Perfect.

So before we dive a little bit more into SEO, can you tell us about what your site Backlinko is all about?

Sure. So Backlinko is basically an SEO training blog. So it's focused on case studies. that are originally SEO, but now I'm writing stuff also about email list building and content marketing. Basically, the focus of the site is that it's world-class blog content that is case study and actionable focused.

Got it. Okay, perfect. And it's backlinko.com. We'll leave that in the show notes for everyone. So, you know, obviously, you know, SEO has changed quite a bit in the last few years. My career started with SEO in the beginning, and, you know, I've done the white hat stuff, I've done the black hat stuff. Your blog especially, you have kind of a— you've exploded onto the scene with a refreshed take on SEO. What has changed in the world of SEO recently?

Well, I kind of feel like SEO is almost like Back to the Future. So after Penguin hit, that's when Penguin 1, which is in April 2012, that was when Google started to target link spam, as you know, Eric. And wiped out a ton of sites including my own because I was also doing black hat stuff back then. A lot of people were because it worked. I mean, the ROI was insane. You could, if you did it, had an agency that was a little bit on the shadier side, you could charge $2,000 a month and spend $50 on links that you bought from some guy on Warrior Forum. And you could make— you could do well with that and those sites would actually do better. So the client was happy, you were happy, just Google wasn't happy. They're the only people who weren't really— happy with that arrangement. So I think that from that point of view, it's changed a lot because you can't do black hat stuff anymore. But lately, I've been talking to a lot of OGs in the SEO game, a lot of guys like Eric Ward, Roger Monte, you know what I mean? Guys who've just been in it for so long. And the funny thing is, if you ask them, what were you doing back when you first started doing SEO? They say, well, what we did— is we built a great site, we targeted the content on the site around keywords people search for, and then we did email outreach to build links to our site. And that's exactly what you should do today. So I think that basically the strategies only changed from this really brief weird period between like 2007 and 2012 when you could just buy links at scale and get away with it. And it worked much better than white hat. But that was like this industrial-level spamming era. But it was kind of a brief period, and that's when I started in SEO, and I think you did too. We started during that time, both of us. And that was all we knew about SEO. But now I've come to realize that actually before that stuff came out, before you could buy links, you kind of had to do this sort of thing. And these guys are really good at it. So I'd say the approach is more or less what I just described. Build great resources, keyword optimize them, and then outreach to people. Okay.

So let's make this actionable like Backlinko style. So let's say, you know—

Let's do it.

A lot of technology startups, they hire, you know, venture capitalists will pour in money. They want them to move quickly. So typically you will hire a paid search manager, someone that understands paid really well, right? But at the end of the day, you know, VCs probably don't understand SEO. Neither do these internet marketers that only really understand paid. How do you convince someone or let's say I have a paid manager coming in and it's like, I know that SEO is the right way to go. How do I start scaling out outreach? We're producing great content already, but I'm only a one-man team, right? I'm a growth hacker, right? So what do I do there?

Well, in that case, I mean, to a certain extent, there's a reason that a lot of the VC money goes to AdWords, because it's a quick way to get traffic, and SEO is a long game. It's a marathon, right? Of course, you can get results really quickly, and I have a case study on my blog where I was able to double my search engine traffic in 2 weeks using something called the Skyscraper Technique, and we can walk through that. I think that if you're trying to scale SEO the same way you do pay-per-click, you can't. So basically, the difference between the two is that with SEO you scale with people, and with pay-per-click you scale with a budget. And it's just two totally different things. So if you're ready to hire people or to outsource to an agency like Single Grain, then in that case, that's where your money would go. Because when they hire you, Eric, and your team, they're hiring people essentially, right?

Yeah.

And pay-per-click, you just shove it into AdWords under your existing framework that's working, have a guy manage it, and you're good. I feel like you can't really just— I mean, the days of replacing pay-per-click with SEO are in a way gone. But what you can do is if you invest in SEO over the long term, you can decrease your pay-per-click budget and save a ton of money.

Right.

Because the problem with pay-per-click budget is just you're throwing it into a fire. And as soon as you stop throwing it in, the fire goes out. So with SEO, it pays dividends for years.

Okay.

Does that answer your question?

Yeah, it does. So the— in terms of, you know, let's just talk about numbers right here. Like, let's say you produce a great piece of content, it's 2,000 words, you know, how much time should you spend doing outreach for that? Or maybe even get a little more granular, how many more emails should I be sending per piece of content that I produce?

Yeah, that's a really good question, and I have rules of thumb that I use. So what I like to do is, is when you're first starting, if you don't have any sort of SEO momentum, and you don't have an audience, and you don't have an email list, so if you're a startup and you're just starting, and you have your product ready or maybe just an MVP and you want to get kind of buzz about it before you even launch, you need to spend 20% of your time writing and 80% promoting. So that's kind of the ratio. And then what I like to do is I send at least 250 emails for every post that I publish, not counting to the list. So I have the email list that's totally separate. And I learned that from our mutual friend Neil Patel because I remember when he talked about it in an interview once that he produced this advanced guide to SEO, which I'm sure you saw.

Mm-hmm.

And Sujan was actually a co-author on that.

Yup.

And anyway, I remember him on an interview saying after he published it, he emailed 250 people. And that blew my mind. I was like, Neil Patel is emailing people about content. I mean, he has like, what, 100K Twitter followers? His list is probably like 200,000. He has one of the most popular internet marketing blogs online.

Yup.

I was like, why would he email people? And he said it worked if you can get in front of people. So I think that if you're not As long as you're not Neil Patel, then you need to be doing this, and I do it all the time. So either before I publish to get some buzz, I email people about a piece of content, or after. And if you think it's a lot of work, you're absolutely right. It totally is. There are some tricks that can help you kind of scale the process a little bit better.

Yeah.

To send those outreach emails, but the fact is there's a lot of grunt work that goes into content promotion, but there's nothing better than straight up emailing people to promote a piece of content.

I agree. So, to break the numbers down for the audience, you know, you said 2 hours. Let's say I spend 2 hours writing a piece of content, probably still not enough, right? But 2 hours, just for simplicity's sake, 2 hours writing a piece of content, then I should spend 8 hours promoting that piece.

Absolutely, at least.

Got it.

And I think that when you're first starting, if you're totally new and you have zero audience, because the reason you're promoting it, forget links, just like promoting it to get some buzz and like a viral effect, because links are a totally different story. That's even more. Now we're talking about 20 hours for for every piece of content depending on how competitive the keyword is. But I mean, that's just to get the word out about it. So I'd say that, yeah, 8 hours is like a good— for the 2 is good, but it might even be more if you have absolutely no audience. And then it can go from like 70, 60, 50, 40%, that percentage can go down. As you build an audience, you don't need to do as much outreach.

Okay, great. So now we have the outreach portion, which we're kind of going into content marketing/social, right? But how do you find the right targets to reach out to? Because 8 hours is a long time for, you know, one piece, right? How do I find like a list of people to, you know, reach out to?

That's a good question. So for this social media content viral marketing piece, I use a very simple formula. So what I do is I use a tool called BuzzSumo, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And what I do is I put in a few keywords related to my niche. So say I was writing something about Like low-carb desserts. So I put low-carb into BuzzSumo, and what it does is it shows you content about low— that's done well on social about low-carb whatever. So if you want to get really specific, you can put low-carb desserts, but you're limiting your results. If you want to cast a super wide net, just put like low-carb whatever. And then what you'll do is you want to see sort by Twitter, because with Twitter, the cool thing about BuzzSumo on Twitter is you can see exactly who shared it. Yeah. Because most networks like Facebook and Google+ are kind of private and you can't do that. With Twitter, it's totally public so you can. So what you do is you see who shared it and then I sort by Twitter followers and then export that list. So now I have some people who have shared something similar. So either one piece of content or sometimes if there's not a lot of people sharing, I can combine 5 different pieces of content and find the people who shared one of the 5. And I grab their Twitter profiles and then I hire someone on Elance or oDesk Mm-hmm. To find the emails using Reportive, this Reportive trick, which I'm sure you know.

Yeah.

Basically, you put in kind of like what you'd expect people's emails to be, so it'd be like eric@singlegrain.com, and then you see if it's a Reportive match, and if so, that's the person's email 100% of the time.

Mm-hmm.

So then you just hire someone to do that because it's boring and awful. And you get those emails, and then I just— what I do is I just send them a script that's just like, hey, I noticed you shared this, I have this.

Mm-hmm.

And it sounds so simple, but it works amazingly well. And for this content, I actually have a piece of content coming out next week that's really big, and I've been emailing people using this formula, and I don't think I'll ever stop because it works so great.

Okay. And so when you send these mass emails, are you sending them individually? Are you using like a mail merge? What are you doing exactly?

Yeah, I know I've been— I used to use mail merge, but depending on the content, so if I can find 200 people that all share the same content, I can use the same script, then mail merge is a beautiful thing. Otherwise, I just have my assistant do them kind of individually. It's not worth it to mail merge.

Okay, so she might— okay, go ahead.

Yeah, because the script is going to be different because you're going to say, I noticed you shared content X, right? So if that content X is the same across all the targets, then beautiful, then you just use mail merge and you're good. Otherwise, that— like, for example, this piece of content It's about conversions and I had trouble finding like one thing that got shared a lot lately so I had to do 5 or 6 different ones and in that case it's just easier to just bang them out and use something called TextExpander.

Yep.

For Mac and Breezy for Windows and you just put like whatever, 88, and it populates it with the script and you just change the name is the only thing. The beauty about this script is that only the name needs to be changed so you put like 88 for the content 1, 99 for the content 2, and you put 88, populate email, send.

Good. Perfect. So when you're having your assistant bang out these emails, I'm assuming you have like a template where it's like 85 to 90% of it is the template and maybe 5 to 10% of it is personalized, right?

Well, yeah. I think for outreach for link building, you get into more of like you have to make decisions on the fly like that. But for this, it's actually just the name needs to be changed and what they shared.

Got it.

But what they shared will be consistent across, let's say like 50 people shared a piece of content. That actually won't change with the script. That's the beauty the script. Only the name needs to be changed and it seems really personal because it's like, I saw you shared this. So people are like, oh, okay, well. So it's kind of personalized by default in a way.

Got it. Okay, cool. That's helpful. So with your blog right now, I mean, it's been exploding. Can you kind of ballpark what the growth has looked like, traffic numbers, if you're willing to reveal?

Sure.

Yeah, I have nothing to hide. Yeah, it's been a great year for the site. It's almost 2 years old in December and I think this year in December my goal was to have 30,000 uniques a month on average through the year. And now I'm averaging like 85,000 to 90,000 uniques a month.

Wow.

And also the— and I had some list building goals that were related that are also much better, partially— mostly because of this traffic increase. One of the helpful things about building a list if you have a lot of traffic. So I also have focused really on list building over the last 6 months and that's also helped. Dude, you need to— Wherever you put your focus.

Yeah, you need to tell me more about the list building. We'll go over that in a second.

Sure.

No, that's insane growth. And just so the audience knows, it is really hard to build traffic for internet marketing blog just because there's so many out there. Backlinko, to have 85,000 to 100,000 is insane. Neil Patel is well within the 6 figures range, so props to you on that.

Thanks, man. Yeah, it's a lot of hard work. I mean, like you said, the niche is— it has its pros and cons. A lot of people say, oh, it's so easy because there's so much interest in it, which I get that, but it's also insanely competitive. Like, the guys I'm competing against is like a lot of guys you write for, like Inc. and things like that. Those are tough sites.

No, you got to do world-class stuff to be able to stand out in the internet marketing niche. So you talked about making it actionable, sharing data, things like that. So we can talk— we'll definitely talk about one of your techniques in a second. One thing that really amazes me, you talked about having an assistant. It seems like you have a really strong process for this and you seem to be doing a lot, right? I talked to you, I was like, who does your copywriting? It's great. You're like, I do it, right? You do copywriting, you have these high-quality videos. What's your secret to managing all of this?

I don't know. I don't actually have a huge team. I basically have a couple freelancers that help me with the sort of things that it just doesn't make sense for me to do. The scripts and things like that. But in terms of productivity, if that's what you mean, I mean, I'm old school. I literally have a pen and— this is my productivity software. Yeah, it's just a checklist and I have you at the top, Growth Everywhere, 5:30, which is what time it is here in Berlin, so I didn't forget. But it's pretty much, I mean, what I do is I think the secret of productivity in my mind is knowing what not to do. And I don't check email until 4:30. So I can give you one actionable thing that just changed my whole business. It's not to check email till 4:30.

PM?

PM.

Okay.

So I don't— sometimes I cheat and I go like at 3, but very rarely before 3 do I check my email because I feel like our brains, they're hardwired to be in kind of like reactive mode or proactive mode. And we love reactive mode because we get the dopamine rushes from all the compliments and the tweets that come out, but it's hard to go from that back into proactive mode, which is where you're writing and creating. So I like to kind of create in the morning and make sure at least till 2 I'm creating or just getting things done, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then afterwards when my mind is kind of mush, that's when emails are great because it doesn't take a lot of mental energy to reply and be like, you know, yes, no, whatever, as I'm sure you get a lot of that kind of like easy to reply to stuff.

Totally. I totally agree with that. It's, you know, when I wake up in the morning, it's like there's this urge to check email or check Twitter and things like that, but once you go into that phase, I mean, Like you said, there's no coming back from it. It's almost as if you open Pandora's box, and I try to avoid opening Pandora's box at least early in the morning. Let's talk a little bit about one of the techniques you've shared on your blog. We've already kind of gone into the promotion part of it, but let's talk about the skyscraper technique. What is it exactly?

Here's the deal with the skyscraper technique. Before I discovered this, I really struggled with content marketing. Because I go to these conferences, and I'm sure you've attended, Eric, that the guy goes up there and he says, here's a 3-step process to ranking in Google. Create great content, create great content, create great content. And you're sitting there and you think, wow, this is— I could do this. They say the black hat days are over. All you need to do is create great content and you're set. The problem is when you're actually sitting in front of your laptop and you're typing, what do you write? How do you write it? What format should it be? Who's the audience for that content? There's a lot of unanswered questions that these guys in the speaker circuit and a lot of bloggers skip over, and they're critical details because if you don't get them right, your content's not going to go anywhere. So Skyscraper Technique was really developed out of necessity, and it was a way of creating something that's based on a proven model. So basically it has 3 steps in it. The first is that you discover content in your niche. That's already performed well. So what you do is you, you know, you can use BuzzSumo, it's a great tool for that. You can also use Ahrefs to find highly linked to content, Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO. And then basically take the base of that content, what made it great, what made it do well, make it better, so create something even better, and then promote it by reaching out to the people who shared the piece of content you found in step number 1.

Got it. So do you have an example? Yeah, I'm sure there's a ton of examples, but can you share an example that you have on your blog?

Sure. So the one that— the first one that comes to mind is a post about Google's 200 ranking factors. So a few years ago, Google basically said, we use 200 ranking factors. And ever since they said that number, people have been attempting to document all 200 or guess all 200. And I noticed that a lot of the content out there, you know, maybe they hit like 120 or 110. and they kind of gave up, plus they were really out of date. So I decided to take that base because they did really well. Even though they didn't have all 200, they were crushing it in terms of links. It was like some of them were like Page Authority 55 from even though they were old. So I figured something we could do better. So I took that base and basically created all 200. A lot of them are speculative. A lot of them are total guesses from SEO nerds and created it, put it in one place. And then I reached out to people who linked out to the ones I found in step number 1, and that was it. So that's easy. If you have like a list post, if someone has like a list of 50 ways to do whatever, and you notice it did well, then that's when you can create 100. And there's different ways to add— to take what you found and make it better, but the easiest in my mind is just to like make it up to date, give it a little paint job, and also add some depth. So make it longer or more detailed. Mm-hmm.

Got it. You know, that 200 ranking factors thing that you did, you actually made an infographic out of it. And then I know you collaborated with me and I actually threw that up on Entrepreneur and it did incredibly well.

Right.

And it's— I had someone 2 weeks ago reach out to me and say, oh, wow, I didn't know that was like you and someone else that did that. And so that, you know, if you guys search for 200 ranking factors Google, like Entrepreneur, you guys will find that infographic. That is a testament to Brian's work.

And yours, man. It was a good collaboration with Single Grain.

Yeah, man. Thanks. So, you know, obviously you've done the skyscraper technique a lot, you know, 200 ranking factors. I mean, your— the best piece of content you've created using that technique, how many backlinks did it get and what other benefits did it get?

Well, I mean, for that post, I don't know how many links it has, but it's hundreds. It's in the hundreds. It's probably, if I had to guess referring domains, I would say 250.

Wow.

It's got a lot and they're really quality because they're all resource pages and blog posts and editorial mentions. The traffic that post brings in about 15,000 unique visitors a month.

Wow.

So I mean, it's just a traffic machine, not only from Google because it ranks for pretty much every Google ranking factors related keyword, but also It's huge. It's like 5,000 words, so it just eats up long tails that people search for. And people love to share it on social media, right? Because it's just like, oh, you want to learn about SEO? Here's this list.

Yup.

So it's done well in terms of traffic. I also got invited to speak at a big conference in London after someone read that post. The guy who organized it happened to find it and he was like, oh dude, come and give a talk on the post.

Yup.

So I did that. So it's just been great, man. I think that— I mean, I heard an interview a couple of years ago with Rand Fishkin of Moz and he said that they had this beginner's guide to SEO. That they put out a few years ago, and he said that was like the number one thing that Moz did to grow. He said without that, they wouldn't be where they were today. So I think one piece of content, if it goes really well, can make a massive difference. It doesn't have to be this grind where you have to publish like every Thursday for a year to get traction. I think one piece of content can completely transform your rankings, your business, everything, your positioning in your space. If you want to be perceived as an expert, all that stuff.

Yeah.

It'd be great.

It just takes time, right? And I think a lot of people just aren't willing to invest this time. And people still think SEO is just like this dark art, which is—

Right. I mean, it kind of is in a way, but yeah, it's not rocket science. It's just a lot of expertise and hard work. But yeah, to give it perspective, that post took me over 20 hours to write. Wow.

So that's 80 hours of promotion?

Yeah, I don't know if I put 80. So maybe I didn't follow my own advice on that one because it would have been insane. But it was a lot. Actually, it might have been— it was at least 40. That was when I had an assistant doing a lot of link building. So we're just like, we did the skyscraper in the sense that we found all the people that were linking to that, the content we found for step number 1. And that was a lot of links because there are so many people linking to the old stuff. And I think we had, I don't know, maybe an 11% conversion rate on cold outreach to link.

That's great.

So we cold emailed someone, got 11%. Yeah, I'll take that any day. I mean, a lot of these are older sites too, so a lot of people weren't even checking their emails and stuff. So to get 11% on like ice cold email, I'm pretty happy.

Wow, that's great. And you know, maybe I need to steal some of these reach out templates and then put them in the post afterwards. So you have this squeeze page where you talk about how you can rank for any keyword. Is this more or less using the same stuff that we've talked about right now, or is there something else that you can share?

This is a little bit different actually. So that squeeze page has a video where I talk about how I ranked a post for the keyword— in the top 5 for the keyword backlinks in Google. And I basically outlined kind of how I did it in terms of promotion, some of the promotion And some of the— and how I created the content. So it basically revolves around this piece of content, this content format I call the expanded list post.

Mm-hmm.

So expanded list post is basically your list post but done a little bit differently. So most people, when they write a list post like 20 ways to lose weight or 20 ways to save money on insurance, the items are just— they don't have any meat to them. They're just like item 1, item 2, item 3, and it's just like boom, boom, boom, fast and furious. The problem is that when you read item 1, 2, 3, you get overwhelmed. You think, oh, this is cool, but I'll just bookmark it and I'll read it later because it's just too overwhelming right now because there's not enough actionable stuff in the list post.

Mm-hmm.

So the expanded list post is different in the sense that each item is almost like a little blog post in the sense that it gives you the exact steps you need to put that item on the list into practice.

Mm-hmm.

So for example, you had a post, let's say, 25 ways to get more traffic. So the first one is like, make sure you do keyword research. Most list posts would just move on to something totally unrelated and be like, post on Twitter 3 times a day.

Yup.

The person has already forgotten about one, they're not going to use it. So the first one, instead of being like, how to do keyword research, it would actually be like step 1, 2, 3, how to do it within the post. And that adds a lot more value, perceived and real, because then people use it, and once they use something, that you tell them and they get results, they'll love you forever because you're automatically separated from most of the other sites online. And then I did the content roadshow, which is very similar to what we talked about, just emailing a bunch of people about it. And that was basically a huge part of it. There are some other link building strategies that I used, but for the most part, it was that too that made the biggest difference.

Yeah, this is crazy. It just takes a little more work to set these things up, getting an assistant perhaps even a virtual assistant, making a screencast and then training them on how to do it. And virtual assistants, I'm just speaking from experience, in the Philippines, you can pay them $600 a month for full-time, right? And they can help you with this.

And they're good.

Their English is good, yeah. So, I mean, it just takes a little adjustment. I think you've really made it work for yourself. I mean, 11% is an amazing conversion rate. Okay, so going back to just summarize what the expanded list post looks like. It's just pretty much a super epic post, right?

Pretty much. I mean, yeah. I mean, the only difference between that and your regular list post is that you probably have less items on it. So instead of 30, you may have 10. But each one will be drawn out a lot. And that's the point, is that each one has a lot of meat so they don't have to leave your site to know how to do it. That's another thing that's not good about the current list post is like they read something and then they have to leave your site to get information. have people stick on your site, right? So it's nice to have the steps right there.

Got it. Okay, perfect. Where do you see SEO going in the next 12 months?

I don't know, Eric. I mean, we could talk about this because I would trust your opinion possibly more than mine because you've been in the game a lot longer than me. I see it as pretty much the same. I mean, the last year is a great lesson in the sense that nothing changed. I mean, you think about it, we had Hummingbird, but that was really not that huge of a fundamental shift as people make it out to be. And basically, there was one Penguin update, which is a refresh of the existing one. And I think Hummingbird might have been actually more than a year ago. I'm not sure.

I think you're right.

So this year was basically nothing happened.

Pretty much. I think they're getting— Google's getting it to the point where they have what they want already. You can't— 4 years back or so, I could just go on a warrior forum or wherever Buy some links, boom, I'm number 5 just like that. I'm an SEO superstar, right? Not anymore.

Right.

It's the stuff that you do that is— it's not easy. It takes— it's a lot of hard work. You need to do the research. You need to put it in. Then you need to do the additional promotion part which people tend to forget about. And I think that's where people are falling short, where people are just still confused about SEO, where it's this hard thing that's— well, I mean, it is hard, but you know, it's just a lot of hard work.

Yeah, I think that's a good point, Eric. It's like eating healthy. It's simple but it's not easy, right? Like, it's so simple, just eat healthy stuff, but then how do you do it and how do you keep yourself from eating unhealthy stuff and things like that? That's where it's hard work and I think that's what it comes down to. And like you said, the promotion part is the part that people skip over because they just publish and pray.

Mm-hmm.

And once you do promotion once, you'll realize what a huge difference that makes, especially if you don't have a huge following. It's a must. How else— otherwise people aren't going to find you.

Got it. Yeah, very guilty of publish and play— and pray, sorry. Okay, so let's switch gears a little bit. Let's talk about email collection. It's something you've been focusing on.

Sure.

How many subscribers are you getting per day right now and how did you get here?

I'm getting about 200 subscribers a day and that basically came maybe 4 months ago or 3 months ago, I was getting 75. So it increased a lot and it's basically because I used a couple strategies, one of which just shot up like a rocket, and that was— that's a content upgrade. And I think that if you have a blog and you want to collect your emails, there's no other strategy that I would recommend. And Eric, obviously you're familiar with it because we both work with Davish, who's a big proponent of the strategy.

Yeah, it's—

So basically, yeah, go ahead.

No, no, go ahead. Keep going.

Oh, I was just going to kind of describe what it is. So basically, the content upgrade is Well, let's just talk about what I used to have to give you a perspective on how it works. So what I used to have on my blog was basically lame call to actions like sign up for my newsletter and get free updates and things like that. And when people landed on a blog post, it basically like most people read the content, this is cool, and leave, which is good from their point of view but not from mine because I want their email. And it was very difficult to get it. And I tried different positions and different wordings of the forms and things like that. And I ultimately learned why people don't usually sign up for newsletters when they read blog content. And it's basically because there isn't a compelling reason for them to do it right then and there. So, you know, if they read a blog post and they like it, I had a thing below the post that was like, you know, sign up for my newsletter. And they might be inclined because they just read something good, but it's just not super compelling. So I changed it to this content upgrade thing. which is basically what you do is you create a bonus for that post that's directly related to that post. So let's say you had a post, let's just keep it all nutrition because I'm just in a healthy eating mood lately I guess. I just got back from a trip and I've just been eating like crap so I guess I have that on my mind.

Nice.

Get back to eating right. So if you had a thing, a post that was like 20 Paleo Desserts, Paleo diet desserts. Now what you do for your content upgrade is be like, these are great, if you want the recipes, sign up for the content upgrade and I'll give you the whole recipes, or be like, these are 20, if you want 5 more, here's a content upgrade, you can sign up for that, and because it's intimately related to what that person's reading right then, it gets them to sign up at insane higher percentages than if you just said sign up for my newsletter.

Give me an example of insane percentage versus like a typical percentage.

So to give you an idea, for the Google ranking factors post I talked about before, the conversion rate on that was 0.4%. I was getting traffic like I talked about, the 15,000 a month, but it almost didn't matter because 99— literally 99% of them plus were leaving without giving the email. So since I did that, overnight it went from Less than half a percent to 5.5%.

Wow.

So, and that's all I— the only change I made. So it's that powerful. If it's a great pitch, but even if it's not, just anything, if you can give away a checklist that's related to the post, even a PDF version of it, you're going to get a lot more emails than if you didn't have it.

Wow, that's insane. So that post, you know, it's getting 15,000 visits a month, 15,000 visits a month. You know, 5% converting, that's 750 subscribers a month. That's massive. And just from one post too. Okay. So, you know, for each content upgrade that you're talking about, obviously it takes work, right? You know, people are thinking right now in the audience, how long is this going to take me? Oh God, it's more work. So can you elaborate on that?

Sure. Well, it doesn't take that much time. It depends on how much you want to put into the content upgrade. For me, it's such a huge— like once I start work, Uh-huh. I was like, I'll go all in on this. You know what I mean? I don't even mind with a huge budget to do it because the ROI is just insane. So for time and money, you can't beat the ROI. If your email list is important to you, we're talking about— I mean, just to give you some numbers, I just gave a talk at a conference and I gave these numbers. For that content upgrade that I just mentioned, each email subscriber for my business is worth $12. And since I added the content upgrade, it's brought in $3,600 Wow. So it's like $43,000 from one post in a couple months, and it cost me, plus writing the checklist, which was like an hour, like maybe I paid $80 for the design because it's kind of a nice design, and then LeadPages, the software that I use to get people to actually give their email, that's like $200 a month.

Wow.

So, but that's across the entire site, so I use it for every post, not just for that one, but that gives you some perspective. $40,000 versus $200, I'll take that any day of the week. Plus my hour in labor, whatever, but still.

Yeah.

It doesn't take that much time. You just need to basically create a resource that's intimately related and you can— the easiest way to do it is just to give a checklist. I love the checklist format, super easy, it's high value because people read a post that's 2,000 words and they're kind of like, just give me the checklist, you know what I mean? And you're just giving them what they want.

Yeah.

It's like, here. There's nothing wrong with giving people what they want. And you give them the checklist, which is like the Cliff Notes, and the value is so high that people happily hand their email over for that. And it's just summarizing what you already have there. It doesn't really take that long. And if you want to get a nice design, you can get someone on Elance or oDesk or PeoplePerHour or whatever to do it for cheap. I paid on kind of the higher end because I wanted it to be super nice, but Backlinko reader actually reached out to me. He runs a golf site called mygolftutor.com.

Heard of that.

He had the same situation. He had a post that was like how to hit a draw shot in golf. I don't even know what that is, but basically people were leaving without giving their email. And then he created this checklist which looks super ghetto. It's literally like Microsoft Word, maybe a Google Doc. It's very, very simple looking. Black and white, no images, no color, no logo, nothing. And he gave it away. Conversion rate went up to, I think it was 3.5%.

Wow.

So it was about 0.5% to 3.5%.

Wow.

And if his offer was a little more compelling, like you're able to show a screenshot of the checklist and it looks really nice, that's when you're talking about like 5% plus.

Got it. So the image matters a lot.

It doesn't have to take that much time. Yeah, it matters a lot. Like how you present the content upgrade makes a big difference too, but just having it, even if you do everything wrong, just doing it is still better than not doing it.

Okay. So you talked about Elance and oDesk for designs more on the lower end. For your designer, how did you find her or him and how much do you pay typically?

On Elance actually, I found her.

Okay.

So Elance is a crapshoot, Eric. You know, I know. It is what it is. Like those sites, you just have to sift through tons of crap to get to someone good. I was fortunate enough to find someone who was very good, so I pay her about I think it's $80 per checklist.

Okay.

So it's not cheap, man. I send her a checklist in Google, in a Google Doc, but if you could see the difference between what I send her and what she sends me back, it's worth $500,000, $600,000, $1,000,000. It's a really great design, what she does.

Okay.

That's not necessary. You can get someone just to make it a little bit prettier or use a template, even better. Hire someone to create a template in Word and then— or in PowerPoint. And then write it, write the content for the checklist and then export it as a PDF. And actually I've seen that, people do that and it can look really nice. It's not— each checklist will have a similar design, nothing wrong with that, right? Similar branding and all that stuff. So I'd say you can get someone to make you a nice Microsoft Word template for $50 and you can just use that for every checklist.

Got it, that's exactly what I do. You know, I have a template, I think Devesh put it together, you mentioned Devesh. And then my assistant will just make a checklist and then we're good to go.

And that's helped?

Yeah, it's helped insanely. So I guess I'll share my conversion rates too. I'm getting probably 5% to 8% on the sites that I'm doing the content marketing or— I'm sorry, the content upgrades on. And that's a testament to you. I think you posted it, Davis brought it up and then we started doing it.

Cool.

Yeah. In terms of what you're planning to do next for Backlinko, let's talk about your SEO training course because that's what you have kind of— you get people to put in their email, that's what they're supposed to go for. So can you talk a little bit about that course?

Sure. So SEO That Works is, to my knowledge, the only step-by-step SEO training course on the market. So it basically teaches you step-by-step how to create a piece of content around a keyword and rank it for that keyword. And there's a lot of great training in the course, but that's the main benefit and that's the main value. I also have one of the best features of the course that I only added after the first— less than 6 months after it was launched based on user feedback was a mastermind group. So we also have a private mastermind group as part of the course. So when someone joins the course, If they have questions and stuff, they can always ask support obviously, but it's also cool to get feedback from— there's over 400 people in the mastermind group who give feedback and a lot of them run SEO agencies.

Uh-huh.

So you get in front of really smart experts that a lot of times you can ask me or you can ask 400 smart people. Now obviously the value is the 400 smart people who know their stuff and that's one of the nice things about the course and it's also cool for me just to see Okay.

How much, you know, if someone in the audience wants to join, how much would it cost to get in on this?

So if they want to get in, they should sign up for the email list. So I have different offers depending on different times. So the course isn't available all the time. It's only— I only open enrollment a few times a year so I can really focus on serving the community in SEO That Works during the year. So if you're on the list, you'll get all the information about the features and different options that you have.

Got it, cool. So it's— and that's super valuable because you're continually refreshing the information because things always change, right?

Yes, yes.

Okay, great. So you're in Berlin right now, you're in Germany. Can you explain the reasoning behind that?

I don't really have a good reason. Basically, I had been traveling for about 3 years in Asia and Europe, and I wanted a place to live. And I wanted to go back to the States too, but I just I just kind of fell in love with Europe. I'm a sucker for the cobblestone streets and all that kind of sitting in cafes and things like that. So I wanted to stick around before I go back to the States, so I decided to stay in Berlin because it was the city that I liked probably the most.

Nice, cool. So it seems like the 4-Hour Workweek really affected you. Now you're vagabonding at the same time, sort of.

Exactly, something like that, yeah.

Cool, man. All right, so what's one piece of advice you'd give to your 25-year-old self?

Wow, that's a good one. I think actually I would say, I think at 25 is when I started to consider leaving grad school, and I would say do that. And I would say, I think the thing for me that got me to actually leave was this feeling that I only had 5 years till I was 30. And I don't know about you, man, but I'm past 30 now. You're looking good. You're also Asian.

I'm 28.

Okay, so I was 25 and I was like, I don't want to be here in grad school and hating it when I'm 30, because I was going to graduate when I was like 29. So I think I had this feeling of like, I only have so much time. And what that did is it put me in decision mode, like get in or get out and like do something you actually like. And I think that we can lose that perspective. I don't know why for me my 20s were like this super valuable thing that I had to cherish and I didn't want to waste them. Because I feel like any year in your life you should feel that way. So I think the thing that I would tell myself is really trust that, that you only have so much time on this earth and don't waste it. So that would kind of be the thing that really helped me was this finite amount of time. I think if I started grad school when I was 30, I'd probably be like, oh well, whatever, I'm already old, so who cares? And I think that's always good. I wish I could go back. I want to keep that mentality that I had when I was 25.

Okay, so it's pretty much, you know, value your time really precious, or like super, super, I guess, harder.

For lack of a better word. Yeah, kind of like, yeah, kind of value your life. I mean, take your life seriously. Got it.

Cool. Who is your idol and why?

I mean, I'm tempted to say Someone like Tim Ferriss just because he's obviously very influential to me. But I'm going to go sappy and go with my dad because my dad isn't like a vagabonding rock star or anything like that, but he's someone that I look to as a person, as a human, and as a father, and as a family member, and as a friend. He's the idol in terms of he's what I aspire to be in that sense.

Got it, okay. You know, you've shared a few productivity hacks already, but what's one productivity— what's one more productivity hack you can share with the audience?

Well, honestly, I'm a big fan of the list. So, you know, I think that if you don't have a list in front of you that's concrete, it doesn't have to be physical, digital version is fine, then you get lost with everything. I mean, I think the extreme that a friend of mine, Brian Harris, does is he literally schedules his entire day.

Mm-hmm.

I know a lot of people do that and that's really great. I mean, that's to the point where you basically want to take your decision-making out of your day in terms of what to do next. Like, of course you make decisions, but you shouldn't be thinking at 1, okay, what should I do now? That should be somewhat planned, either like super detailed, like 1 o'clock you should have in the calendar or on your list, you have 3 more things, you better bang those out.

Mm-hmm.

So I think that's really helped me is Having everything I need to do in writing so I can just relax that part of my brain and then my lesser self, my baser instincts don't have me on Facebook and Twitter when I should be writing a blog post.

Got it. Okay. What's one must-read book you'd recommend?

Wow, one. I mean, I'm a huge avid reader, so I have like 1,000, but I would go with definitely The 4-Hour Workweek. I think whether you're an entrepreneur, if you work at a company, if you lead a company, it doesn't really matter. I think that if you just want to get more out of your day and your life, that's the one book that kind of has it all.

I couldn't agree more. And you listen to Tim Ferriss's podcast and you— I think the title was intended to get everyone to buy it pretty much and get a lot of hype. But the book is— when I read it at the time, I was like, wow, I'm going to just work 4 hours a week. It's totally not like that. It's just like he said, it's about maximizing efficiency. It's like he said, making the most out of your life, and it's exactly what it is. I think once you get into that mindset, you never really lose, and you're just like boom, boom. It's like, how do I maximize every single minute, right?

Right, definitely. Yeah, I think the book, he's talked a lot about the title as like a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's great because it gets people's attention. I know it got mine. But it also, people will judge the book without reading it.

Yep, totally.

They'll be like, oh, 4 hours a week? How can you do that? And I think that's not the point of the book at all. If you read it, you understand that that has nothing to do with anything. That just happens to be the hours he was working when he ran his business while traveling. It could be 10, it could be— I know I work a lot of hours, but I enjoy what I do, so it feels like a 4-hour work week.

Yeah, exactly. Couldn't agree more. So what's the best way for people to find you online?

Definitely backlinko.com, and right on the homepage, there's a place where you can sign up for the newsletter, and that's where I give exclusive traffic tips and insights.

Cool, great. Everyone make sure to go to backlinko.com. Once again, this is Brian Dean from Backlinko. Brian, thanks so much for doing this.

Hey, no problem, Eric. Thanks for having me.

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