Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today I’m going to republish an episode from my now discontinued podcast called Ranking Revolution. It was a really good show and one that I. At this point it’s canceled on hiatus right now, but everything was going fine. I’ve talked about it in a couple of previous episodes.
So I had the idea to do the show. I thought about it. I did it. Everything was okay, but not great. And I kind of lost interest a little bit. And then since things weren’t turning out, like I thought, I was like, Hey, I’m a quitter at heart. So this is a good, good time to quit. It’s like. When things work out, usually they work out like pretty quickly.
You don’t have to like force it. Sometimes you have to put in a certain amount of time and effort to get the compound returns that we’re looking for. But in this case, as I was working on it, I was like, fuck this, this thing is not working. It’s not working. Like I thought. And when I think back to the other more, uh, you know, recent yet, still I’ve been doing the show for a while mile high five podcast, we actually got traction really quickly and got, you know, many thousands of downloads pretty fast.
And then. Things kind of worked out. So it made sense to keep moving forward with that ranking revolution. SEO has had some rocky days. So it wasn’t exactly as, um, people weren’t interested in listening to it. And part of it is like, it’s kind of closely related topics to this show that we talk about SEO sometimes and, and related things.
So anyway, in this episode, we’re talking to Julian Goldie. And I do a nice intro for him, so I’m not going to go through it here. One side note, I’m going to plug a couple of things really quick. Linkify, they do digital PR. I’ve interviewed Chris a couple of times. Good guy. I did a recent interview over the summer, so feel free to check it out.
They do the digital PR campaigns that, um, really have gotten me the best links that I’ve ever received in any. Campaign. They’re very good as far as, um, the relevancy and the authority of the site. So I have like a nasdaq. com. They got me a link most recently over hrefs on their blog. And I think I have a Yahoo finance and one other one.
I was blown away with the links that they were able to get. So anyway, check out linkify. You could save, I believe it’s 10 percent with coupon code, Doug. The other one that I’ll plug is mangools tools. So these are, it’s the makers of KW finder, which is one of my favorite keyword research tools. And I’ve done many demos in it in the past.
They do a great job. It’s a simple tool to use. It’s a full suite of products now. So it’s a full like digital, uh, marketing, uh, tool. So you can check it out. The thing is they do really, really good deals during the black Friday, the November timeframe. So I mean, nowadays black Friday deals, they come out in like mid October or something.
So check out the link. You probably will get a huge discount. I’m an affiliate for both Linkify and Mangool’s tools. So. Thanks. If you use the link, of course, it doesn’t cost you anymore. It just helps support the channel and gives me a reason to show up and do these things. Finally, I’ll give a little bit of an update since.
Well, it’s called the Doug show. So I talk about my stuff sometimes. I just got back recently from the FinCon conferences, the financial creators conference, and that’s out in Atlanta and. They change it every year. So next year it’s in Portland in 2025, it’ll be out there and highly encourage you to check it out.
Even if you’re not specifically in the finance space, there’s a lot of people that you could partner with. And actually, you know, opens my eyes a little bit to go to like the travel creators conference, which is a, like a sister conference for FinCon. Same conference. Group puts it together and there’s so many partnerships.
And the thing is, if you go to a conference where it’s not your main topic area, not your main industry, very few competitors, people. Want to work with you. And the thing is, I usually go to hang out with friends, which I did a lot of that. My voice is actually just coming back now. But the other thing is there’s a lot of vendors there.
There’s a lot of companies that are trying to connect with creators. So. When we’re like, Hey, we’re trying to find advertisers. Um, they want to get in front of our audiences. So I have like a stack of cards, which I usually don’t like reconnect with people, but there are several folks that potentially could advertise, not, not just on my finance podcast, mile high FI.
They want to get in front of this audience too. So we’ll see how it goes. But the interesting part is like mile high FI. It’s an advanced audience as far as personal finance. Like a lot of the listeners are on their way to financial independence or they’re already retired and they don’t have a corporate job.
However, um, there’s a wide range of, you know, skill levels. On my different platforms. So this show, I, I know some people are interested in personal finance, but maybe you’re on more on the beginner side. So anyway, a lot of the companies were like, yeah, we’re, we’re more towards the beginner side. It’s more of an educational thing, um, with an app or the platform or whatever.
So hopefully we’ll get a couple of things worked out there because as I’ve described in the last few episodes, I actually have. A drive to produce this content, but I’m not excited right now about creating new courses. So one thing I can do is have advertisers get in front of the audience, and that could be a great way to bring products that you’re looking for, the products that could help you, products that I mean, I may not actually use them because I don’t need some of the products like that.
Like I said, one of them is like a financial educational situation. I’m fairly advanced. I don’t need, um, like basic information. So anyway, that remains to be seen. We’ll see how it works out. Hopefully I’ll get a couple of deals, but encourage you to go to like the in person conferences and make connections.
So not only did I talk to a bunch of potential advertisers, but I also talked to, you A bunch of people that have, you know, interesting things, interesting stories to share. They have podcasts that I could be on and you just end up like hanging out, having a good time. And it’s not very transactional. Like I just hung out with people and we’re not probably not going to work together, but.
Maybe someday in the future, you end up working together with that person on some project. So highly encourage if you have the budget to go to a conference, definitely check it out. Super fun. Usually people just want to hang out and have a nice time. So I think that’s it for now. Again, check out Linkify, check out Mangools, see if there’s any deals going on and I’ll send it to the interview with Julian.
Intro Music
Doug: Today, I’m excited to introduce you to Julian Goldie. He’s a Chiang Mai based SEO expert and link building specialist. He’s a CEO of Goldie agency, a firm dedicated to helping businesses grow their traffic and rank higher on Google through link building strategies.
He’s known for his in depth knowledge of SEO, and he has successfully helped hundreds of businesses globally from startups to large corporations. He has a killer YouTube channel. He speaks at conferences all over the world. And today we’re going to talk about using AI in your agency to boost revenue, increase productivity.
Increase your customer lifetime value as well. And in the second part, we’re going to talk about using YouTube to grow your agency or business overall. Julian, welcome to the show. How’s it going today?
Julian: Doing great. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Doug: And I’m, I’m pumped to talk to you. We’ve, uh, sort of passed each other online for a little while, but it’s the first time that we’re speaking.
You stayed up a little bit late for us to talk and it’s my morning. It’s your evening. So I really appreciate it.
Julian: I should be in my pyjamas by now. I know,
Doug: I know. I, and if we were, we were talking, I was like, all right, I’m not going to keep you up too late. Cause I’m, I usually get in bed about eight o’clock or so.
Read for a little while, get a good night’s sleep. So I. I respect that you’re, you’re staying up to chat with me. So before we get into some of the details on using AI in your agency, I want to know a little bit about how you started your agency and how long you’ve been working in SEO just for a little bit of background.
Julian: Yeah, sure. So I’ve been doing SEO for, I would say the last seven years. And I started off because I used to be a sales copywriter and I was writing copy, like all day on my website, trying to create a portfolio that I could show off to clients and I would literally spend like my mornings just writing for this website.
The problem was it never saw the light of day, never got any love from Google and it didn’t matter how good the copy was. It was just getting nowhere fast on Google. And so I had a few friends in Chiang Mai at the time who saw me Wasting all my mornings trying to create a website that clients would see.
And they were like, mate, have you heard of link building before? Cause if not, we need to get you on it. And so they sat with me for the next 90 days after that, every day we were working together in the coffee shops and that sort of thing, just, just getting stuff done. And they taught me how to do link building.
I finally got my website ranking and getting traffic. And I was like, Oh, if it works for me, I could probably sell this as a service. And that’s how I sort of went from doing this for myself to selling it for one client who was from Mongolia. So my first ever client was from Mongolia and then just scaled up from there.
Like obviously it didn’t happen overnight, but grew from like, you know, one random client in the middle of Mongolia to having over a hundred clients today and making well over seven figures.
Doug: And you had to figure out how to do link building, you know, some of your, your friends taught you how to do it and then you jumped in and I suspect like your copywriting experience helped you do a better job than, you know, just the average person that learned how to do outreach and link building and all that kind of stuff.
Can you talk about that a little bit? Just the copywriting experience.
Julian: Yeah. For me, I was a sales corporate, so I kind of lived and died by my results. And that made me much better at marketing, honestly. I genuinely, even today, I still consider myself more of a marketer than an SEO. So I like to do SEO.
It’s fun to play with. I have a bunch of websites, whatever. But for me, I consider myself more of a marketer. And that really stems from spending years studying people like Dan Kennedy, Russell Bronson, learning about copyright and learning about funnels and really learning about direct response marketing.
So how to take attention and transform it into money.
Doug: Okay. And it’s funny, like I, I identify the same way and especially as I Hang around like more SEOs that are really good SEOs. I’m like, I’m not a very good SEO. I’m an okay marketer I can’t write that well, but it’s good enough So it’s interesting that you took that route So once you once you figure out how to do the link building you guys One or two clients.
How long was it before you started scaling up a little bit there?
Julian: Yeah, it took quite a while. I would say between six and 12 months to really start cracking the code on client acquisition. So I think when you’re first getting started, you’re just, You desperately trying to get one or two clients in, and that’ll be enough for you.
I remember thinking to myself and my mate who taught me link building, we were chatting about it. We said to each other, if we start making 5k a month with our agencies, that’s enough to like, just go and play Skyrim all day in Chiang Mai and play video games and not have to work again. And at the time that seemed like the Holy grail of freelancing or being an agency.
And then from there, you know, you get to 5k and you’re like, Whoa, you know, maybe we could scale this to 10k and then you get to 10k and you’re like, mate, why would I stop at 10k? I want to get to 40k. And so just kept moving one step forward. I wouldn’t say it was part of the plan, but for me, we started off with one client, then I figured out, Oh, if I can get one client this way, then I can crack the code and get four or five clients.
I was using Upwork at the time to land clients. And then I just got really good Cracking the code on Upwork, cracking the algorithm, attracting attention, differentiating myself from everyone else, especially my copywriting on Upwork. Like if you check out my Upwork profile, it’s not an Upwork profile, it’s a sales page, and it’s probably one of the best converting sales pages I’ve ever written.
Doug: Very cool. All right. So a couple last questions. What is the agency look like now so that we can get sort of a, idea of the framework that you’re using when we’re, when we’re talking about AI here. So you could lay out, you know, whatever the org chart or however you want to describe it here.
Julian: Yeah, sure. So we have 50 people at the agency and over a hundred clients.
Doug: Okay.
Julian: Multi seven figure company and Yeah, I’m at the point now where I just managed four people directly and then they managed the rest of the organization. So for me, literally my main focus is just focusing on marketing because that’s what I love. So I love to create YouTube videos. I love to build systems that generate more clients, handle the Facebook ads, et cetera.
That’s why I excel and that’s what I enjoy. So I focus on that and the team focuses on everything else.
Doug: And how often do you meet with your four direct points of contact?
Julian: So we implemented a system called entrepreneur operating system. Which is a EOS system based on traction, a really good book. If no one’s ever read it, check out the book traction.
And essentially what we did was we, we have one weekly team meeting. It’s called a level 10 meeting on Mondays. And then from there I have one to one KPIs, which are just 30 minutes maximum with each of the four people that I manage directly. So just takes me about. I would say two and a half, three hours to manage the whole team.
Doug: Okay. That’s per week?
Julian: Yeah, per week. Yeah.
Doug: All right. And then how many hours per week would you estimate that you work?
Julian: It really depends. Honestly, I mean like, if, I mean, for example, for me right now, I could get away with just one hour. Maybe doing like 30 minutes a day, you know, doing a quick live stream every day, 30 minutes.
If, but I’m not really satisfied with that. Like I always want to grow. And if I don’t grow the agency, then it’s quite painful for me. And so, you know, I like to grind it out like six, eight, 12 hours. That’s a lot of fun for me. Yeah. Okay. That’s where I get most of my pleasure.
Doug: Gotcha. And you only do that maybe like once or twice a week though, right?
You don’t do that like every, every day. Right.
Julian: What, the 12 hour day?
Doug: Yeah, yeah.
Julian: I genuinely, I like to squeeze as much time as I can out of it. But when I work, like, I track everything that I do and the amount of money that it brings me and also whether I’m being productive or not.
Doug: Got it. Okay. Very good. All right, let’s start transitioning into how you’re using AI with an agency.
And obviously, like you said, you guys started something like seven years ago. You slowly grew over time. The AI tools were much different, like six months ago, 12 months ago, 18 months ago, and to let people know we’re recording this. Early in May of 2024. So the thing is everything moved really rapidly and we went from kind of a shitty experience with, um, like Jasper, no offense, it was good for the, for the time that it was, um, the only thing out there, but then chat GPT, we have, uh, Gemini there’s, um, Claude, there’s other tools that are super powerful.
So. When did you start integrating AI into the agency more?
Julian: It was really about, I would say 12 months ago. So I had a conversation with Ryan Stewart. I actually got Ryan Stewart as a interview guest on my YouTube channel. And I remember having this conversation that felt like the SEO apocalypse. So. We were talking about how AI could transform the whole industry, how it got rid of the need for, for sales, copyrights or human writers, and then how it was a massive threat to anyone in the SEO industry, particularly agencies.
And so at that point, I remember going to sleep and thinking, do I have a job anymore? And at that point I was like, right, I’m going to spend all day, every day. learning how to use chat GPT and implementing it for my business and figuring out, okay, how can I get my team to do it? Or how can I eliminate a lot of stuff in my business and just have AI do it instead?
So yeah, it was about 12 months ago that really started taking it seriously.
Doug: And what were the first couple of things? So obviously you start messing around with the chat GPT, see what it can do. How did you identify an area where you’re like, all right, I’m going to, I’m going to try to investigate this problem.
It looks like an inefficiency or something that we can get help from AI. And how did you approach it?
Julian: Yeah, it’s a really good question. So for me, people won’t expect this, but one of the things that I started doing was looking at our marketing team. Cause I was like, this AI is so good at getting attention.
You know, it’s okay for copywriting. It’s not bad for that. Actually, if you’re getting attention and making everything more efficient in marketing, it’s probably the most powerful thing you can use. There’s an example of that, right? This time, probably March or February last year, we had a full team of marketers, so we had like a YouTube script writer, a marketing manager, video editor, YouTube thumbnail designer, et cetera, right?
Big team. Costs thousands of dollars every month. And I was like, right, do we really need all of that? Or could I just record a video of me using chat GPT as a screencast? And upload that to YouTube and see if that pops off instead, because most of my videos that were really well edited were getting like 300 to 500 views a video.
And so I tested it, and it blew up. You know, I was using Descript, which is an AI tool for recording videos, and so it transcribes a video automatically. Edits the sound with AI, it removes all the silences and filler words inside your script, inside the content that you’ve actually recorded with AI. So it’s, it’s a very AI driven tool that not a lot of people talk about.
And I use that instead of my full team of marketers, the video popped off. It got about 10 times more views than we normally got. And so I was like, Oh, okay, well I’ll try it again and again. And then after three videos, I was like, right. Very hard decision, very sad decision, but I’m going to have to let go of the whole team.
You know, and it saved me probably about a hundred thousand dollars last year doing that.
Doug: Perfect. And in this example, you’re literally just, you’re creating videos to put on YouTube and you’re, you’re just showing yourself using chat GPT.
Julian: Yeah, exactly. So it was kind of like a positive feedback loop where I was learning and training myself how to use chat GPT.
And then I would use that as marketing material to get more clients and by getting more clients, I could spend more time on chat GPT and figure out how to use it more. And so it was like this positive feedback loop where it’s fueling itself. I was making money on both sides. I was making money from, you know, using chat GPT and.
Automating a lot of processes, making more money with SEO, et cetera. And then I was also making money by filming me learning about ChatGPT and attracting more clients and bringing more clients to our funnel through that recording.
Doug: Why do you think that worked better? Because it sounds like it was lightly edited.
I used a script as well. And. Yeah. You can do some rough cuts and get it kind of close versus like you said, you had well edited, you had a marketing team creating really like short films. Right. So why do you think the raw videos did better?
Julian: I think it was a combination of number one, there was a starving crowd of people interested in chat GPT and not enough content to go around to help people.
Right. So like that was number one. Number two was, uh, I was very authentic in the videos instead of being like some perfectly lit studio with amazing production quality and like the same thumbnail design that every single person who’s interested in YouTube uses. I did everything the opposite. So like there was no editing.
There was no fancy effects or anything like that. The sound quality was average at best. If you go back and listen to the videos that go like 50, 000 views, the sound quality was absolutely average. I think you can hear the air con in the background. So just by doing the opposite and being very authentic and honest, I think people appreciated that and they could connect with it more.
And like, for example, when I go to these conferences, like when I spoke at Vietnam last month, when I went to Vietnam, like. Everyone in the room knew me. Like everyone was coming up to me, shaking my hand, introducing themselves. And it was like, wow, people really connected with me in a way that I didn’t even realize was possible.
Doug: Let’s get into the details of what you learned as you were creating these videos and then implement over in an agency. So imagine the average, you know, either a solopreneur or an agency with maybe a couple, few freelancers working for them. What things can they start using with AI to get, you know, more revenue, you know, keep customers around longer, be more efficient.
And I’ll leave it kind of wide open so you can lay out a few of these for us.
Julian: Yeah, I think number one, like you probably know this as well, Doug. Like I’m, I’m 99 percent sure we’re both convinced of this. If you want to get clients or just make money, then you have to get attention. If you want to get attention.
I think that YouTube out of every single other traffic platform that I’ve seen is number one, the highest converting and number two, the easiest to get traffic from day one, like for example, I can publish a new video on a completely new channel, just like you’re saying on this new channel, and that will get hundreds of views, if not thousands of views from day one.
Whereas if I use any of a channel, I might be waiting months. I’m at the back of the queue with like a hundred thousand of the people. And so I think using Descript to record screen recordings of you doing SEO or doing client work, et cetera, every single day, publishing every single day will be the easiest, fastest way.
To generate more traffic and generate more clients with AI, like hands down, that’s easiest way. And then what you can actually do is use AI to repackage that content that you’ve created on YouTube and cut it up, chop it up, reformatted for every other platform. As an example of that, right? Last year, what my Twitter virtual assistant would do is he had a custom GPT I personally built, but he would use every single day and he would take the transcript from my YouTube video.
And chop that up and then post it into like a five part tweet and a LinkedIn post and a Facebook group post, et cetera. And so just from that one single piece of content that I create on YouTube, we could generate content for like every single other platform just by using AI. And this isn’t like, you’re just repurposing content and throwing it out there.
These are like Twitter accounts that we’re getting like millions of views, millions of impressions last year. So it works really well.
Doug: Awesome. And it’s funny for my, my other podcast, I interviewed a guy named Brian Feraldi. He’s a, a writer for Motley Fool and written a book or two, but anyway, he, we talked about building a content machine.
So. You know, he’s, even though he has a writing background and has written like thousands of articles, he, um, is using chat GPT. He’s going through like a similar process. And the other thing that he does for his content machine, like he’ll test a, you know, a specific topic, maybe I’ll do a, uh, in your case, you would do a video, but he tests things on Twitter.
And then if it does well, like if it’s say, I don’t know, the top 10 percent of his, um, content, then he’ll. Put that back into the machine where he’ll create, yeah, LinkedIn posts. He may do an infographic. He’ll just repurpose it in every way possible. And then if it works well, he’s, you know, pumping it back into the machine because on social media, not so much on YouTube, but on social media, like not everyone sees everything all the time, you could publish the same thing over and over again in your reach, maybe, you know, some small percentage of your overall.
Um, audience. So it’s not like people are going to see the same thing over and over and it works. Awesome. So I think that’s super smart, man. Yeah. Yeah. I
Julian: mean, the, the custom GPT that I built is called a hundred X content machine.
Doug: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll, we’ll link up. Is it readily available or is it a private one?
Yeah. It’s on the GPT store. It’s publicly available. Okay, cool. We’ll link up to that so people can get to it. And yeah, I hopped in and created a couple of the custom GPTs too. And yeah, I just created them cause I was using them and then it was like, Oh, I’ll just put them out there now that that’s, that’s out there.
Julian: Might as well. Right. I mean, I don’t know, this is another way that you can leverage AI as well to get clients is like what we actually do with our custom GPTs is like, number one, it helps me save time on my team. It trains him on how to. Do marketing without having a marketing head, but also when I make these available publicly on the GPT store, I insert like affiliate links, links to my funnels, links to my sales pages, et cetera, in every single response.
And so every time someone uses one of my GPTs, it sends traffic my way to my, uh, sales funnels. And it’s like, okay, that’s just a machine designed to convert that traffic into money as well.
Doug: Oh, that’s great. Uh, I’m going to have to go take a look. Cause I minor super basic, literally just what I was trying to figure out how to, how to, um, save time for myself.
So I just have like the normal link back to the home page of the site, but I don’t have it. Um, Doing what you’re saying, which is great. I haven’t heard anyone else doing that. Where did you come up with that idea?
Julian: I think it was just like I wanted to showcase something new that people hadn’t seen on youtube before and I was like, how can I make sure this?
GPT makes money in some way. And then I was like, Oh, you can insert affiliate links into it. Let’s do that. That’s so awesome.
Doug: Okay. So that performs pretty well. Do you advertise or in other ways, market or promote that custom GPT? Or is it just through the natural search of people looking for content production and productivity and all that on GPT or on open AI?
Julian: So like, In many different ways, I showcase it, right? So it might be in my funnels, my email funnels on the backend. Then also have a free SEO course on how to do AI SEO. And so it has multiple modules on like how to build custom GPTs, some of the ones that I’ve built, et cetera. And then I have this sort of massive document from the last sort of 12 months of work, cause I’ve been doing this every single day, where it has 200 chat GPT prompts inside there, along with all my custom GPTs, all the workflows I’ve built, et cetera, all the SAPs.
And so. I try and give it away in as many ways as possible, because if you just create it once and market it once it will just go off into the ether, like you were saying about social media. So like, if you can really show people like, listen, this works really well. Here’s how to use it. Here’s how I’m using it.
And then you get people using it and that builds up traction. Additionally, one final thing I want to say on that, sorry to interrupt there. One final thing I would say is like, you can actually rank these custom GPTs on Google. And then kind of like parasite SEO, you can rank number one for a bunch of keywords related to tools that people are searching for, and then they’ll use your tool and you’ll be number one.
GPT is like a DR 90 ranks. Well, can
Doug: you, I guess you have some examples of that. Um, can you talk about one of the examples and can you tell us how you did. The SEO or link building or how you generally promoted it so that you can rank on Google with one of your custom GPTs.
Julian: Yeah, sure. I’ll try and pull up one that’s still ranking right now, but in the meantime, whilst I’m trying to find that, like, so the way that this works is a.
OpenAI, chat. openai. com, and I’ll share my screen right now, if you want, and just show you what I mean, but chat. openai, it’s a DR92 website, you can see my screen right here, right? Yeah. And so it’s a DR92 website, so it ranks really well naturally. And so you can see, for example, I’m ranking for 151 keywords with this custom GPT that I built.
For example, I chat GPT keywords, chat GPT for keyword research, et cetera. And so what you can do is inside Keyword Explorer, without doing like a full SEO tutorial, but what you can do is like you put keyword tools, say into, into, uh, Ahrefs. Fill it down to like, I don’t know, I would say KD 20 or less, a keyword difficulty 20 or less, and just find a bunch of keywords you can potentially rank for, right?
So for example, like keyword match type tool, that could be a tool that you actually create on openai. com. And then when you build it, when you build these custom GPTs, you can optimize the title for the keyword you want to rank for, optimize the description for the keyword you want to rank for. And then you see these conversation starters, for example, like I want help with SEO, what that should do is.
Like if you click, I want a free SEO strategy session, it will send them to my funnel right here. This is like, if you want a free SEO strategy session, just click here. And then I can also track with the UTM that it came from my custom GPT in the URL. So it’s just like very easy, quick should take you about 10 minutes once you’ve had a few practices of that, but it works really well, ranks really well.
Doug: Very good. And for the people that are just Listening, um, Julian, you actually explained it pretty well. So you didn’t miss anything for the audio only listeners. So you explained a few ways where obviously, um, AI helped out a lot. You explained how you integrate your, your marketing funnel into the GPTs, which is, I think I haven’t seen anyone do that.
So kind of groundbreaking. I’m sure other folks are doing it around there now that you’ve mentioned it, but any mistakes that you made along the way where you thought, Oh, this is going to be really awesome. I think I’ve. You know, I’m going to change the world. And then you realize, Oh, this is actually not working like I thought.
So what are some of the mistakes?
Julian: Oh, man, I can tell you a fine example from last month, if you want. And this was just at the time that I absolutely didn’t need it. Right. So what happened? Obviously the whole clapping in situation happened. And if anyone’s not familiar with that, basically what happened was March the 5th, Google releasing the Google core update.
But what they also did was manually clap a bunch of SEO influencers. So for example, I got hit a bunch of my sites, including my personal agency site, got manually de indexed from Google for showing if. A few things on YouTube that they probably wouldn’t be comfortable with. I don’t blame them, but it happened.
And then you got Jesse Cunningham, Jackie Chow, et cetera, who also got hit during this update. And so this was. I had a lot of attention on me that weekend. Like every time I open up YouTube, there was a new YouTube video about me. Every time I open up Twitter or Facebook, someone else had posted about my website.
It was a really surreal, but scary time in terms of, you know, like, uh, I’m, I’m getting a lot of attention on me and it’s this kind of out of control at the same time, my virtual assistant. Taking that transcript from my latest video, where I said, I’m going to remove my websites from Google search console, because that’s how they got clapped.
And I’m just going to do this as an experiment. When he was transcribing this into a custom GPT for a Twitter post, he put, guys, if you, if you remove Google search console from your manually actioned website. You’ll get it back and it will start ranking again. And I was like, Oh, come on guys. Like that was, uh, the worst possible moment you could have posted that.
Cause everyone’s looking and everyone wants to, to sort of, you know, come after me anyway. And so. Luckily I found it in time and posted, retweeted it and said like, you know, listen, this is English sarcasm guys, but that really backfired on me. Like that was really a, an interesting moment. And one way I realized how, well, you can, if you’re not careful.
There’s black swan events where this can backfire and actually hurt your reputation if you’re not careful. Thankfully, I was checking Twitter and I was checking what my virtual assistant was posting that weekend. If not, that could have got way out of control. He could have kept posting that all weekend without me realizing, you know?
Doug: Is there anything that you implemented after this happened to prevent it from happening again?
Julian: I mean, so one of the things I realized about that was like, number one, I probably have to train my virtual assistant better if he’s going to represent me in my company, but then at the same time, I realized that most of the negativity.
In the SEO space tends to come from Twitter and most of the hate, et cetera. And so I was like, okay, I need to switch this around. And then the other thing that I noticed was that if you look at all the influences that got clapped manually by Google during that day, they were all on Twitter. Like that is a common denominator between everyone.
If you look at YouTube, and there’s a bunch of people still doing very naughty stuff on there, they haven’t been touched at all. In fact, some of their websites are doing better than ever. And so, what I realized that weekend was, uh, if Twitter is the source of these manual action penalties, Then why don’t I just target a totally different market?
And so now my assistant actually focuses on agency related content, not SEO related content on Twitter, which means that no one’s replying to my tweets and tagging in Google search liaison or Joe Mueller. And that has played out way better because agencies are our best clients. Anyway, I want to work with them and SEO is probably sometimes very difficult customers to work with.
Doug: So interesting. Yeah. I don’t spend much time on Twitter and it sounds like, I mean, you just pop in occasionally, but mostly it is, uh, a VA that’s helping you out on Twitter. Is that right?
Julian: Yeah. Best thing you can do is just not look at Twitter, like especially the tweets and the replies, especially right now after all the updates, like there’s a lot, don’t get me wrong, there’s some good people on there.
But there’s a lot of negativity and hate on that way worse than it. Yeah, he’s crazy man. Yeah. Yeah.
Doug: Yeah Now that you mention it, I mean, I don’t spend time out there, but I published a video or two Where other people shared it and i’m like, ah now that you mentioned i’m like, oh shit. Luckily. I don’t i’m not Nothing that i’m doing relies on google Search traffic or Google specifically, which is a great place to be after going through some ups and downs over the years.
So,
Julian: yeah, you’re speaking to Michael Denich from wealth of geeks yesterday as well. And he was saying the same, like his, you know, you made a video, right? About the, the case studies on Google’s publisher site. Yeah. Where all these sites that were case studied and showcases creating the best content, real businesses doing content the right way.
And like 90 percent of these sites took a hit, took a dive in traffic after the latest updates. He was one of them. So he had the photographers in like this time last year, and then he’s, his traffic is basically down to zero now.
Doug: It’s, yeah, it’s, uh, somewhat embarrassing, I would say for Google. And I don’t know, obviously, I mean, it’s a big company, there’s different teams.
They have different priorities. Like no one’s dumb. Like they know what they’re doing, but externally it looks pretty stupid. And I’m sure the teams are like, ah, like this looks dumb.
Julian: It’s wild. It’s wild to see what’s ranking instead. That’s what I would say.
Doug: Alright, let’s transition over to YouTube. So I love, I love YouTube.
It’s probably like my, my primary area. And you have been producing a lot of videos. For a while so, you know talk about when you decided to just go in Deep with youtube.
Julian: Yeah. So for me it was when it really justified going deep, right? So for example when my videos were just getting like 200 or 300 views A video, it would make sense to just see one or two of those each week and, and get a few clients in, but I know it’s not popping off in the way that maybe Matt Dixie or someone like that was.
And then when I started doing these chat GPT case studies and I was getting like videos with like 50, 000 views, a hundred thousand views, 20, 000 views consistently. I was like, okay, I’m getting a ton of clients in, I’m getting a ton of sales calls booked from here. This is converting better than any single other channel that we have.
Cause I, I track every single channel and how many leads we’re getting from it. I was like, right, let’s just do this every single day. And I’ll set a get, get a point. So as long as I’m getting a thousand views per video, and as long as I’m still generating sales calls from this every single week, I’m just going to go hard on it.
And that’s what I did. You know, 12 months later. pretty much every single day since.
Doug: When was that? Was it like one year ago ish?
Julian: Yeah, it was about, I would say March 2023 last year that I really started going hard on it.
Doug: All right.
Julian: Yeah.
Doug: And so how many videos do you have total roughly?
Julian: I took, honestly, I took a lot down after the clapping in.
So I would say probably about a thousand videos with There in total, including shorts, but right now I think there’s probably about 400 or 700, let’s check how many are. Yeah, 453. So I took a lot of shorts down. That was the main thing.
Doug: Okay, cool. So you mentioned a couple of times, like agencies are the folks that you want to work with.
So how do you, how do you publish or plan your content to make sure you’re attracting good leads and people into your funnel?
Julian: Yeah, so I have multiple ways to do that. So number one, for example, on Twitter, we just post content targeting agencies specifically, because I know so many agencies and freelancers that specifically over on Twitter, at the same time, a lot of the SEO content that I publish will be watched by agencies because they want to learn this more than anyone.
Like there’s so much money to be made with AI SEO. That for sure they’re learning how to do it and who they’re going to go to. They’re going to go to some of the most popular YouTube channels on SEO, hopefully including mine. The other way that I attract a lot of agencies to our channel is I actually set up a Julian Goldie agency YouTube channel.
Um, that was back in about November and it’s already at 1, 200 subscribers. And I just, I post tutorials on how to get clients as an SEO agency. And then people find that and then they go into my funnels, my free SEO course and my. Book a white label, SEO strategy session, CTA, and they grow from that. The other thing that was really well for attracting agencies.
Is building communities. So I have a discord community where that is full of SEOs and agencies just launched it last week. And then I also have a mastermind community with 200 people inside there. And that’s an SEO mastermind, but it’s also got like courses on how to grow your agency, how to get clients with YouTube, et cetera, how to all the SEO SOPs that they would need for their team, et cetera.
So yeah, community building is another great way to attract agencies.
Doug: And you mentioned earlier about creating really a lead magnet, but you were like, if you create a lead magnet and you don’t keep talking about it, then you don’t have a chance to keep reusing that piece of content and get more leads.
And one thing that I know from creating YouTube videos is you, If you want to promote that lead magnet again, you kind of have to keep doing the same type of content. I mean, you’re hitting the same topic, right? Like you can hit it from different angles, but it becomes repetitive. And sometimes. I’ve done this so many times.
I’m like, I’ve already done a video on that, or I’ve already done five videos on that. So how do you keep going back to the well and creating essentially repetitive videos over and over again? And I don’t know if you end up doing that, but let me know how you approach that repetitive idea so that you can keep pushing people to this really high converting lead magnet.
Julian: Yeah. So the best way I think is just to document what you’re doing currently. Right. So for example, if I’m creating a new agency video tomorrow, Then I’m just going to document some of the new changes that I’ve released in my agency to help us. And I know if they’re working for us, it’s going to help other agencies.
And so for example, it might be like, Hey guys, this is how I’m getting clients with Facebook ads today. I set up a new ad based on these metrics because I see the hours down and I want to test this new copy. That maybe will increase the CTR and therefore bring more clients. And by the way, I did it with chat GPT, here’s how I did it.
And that will be like video done for the day, easy. And I think one of the best things you can do as an SEO agency is just document what you’re doing in terms of SEO. So doing loads of case studies where you showcase how I’ve ranked this website or that website, et cetera. And then also documenting the processes that you have internally.
And showcasing how you’re using those to get more clients because that’s going to attract more Agencies to buy from your agency white label.
Doug: Some people are scared to You know in air quotes like reveal their trade secrets or like oh if I just show people how to do this Then they’re not going to hire me So are you scared that people are just going to do what you just taught them to do instead of hiring you or?
Working with you in a professional capacity
Julian: No, absolutely not like I mean I could sit down with you today You And teach you everything that I know about link building and running a link building agency But bear in mind it took me like seven years to implement it and I could literally break down everything show you everything I could even give you a list of all our clients and tell you where we’re getting our clients from But the problem with that is like it might take you seven years To implement every single one of those things.
And so I don’t care about giving away value for me. I think if someone’s watching that and they’re implementing it, which 99 percent people don’t, but if someone is implementing it, then that’s his type of person. That’s just going to figure out anyway, whether they learn from me or whether they learn from someone else.
So I might as well give them value. Like for me, I’ve been in masterminds with some of my biggest competitors. I’ve sent tutorials of how I do YouTube to some of my biggest link building competitors. I don’t care. Like I’m happy to help everyone. The more people I help, the more money I make.
Doug: Well said.
What do you consider a conversion on any of the channels? Is it an email subscriber? Is it some other action? How do you judge that?
Julian: Yeah, so for me, I just chase the money, not the views. And so I’m always focused on one thing, which is generating sales calls. Now, I know that there’s going to be some lead and lag indicators for that.
So for example, if we get in opt ins, email opt ins, I know it’s just a matter of time before a bunch of those convert into sales calls. And so I’ll track both. And I know maybe this week we get five sales calls, but we get a hundred opt ins. And then next week we get 200 sales opt ins, which means next month we’re going to have even more sales calls booked in.
And so, yeah, I’m always thinking about how can we get more opt ins and then how can we get more sales calls booked in?
Doug: Okay. And do you have a good mechanism to track the specific lead? Through, you know, various channels. So for example, maybe someone follows you on YouTube first and then they end up following you on LinkedIn and then Twitter.
So there’s all these different touch points. So do you have any handle on. All the different places that you might be interacting with a specific lead to understand better, like, okay, actually LinkedIn doesn’t get as much traffic, but it converts so much higher, or it doesn’t even convert as high, but they spend a lot of money.
So any idea on that?
Julian: Yeah, a hundred percent. So I think tracking is everything like you need to have the data and the longer you build your agency, the more data you collect, which is going to give you a competitive advantage over everyone else as an example of that. And I would, If you’ve got an affiliate link, I would recommend putting it inside the description, but go high level, go high level.
It’s just hands down the best CRM I’ve ever used as an agency. And the reason that is, is because no one’s going to save you a ton of money with tools, like for example, Calendly, you can, it’s already built into their school, it’s already built into their ClickFunnels, you can already get a version of that inside go high level.
And so like, it saves you a lot of money, but additionally, Every time that someone opts in or interacts with any of your website pages and puts their details in, you can see their name and you can see their whole history from start to finish. So you can see, ah, John, he watched a bit of LinkedIn. Then he came and clicked on a few emails.
After that, he messaged us, but he didn’t show up for the sales call. And then six months later, he’s like, right. Let’s hire Julian Goldie, and so I can see all of that history down the right hand side in chronological order And I can see all the UTMs and all the pages that he’s interacted with this one one of the reasons I have UTMs aka like Uh, UTM equals at the end of every single URL inside my custom GPTs, because I want to know, like, how many clients are we actually getting from custom GPTs?
How many clients are we getting from YouTube videos? I’ll even inside my YouTube videos, if you check them out, I even put the code of the video inside the UTM so I can track which videos and which topics are converting the best. And so I think tracking is everything. And then on the other side, obviously you’ve got all that data, the micro data on the contact.
On the other side, you want to make sure you’re tracking every single sales channel and your activity, AKA the inputs, like how many tweets, how many videos, how many emails, et cetera. And you want to track how many leads and sales calls and sales did you get from each channel? And from there you can quickly figure out, okay, YouTube is getting me the 80, 20 sales calls.
So I’m going to double down on YouTube. I’m going to do more YouTube lives. I’m going to do more videos every day. I’m going to create another channel and then Facebook ads. It’s getting me nothing. So I’m gonna stop spending and wasting and burning all my money on that. And so like Just from having that data, you can tweak the dials.
And I see an agency as a machine where you can tweak the dials and discover the inputs to get the outputs and go, right. If I double the inputs, I’ll probably get double the outputs. And that’s how I can grow an agency pretty much on command.
Doug: I think we could probably talk for many hours, but I know it’s close to bedtime there.
So we got to start wrapping it up a little bit. You mentioned, yeah, this is such a blast. We’ll have to, you know, schedule some more time and, and collaborate a little bit more. I do want to talk a little bit about the community aspect and how you’re building that. And you could tell a little bit about how you’re, you’re, you know, finding it so far for me, you know, I’ve, I’ve They’re popular, right?
It’s a good way to have recurring revenue, but I’m not a community person. And I was like, I’m not, I’m not going to worry about it. You know, I’m, I’m lazy at heart as well. So a lot of things working against me here, but you’re, you’re making it work really well, Julian. So, um, can you talk about how you set things up, how you operate it and some of the value that people might expect if they checked out your community?
Julian: Yeah, sure. So I mean, number one, we’ve got like the free communities, for example, YouTube. And so the way that I build a community on there is like, I’m always asking for feedback and making little micro promises and then delivering on that. Right. So for example, the other day I posted, by the way, guys, we’re interviewing a Flipboard expert who gets millions of traffic every month from Flipboard.
If you have any questions for him. Let me know and then all of the questions that people asked for free I asked that guy during the interview and that’s just like a little way of And I make these promises every week to people, but I’m like, I’m going to do this for you. I promise I’ll do it. And then I deliver on that promise.
That’s one of the best ways I think to build a community that actually trusts you and sees you as the expert. And then when you have these paid communities, for example, I have a school. There’s 300 a month and then I have a discord that increases in price every 10 members a joint with these communities It’s really about taking a bit more responsibility on my side to help them, right?
So like for example, people can direct message me they get weekly action items to do they get All the systems I personally use and have tested along with the SOPs to implement it in a very simplified way. And then they get the ability to interact with each other, which platforms like YouTube don’t really allow, right?
So, for example, if John’s an e commerce SEO agency and Jill’s got an e commerce SEO agency, then it would make sense for those two to collaborate. And teach each other and say, right, here’s what’s working. Here’s how we can partner. Here’s how we can help each other refer clients, et cetera. This is a massive benefit of communities.
The other thing that I would say on the flip side, if you’re an agency owner, the, one of the biggest benefits of having a community is that you are the expert leading that community and helping everyone and giving value and connected. And so when clients are looking around and like, who’s the expert, who should I hire for link building or SEO or agency stuff, whatever, they’re going to see you.
As one of the standout people that she took that responsibility on.
Doug: Got it. Very good. Any specific challenges with the community so far?
Julian: Yeah, I think it is a skill to be learned. Like it doesn’t come naturally as well. So for example, one of the biggest problems you might find is that. Well, I mean, number one, a lot of agency owners, like they don’t want to speak to clients directly and for sure you’re going to get some DMS from clients who, uh, even if you have account managers, clients are going to DM you because they want to interact with you, the agency owner, that’s something that’s going to be a struggle for some people watching this.
Additionally, making sure that people give value and that you’re not carrying the community is very, very important because every single person in that community has something to offer. But you have to build an environment that’s comfortable and makes it easy for them to share their value and their expertise, because that’s how a rising tide lifts all boats.
And so that’s something that I’ve really learned over the last few months to help people interact with each other.
Doug: Very good. Yeah. I can see that being a challenge and you want to have a positive energy, not a scarcity mindset. You want everyone to feel like they can share and they’re gaining value. And that’s tough to nurture.
Julian: Oh mate, I mean, I’ve been, I won’t mention any names, not gonna mention any names, but what I will say is I’ve joined some communities where they’re like, Oh, share your wins this week. And then I’ll share a video. I’ll be like, Hey guys, publish this video. And people reply in this community that you pay for as a customer, they’ll reply with like a throwing up emoji, like a sick emoji on your video.
And you’re like, what am I paying for here? I’m just getting abused. Publicly, anyone else looking up,
Doug: you can get that for free. Yeah.
Julian: No, I could do that on Twitter for free every day if I want.
Doug: Man. All right. Well, Julian, this has been amazing. Um, we’ll link up so people can get to all the places, but where do you want people to connect with you?
And check out your stuff. You can mention them here. And like I said, I’ll link it up so people can get to it.
Julian: Thanks. Appreciate that. Yeah. So feel free to check out our SEO and agency community. It’s called the SEO boardroom. If you want to link to that in the description, that’d be amazing. Otherwise just check out my YouTube videos.
Julian Goldie agency is probably the one that most people watching this will be interested in. It’s got all my systems I use to generate clients. I publicly displayed on my YouTube channel because I want to help people
Doug: awesome.
Julian: Well, we’ll talk
Doug: soon Have a great night there. And uh, thanks again.