Edd guests on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

It was great of Mark to ask me to appear on a podcast that's previously had such well-known guests from the SEO industry , such as Rand Fishkin , barry Swartz , lily Ray and many other well-known names . Mark , very kind , has allowed me to post the audio of the episode here today , so I hope you enjoy it .

I've dropped a link to Mark's podcast in the show notes , so if you want to go and describe it as a guest , I'd highly recommend it . So , anyway , on with the show .

unedited and 100% real . I'm your host , mark A Preston , and today I want my guest to introduce himself for the pure reason I don't want to do him any injustice .

I started off in SEO with a website called BroadbanderCode UK , which we ran very successfully Until 2021 , when we sold it in a trade sale to one of our competitors . They approached us mid-pandemic and made us an offer and it was an offer , a good offer so we took it . Well , that's not the only thing I've done for the last 20 years .

Obviously , I've run other affiliate sites and I still have other affiliate sites and more recently , I launched a keyword research tool called Keywords People Use .

We developed every solution we needed because we had the ability to do it and a lot of things you actually had to do back then . It wasn't a whole range of tools and platforms that there are now . It was literally there was very few things and it was a lot more . You needed more technical knowledge back then .

So it definitely helped back then and I think more now . It means that we never hit a roadblock where we can't do something . There's always a way to do something .

So if you've got some technical skills , it means you can do things that might be more difficult if you're just relying on sort of off the shelf tools and what the the on the converse side of it is . You have to make sure that you don't over engineer stuff , because you can end up spending a lot of time creating something .

When there's enough to show solution , you could plug in in half a day and you might end up making something . So you have to find the right balance . Otherwise you're not going to make the best of it both ways .

So I wasn't there involved at the start of that web agency , but I came in and started working there and through a combination of buyouts and you know , and people get involved and different things , I ended up with partnership with my wife and along the run at the same time what happened was broadband became a technical thing .

It became a product you know broadband internet . So people were ringing up saying can we get some broadband off for you ? And we're going no , no , no , we're a web agency , we're a web agency . So we rebranded the web agency and then we're like let's do something with this broadband domain that we've got sort of accidentally and it was my wife's idea .

She said why don't we make a comparison site , one of the very first comparison sites ? It was a very new concept back that long ago to have a comparison site of any sort and we were just like , right , well , let's work out how to do this and then work out how to monetize it .

So we didn't exactly set up with a big master plan of what we're going to do as a case of what can we make with this opportunity .

And to start with , I mean , it started off with too many cooks , so different people wanted to do different things and in the end me and my wife said , right , we'll buy out our partners on this and we'll take it forward just by ourselves . Because , yeah , originally it was not that everyone's ideas were bad , there was lots of good ideas .

But there's obviously we've got you've got a finance of resources and different competing ideas . You know , and being in business it doesn't always work . So it was a case of we took it with agreement with everybody else .

You know we paid a fair price for it to take it , take it that way and then sort of built it up from there and concentrate on solely on that . And you know , we sold the web agency probably years later and then concentrate solely on the affiliate side of it .

You know , I mean just it . Just opportunities just happen down the road when you least expect to me , and do you think if that particular incident happened , would have you gone down the affiliate marketing route yourself ?

So we were used to working with affiliates when so we'd be over them working on the merchant sites and they'd have affiliates , so we had to make sure everything would be that .

So we were becoming aware of this , this monetization model , and I mean I would have liked to think I'd put two and two together and I can build sites and I can now have some monetization in the side and then we'll do it . But I mean , who knows , it's one of those great ifs . It's probably 50 , 50 and I've probably been generous to myself , right .

Then there was some technical problems , like we wanted to be able to do a postcode checker so that it wasn't just a site about broadband . It had actually . You could go there and say this is where I live . Can I get broadband Because in the first instance , when broadband was first rolled in , it wasn't available everywhere .

So be able to answer that question was quite a key one in terms of , obviously you can monetize it better if you can tell people what's available in their area . And then there was the piece around , obviously , how we monetize it and how we get the information from the broadband providers .

And naively to start with we thought , oh , they'll just come to us and they'll fill in a form for us and we built a whole CMS for the broadband providers to be able to log into and put in all the details of the deals and stuff . Then we went to , we approached them and they were like , no , we don't do that . You know we have our own .

You know we just thought that out yourself . So that was like , ah right , so we've now got to manage , like , get people that deal information of the day and keeping that database up to date . So there was those challenges where I think probably going in naively means that we didn't have to overthink it , so we just got on with it .

If we'd really thought about it and all the complexities and everything that we had to solve as we were going along , it's one of the things where you might not start . So I'm a bigger believer in just getting going on things rather than overthinking it too much up front , because if you overthink it too much , you'll talk yourself about doing things .

They'll give you a certain amount if it's like feed data or endless emails , but the thing is there's no consistency between how they communicate with you , so you really have to build your own processes .

If you're going to build a database , if you're going to be an affiliate building a database and that's what I would strongly suggest for anyone who's looking into affiliate marketing you need to be more than just content . You've got to have a tool based around it , too . That really , really

helps , and with us , it was the postcode checker , and then we did things like the broadband speed test , and it was like that , trying to build tools , because tools are what will bring people back . Tools are what's really good at getting people to take certain actions . You can walk them through a process rather than just bombarding them with a little text .

And yeah , so it's more about making your site into something that's useful , in a way that people start to link to it . I always find that things like tools tend to get links If you've got a database which isn't available elsewhere , you will get linked to naturally .

So it's building that kind of content that is unique , is good , is valuable , is the kind of resource that people link to .

And do you think a lot of affiliate marketers these days are just missing out on points or missing out on things because they just think let's just throw a load of content out and slap affiliate links in them ?

I think there's One way to look at it is , obviously you can just try and get more and more traffic and throw it at any old content , so you can scale by scaling your traffic , or you can scale by trying to convert the traffic you're receiving better .

And if you can do both , if you can scale your traffic and improve your conversion , then you win both ways . But it's often easier to work on improving your conversion rate so you can monetize the traffic you do get better .

So then you can double your business without having to double your traffic just by doubling your conversion rate , and especially with affiliate conversion rates , which tend to be much lower than , say , e-commerce conversion rates , so you're talking at single digits and sometimes less than a percent , you know , depending on the type of traffic you're getting .

So that's the kind of thing that I think that probably doesn't get taught by enough in the affiliate world is converting traffic into clicks and into sales .

And it's when we looked at it and saw hang on , if we turned off the PPC and just relied on the SCA , well , traffic could go down , but our sales wouldn't drop that much and our outgoings would drop hugely .

And it's the case of , rather than throwing it away , I think at one point we're doing 20 , 30,000 pounds a month on PPC , about a thousand pounds a day , and you know sales would be around about a thousand pounds a day . And it's when we worked out that we put some track here on , we could track the sales from PPC to SCA .

It's like , well , if we cut the PPC , we might lose 20% of sales , but our costs would use by a thousand . You know our costs would go to when it's zero a day and our sales we would put like 800 plus a day .

And it was at that point where it was like , actually , this is where we need to change our strategy from trying to do SCA and PPC and just go for the SCA . We could repair to be better at that . You know the PPC margin was getting . It had worked for a while .

You know , we first started because the merchants themselves , the province suppliers themselves , weren't doing PPC . But as soon as they started doing PPC it pushed the cost up hugely because they've got a lifetime value far higher than an affiliate does .

Our lifetime value was the sale , if we got the sale , and that was it , whereas obviously a broadband supplier is looking at many years of income

off that person . So it just killed PPC for us . But it was that point where we saw that PPC was there that switched everything basically yeah .

You have to make those decisions and look to maximise them all the way through . So , yeah , I mean you definitely have to have a commercial mindset on , but you have to balance that with the content that you put out , because you've obviously got to provide the content that is good for users , especially on a consumer-focused stuff .

So if you're an affiliate you're essentially selling to consumers . Most of the time there are some B2B opinions , but it's very rare . But you know you mainly . You know you're dealing with consumers who are hopefully going to get into transact with a business . So you've got to have that sort of consumer side in your head at the same time .

Because the best affiliates I mean the very best affiliate in the UK for example at the moment is , and for a long time , is Martin Lewis . When he's an expert , right , he is just . You know he's run affiliate sites all the way , he is the donor of affiliates .

But you know , if you most people just think of him as like a consumer champion and he is sort of 95% of the time but with that 5% on top , that monetises that audience is built incredibly well by affiliate sales . You know he's got his .

He sold out for was it just under 100 million to money-saving , to money supermarket , but he's still involved in running the site . So he's still obviously on the payroll , and you know so , and he's got his TV shows and all that all based on being a consumer champion .

So he's you've got to have that content piece , but think very strategically on the business side as well ?

What he did was , you know sort of take , that audience who was building it , and that ability to build an audience , that journalistic side of him knowing how to speak to an audience , how to shape a story around very boring products Like I say , consumer finance is boring essentially but he makes it interesting for people and he gets people excited about it and

builds stories around it . And that's what you've got to do really with anything you're trying to sell . You've got to build a story around it and build a narrative that gets people to engage with it . And like he's just brilliant at it , I mean I try but I've never got I wouldn't say I've got anything that gets close to him .

But obviously because we competed against him with Broadband at KK he sells Broadband . There's a lot of content at Broadband .

We used to know on Broadband at KKK if his TV show had been on , because our traffic would spike Because if you've been talking about Broadband on his TV show then all the Broadband sites would get a boost in traffic because people are searching different things around Broadband and on other sites I've got which touch on similar things that he works with .

That I still see those spikes when he's talking about certain products . Yeah , you can see at that 8pm on a Monday night the traffic goes up and that's him driving that . It's amazing .

I know that's not necessarily the advice people always get when they're starting out , but I suppose when you've been doing it , as long as we've been doing it , we're fortunate in the fact we've got more resources than average , basically to start out something . So it's given us that in to be able to do the break into areas which are harder to get into .

So with the broadband we were lucky . With the domain name we were lucky that it was an immature market at the time , so that was just fluke . Can't claim any kind of business brains or cleverness for the opportunity . The opportunity was just pure luck . But then obviously , since then you make your own look after a certain period of time .

So that's when we've gone on to other sites . So we've stayed in telecoms . We've done lots of stuff with mobile phones . We've done lots of stuff with electricity . We've tried to do stuff that is not the utilities , the stuff that everybody needs and wants to purchase , basically because it gives you a large market to go out .

But it is harder and it does take longer to for sites , especially starting from scratch , to pick up , and the reason I went on to do another site was because , while having one site with the broadband story was , you can put a lot down to luck . It was a case of can I do it again , and it was also because we got hit by Penguin and Panda really badly .

We were in 2011 , 2012 time we got hit so badly by them which we recovered it . But I was very nervous and thinking I don't want all my ink in one basket again , and so it was a case of can I actually do it again in other areas ? So that's why we then went on to launch all the sites and try again to the areas , and we did .

We managed to do somewhat better than others , but that's what got us into the position to then later to be able to say well , actually we'll sell broadband on Codie UK , because you can't keep everything forever and always come to time to cash out with it . I mean , everything's got its price at the end of the day .

And it was a case of if we hadn't done that diversification sort of in the mid sort of 2014 , 15 times and doing that , we wouldn't have been in a position to sell broadband to Codie UK in 2021 and take some chips off the table .

But obviously the growth aspect you know , obviously you're talking about . Well , you know , the growth is phenomenal because the market's phenomenal and I think , with the well people who niche down only a small market , yeah , but the difference .

So , for example , say I've got a site that promotes electricity that took two years to get traction and it was one of the cases it was almost a case of is it worth keeping it going ? But you know , I've realized now that I never turn a site off Right . I always keep them going because you never know how long it's going to take to tick up .

And it took two years for that to tick up and then it started to tick up and then it started to make some income Right , and it makes good income . You know it makes it would be a couple of thousand pounds a month and it's one of our smaller sites , but it's the case that that's a nice little income now , is that ?

But it took a long time to get there . So if I was trying to start from scratch . With no runway , I wanted to get results in an area as quickly as possible . Then , yeah , meashdown , go much lower , because that way you will start to get some traction .

If but I think because I had the luxury of saying I can wait two years for a site to do something or I can write it off completely , you know , if I'd have to write off an investment on a site like that , that's fine , it doesn't matter , that's like a rounding error .

But that's that's because I'm in a fortunate situation and I have that much broader time horizon . So , yeah , I mean , it's a case of best . You want results on something . Meashdown further . If you're willing to wait and have a longer time horizon , then you can go broader .

If you're going to write all your own content , if you're going to , you know , do all your own design work , you're going to just you're going to do everything yourself and you've got the time to do it , you can do it for far less and , especially if you're going to something really niche and you just don't use Amazon affiliates and you're going down that kind

of route , I don't think you need to spend that much money . And I wouldn't say to people don't start unless you've got that much money .

I'd look at it in terms of taking small bets , and actually there's a guy called Daniel Vecillo or something like that who created this small bets movement , which is by basically saying you haven't okay , it's not thinking about the long term , it's trying to start something small , quick , now , don't be perfect , just get on with it . See where it goes .

Say I'm going to spend a month on this and then launch it , or two weeks and then launch it and see what happens . I'd very much , I think you know I'd encourage anyone to get going , get started and try . You know , because if you don't do anything , you're not going to get anything .

Okay , so if you do something , if you don't get anything , you know worse off than if you've done nothing . You might spend some time , you might spend a little bit of money , but you know it's not the end of the world . But if you don't start you're never going to get anywhere . And the more things you start , the more things you start .

And the more times you're willing to start again and again , the more likely eventually something will pick up for you .

Because what I tend to do when we log sites is we launch with no monetization and then when they've got a bit of traction , then we tend to put something like AdSense on just to sort of bring a little bit of money in . And then when they get to a certain point , that's when we'll start looking for affiliate partners .

And this one in Canada had got to the point where we'd launched it and we'd left it for a year or so and the traffic was ticking nicely enough because the right will put AdSense on and that was bringing in some money . And then it wasn't the helpful content , or was it the help of content .

It was around about October time , I can't remember because I said there's so many different updates going on I can't remember which one it was , but I did see from that that it started to

tick down and that did lose maybe 40% of traffic over about a month . But the weird thing was it was based on an exactly the same template as other sites in other countries which didn't see the drop . We had the exact same site targeting India . So it was on a different domain but with the same template . It was a bespoke site .

It wasn't WordPress , but the one we'd written bespoke and the one that was targeting India and the Indie one at the same time went up 100% . The graph just went straight up like that and it's like well , these are both exactly the same , but the only difference is the Indie one we hadn't put AdSense on , so that was still unmonitized and it went up .

And the candidate one which we had AdSense on , went down . So since then I was like well , let's take AdSense off and see what happens . And it's sort of baseline stopped . That 40% drop hasn't gone down any further , but it hasn't gone back up again yet .

So I'm just waiting for whichever algorithm that was run that decided that and then flip it up with a way . So we'll see .

it's still written for people . I've not actually published any AI written content to any of our websites . Now , that's not to say AI can't be used . We do use AI within keywords people use to do analysis of keywords and to do clustering of keywords and to do content briefs .

So I found AI is really good for content brief , for doing research , that kind of thing . But I've still and I've experimented with trying to get it to create copy , decent copy , but there's nothing that I've actually read that it's done , that I would be happy to publish , and that isn't so spotable .

I mean , the only thing I've used AI for is on publishing the podcast , where it does the show notes , and I let Buzzstream have a go at it . I often edit it a little bit , sometimes I leave it pretty much as is , but I reckon you must be using the same AI on Buzzstream because your show notes look very similar to my show notes .

I have no sponsors or anything , so it's a case of well , it's just that you have to decide whether or not .

But sometimes I read the ones that produce this . I mean , I just cringe slightly at some of the words , some of the phrases it uses , and I've experimented with deleting and having no show notes sometimes , or sometimes writing my own or sometimes using the AI ones and seeing what effect it seems to have on the number of people down in the podcast .

I don't know , I can't see which difference either way . So yeah , but that's the reason why I've not been willing to put anything live yet on consumer-facing sites , because I just don't think it's good enough yet . That's not to say it won't be at some point in the future , but I'm still not quite there .

But it's the kind of thing where I say everyone experiment and it's especially it is good for doing research and getting ideas and writing content , briefs , and if you get over that blank page problem where you don't know what to write or you don't know how to sort of structure a document or structure a guide .

It's a good starting point , but I would always use it as a skeleton rather than as a whole piece .

I've always taken it back to more first principles , which is when someone's going to a search engine and trying to get a question answered . So if you base your content and your site around answering people's questions that's what Broadband at Katie told about .

It was about answering people's questions about Broadband so you've got to write content to answer people's questions .

So therefore , you've got to work out what people's questions are and back in the day when we first started , we had to work it out ourselves and then gradually , more and more sources online became available for finding those questions and it just became apparent that the more that we could automate that process , the more quickly we could produce content

. More content , we could assign good content that matched the intent of people searching and helped cover a site in its entirety . To get that topical authority . I'm really big on topical authority . I'm really big on getting your site architecture right and within that it's all going to be based around the questions around the topic .

So it was in a case that we're building this . Anyway , let's build a tool , because there were tools that were doing bits of it and parts of it , and individual tools doing various bits , but there's nothing that was bringing together and there's nothing that we're working on now in terms of taking . You've got your questions .

Now take it into building your topical cluster so you can build your topical authority to build into the complete process . So , yeah , it was just a case of , well , I've never had a software as a service , but I could see a demand for it . I could see more and more people asking me about questions like how do you do this ?

How do we build a site like that ? How do we build topical authority ? What was your process when you built Broadband at KDK ? What was the process in your other sites ? It's like , right , well , there's an opportunity here to build something to help more people than just me . So I can only scale so far , I can only build so many sites .

So it helps other people build more sites , so it helps people get that process right and build better content , which builds a better internet at the end of the day .

It's not about answering that exact question . It's then finding , about finding all the related questions around that question or that topic . So we're talking about student broadband . So it's then finding all of the questions that might pertain to a student and broadband .

And then you could put together all these questions together and then you say , right , I'm going to write some content that answers those questions , maybe not directly , maybe not like question answer . Question answer not FAQ . It might be a whole article or it might be a tool developing a tool to answer that question . So it's making sure you answer the question .

But it's not about just literally answering questions one after the other , because that's boring content as well . There is a time and place for an FAQ within most content , where you've still got to have body content , you've still got to have all the other content that produces around it . So it's not about chasing FAQ snippets . It's not about it .

It's basically about covering a topic in enough depth that you can . You will pick up all the keywords without even thinking about what those keywords are . So it's right now you've got a long , long list of keywords and say , right , I've got to hit all these keywords in this article . And writing an article to hit the keywords it's not .

I've got to answer all these questions in my article so that someone can read this article and then be able to look at this list of questions . They'll be able to answer them all . So it's not necessary . It's not a one to one relationship . You know .

It's a case of helping you create essentially the best article on that topic , and you do that by answering the question . So you've got to find the questions . So you know what then to cover .

And it's not about keyword volume , it's not about keyword popularity , it's not about keyword difficulty , it's about answering questions .

And we're like , well , if we did put that on , most of them would say like nothing , because all the keyword volume tools they get they're not getting the data direct from Google . You know they get . They get aggregated sets of data from different suppliers . Lots of the times it guesses if it's any kind of new trending topic . There is no volume data .

Even if anyone had an accurate volume data and it's it's . That's not the point of the process that we're trying to encourage people to follow . When it comes to creating the content , yeah , it's , it's .

I mean I'm not , I don't have , I don't use any of the like traditional SEO tools like HRFs and all that for looking at , looking at , you know , keywords or volumes or stuff . I just never bothered with that for years and years and years and years because it never got me anywhere by worrying about them . Best way was to produce content .

I don't repeat myself , but produce content that answers the questions real people have and that is what will draw the traffic over the long term . You know , and you start , you start , you start aiming at the , the , the lower , the sort of the longer tail keyword .

Things don't worry about the broad , the broad , the broad ahead , the , you know , the lower head at the top just goes to the long tail and you will start over time to pick up shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter and then you'll start , you know , ranking over time for those , for those really high volume keywords .

But you know my experience the high volume keywords are great for traffic volume but they don't always necessarily translate into sales brilliantly . You know it's not back in the day when we did have access to keywords from Google , so we knew what Google was searching on . We're going back now to 2009, . Those 2000s we were tracking you know what .

What are the keywords actually drive sales and you know for the amount . The terms like broadband , which is great for loads of traffic , but can we did run mean I think the site still ranks in the top 10 for the term broadband . I mean we ranked number one for many , many years and we've got tons of traffic for it , but it was awful for conversion .

Those people were not people who had the buying intent . The people had to buy an intent . For the ones who are putting in much more detailed questions , you know they've got a much more specific question and if you can answer that you're getting them towards the sale where someone's just doing a start off broadband .

They're so top of funnel that you know it's not actually the most valuable keyword to chase .

We used to get comment links , forum links , blog link , you know , buying links in articles , pbn links , all the stuff which wasn't against the terms of service or , as it became , against the terms of service , google was rubbish actually working out , everyone was doing it , and that's just . That's just what happened . Then , come 2012 .

I always remember forget which year was penguin came along , wallet , and we went from ranking number one the December broadband , to ranking I think it was 989 , just like the very last page . But all the way down we lost 98% of our Google traffic every night , which worked out to be about 80% .

So 75% of what traffic overall just went like that and that was like our income gone , you know . And we've got payroll , you know , we've got mortgages , you know all the things that it's like the business is gone . It was like , okay , what do we do ?

So , luckily , a guy called Carl Hendy and you might not have heard of Carl Hendy he would just started working freelancer . He'd been at IEMA before that and he started working

freelancer . But I'd met him a few times at SCME , tups and stuff , and he just gave me a call and said so , you've got a problem . I said I think I might be able to help and I was like , right , yeah , let's do it , let's work it out , let's sort this out . And he helped loads with .

Could we also have Panda issues at the same time that we're sort of starting to take it , because the content was all good enough back then to have Panda issues and then we've got Penguins Wipers out . So we went through the whole disavow process .

We went through the whole getting links to main links to remove as possible , spent months on it and then got the penalty for lifted , basically . So I took two or three attempts to put this about and we came back home and that's brilliant . Right , at that point I was like I am never , ever , ever buying a link ever again , because it's just not worth it .

It's just not worth it , especially not to anything I care about . Right , if you care about a site , you know it's a long-term buying links and these people down there . If you didn't go through Penguins , it's slapped like that . You don't know how bad it was .

So , yeah , so we then said right , and this is again where we pivoted more to the content side , you know so , and obviously that Panda was part of that , fixing issues that Panda had caused and fixing that was right . And we had to change how the site works , change the architecture , change the whole approach to content .

Yeah , so that's where our link building went , 100% organic and 100% natural . And , like I said , when we sold Broadbentak at UK , it was part of the legal pack . This big One of the things I had to warranty was that we didn't you know that we didn't buy links and we , you know I obviously told them all about it .

I thought that by all the problems we'd had at Penguins , they'd had similar problems like there's lots of other sites had back then . So I said , yeah , that's what , that's where we were then . But since then we switched and we're , like you know , no more link buying .

So I've legally warranted that on that site and yeah , and it's again with all the other sites I've built since that are important to me , yeah , definitely no link building . And I know some people will go okay , I know it's nonsense . You know , make good content , build good content , it will .

If you've really made good content and really made a good site , people will link to it . They will attract natural links . If you make a rubbish site with rubbish content . There's no effort , no skill and something that's not worthwhile . People won't link to it and , okay , you can shortcut it . People do break media sites and spam loads of links at it .

And , yeah , it can work . Links or links can raise you up , but you've always got that sort of dummocles at the top of your head at some point . Those links will stop working and if you're lucky , they'll just stop working and you'll just drift down . If you're unlucky , you'll get caught in a penalty and you will plummet .

So if you wanna be able to sleep well at night , it's better not to buy links . And if people wanna buy links , that's up to them . I'm not gonna sit here and say people are selling links or following that process . You know that are bad people . They're not , you know , and those are people that buy links and they're really decent people .

But it's all about you know . As long as you understand what you're doing and understand the risks , then each to their own you know , but for me it was a case of . That was that penguin was so bad and yeah , and it could have been , and it was existential for other sites .

I saw some competitors get hit by it and they never came back , they never recovered it and that was it , that was business gone .

But the great thing for us was , after stopping buying links and then concentrating on the content , we , our traffic , went up fundamentally then a bit by about five to six times higher , so a 600% increase in traffic over the next sort of three years , by concentrating on content and not on just trying to obtain links at any cost and not worrying about the content

and trying to make it up with links . So as soon as we started concentrating on better content and we attracted better links , links that stuck , links that didn't cost us anything and the links that actually ended up , you know , boosting us up to get much more traffic in the longer run .

That's why I looked at the sites with just not great domain names , with two word domain names , nothing , you know , not hugely branded and that kind of thing , and they've attracted the same level of links and have ranked in , you know , say , areas as competitive , not more competitive than Broadband .

So , yeah , it definitely helps if you can build a brand and that's why I say you know , there's nothing wrong with building a brand . Every brand starts from scratch , you know so , and Broadbandcouk was , I mean , that was always a big fear we'd had for many years , was ?

It was so specific to Broadband when the next thing came out , is that ever in the very call ? It's like the next thing , something different than it's toast . You know , because you were just your domain name didn't make sense anymore .

Well , fortunately , all the Broadband companies have carried on marketing all the different variations of Broadband with internet access as Broadband , because it might most people on by brocked it now , which actually isn't Broadband .

It's a completely different technology it is , you know , it's Broadband was about the spectrum across copper wires and how they could get a higher frequency through , and that's , it's a Broadband . Broadband spectrum , that's what it stood for , whereas by brocked is completely different method of data transfer . So , but they still call it a market as Broadband .

So that's why they kept it value . Yeah , that's because the .

But as a business model it's really hard to scale because generally , to produce more work , you ended up needing more people , more people with more overhead . More overhead is more risk .

You lose a big client and then you lose a lot of income and it's just like that , whereas with the affiliate side like it , just once the scale comes , there's nothing to sort of hold you back . If you go into e-commerce which I did I had an e-commerce site for a while was certainly e-commerce business in the almost about 2011 .

Quite a long time now Selling model railway stuff , bizarrely , and we were selling well over a million pounds worth of Hormi model railway gear over here , but we couldn't make a penny because every time we sold more , you needed more stocking .

You were competing on the same product on the same and when you're basically just competing on price with everybody else and it just became you needed more people , you needed more packing . Even with the work with three pills , all the costs .

Just the bigger it grows , the more the costs grow and the margins are really thin , whereas with the affiliate side the margins are great . There's a lot of margin in there and as you scale your traffic your costs don't rise anywhere near as much . So your costs go up a little bit but your income goes like that . So you become much more profitable .

So the scale of it weight scales is the thing that makes it worthwhile doing for us . So it's just more lucrative essentially than pretty much any of the model on there . I mean , I know that people that do display ads it's a similar thing . They're not affiliates but obviously the more eyeballs they get on the ads on their sites , then that scales up .

So it's because it's a business model that has that kind of level of scale where you don't need to scale your costs as your traffic rises is the main thing Wonderful Now .

So , everything that we have , a launch every site , rather than getting stuff polished and perfect and never launching because you'll never get it polished and perfect . Just launch stuff , just keep trying stuff . It's like my podcast . I'm just like I'm just trying to try a podcast and I don't care how good it is or isn't to start with .

I just hope over time I gradually get better at it . And you know , don't be afraid to fail at stuff . You know , just make sure that the bets you make aren't so big that failing is going to be catastrophic for you . And I would just say to everybody just have a go at stuff and don't worry what other people think .

I think what stops most people starting anything is the concern of what other people will think of them or the product that they've created . Just don't worry about it . Don't worry about what other people think , because you will find whatever you put out there , you will find your audience .

You will find some people that like what you do , and they're the people that matter . And if you find your audience , then don't care what anyone else thinks , don't care where the other people think oh , that's wrong , there's a problem there or I would have done it differently . These people haven't done anything .

So they might say how they would have done it differently , but they haven't done anything in the first place . So I'd just say just get out there , try stuff , experiment , and just don't worry .

And about a week later I was thinking I'm going to start a podcast I wonder what I'll call it and I thought , yeah , seo is not that hard because , fundamentally , compared to many other industries , many other things that we do , seo really isn't that hard To master .

It is probably impossible because no one knows how it works , but the fundamentals , the things that will get you going , are not actually that hard . And that's what I want to try and get across in that podcast that it's not that hard . And here's some things you can try and here's some things that will work for me and they might work for you .

So , yeah , that's very comfortable and that's where it's called that Wonderful .

I love helping people get started because that's the best time to find out , because it's hard to re-engineer stuff later , so I'm willing to talk to anyone about anything . I've got nothing to tell people other than keywordspeopleusecom .

If they want to use that , it's brilliant , but there is there's a premium model on there , so you can use that for free , because I don't want to put people off using it . You haven't got the resources to start with , but yeah , I'm just . I'm always willing to talk SEO with anybody .