James Dooley: All right, everyone. Welcome back to another sinkalot.co podcast. We're here today with Mr. James Douly. How are you doing today, sir?
James Dooley: I'm all good, thank you very much.
James Dooley: Awesome. How are you doing today, Nick?
Nick: I cannot complain. Pretty uh excited about getting to talk to the party master of SEO I've heard all about for all these years. I'm excited about meeting you out in uh Chiang Mai for sure. But uh thanks for being on the podcast. Really excited about this.
James Dooley: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be on. Um, I followed you to you guys for quite a long time and share links a lot. So, awesome. Um, so yeah, if you guys are unfamiliar with James, he's the uh CEO of Promo SEO. Uh, he's also the founder of Fat Rank. Uh, he's a self-proclaimed uh digital landlord with 600 or more uh websites under his management. And um, he's also had big success in the casino and gambling niche as well. And uh you might have also seen him around on a bunch of other podcasts recently because it seems like you've kind of been uh doing the rounds. Um yeah. Did I miss anything important there?
Nick: No, you've you've kind of got majority of it in there. I own one or two of service kind of based uh businesses as well, but yeah, that's that's the hooks and crux of what I do. And yeah, I'm a bit of a podcast slag at the moment. So awesome. But yeah, glad to have you on. Um, so yeah, I we really wanted to have you on because uh we actually get a lot of questions in our Facebook group SEO round table um as well as on our YouTube channel on our live streams uh about rank and rent and I believe Nick has a little bit of experience with rank and rent but this was quite some time ago and I don't have any experience with it myself. I failed at it every single time as well. So uh ranked rent is not my favorite. I'm excited to uh hear some tips and tricks about this and I know our viewers are too.
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Sure. We get asked about it a lot and every time we just have to pretty much say, "Yeah, we don't really know much about it, but here's the things that we kind of do and what we recommend doing." Um, yeah. So, it's good to have you on. We can kind of fill the knowledge gap there. Um, but yeah, so I guess to start things off, could you just briefly describe uh what rank and rent is?
Nick: Yeah. So, uh, rank and rent is where you build a website, you rank it, and then rent it out. So you need to try and find certain industries that you think if you generated leads for that kind of business, somebody would want to pay money to take those leads. It's kind of one step further than lead generation. Um the reason I mean a lot of the time you start out in lead generation and then you kind of move it over to a rank and rent model. Um the main reason for doing that is because it's predictable income. Um, so that's kind of why you kind of progress from building out the site, doing maybe a cost per lead, and then in time moving it to a ranking rent model.
James Dooley: Gotcha. Um, so when when someone rents your website, what does that actually mean?
Nick: So what it is is that um you so what starts to happen naturally is when you build a website and it starts ranking and it's generating inquiries they the the client starts to the the hard part about lead generation is it's it's almost like doing client SEO um and you've got a client that's ringing you up regularly maybe every other day saying I've just had an inquiry and they've not answered the phone so I don't want to pay for Hi, I've just had a I've just had an inquiry and it was one of my competitors. Hi, I've just had an inquiry and it said that it was Mickey Mouse and they're consistently ringing you. And that's not obviously all the leads, but generally speaking on average across a lot of different industries, around 10 to 20% of leads that you generate online, either they don't answer or the fake inquiries. So, or all right, someone's spamming them saying, um, do you want to buy some guest posts from us on the on the website and stuff like that? So they're like, "I don't want to pay for these leads." And and you're kind of saying, "You won't. Like, just tell us what uh invalids and we'll reimburse you any money for the invalids." The issue it starts to be is that you need to have a sales team to run lead generation. So when So as you're running um a lead generation team, it's difficult because you need a large sales team, like you said, to run it. Where a rank and rent model, what normally starts to happen is if they're used to paying on average maybe three4,000 pound a month or five six thousand pound a month. If you was to set a fee once you once they've been with you for a while to say look on average you paying £5,000 a month. What happens if you just do a rank and rent? We don't kind of log every single inquiry that happens. you just pay a flat a flat fee of4,000 pound. They should be happy because they've been used to paying5,000 pound a month. And and you might say, well, why would you do that model? Like why if you earning 5,000 would you knock it down to four? Well, one, you need to give a little bit of meat on the bone for to make them think actually do you know what? This is a good deal for them. But two, then it's predictable income for us. So we know exactly what's happening. They're happy to rent it out. We don't need the kind of sales team to keep logging every single inquiry, checking whether it's not an invalid or if it's a valid kind of inquiry and and it just works better all around. They're happier and actually longterm we're happier because it's less management involved.
James Dooley: Gotcha. So, do you actually um do you just do you actually like edit in like all their like phone numbers and everything on the website so it just contacts them directly or how does that how does it all work?
Nick: So what what we normally do is we normally do um like a Twilio number car rail or in Vulco which is like where you rent a number. It cost like $1 a month to rent the number. Um it might be a local number to wherever they're based. So let's say in the UK if you're based in Manchester it's like an 0161 number. So you'd go and rent an 0161 number and then that number then can redirect either to their office or to their mobile number wherever it is that you want to redirect it. And you don't really want to be putting their number on just in case something bad was to happen where they stopped trading or something like that and you lost that number and that's on all this kind of citations and directories and stuff like that. You've got ownership of the number that way. So you but in general yes in time once they've moved to a ranking vent model they've generally been with us for over 12 months. We've got a good trusted relationship with them. They're happier and we're happy. And at that point, they'll be sending us all their photos of stuff like job, previous jobs that they've done. They'll be sending us all the videos of jobs that might have done. And sometimes, yeah, we can use their address, it could be their office address, it could be the warehouse address, it could be the director's address. So, we we can put a real address on the site, a telephone number on the site. We can even put some of their members of staff on like the meet the team page and stuff like that. Especially if they've got a LinkedIn account or a Twitter account. So, you're kind of ticking all the boxes for EAT. Um there's real people behind the site and yeah, it works well and obviously they're happy to do it because they know that they're getting exclusivity on the leads. So, the the clients are are are actually really happy with it because it's a no-brainer for them where they know after a while that they're going to make a return on investment of the rental of the site because they've worked with us for a long time. It's the first six to 12 months it can be tricky. Like so many people come and contact me and go, I tried rank and rent and it didn't work. And I'm like, you can't just go straight into rank and rent. You need to you need to start off by doing SEO, maybe even doing display ads to start earning a little bit money off the site. Then you might progress then into lead generation and then after lead generation, then you can move to rank and rent because someone's not going to if someone doesn't know who you are. So let's say um Nick says that he's he's tried a few times to do um rank and rent. If you go straight to the model of do you want to rent my website for a thousand pound a month and they don't know what traffic level you're getting, they don't know what type of inquiries you're getting, it's a hard sell because they don't even know what they're renting out. Where if you kind of go down the lead generation model and they've had the leads, they've converted a few of the leads and from there then they're saying, "Yeah, this works." and you give them an offer that's slightly less than what they're already paying, they're going to go down the route of saying, "Yes, we're happy to do that." Um, and then from there, then they start to they start to put a lot more trust in you. So, they start telling you basically all the juicy keywords because too many people are using Semrush or Hrevs for doing the keyword research. And if you if you're really advanced, people think, "Oh, well, I'll sort that CPC on like cost per click on pay click and go, "Oh, these are the big keywords." But the truth of the matter is speaking to the business owner and asking them what they're best at converting and one plumber to the next plumber or one roofer to the next plumber, they might be better at converting whether it's flat roofing or pitched roofing or slate roofing or blue roofing or brown roofing or biodiverse roofing, heritage roofing. Within just roofing, there's 10 different like subindustries and subtopics. Now, one of them might say, "No, we are no good at flat roofing. we only do slate roofing and this is just one example obviously. Um so you go down the the the kind of rabbit hole of right okay well let's get into doing this and then further down the line you might realize that the slate roofing that they're really good at is heritage roofing for churches and that's kind of how how you almost go down the route of we are the church roofing experts. It's always a pitched roof. It's always slate roofing. churches have generally got good budget and then you go, "Oh, that's great." And and that's kind of when you start speaking to these business owners, they're telling you where the money is. And then a lot of the time what the stuff that they tell you whether it's like like I said heritage roofing and stuff like that you look at it in Google search console or when it's coming through or you look in nature and it's quite the keyword difficulty is relatively easy to go after and and they're telling you that it's a profitable keyword. So what what better kind of site and kind of setup to go after than the stuff that they're saying that they convert well for?
James Dooley: Gotcha. Um, so yeah, so your basic kind of process is like rank a website, um, maybe start doing some like lead genen, like actually selling the leads, then kind of sweeten the deal and turn that into a rankto- rent relationship. And then after that happens, you might act you might you kind of develop a further partnership with them and might actually start putting more of them like on the website and having more of a back and forth dialogue with things you can go after and stuff like that. Is that about right?
Nick: Yeah, that's that's exactly right. I mean, further down the line, what normally starts to happen as well is I mean, we've been doing this for quite a long time. So, um I don't know many who's got a bigger portfolio than we have online. It's it's only in the UK. We don't we don't kind of go outside of the UK. Um I'd be very surprised if there's anyone in the UK that generates more inquiries than what we do on a weekby-eek basis. But what starts to happen is some of these business owners then start to want me to get involved as like an investor within the company because actually what starts to happen and and this sounds probably your first reaction to this will be well it's a good problem to have is we start to generate them more leads than what they can deal with. and you say, "Well, oh, that's a great problem." But the point is, it's still a problem because if they're not getting back to these inquiries very quickly, I'm getting annoyed because I'm like, I want them to make certain they're getting the most out of the leads to make certain that they're making good profit. So, if it's taken a while, what we can start to do is we also own I've not really said this on one or two other podcasts, we also own a large call center. So there's times where we could say, well, look, you train us up on I'm just going down the road of heritage roofing for for this podcast for for the sake of it. So if we're generating inquiries for it, you train us up with the general spiel of what you need, which might be the size, some photos, and do you have a budget in mind? Right? and just initially start to get that information because that will weed out maybe 50% of the inquiries that come back that don't that aren't willing to get photos, not willing to get photos, they're probably not serious about having it done, right? That they need to try and get some sort of photos. Even if it's just from a distance, I'm not saying go up and climb on the roof and get the photos, but if it was like a a playground or something else, go and get some photos. Go and tell us what it is that you're looking for. um is there any anything specific that you've kind of done research for for like let's say what type of slate roofing that that it is? Um come back to us. We'll then get all the information and then we change it from like a cold web lead to like a a hot lead then because not only have they inquired saying, "Oh, they'll offer a price for Heritage Roofing." Now they're giving us the all the information and then we can send it through to the to the clients that way. But I only really do that when I have some sort of investment in the company. And then and then it's almost like a sales generation. And we could go one step further and do the quotes if if we felt it was worth it for for us. Um because you get some are very good electricians or plumbers or tarmac companies and they might not be in the office until the weekend. There might be a way himself doing some of the installation, but there might be a really good company that we might say, "Well, you know what? We'll take the inquires and we'll do the pricing for you, but let's let's kind of that at that point it could even be cutting like investment opportunities that we own part of that stuff."
James Dooley: Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, what like what percentage of of your portfolio would you say that you are also an investor of the company?
Nick: probably say about 3% something like that. Not not many. Um but but we're in hundreds and hundreds of niches. So there's probably about 20 different businesses when you look at it that way that I'm involved in as an as a direct investor or director. The um like we've got one which is like a road markings company doing like the double yellow lines and stuff like that. Um, and the reason why we kind of went into that is because it ties in with we do quite a lot of lead generation for road traffic management. So like when I got into road markings, they need road traffic management and it kind of crosses to each other. So you start you almost like imagine when you build a website and you're looking to build topical authority and you have all internal links like a spider's web. We've kind of done that offline with businesses like what business can feed another business which can feed another business which can feed another business. And that's kind of how we how we started to build it out.
James Dooley: Yeah. For for what we do, building a little empire. Very cool. Um so yeah, getting getting back to like your kind of your portfolio. Um can you briefly just tell us a little bit about the size of your um basically the number of sites that you're renting out right now and also the size of the team that you have behind this?
Nick: So we've got we've got over a thousand websites that we've built. I think there's about 12 thou 1,200 websites in total that we've built out but I think there's about don't I mean it to be fair this can vary um I think there's about 850 sites of the 1,200 that are actually earning some sort of money whether it's lead generation whether it's rank and rents whether it's display ads right from that I reckon probably around 650 are rank and rents Um, so we've been with us for a while, 650 with we've agreed a rate. I mean, some some of them could only be two, three, 400 pound a month, but some of them can be £25,000 a month. So, it completely varies on the niche and how many inquiries that we're generating for how much it can earn. But obviously the the sites that are only earning maybe two300 pound a month might have only cost us5,000 pound to rank it where the ones at 25 or 20 grand or 15 grand a month that might have cost us 200,000 to rank it. But still it normally works out because we I mean don't get me wrong we we've failed a lot throughout the years. Um but now I feel like SEO is very predictable. Um, I know people might laugh at that and there's been a lot of updates and stuff like that, but especially in local or in certain kind of industries, it it's you build obviously build a good technical site that's not any errors and it loads pretty fast and it converts and it's got like all the EAT signals on there. Build good quality content. Build topical clusters so you've got topical authority and build links. And if you try and cut one of them corners and don't do one of them pillars correctly, you'll struggle to rank. But if you do all of them well, you will rank. And what really frustrates me about the industry is how some people go out there in in kind of groups saying you don't need links, just build good quality content. And then some people that are link builders like, oh, you just cheap out on your content. And you're like, no, build good quality content. build out topical authority and build links mainly to the homepage with like branded and naked URLs, but then start hitting links to your category pages and your money pages. In general, we we don't actually do that many links to money pages. That's the last thing of what we hit. Um, but it it's not rocket science and and to be fair, everybody's got the blueprint. Some people want a a knowledge bomb and sometimes I sit there and I say the knowledge bomb is get your right SOPs and good members of staff and start now today. start building a site today because actually last time I spoke to you four months ago, you're in exactly the same position as you was four months ago and I told you what to do and you didn't start. You procrastinated and then you come back to me asking the same questions and at that point I feel it's disrespectful. So go and do what I told you to do. Go and do those four pillars and do it.
James Dooley: Yeah, it is disrespectful. Yeah, they just don't want to do it. And that's that's the problem. It's the corner cutting race, right? But that's interesting about your uh your link building method as well because that's pretty much uh the exact same method that we preach to people like in our group and stuff. Uh you know, we're always trying to help people just kind of link building uh best practices and we we preach a lot of homepage building, you know, category pages, hub pages, anything that links out to a bunch of stuff, you know, like pillar content pieces or whatever. And then go and hit like money pages as well, but don't just like spam your money pages, right? Lots of natural anchors, too. So, why do you do that? Because it works.
Nick: Yeah, it works. over all authority of the site. It's safe and you're and you're educating people that's what they need to do. And I'm educating people on top of that. They need to do good quality content and topical authority.
James Dooley: Mhm. So why are they not doing it? And and the point is because the cheap like you you guys do quality links. So you do all the foundational links, you do all the PBMs, you do the guest post, you do the niche edits, right?
Nick: Mhm. It's no different realistically from I mean there is a little bit with regards to toxic links and trust and stuff like that and certain power of what you can get but you guys are an amazing link vendor right so alls that they need to do is write good quality content whether they use surfer SEO market moves whether they use onpage.ai AI phrase, um, clear scope, whatever it is that they might want to use for good quality content. Go and do good quality content. Genuinely believe that you've covered that page topic in its entirety. Then go and do what you guys preach. Go and get the foundational links to start with to the homepage, naked URLs, and branded anchors. Go and get a couple of the PBMs to go and get some power through to it. Go and get a few of the guest posts and then he said it's to some of the category pages and kind of pillar posts that you're doing. And then they'll probably the last one tap a few guest posts directly to the money pages that are really really relevant kind of what people call like reversing cost swim that's super matching up the relevance and that's it. And and there's no if someone's watching this and they're like I want a knowledge bomb. That's your knowledge. Just go do everything right.
James Dooley: Yeah. People don't like it. They don't they hate this answer. They hate, you know, I think Diggity might have made this uh phrase, but we're in the age of kind of like do all the things in SEO, right? And people hate that answer. They hate it so much. They just want like the the easy answer where you just have to do this and you can save all your time doing the other stuff.
Nick: You mean I can't just spin content and put up a site in like, you know, five hours and then have it ranking within a week by spamming it out and you keep the rankings for years. I do remember those days though. Those days.
James Dooley: Yeah, it was it was awesome.
Nick: Yeah, but it's long gone, I think, for the majority of people. Um, yeah, for sure. So, yeah, James, um, what is like what's like the typical size of these sites that you're building? Um, I know there's probably quite a big like variation, but like if you just give us an idea like how many of how many sites are you doing that are like these big like national sites or even international where you just have like tons of location pages all doing like the same service or whatever versus
James Dooley: We don't go on. Sorry. We don't we don't have any um international. They're all UK and Ireland of what we have. Um some might be completely national in UK and Ireland. So there's 43,476 villages, towns, and cities in the UK. So if you just had one service and you wanted to kind of go after every area in the UK, there's over 43,000 pages to go after. Um, majority of kind of companies don't work fully nationwide. So, they might work like the uh Scotland and the north of England. Some might work just within 30 miles of London. Um, so it depends on the client if I'm being honest. Like if they only want leads that's within an hour's drive of them, that's kind of what we'll build out. So, we might build a a 100 location page site. Some we might build a 500 location page site. There is some that we've built out that have got I think 1.2 million pages. Um for being 100% honest like do do I struggle to rank every single page? Yes, of course I do. Like Google's like I need an insane amount of I probably need a D not that DR can manipulate but like you need like some sort of DR80 site that's amazing content, amazing silo. um new velocity of content being done, new velocity of links being done on a consistent basis to get all them indexed. Yeah, be a lot of juice to pass around. Even if I can just get 50% of those indexed and you can use certain ways whether you're using like amigga indexer or you can do like mass tweets and you can do certain things like that to try your best to try to get more pages in the index. You'll never get them all in the index, but like you said, even 50% of the site, that's 600,000 pages in the index. Probably it's probably going to generate you 40 50 inquiries a day if that happens. And at that point, if you're in a good niche, especially in the finance industry, that that alone could be earning you approximately about 80 grand a month. Nice. the um there's some there's some like I don't really talk about this too much but I'll say it on here we we make a little we make quite a lot of money on in the finance sector and that's what kind of goes through to the call center. So from from there then um whether it's like invoice factoring is quite a good one or business loans or mortgages um and what you start finding is when you get really good at lead genen and I was talking about the spiders web if you think if so if you think about this what what person would be looking at their pension would it be a young person or an old person? old person most likely, I'm guessing. Yeah. So, we try to then start thinking, okay, what else might they be looking for that they're probably going to be 55 plus? What else might they be looking for? And they might also be looking for something that's called equity release, which is where you're releasing equity out of your house because you want to go on a really nice cruise and you want to spend some of your money that you've got in in your house. you've worked really hard all your life and you want to get some money out of your house, right? So, when someone inquires for a pension on the thank you page, we might also say, "Oh, by the way, we've got some amazing deals on equity release. Are are you interested in this?" And if they tick yes, that's a lead now for my equity release company as well. If they also say, "Would you be interested in um sorting out your will?" Like if you're getting a will written or lasting power of attorney, which is in New L. If they say yes to that, I can sell that to a will writing company. So next minute before I know it, that one lead I've now and each company's only had it like they've all got exclusive leads, but now a pension provider's got a lead, an equity lease company's got a lead, and a will writing company's got a lead. So it kind of ties in. and managed to sell free leads all exclusive or not even selling it could like you said it could be on the rank and rents and they could be a good client. She's just trying to think of ways like majority of time when you let's say the mortgages when you first get into doing mortgages majority of the time when you get a mortgage especially let's say you're moving in the house with your wife right at that point you might start looking for life insurance because you've got you're getting a mortgage on your house and you're saying look if one of us pass away here we want to get the mortgage kind of paid off but if I try and sell you life insurance at any point in your life, you're probably like, "No, get away. I don't want it." But at the time of you getting a mortgage is probably the best time that you might want life insurance. So, you do what's called cross-selling or upselling. So, there's all little things like that and different nuances like that of what you can do, which isn't just SEO related, but it's maximizing the money that you can earn. And that's why I think what I think that's why we're good because there's so many people come to me going, "Well, I can only earn 200 pound, 300 pound a month off that site." And I'm like, "Give it to me and I bet I can earn two two grand a month off that sign because you're probably just not finding the right customers who's going to deal with it in the correct manner and give you the kickbacks that you deserve."
James Dooley: I feel like we're starting to get um I feel like we're starting to get like an idea for the scope of your business like it, you know, when you take 650 sites now and you start factor in this kind of thing, it it starts to feel like it, okay, this is going to be a ton of work. Um yeah, to be to be honest with you though, like if if I recommended someone to do like I wouldn't recommend someone else to do what I've done. Like it's not it's not easy. You need a massive team. Um you are you going to have problems with um staff? Yes. Are you going to have problems with um staff ringing in sick on a Monday morning because they've been out all weekend? Yes. Are you going to have VAS that just leave? Yes. Like it's not all kind of rainbows and sunshine. Do you know what I mean? Like of course you have problems within the business. So people just want to hear the high level top level. Oh my god, you're you're crushing it. And you're like, yeah, but the team have got loads of problems as well. Like but they don't want to hear about that. They just want to hear about the good stuff. So what I would recommend is if someone's happy with earning 15,000 pound a month, go and build five websites, right? And of them five websites, one of them might do well, four of them might fail. But that one that does well will pay far outweigh the losses of the four that you've lost. You're not going to have a high success rate. You're going to fail more times that you do than you do well on. So what we did when we was failing back in our day of entering what we thought might have been a good good kind of industry anything that we was generating leads on but was find to monetize just change to display ads or we put it in our testing pool for our R&D testing team to say go and play around with that. Go and break Google. Go and do whatever you can do. Push the boundaries on exact match anchors. Push the boundaries on how many links you can build. Push the boundaries on now like AI content. go and do whatever you want with that site and if you tank it, I'm not bothered. Come come come back with data with how far you manage to get away with it. And there's times we've got now some display ad sites that are only 15 grand a month just with AI content, just with what what you deem to be spammy kind of backlink profile that have got exact match anchors and stuff like that and you're like, how's that even working? And then I've got other sites where I've actually tried to do well on it and tried to build up my my content velocity and tried to build um good quality content, topical authority and good links. And in the in the latest update, I've had two sites hit that in my opinion shouldn't be hit. Now, obviously there's a lot of people go, "Oh my god, I've had my sites that have been hit with a penalty." I've had two sites hit within the penalty hard. Probably lost 50% of the traffic and everyone says, "Oh, I don't deserve it. I don't deserve it." I genuinely think I don't deserve it. But the worst thing is I've had probably 10 sites jump up and overtake my two sites that have gone down that I've not updated in two years. So I'm like, they don't deserve to be outranking them. So, in my opinion, the latest update has been like, don't get me started on that.
Nick: I feel like Yeah, there's a lot of chaos right now. No one no one's too happy with Google these days. Uh man, your your business model um for the rank to rent uh thing you've got going reminds me of how I got my start in SEO, which was working for a company that was ranked to rent, had, you know, hundreds of sites and then a a couple call centers, but predominantly, you know, that was all outbound sales calls, which is what I did for that company. Um but like 500 people uh doing outbound calls. Is your call center predominantly doing like outbound calls for your these leads that are coming in or um are they taking in calls?
James Dooley: Uh both. Um so what will happen is um the call center generally is when an inquiry come we won't do cold calling but when someone inquires we've got KPI set up within the call center. We need to ring it within 23 seconds. Um, so I there's times where for certain industries we've rang up the client, pretty much closed the client and sent a quote prior to even the next company even ringing them. That's efficient kind of the process is. Um, we don't do cold outbound calls, but like you said, when they fill in the form, we ring them within 23 seconds or sometimes the telephone numbers that are on the website for the inbound calls, they'll take them as well. Um, and but it's just difficult because like you said, um, a 500 person call center, I couldn't think of anything worse than managing a 500 person call center. Like we we fluctuate from 90 to maybe 120 in the call center and it's a massive headache.
Nick: Um, dude, I couldn't imagine. Yeah. Um, wrangling in a lot of stuff. Now, mind you, this was predominantly doing like Jordan Belffort type outbound cold calling all day long, right? Um but still just I feel like uh there's so many variables in managing that many people um you know taking different kinds of leads um etc. And is that is that call center all local or some of it you know people in other countries as well?
James Dooley: So we've got um an overflow call center in the Philippines um for nighttime kind of shift and then the two kind of we've split up into three eight hour shifts. So the nighttime shift um is in the Philippines. Um the daytime the two daytime shifts, so like the early morning till maybe I think it's like 4:00 and then 4:00 till midnight. Um that's all based near Manchester. Um it's placed in 11. Um so yeah, it's it's all Manchester based. to all UK English speaking um people that are doing those and and to be fair it kind of works well because sometimes if you outsource it to let's say Bangladesh or Philippines or South Africa or Venezuela and stuff like that which are all quite good places to get like virtual assistants then the English the they know that you've shipped it abroad and I feel like you need to have English- speakaking people dealing with a UK lead our Scottish deal with Scotland and stuff like that. Um just just the conver just from the data the conversion rate um just it's just a lot better. It's going to increase trust flow I would think you know for them to think that they're talking to a local person or something like that. And that Manchester um call center is that something you actually set up yourself or or is it like a call center that's already there and you kind of like contract through it or or something?
Nick: Well, so we we set it up probably about seven years ago. We had um a a friend, a close friend now. Um he actually worked in a pig farm. It was it was the we called it a pig farm. Basically, it was like a wooden kind of on a farmer's field, a w a wooden hut. Um we ended up getting like six people in there. Um and then we just kept building it up, but our issue was the internet access was like ridiculous. It was in the middle of a farm. So when we're trying to kind of send documents through for like mortgage brokers and bank statements and it was just taking ages on the Wi-Fi and the internet. So at that point we needed to like level up and get a bigger size. Then we got like a 30 person call center in the center of Manchester. Our issue was in the center of Manchester the rent was high for like for big areas. And then in Levvenw is like I don't know if you if you've ever heard of it. It's a quite a rough area of Manchester. No don't no disrespect to anyone who's from Leven like but the um it's it's easy to get to. It's not really it's easy for parking. So there's not like it's not within um the city center where it's hard for parking. It's hard to get to. There's traffic and all that. So it just made it a lot easier to kind of recruit in that area than it was in the center of Manchester. Then from there then it's just expanded and expanded. We bought the warehouse next door and yeah it's it's grown to a nice that's pretty awesome.
James Dooley: Um and so also speaking of phone calls um what are you guys doing about GMBBS or GBPs, you know, Google My Business, whatever you want to call it. Um so over the years I've had a lot of problems um with GMBBS a lot. Um there's so so many people out there that oh I can create you a GMBB and stuff like that and then they just get suspended and the the worst part is that we used to mass create GMBBS and the issue was that it they only got suspended when they started ranking. So you end up spending a lot of money on citations. You're spending a lot of money on whether people do like driving directions, filling out all the posts, doing all the photos, and then it gets suspended. And you're just like, it's just not for me. It's just not a business model that it it don't entertain me because I want long-term sustainable rankings. I've got staff that I need to keep making certain that we can pay. I don't want to wake up one morning and a thousand GMBBS have all gone down.
Nick: Yeah. So, we kind of because of that and um I mean we've I know people that are out there creating the GMBBS and they'll obviously fake fake the address and then when Google sends a suspension, they'll go and doctor like Photoshop like the address like bank details and stuff like that, but the issue is it's just blatant fraud. and Google actually I don't know if you knew about the lawsuit but like a few months someone got done for it and I'm just like I'm a prime candidate for for some for someone like Google to come after where like I just I just don't want that hanging over my head in thinking I'm actually doing something that's fraudulent. So if if our clients that take the leads aren't willing to allow us to use their address, we just don't create a GMBB for the site.
James Dooley: Yeah. where sometimes they say, "Yeah, by all means, we can you can use our address." Now, obviously, if they've already got a GMBB, we won't bother. Um because we can't have two GMBBs at the same location and stuff like that. Um, previously we've tried to do it where you do like 25A or 25B and set up like a sweet number and stuff like that, but I I just want to do things right. And I know it sounds very white at because I came from a bit of a black hat background and I feel like I've gone very white at and I'm looking for long-term sustainable kind of rankings and I think Google done a good job at cleaning up the industry from being we're we're actually the same way. We used to be I think quite a bit more black hat than we are now. But uh once you you know start making some money you you want to protect it, right? You don't want to for sure.
Nick: Um, so okay, so if the client has a GMBB, use the GMBB. Otherwise, you're basically just saying, "Okay, so much for maps. We'll just bank on, you know, organic clicks." And and and don't get me wrong, Chris, right, the that's probably bad advice because if you can get a GMBB, a GMBB can create you a lot of inquiries. I'm not I'm not denying that a GMBB is not good for a site. If you can get a GMBB and build that GMBB out out, it actually helps the website rank better. And if your website's ranking well, it helps the GMBB rank better. So it's not just about like engagement on the GMBB. If the what the website that's connected through to it, if that's ranking well, the G&B will rank well. So there's a lot of trust signals there if you can get one made. I just don't go down the route of faking it. Um because it's just going to lead to suspensions and and like you said, it could lead to a lot of other issues further down the line that I don't need.
James Dooley: Could you imagine being that guy and getting the uh you know whatever legal document sent by the world's largest or you know one of the largest corporations in the world be like holy shit I am I mean I'm done like what are you going to do at that point it is it is blatant fraud in it you know I mean like we all try to do things to like you guys do PBNs and try and and and and some people go that's illegal it's illegal but it's not actually illegal you know what I it. There's nothing illegal in doing something like that. It's frowned upon in the industry, but then these same people that frown upon a PBI and frown upon buying links and say, "Oh, it's against Google guidelines. It's illegal." It don't mean it's illegal. Do you know what I mean?
Nick: Yeah, frowned upon is fine. Yeah, we we'll do frowned upon. We don't do fraud.
James Dooley: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely staying away from the illegal side of things. Um, you know, okay, so going back to kind of like more a little bit of an SEO focus on things. Um, and we kind of talked about this before about just doing all the things for SEO. Uh, but are there any specific strategies that you guys really like to use right now as far as ranking these sites?
Nick: So, we build good quality content. We try and make certain that we think of every kind of topic and question that someone might want to know for that product or service that people are doing. Um all them pages. Uh you guys do some I think one or two of my different companies buy quite a lot of links from Sir Links a lot on the like the foundational links and um okay some stuff of what you do. Um the I've got like diff I try not to get too involved in the dayto-day of like I've got one or two companies that'll buy obviously I'm investor in searcheroo but then I've got another company that says no no I like the foundational links and stuff from from you guys and the PBN's and the guest so it's just like bet the devil they know and like if they've got a process of ordering from you then then let that be so it kind of just goes down the route exactly what you was preaching before build a lot of citations. Um, build a lot of like um, trusted branded naked URL links to the homepage. Start in a few category pages with some links generally with some PBNs, maybe one or two PBNs to the homepage as well. Um, start getting some guest posts throughout the whole site for relevance that's coming through. Few niche edits which aren't as relevant but might send more power and trust through the site. it's hard to really line up relevance on a niche edit or link insertion, stuff like that. And a lot of time that's enough. Um, if it's not, you probably need to write more articles for more topical authority and build more links. Um, and that's kind of how it works. And and there's no secret apart from that. Um, we I mean something that that we do like one or two little tricks of what we do is we try and make certain I'm sure you've heard of like parasite SEO. We try to make certain that our guest posts, all of our guest posts, we kind of treat as parasite SEO. So, we try to rank our guest posts for the keywords that we want our money site to rank for. So that in an ideal world for me, I want us to rank number one and I want our guest post to rank number two for the keyword that we want to go after. And what better way of getting traffic from, let's say, the position number two, which goes back to position number one. Do you know what I mean? It's kind of how we do it. Um, we do quite a lot of tier twos. Okay. To our guest posts. What do you like to use for tier two?
James Dooley: We've actually got our own networking search room. Um, so we've got a lot of um like old PBNs and like niche edits. So we might have like certain relationships with um a lot of blog owners that might turn around and say, "Right, okay, if you're going to buy X amount of guest posts from us like and we if you're going to buy X amount of guest posts, we'll allow X amount of niche edits." So we with the the the niche edits that sorry the guest post the tier two sorry that we get we're only selling at $20 each and it's for a niche edit. Now, if I'm being 100% honest, some of them are buying them for money sites as well. Um, because they're actually they're actually pretty good and they do me, but um, yeah, tier twos work pretty well. Um, and and I only really t I only really tier them to the guest posts. Um, but I'm sure your guy P your your PBNs would work an amazing way for powering up the the guest posts. If if you're not selling many of them, I'd start recommend to your clients in saying if someone's paying quite a lot on the guest posts, get them powered up because they might have a high DR DR50, but if the if the internal linking to it is not great, then the page level is not very strong. So, start tapping a few tier twos through to that. Um, and yeah, that's that's generally it. There's no massive knowledge bombs in that apart from so something else that we that we try to do is if we've got an author on the site or a name on the meet the team page we try to make certain in the guest post that we'll be mentioning them as well. So if ever someone like a Google quality rator guideline, a Google quality came to look at the site and Google the name of the author with the topic or the industry, these articles would be showing up saying, "Oh, these are an expert in heritage roofing." Do you know what I mean? And then obviously get some uh expertise out there because I know the quality raiders actually do that. They'll search for your name and then look around see where you're mentioned and stuff. So that's that's a good idea. I don't they'll search for let's say Nick ultim minus sir linksot.comco and obviously then links so they kind of say what where on the internet now obviously for links it doesn't it's not really an area that eAT is a big thing but let's say it's to do with finance they might come along and say something like Nick alultimore um FCA minus nickfinance.com if that's your website and see where where on the internet are you are people saying that you're an expert that's not on your website and and do you have a brand search for it and if you don't well we might not trust your your articles that you're writing about finance because realistically probably would have an FCA license which I have an FCA profile and you'd have certain other kind of people talking about you or and stuff like that. So that's something else that if I'm being honest with you about up until about 12 months ago um I thought EAT was like a myth. I thought it was one of them things that was going throughout the industry. Same with disab um I thought disavose and eat was a myth for many many years and it was one of them that I'd love to go out and say ah you're talking so much garbage it's not even a thing until now no that they're like businesses now that I bought. So, I love I love kind of getting my teeth into website recovery quite a lot. And we get still to this day, and I don't know whether you know this or you don't, um there's probably two or three manual action link penalties that still happen today. Um I heard Kyle Rof the other day talking on um with Gail Britain and he's like, "When the last time you heard a manual action link penalty?" And I was like, "Kyle, like there's several every week that's still happening now to this day. It's not they've not stopped it, but we haven't seen one in a while actually. We're in the it's been quite a while. You know, we haven't had at least we haven't any like any clients complain or anyone in our like managed link building program or whatever. Gen generally speaking, it's in the finance industry, money or life industry or actually quite a lot of them is in Google News. So, if you got like a big Google News site, um, the only reason why I start to know about it now was we actually got hit, I think it was about four and a half years ago with a manual action penalty and I didn't have a clue like what to do. So, it's in Google Search Console. They've emailed you. You've got a manual action penalty. What do you do? Oh, you need to do a reconsideration request. Right. Okay. Who does this? Um, who's the godfather of disavows? Who's the main guy in the world that can get me out of this? Because I was earning the site was earning like 40 grand a month at the time. And everybody, all fingers pointed to Rick Lass. He's like, "Rick Lass, he's unbelievable. He's god of it." So I went and met him. He's from the UK. So I went and met him. And he basically started to say, "Look, I'm looking to wind down. I'm looking to like semi-retire. Obviously, I'll do the disavow for you." And I'm like, "Mate, train me up. Like I buy so many links." Just for me knowing what a good link looks like. Train me up. because I never at that time I didn't I didn't use trust and I didn't use toxicity. All that I thought was if I get a high DR with traffic and with relevance I've got the holy grail of link building until he starts talking to me about trust and toxicity. And at that point I'm like I don't even know what you mean. Like you're talking gobbledegoot to me. And then I got trained up on it and then from there I was like, "Oh, and now we do all of Rick's disavows now." So because he's he's like the godfather of link manual kind of action penalties. Mhm. We now do the fulfillment for Rick and Rick's a great guy. He's kind of more than semi-retired. He's almost retired now. Um but because we're SEOs, we do our best. And sometimes for about a year, me and Rick was banging heads with each other. I'm like, I don't want to disavow this link. it's got trust and it's got power and it's and it's relevant and it's a branded anchor text and he's like but it's toxic and we kind of know I don't feel we're as as aggressive as what Rick Lass was but we get them out of the penalty but we still try and keep as many of the highowered high trust links that's pointing through to the site and then same with the EAT I don't know if you ever heard of um an author transparency penalty you heard of that no So, we had a Google News site um and it was doing really well. It kept getting Google discovery. Um, bam, manual action penalty. And this is this is recent. This is like maybe three months ago. Manual action. I'm like, oh god, I've got a link penalty. Well, clicked onto it. All for transparency penalty. I was like, what even is this? And then I went through it and it's literally I I can send you through the um the image of it from Google Search Console. All for transparency penalty. And I've only ever known now anybody in the finance your money your life and um the Google news sector get them at present but I'm being told that and and you don't know but I'm being told they're going to be rolling out algorithmically a little bit more. So from that I've just now started to I set up an EAT SEO kind of brand and you know what it's just ticking the boxes like it for the sake of when you're building out a site build an about us page and meet the team page have a telephone number on there have an email address on there where someone if someone wants to complain about your site about something they can get hold of you try not to hide the contact page do you know what I mean like just have a privacy policy cookie policy just again and I know it sounds very blas but just do all things right. Just do what a real business would do.
James Dooley: Um that's the same exact thing we tell people. Just like do what a normal business would do. Try not to be sketchy. Don't cut corners. I mean like you know if a regular business is doing it go ahead and set it up like a regular business. But for you guys it could work for sir links a lot. It could work amazing because realistically you could start almost selling EAT link building because if you start to like you said mention the author in the guest post you're saying it's an EAT link building service. Do you know what I mean? Like it's a good idea really. You should be doing it. I like that. You should do it. You should do it 100%.
Nick: you should do it because then you're taking like why waste so many people build a guest post right and all right they might line up the relevance but they're wasting so many things like why not on that guest post get an image embed get a video embed mention the nap listing and mention the author like they're still only getting one do follow contextual link to the site but actually having an image embed and a video embed helps it indexing better as well it's got a chance of that then um ranking in Google images and Google videos of that guest post getting that little bit more traffic. So all those little minor wins that long term is what's going to stand you in goodstead. Right. For sure. For sure. Watch now. So links a lot. E8 link. Yeah. Newest newest product. We'll see. We'll see if we're first to market. Uh so that that's a good idea. Yeah. Thanks for the hot tip, man. For sure. Um so back back to ranked to rent a little bit. Um what like so how you know we we talked about you you know you build the site you rank the site you start getting leads you start selling leads how are you finding your clients to sell these leads to initially like how how are you finding them initially?
James Dooley: Yeah. So initially let's say again we'll just use the heritage roofing it doesn't matter what industry it is but heritage roofing um we find that okay or let's say just roofing in general because we might not know heritage roofing yet is good. So you go and build a roofing website and generally speaking what you do is you go out to every single person on the internet that is paying for PPC for anything to do with roofing. You go on to yellow pages, anyone who's paying for um like yellow pages premium advertising. You go and check a trade, anyone who's paying to be part of that directory. Anyone in any newspaper that's that's kind of doing any sort of ads. If you listen to someone on the radio and you hear that they're doing anything to do with roofing, you go and find any company that's paying some money for advertising and you contact them saying, "We can generate your roofing leads." Right? And on that website, you might have 30 different companies, right? But you're not you're not promising any one of them exclusive leads. You're just saying we might be able to generate you leads for you interested for completely for free. Ours what we ask you to do, you don't pay anything for the leads. Once you if it's one of our leads, add 5% on top of your price for us, right? Are you still going to be competitive if you do that? They go, "Yeah, not a problem." So, you're going, "Right, okay. So, if it's a 10 grand job, just going at 10,500 pound." The majority time that's not going to lose them the job. And if they win it, the one that wins it, we get 500 pound from. What it actually starts to tell you is the ones that win it and give you the 500 quid are the best at converting the leads because they're the one that's converted it. So at that point now you're not testing, you're not like, "Well, how do you know the company's good at conversion?" Well, you don't know they're good at conversion until you start to realize who's won the job. Do you get what I mean? So like at that point, some of them start becoming annoyed because you're going, "Oh, you're sending it to 30 companies." And you go, "Yeah, I know we are." Like I never told you you get exclusive leads. And those that are going, "Oh, but they're cheaper than us," right? They just me 500 quid commission. You didn't pay me anything. So I'd sooner go to someone that's going to win more work, right? Complaining about your free leads.
Nick: That's the problem I kept running into was uh you know, you'd send them leads, but then I don't know, depending on the type of bluecollar worker, especially that I was working with, they'd be like, "Oh, well, you know, I don't know." And blah blah blah. It's like, well, you know, if I can't talk rational sense and data with you, then, you know, it's not going to work out eventually.
James Dooley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you need to kiss a lot of frogs to find your princess. Do you know what I mean? So, like for sure you just got to go out and have a broad like the ones that realistically this is what normally happens. You sent out to 30, 15 of them come ringing you up going tear me off. Ah, you sent it out to loads and you switch them off, right? The other 15, maybe 10 out of them 15 have created a Google sheet that have logged every single inquiry that's come in and told you where the the leads up to and what commission that they've added on. And you go, these are the companies I want to work with, right? And they're not every not every company out there that do that, but they're the ones that you want to work with. The ones that log every inquiry and tell you where they're up to. Not that I want to go and sit in every single Google sheet to find out where people are up to or not, but you want them to have some sort of system that you know that they're tracking it end to end from inquiry coming into the source is us and what commission they've added on. And at that point, you go, I like these. I can trust these. And that's when then further down the line, they start to trust you a little bit more. They'll win a few jobs. They probably made some good profit off it. And then from that generic roofing website, you then can start going down the road of saying, "Right, that's a website that just is just roofing. What is it that you do that you're really good at?" It's like someone coming to you and um selling you digital marketing leads and loads of people are coming through to you that are wanting um PPC, Facebook ads, and web design, and you kind of go, "Well, it's not really what we do. We do links." Yeah. So then you don't want to build a website that's SEO, but then they're wanting loads of content being written and you're like, oh, it's not really what I do. It's so like you kind of start on digital marketing, then it might move to SEO, and then you have to start realizing actually no, it's just links. It's not even content and parts of SEO. It's just links that we want, and then when you build a website on that, they're converting them exactly as they should be converting them because it's exactly what they want. And and that's where you've kind of But is there any way of finding that using Seamrush or HDS? No. Like is there any quick wins that you can do? Like you just be able to throw up a 500 page site? No. Like it's hard work. I'm not I'm not going to tell you that it's easy because it's not. But it's all it's awesome the filter that you've got set up essentially because then you like you said you are finding these very serious open-minded kind of broadview business people that are willing to uh you know do these exercises that you need to see if it's going to be symbiotic. Um, and then eventually, you know, if you can take over part of that company and help grow it, um, you know, that's that's awesome. Um, because you filtered out all the all the junk.
James Dooley: some something that I would say and I've said this on a few different podcasts and I think it's very very very important is I now know and there's a little bit of a problem where I've got to make certain internally my staff know this and I've got to keep trying to instill into them that um with a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility and we've got certain websites out there where some of them might be renting like you said let's call it 25 grand a month is on the upward side there some that maybe do slightly more but generally speaking let's say it's 15 to 25 grand on on the higher end. Those clients might have grown from two vans on the road to 25 vans on the road, right? That now means that they've got 60 members of staff on the road in in installation teams that if I stop their inquiries, there's potentially 60 families that might not be able to pay the mortgage next month. Yeah. Right. So at that point it becomes a little bit scary because you're then starting to go like I need to make certain that I don't get hit with an algorithm update. Do you know what I mean? But the um but the big the biggest part actually is making certain that my staff that are managing them sites don't get a phone call from the biggest competitor down the road and say I know that or they might say how much is um Chris renting your site for or all these leads are going through to Chris Roofing and you you go yeah and they go they're paying 15 grand a month and they go I'll give you 20% extra I'll give you 18 grand a month. We can't just switch them off because that's not fair because they've built the business with us. We've built a business with them. We've got relationships with them, long-term relationships. Like we could like there's not we're not got a contract to say it's this is it. They own the site. We own the site. And at any point I could switch them off. And I could say no, that's it, but you're being switched off. And I just worry sometimes and I don't because it's like I make certain that they wouldn't do it. But could a member of staff who gets commission on what the sites earn, would they want to earn an extra three grand a month? Of course they. So for that, I've got to make certain that they're doing stuff with honest trust and integrity and and again it's a good problem for me to sit on and have, but it's still a problem and I've still got to make certain that the culture within the company is the right they're doing the right thing. Um, and it's not the right thing isn't always the most profitable thing. Um, so that's something else to take on that. Again, it's like people might not be able to scale it like what we've scaled it. Um, but it all I do is if you do start doing it, I'd like people to learn just make certain you do things right because pe things can come back to haunt you the further down the line. Like I'm a big believer in karma and stuff like that and just I I hate like I hate it when I hear people kind of mugging somebody else off or I hate it when someone has done something to to like earn a lot of money out of someone and robed them in some way, shape or form and just I know I'm going off subject now from SEO but I think it's very important.
Nick: Uh yeah, I don't know if it is going off subject. I mean, I remember getting my start and having to go through all these different um, you know, situations like that where it's like, I mean, I lost a fortune trying to figure out how, you know, SEO works. And then comparative to, you know, what we talked about earlier in this podcast, it's like the principles are pretty simple. Um, it's all this confusion that's out there on purpose, uh, so that people can suck money out of other people, um, you know, that are creating these negative effects.
James Dooley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. Um, yeah. So, in the inter in the in the interest of not keeping you here all night. I'm sure it's probably getting kind of late over there. I'm not really sure where you're at, but I'm assuming you're in the UK right now. Um, yeah. Do you see do you see any problems? You know, we're talking about problems. Do you see any kind of like big problems for the rank and rent kind of business model moving forward? Um, or or is it just kind of usual SEO stuff? You know, just trying not to get hit by ALGO updates.
Nick: So my my question back to you on that would be um yeah there's potential um issues where certain websites can take over you but then you just reverse engineer why that's happened. It's the same with affiliate. It's the same with e-commerce um drop shipping whatever industry that you're in. Are things going to change? Yes, absolutely. Are things going to change with AI? Yes, absolutely. Have you got to adapt? Yes, absolutely. Like, but it's just part of SEO. Like if if anyone thinks that growth is linear, that you need to get out the industry ASAP because you if you want to get from here to here, it's not one straight line that goes, hey, it kind of like this and there's going to be peaks and troughs and and yes, like um Nick mentioned before, you could you just be able to roll up a site, a 500page site quite easily, spin the content, do a bit of GSA, SEO, nuke, money robot, SEO autopilot, and spam it and bam, you're ranking within a week and you can't do that anymore. You can't do it anymore. But but things change and you just got to keep adapting to what the changes are. They might put more emphasis on GMBBS and then then I might have to get more involved in GMBBS. They might put more emphasis on links and then I need to get more links. They might put more emphasis on topical authority. Then I need to do more topical authority. But the truth of the matter is, if my site drops, they're going to have to replace it with another site that's better. And what other site out there is better than mine? And and if I find another site that takes over me, I'm going to get back in the trenches and find out why they've overtaken me and go and do everything I can to overtake them. So, and and I'd love to have a fight with anyone on on the on the work treadmill. I don't think Abby be like I will work 23 hours a day if I need to seven days a week. So there's that. But yeah, I mean you've got SGE that you could start saying is that going to take stuff away? I don't think it will from lead generation. It might. Where a lot of people I think are going to get hit hard um is when SG fully rolls out. All the people that make money by doing display ads, I think are going to get hit hard with how much earnings they're going to make because I think a lot of the sites, the hightra sites because they'reformational terms and I think thoseformational terms are going to be answered by AI within um SGE. So I think those people need to start looking at alternative ways of money. Um, but some of these people that are sat on these display ad sites that are doing 2 million clicks a month not being money. I'd love to manage some of them sites because you could put lead genen on. There's so many different ways that you could earn money from it. You could put affiliate on it. You could put lead gen on it obviously display ads on it and just teny on there. There's so many other ways of monetizing. You could rent out the um the pixel to someone like the Facebook for retargeting pixels. There's like there's endless amount of ways of monetizing a site. I think we I think there's a 17point checklist that we have for how to monetize a site, right? And people just do display ads and put Isoic or Ad Thrive or Mediaine on it and go, "Ah, I'm earning money." And you're like, "There's so many other ways with the traffic that you're getting that you could do to monetize that in a better way." So yes, the answer is I do worry for certain industries. Um, do I worry? I I'm not losing any sleep at night because anything that does change then I need to adapt my strategy and that's what I've always done in the last 12 13 years.
James Dooley: An SEO that sticks around, right? You got to adapt. Um I actually lied though. I've got one more question for you. Uh besides working 23 hours a day, what's your secret to scaling your rank and rent empire?
Nick: Um I I couldn't do anything of what I do. Like I definitely don't work 23 hours a day. Um, I've got two kids now, so um I want to be I want to be super successful and I want to keep growing um in work, but I also want to be the best dad in the world. So, I want to make certain that I can switch off when I get home. I normally get up at 5:00 in the morning, go to the office, smash out as much work as I can. I normally start getting distracted from about 10:00 um with like staff coming in the office and all the rest of it. they come in earlier, but my first four hours I feel like I've got flow state work done and I get all my work done. Then then I'm just speaking to the team and seeing how everybody is in the office who like are all my like middle managers which have all got like VAS and stuff working for them and graphic designers and videographers and stuff like that. Um go to the gym at midday and then I try and spend time and switch off between like three and seven every day going on bike rides and stuff with the kids. But how how have I managed to scale it is previously just onboarded brilliant staff that you elevate that you train up that you spend time with and you have really really really concise SOPs. So the two best things that we've got within the business is we've got an R&D testing team. So if someone turns around to me, if you came to me and says PBMs are working better than ever, I'd be like thank you very much Chris for that information. I'll go and test it and I won't just go and rehash what you just said going to everybody else. PBN's work amazing. I'd go and test it and check and I probably already got the test data anyway because we we do some stuff with PBNs. Um but then you might say something else and again I go and test it. So that's one part that's good. And the other part is we employ two members of staff and all what they do is work through the SOPs. anyone who doesn't know like standard operating procedures like stepby-step processes of like how to order this, how to how to order this, how to do a content brief, how to do keyword research, just all the basics of every step and I think there's 118 SOPs that we have and each one might have maybe 30 40 steps, right? From how to look for a domain, how to buy a domain, how to host a domain, how to set up the site and to everything. Now, they don't all do that. They only do elements of, let's say, building it and stuff, but build get good quality staff, train them up, and good quality SOPs and make certain that they're concise. Majority of SOPs I look at, they'll do a 45 minute video that could have been four minutes and just make them concise. Make the step step by steps and we we two members of staff just go through the SOPs and make them as concise as possible. Can that 18st step checklist become a 12step checklist or an 11step checklist? Just make it really concise, straight to the point, no no fluff. Straight in and then have like a Loom video underneath it showing the steps of this is how you do it. And do I want that? If if it's a two-minute video, if it can be 90 seconds, redo it. I want it 90 seconds because that video is going to get watched hundreds of times. And that's saving 30 seconds times 100 people watching it. it's well worth kind of make it as concise as it can be. So just brilliant staff like I'm nothing without my staff around me. Um I know that they know that I know that and my kind of role my main role now is probably being a cultural architect in the business um in just keeping them happy and um a lot of them like I've got six apprentices that started and I think they started on and bear in mind these are in the UK. They started on 500 pound a month which is like way below minimum wage but that's what the apprenticeship wage was and it's like an alternative to people going to like university and they had no experience whatsoever and now them six people that are apprentices are all directors of the company. They're all now they earn more money now off commissions than they do off the actual wage that they get and they're on a good wage as well. And and my kind of role is I want each one of them to be as successful as they can be and they can grow to have their own empire. Um and they're on the way of building out their own mini empires and they're happy and it makes me happy seeing their growth.
James Dooley: Awesome, man. Good stuff. Um yeah, so I guess we'll go ahead and wrap things up there. Um yeah, it's been awesome. Thanks for coming to talk to us about Rank and Rent. I feel like, you know, it's been quite educational uh for me, I'm sure, for for Nick as well. Um yeah, what are your what are your next plans for the year? So, are you are you planning on kind of uh extending the uh the podcast circuit into a speaking circuit? Are you going to be around any um events?
Nick: Yeah, I'm I'm always attend all the events. Um I prefer the masterminds and the actual talks. Um, if I'm being honest, I I I don't like I I I prefer interacting with people. I quite like the podcast more than what I thought I would. Um, because you can go down a rabbit hole of speaking about something specific that you might want to know or want to get into. Where if you're up on stage and you've just got a a fixed talk and that audience don't really want to know what that talk's about or they might have certain questions and want you to divert that way as opposed to going that way and you don't know how advanced the the the kind of the crowd are. There's been times where I've known some people go and do a talk and they've had a standing innovation and they've gone and done the exact same talk at another venue and they've been booed off stage because they're like it just it matters. You need to adapt with who's there. Sometimes you don't know who's in the crowd. Um does it need to be like a white like if you go to Brighton SEO it's got to be like a white hat type. They don't like you hearing about buying links. If you guys turned up there you'd get booted. That'd be makes me want to go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I love I love doing the masterminds. I quite like doing the podcasts. I want to build up a bit of a personal brand. Um, just because I think as AI is growing, I think personal branding is going to become more and more important. So that's the main reason why I want to do it. Um, and yeah, I might do one or two Q&A on stage, but I'd never do just an outline, just going up and doing a talk. Um, I have nothing really to sell as well. Quite a lot of people get up on stage and they're trying to sell something. Like none of these podcasts I'm not trying to sell anything to to people. I'm trying to help others do well. I want others I want to elevate others to be more successful. Um I make nothing from apart from more competition by telling people that ranking man's a good business model.
James Dooley: Yeah, you've given a lot of uh very direct advice on some of the niches you're in etc. So um yeah, but you know I would highly advise anybody watching this not to go up against the famous James Douly. He will whoop your ass mo more than likely. All right, James. Um, yeah, we look forward to seeing you out at Chiang Mai. And yeah, I guess to leave things off, uh, where can people find you or is there anything at all you want to plug or Yeah, where can people follow you or whatever?
Nick: So, I'm on um jamesdouly.com is probably the easiest way. So, from there then you can find all my social profiles like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Um, I'm going to start doing quite a bit more on YouTube. Um, with regards to like making some shorts out of this kind of podcast and stuff any other podcasts, I'm more about trying to create the shorts than doing the long form videos. Um, just I think I think people nowadays they're very they want to listen to something for 30 seconds and then go. So, way in the world. Yeah, exactly. Um, that's kind of where where I'm going to be on I'm going to be a bit more active on social media and stuff. I've always tried to keep myself to myself from a business standpoint, but yeah, with my personal branding, I need to talk a little bit more.
James Dooley: Awesome. That's probably why people aren't getting stuff done anymore is they've got that 30 a minute or 30 second, you know, uh, attention span in the morning while they're doing their morning routine and they're like, "Ah, man, learned so much today. Let me go do whatever now." Yeah. Awesome. Well, good luck with your uh personal branding uh blitz or whatever you want to call it. And yeah, we'll see you out at Chiang Mai, man. Thanks for coming.
Nick: Yeah, see you in cheers.
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