Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today I’m talking to Chris Piantelli from Linkify. And I’ve, I’ve known Chris for a few years. We haven’t met in person yet, but we’ve talked many times on the pod. We’re going to talk digital PR and some of the changes that have, I mean, really affected the entire industry.
Overall, from an SEO perspective, but there’s a lot of stuff in the linkify world and the digital PR world that has changed quite a bit. So Chris, how’s it going today?
Chris: Yes. Very good. Thank you. Yeah. It’s been a few years now, hasn’t it? So I’d say friends now.
Doug: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it’s good, good to speak with you.
Thanks for agreeing to chat. And I do want to give a shout out to linkify. You guys did a couple of campaigns for me over the last couple of years. I’ll actually put the links in the description and show notes so people can check it out, but it. It’s amazing. So it’s a DR 92, 91 and 90 and 82 and 86, 72 and 68, including Ahrefs, Nasdaq.com, GoBankingRates, uh, Yahoo Finance, places that I probably wouldn’t have been able to land the link. So you guys did an excellent job. And I just want people to understand sort of the links that PR. So we’re going to go through a lot of like news. So I will mention that we’ve done a couple of interviews before, so I’ll point people towards those to get a little bit more about your story and background and how you got started with all of this.
But one of the bigger things out there was the death of Haro. So help a reporter out is something I heard about when I first started online over 10 years ago, and it had been around. Before that. And I believe they were acquired and or rebranded. And then shortly after that, they closed up shop. So what is the story with that, Chris?
And I’ll just leave it open for you to tell that story.
Chris: Sure. Um, do you want to start with like a minute silence or something for the death of HARO or get straight yeah, it’s crazy, crazy, um, time. So HARO was founded About 15 years ago by a guy called Peter Shankman who’s a really nice guy.
We had him on our podcast actually. And he opened up this service, which was like a free at the point of service to connect journalists with expert sources three emails a day, Monday to Friday, everybody got really used to that sort of system. And it worked really well and allowed. Small businesses really, which, which was the reason Peter Shankman set it up to, to get press coverage and media attention.
And then a few years into that process, I think like SEOs and link builders recognized that it was a great opportunity to, to win backlinks. And then Peter then sold it to Sissian, which is another company. And it’s still carried on in, in the exact same format that it. that it originally did.
It was still a free to use three emails a day. But then I think maybe three, four years ago, it was Sissian itself, which is a wider, larger media corporation was purchased by private equity. And then that’s when we started. Seeing things sort of the sands shift as it were so they started by going after agencies selling quote unquote HARO links.
So we actually got a cease and desist from Sissian for using their, their sort of their copyrighted. Term HARO on our website. So that was a stressful 48 hours when I was in Thailand in Bangkok with my now wife reading emails from lawyers saying that they were gonna you know, take aggressive legal action, but anyway, we were able to move that the industry responded to that quite quickly.
And we started referring to HARO links as what they are, which is like expert quote links, just some sort of basic copywriting. Changes to the websites and stuff. And then everything seemingly got back to normal and carried on. Then they said that they were changing the email based system, which likely was a response to the AI mass response bombardment.
I’m sure all the journalists that were using using HARO were getting in their inboxes. So this was around the time that chat GPT had been prevalent for, let’s say, 12 to 18 months. Everybody. Figured out that rather than hand crafting one or two pitches a day that they could, you know, mass spam every single query in there.
So Sissian then said that they were going to change to like a platform based system that you logged in and you had to do everything within this housed system. And then it also went from a free system to a freemium Pay to play model. It wasn’t prohibitively expensive. I think it was like a dollar a pitch, let’s say.
But I think that was their response to try and curb and combat that AI spam. And it actually went really well, especially for us as an agency. It did, I think, cut that spam. Our win rates went Really, really high, and there was still really good publications sourcing for expert commentary on the platform.
Everything was running relatively smoothly. And then all of a sudden out of the blue, they just said thanks a lot. Everyone will be shutting down the service, which was crazy.
Doug: Damn. And I thought, you know, we talked around the time period of the rebranding, which was only, I mean, that was like the fall of 24, right?
Chris: Mm hmm. Connectively. Yeah, they said that they were going to change the name and the system and all that. Yeah.
Doug: And then with the, you know, the charging, I was like, that’s actually a decent move because of the proliferation of AI and the ability for people to automate. In fact, I was contacted more than once by at least one to two companies that set up a AI.
System where like they would pitch basically, like you said, they would pitch everything and they were charging, you know extremely low rates because like once they had the system set up it was very cheap for them to run and I I get a lot of pitches I resisted talking to them because I knew this was like short lived like anytime like if someone could figure out how to do it Then that means many other people have figured out how to do it, too So like it was only a matter of time before everyone Was sending AI answers back and it’s just like pretty much useless.
It’s like too much for the reporters to sift through. Okay, well, your business was basically built on top of Haro in the beginning. And I think you diversified. There’s other ways to get these links. So how were you dealing with this as a business owner and knowing that? You need to keep this running. You actually have, you know, not only do you want to have new clients coming in, you have clients that have already paid you and you’re running their campaign.
So what was this like mentally, emotionally, psychologically?
Chris: I, it actually wasn’t as, as bad as it sounds in the early days of having Link afi. When we, we were basically a HARO agency. We basically were, started life as a company quite organically. I was doing HARO link building. My then business partner had some, was it like a link builder, but not like PR link building.
He was doing you know, more full SEO link building campaigns, skyscraper, guest posts, that sort of stuff. And then he saw. My link profile and said, Hey, do you think you could earn these HARO style links for some of his clients? I said I could give it a go and then that’s how our company started As we progressed and started to grow and scale obviously sort of the the magic gold dust was was queries more queries Where can we find more queries to for more opportunities and it quickly became apparent that that there were in fact multiple places to find these queries.
And actually, the journalists that were looking for these queries were submitting their journalist requests across multiple platforms. So they wanted to go as far and wide as they could. And they would use basically any platform or system that would allow them. And actually most tier one journalists, or certainly a significant amount of tier one journalists that are frequently.
Sourcing for expert commentary are actually posting those requests directly on their social media as well. So they’ll blue sky threads, Twitter, they’ll post and say, you know, I’m sourcing for a fitness expert. I’m writing an article for men’s health. com. I’m looking for someone, a fitness expert to give me three ways to X, Y, and Z.
And you’ll see that query on multiple places and also directly from the journalist. So as we were scaling, we built our own, um, sort of automated in house system where we pull all the queries from all the possible sources. We also monitor and track all of the tier one journalists. We also know when the journalists move jobs and go from one publication to another.
We track their social handles and then we just pull everything in and then we sift through. Uh, and then we, you know, we assign accordingly to, to the clients that we think they’re a good fit for. So actually HARO is a single pop. Point of failure. It wasn’t, it wasn’t really it, it wasn’t an issue at all.
And actually, funnily enough, Peter Shankman had already started a new platform even before Connectively went down which he actually called Hero at the time. So not HARO, but Hero. And when we had him on our podcast, he said he’d done that too. Piss off Sissian and I think he got a cease and desist within about a month of launching that and he said he knew it was coming so he already had a backup name and a backup domain which it now lives today as SOS source of sources, which is essentially exactly what HARO was when he originally founded it, you know, over 15 years ago.
Doug: Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. And does the, does SOS like look a little more modern? I remember Haro looked like it was from 2007 or whatever.
Chris: I mean, it’s just not identical looking. It’s very, very similar. The, the user base isn’t as big as, as HARO was in its prime. So there does seem to have been a dispersion of maybe where journalists prioritize the ones that will just source from one or two places.
There’s also, I mean, there’s many other platforms I can tell you about, but no, it’s still got that classic look, but Hey, if you’re someone who likes. Things to not change then it’s perfect and it’s still exactly what you want it to be which is you can see the queries You can go through them and you can answer what you want So
Doug: one thing I want to highlight and go back to a little bit is you know the fact that you realize that Connecting directly with the journalists via their social media or otherwise and keeping track of them was really valuable What you find and I’m completely on the outside, but even I see this where a lot of the journalists are freelancers.
They write for whoever will hire them, and they’re writing all the time for different places. So, you know, if you just follow them in one area, you’re going to miss a lot of of stuff, meaning the publication. So if you just follow New York Times, you’re going to miss all the other stuff that that person is doing.
How much did AI or how much are you using AI in sort of like sifting through all the data and or pulling the data? Because, you know, back in the day. Even just like four years ago, five years ago, like you would probably have to manually look through, you could do some sorting, but you would probably have to have a person review the data that you’re pulling in.
But now it seems like AI is so good. You can give it some good instructions and you’re probably getting most of what you need. So are you using a AI in that way?
Chris: We’re using a lot of automation. And then we said there’s a lot of AI on the back end of like the automations that we’re doing. And we are using AI as well to engage journalists albeit in a very like structured way.
We also use AI to ensure that the pitches we send don’t get detected. As I and then obviously we don’t just do I like to put HARO or the umbrella term, the old umbrella term for these inbound PR requests as an inbound form of PR activity. So that’s where the stuff’s coming into you basically.
But we also do outbound, which is where we come up with the stories. And then you sort of are outreaching to the journalists with your story as opposed to waiting for them to say, I’m working on a story and I’m looking for an expert, we go to them and say, Hey, we’ve got a story. We’re an expert. So that’s the outbound inbound as well.
Outbound does really, really well with data. So I think the new, the new winners in the digital PR link building space are going to be the ones that can gather, analyze, interpret and find narrative within data at mass using AI. I wish I was like an amazing coder, but I think as the weeks and days go by the tools for us to interact with.
AI in order to get it to do stuff that we want it to do as non coders is, is getting here faster and faster every day.
Doug: It’s pretty amazing.
You mentioned using AI for You know, just generating the outreach, but you also mentioned that you’re using AI to help it not be detected, which is a classic thing. So how are you doing this? And I think I asked you the last time you were on, and this is a kind of an evergreen topic now, but yeah, what are you doing?
Chris: Yeah. Um, but I think it’s got to a point now where it’s, it’s gonna become largely irrelevant, but whilst it’s not, then it’s something you have to take account of. So I think the journalists are being mandated to by the publications and the editorial teams for which they’re. writing and producing articles that this must pass AI detection.
So I think it’s got to the point now where even though it’s, um, an issue for the editorial teams and the journalists that are writing, and bear in mind that if a publication hires a freelance journalist or, you know, a beat journalist to produce a piece of content, then they are well within their right to expect for that journalist to not have used AI to write that content or at least not to have blatantly used AI where they could have just cut out the middleman and not paid the journalist to do anything.
So it, you can understand why this stuff’s being tested. But it’s going to get to the point where the, it’s undetectable anyway, and the detectors themselves are, are just no good. Like, I don’t know if you’ve played with AI detection tools or if you’ve written a paragraph or two paragraphs of your own text and it’s flagged as 100 percent AI and you can take a piece of text and run it through some dodgy DAI machine that adds like a weird full stop in the middle.
And then it becomes a hundred percent human. There’s just no rhyme or reason to it. It’s not an exact science and it just seems a bit pointless, but as we are living in an era where journalists are checking and using these tools, then if we want to maximize our chances of winning pitches, then what we send off, we should also check to make sure it passes these tools because if they’re doing it.
Even if it’s not AI or the detection tools rubbish or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They’re still checking it. And you may just be putting a bin of like a hundred other pitches that they’re just auto dismissing based on a simple check from, you know, zero GPT or any of the other detection tools. So how do we use it?
We use some, like, pretty basic DAI prompts. We aggressively change the prompts and, like, iterate on the new models and, and try and find different ways. It works a lot better if you break stuff down, um, into chunks. So rather than taking, like, a three paragraph response and asking AI to DAI.
that full piece of text. If you break it down into sentences or if you engage with the chat GPT as it’s meant to be engaged with, which is like, you know, chatting to it, you could take individual sentences or elements. And you can find what’s being flagged as AI. In these AI detection tools, it’ll sort of highlight the areas.
So you could take those specific areas and say, you know, could you use X, Y, and Z to enhance this? It’s quite a laborious task, but they are checking. So I think it’s worth doing.
Doug: And, you know, you mentioned, have I used the tools? I, I have used the AI detectors, but it was like probably 18 months ago now.
And then to your point, it’s like, it. It didn’t matter because I put in actually a transcript of me speaking like a podcast or whatever and it was like 90 percent AI so I was like, okay, this is obviously like there’s too many false positives false negatives like you’re mentioning like different ways to um, like disrupt the AI detection even though it’s like Perhaps the same text or really close to it.
So yeah, from my perspective, it’s just like, it was an interesting thing in the beginning. I think there were a lot of like AI tools and I actually heard of some where it’s like, I developed this AI tool, I did this stuff and then people sold it. And I think that was like the right move. Just like develop something, get the hell out of there.
This is going to be useless in like two months. And then. You know, it’s bigger companies trying to acquire stuff, but interesting projects. And I do see, I mean, I see people with like, you know, no, this is a whole movement, right? It’s like no coding skills to like, here’s how you can code with this stuff, which is interesting to me.
It’s been a long time since I coded, but I have like a computer engineering degree. So I spent whatever fucking hundreds of hours like coding and like debugging and doing all this stuff. And now it’s like. You know, it could be solved really quickly. Yeah.
Chris: Are you a coder then? Can you do that?
Doug: I these days I would say I’m not a coder, but technically I could, I’d probably like in a day I could like catch up to like some other stuff, but I did, I took, like I said, hundreds of hours of, of classes around coding.
Yeah.
Chris: You’ve got to play with, um, there’s a couple of natural language. Coding tools that are out, which I’ve been playing with. There’s one called bolt. new. I don’t know if you’ve come across this another one called lovable. dev. Honestly, I’ve built like uh, I’m working on a press badge maker.
It’s basically ready. I just haven’t launched it yet. So I coded an entire front end. It’s you go in it’s got like, it looks great. They, you can go and take three URLs or five URLs. You select which one you want of websites where you’ve been featured before. Then it will, it will slot the URLs in and then produce a button to hit, hit generate press badge maker.
So they click that. It’s then connected to a background image remover, API. Um, it’s got a database on something called super base. It then like blurs the the HTML code that it produces after it makes like a press badge, which is the three logos is options to then change the background color to style it.
And then it gives you the HTML code. It’s blurred. The person has to then click to sign up, gives them a password, signs them up and then shows them the HTML code. And I did all of that. With natural language, just saying, can you make it do this now? And it’s like, Oh, you need an API key. Okay. Which API key should I get?
Go to this website. Get that API. I get to do that. It’s taken me about 40 hours probably, which is way too much, but I don’t know anything, but it works, man.
Doug: Interesting. That it is so cool because. It was unobtainable before, like, you would have to, I mean, you could do it, but you would be, like, looking through documentation, you would, I mean, there is this, I mean, one of the skills of, like, coding is, like, to be able to look through the libraries and see what call you actually need and how to make those calls, but you’re just, like, you don’t have to do all that shit, and the thing is, like, obviously, well, maybe it’s not obvious, it’s like, You’re you said it took you 40 hours or whatever, and technically, I mean, it would probably take me 45 because I’m like even less less aware of it now.
But like if I like refreshed my skills in a certain area, then I potentially like a skilled coder can do it so much faster because they don’t have to go and Google shit and see, you know, how a specific call is used or whatever. And it just speeds everything up or debugging where it’s just like in the past you had to look through and find your syntax error with a fucking semicolon.
And now it’s just like. You don’t have to do that. So,
Chris: well, that’s, that’s where you’re. Yeah. That’s why I wanted to tell you about it. Cause even if you’ve got like any previous knowledge of this stuff, then you’re going to be miles ahead of everyone else, but it’s, it’s almost leveled the playing field for like dreamers and thinkers and tinkerers and imaginers, because like, you know, it’s expensive to hire a dev team.
If you’ve got an idea, like I remember when I was like. I don’t know, 15 years ago, I had an idea for an app, let’s say I looked into it and it was going to cost like 20 grand to get, you know, this basics. So it was just unobtainable for me to even entertain the idea of getting into the app developer. But like now, especially like we are in the online business, we’re always coming up with ideas of like how we could make stuff better me with digital PR and like.
Gathering data or finding information on particular journalists in order to make different campaigns more interesting and we can automate and create tools that can speed this up. And, and even now, even if it’s just to the point where, you know, I could go in and like code something that like kind of looks like I want it works, but doesn’t, but that could be like 60 percent of the cost of a development project.
And then you just take it to someone else to like, bring it over the finish line. So it’s super exciting time.
Doug: And it’s, I think someone could develop like a whole podcast and YouTube channel just talking about this portion of it. I’m, I’m sure they’re out there where it’s just non coders coding, like average coders becoming like elite kind of coders and that sort of thing.
Okay. So. I’ll close that portion up and just say, I have, like, I’ve had an interest every now and then, but I’m doing like less stuff online.
So I’m not running into like. Digital problems that I need to solve and I think that’s the key where you’re like, I have this problem There’s not a solution out there and I want to like create one And I think I mean there’s obviously like plenty of problems out there to be solved. But Because I’m, whatever, I’m like writing in a note, I’m, I’m writing on a notepad.
Like there’s less, there’s less digital problems I’m trying to solve. So as we,
there’s something better, there’s something better about that. That said, I have like a million post it notes and notes and Google docs. So it’s just really, it’s just scattered fucking everything.
Chris: You sound like me. Yeah. I’ve got duplicates. I’ve got paper notes that are like as the same as the. Digital notes, notion notes, notes, notes, notes, notes, notes.
Doug: I like it. And I think maybe that’s the problem. I should be able to just like take pictures of everything. And it’s like, consolidate this mess into like one document here. So, okay, moving on, you were essentially getting into. Where digital PR is moving these days, and part of it, you know, reaching out to people directly using AI, but not too much.
Where else is digital PR going? Are there any trends?
Chris: Yeah. Um, so it’s becoming a lot more now about the, the, the, the personal company or the brand the expertise and the authority behind, behind the pieces that they’re going out with. So whether or not you have, that’s answering HARO questions or like HARO styled inbound. Expert quote questions, long gone are the days where you could just be a finance expert and answer a finance question.
Um, you know, if you want to get quoted in a big finance publication or in a big tier one publication, given finance commentary, then you really need to be like an actual finance expert, like a CPA or a CFP or an accountant or the ex head of a HSBC banking conglomerate. Something like that, not.
necessarily to that extreme, but this is, this is who you’re competing with in order to win that coverage. And then also we have to think about the publications themselves. Like many of them have had reductions in writing staff and they’re losing readership to all of the other places that people can.
You know, consume their media. So I think the opportunities are probably going to be in somewhat of a decline and then the competition is going to be heating up. So I think it will get harder and harder. Having said that that I still think there is a continual and will forever be a need for new content and news.
Like I personally can’t ever, ever see that going away. I love the news. Even if it’s a fluff piece or an important piece, these places are still going to need to exist in order to deliver good quality news. And then within that there are PR opportunities. So, yeah, I think it’s going to be about in order to achieve it on an agency level, it’s going to be about systems, processes, contacts, relationships new ideas, new ways of doing stuff.
And in terms of, you know, getting yourself featured is. And this is true of doing well in Google and appearing in large language models and existing still as a business, it’s going to be about brand building and having a recognizable either brand or personal brand. Because that is, that’s going to be the future of, of everything, I think.
Doug: And one of the notes that you sent over in preparation was around. Other advantages of doing digital PR and part of it is having that brand out there in the world, not just SEO, but in essentially AI tools or LLMs in general, can you expand on that a little bit and, you know, I guess, give context around it.
Chris: Yeah, well, people are changing the way they search on, hey, that’s, that’s, it’s not just Google now, I mean, it is for a lot of stuff, but a lot of search happens, not on Google now. It was the dominant. Search engine. Um, I think it fell between below 90% of the search the like real estate for the first time in 15 years, something like that.
Now those stats don’t necessarily take into account the, the large language models. I think it’s just a search engine based. I think it’s, I can’t remember the name, bright data, whether that data comes from, but we know people are searching in places outside of Google. YouTube is a search engine.
And then you’ve got like non Google entities, perplexity, chat, GPT, search now has a search feature. And then deep seek is also, you know, a new language model. People are searching on social Tik TOK, Instagram. So search is happening in many, many places. And. The way that we succeed with our businesses is to be found.
So we have clients that will say that, you know, they, they track their referrals. I think it’s less easy to do with places like chat GPT on a sort of cookie sort of tracking level, but certainly they’ve been told in, you know, Forms the customers said, I found you on chat GPT, which is scary to think, you know, you’d be saying, you know, is there a good plumber near me or, you know, I’m in such and such town, what’s the best plumber.
And then it’s recommending plumbers. So if you’re a home or local service business, like if people are going to be searching in those places, you, you’ve got to try and get there. Like you don’t want to be one of the four main plumbers in your town. And if. Somebody asks, what are the best plumbers in that town on chat GPT?
It only ever surfaces the three and not you because you’re you’re never going to get business from that search platform So we need to try and get ourselves into the large language models it’s still early to opt to give any definitive Do x y and z and you’ll appear in all large language models. We don’t even fully understand How they work.
We know that it’s not they’re not directly tapping into an index per safe like Google does, although for example, chat GPT is built or leverages the Bing index So we know that they’re going to rely on trusted sources. That’s logical. And trusted sources tends to be places like tier one media.
There was a study done by, not a massive study, but a study done by Grow and Convert recently, where they looked at Keywords from, uh, well, 18 companies, I think, and keywords, and it showed that 80 percent of the businesses that were surfaced in the AI results were also ranking in the top 10 on the first page of Google.
So. Google itself is you know, an arbiter of truth in some ways with its first page of results. So I think the whole thing needs to be holistic. Like we’ve got to be brand building, being everywhere and be in aligning ourselves with bigger and more trusted. So I can’t give you like a definitive strategy, but being on podcasts, networking doing good SEO and building good links and getting tier one media coverage.
And being talked about in lots of different places can only go to feed the new beast and give us a chance, I think to appear in, in, in all the places that we want to appear.
Doug: And I’ve seen this as well, just in a general sense, like where someone will Google me and I have a lot of content out there. So, you know, there’s a knowledge panel on Google, but there’s other information and I have. Checked like keyword golden ratio within some of the LLMs and it’s cool.
It pops up, you know, mostly accurate. I don’t know. I can’t remember. It’s probably fine. It probably just, of course, copied it from somewhere else. So it’s probably fairly accurate. But it’s kind of interesting, like how. They go because I’m just a random dude that made up something and produces some content out there But it’s like it has information about me I should go I should like look deeper and see what kind of crazy stuff is out there.
But When I chatted with some of the local newsletter creators in the past few months One thing that they mentioned was just having some presence out there not necessarily like PR mentions but If they have that, that’s huge for working with companies and actually getting advertisers. So the example that they gave was just having like a presence on social media.
It gives them some credibility. Well, if you add like actual like press mentions or you’re featured in the local magazine or whatever, like that’s pretty big too. And it’s like, Oh, a journalist actually valued whatever that person has. So before we get into some other stuff here. You mentioned that you have a cheat sheet and I think it has some, uh, information about other places that people can go for digital PR.
I don’t want to bury it at the end of the episode. So I’m going to let you talk about it now. So I tricked all the listeners out there.
Chris: Yeah, you’re nice. Yeah, so yeah, HARO’s gone but it’s, it’s not the, what do I say HARO is dead, long live HARO, something like that. So there are loads of other places to go, and we’ve got a cheat sheet which you can get completely free and I walk you through.
From top to bottom, how to basically start getting winning press coverage for yourself. I’ll tell you the first five links that you can definitely win. Really, really high quality publications. I go through, I think there’s a prompt in there so you can work, work some of your ideas into an, an amazing pitch that won’t need any editing.
Um, I also break down the other places that you can find these requests. Almost all of them are free. Yeah, so it’s all in there. It’s completely free. So that would be great if anyone was going to get that. I think you said you’d leave the link in the show notes.
Doug: Yep, exactly. So people could go there and check it out and yeah, it should get people started.
It’s very, it’s a tight resource, so people should check it out. Okay. So as we’re transitioning I’ll let you, if I missed anything Haro, digital PR wise, anything else you want to add before we talk about kind of the niche site industry and SEO industry overall. So anything that I missed.
Chris: No, I think I think we covered it all.
If people are wanting to proactively go and start earning themselves coverage on big publications. Yeah, I think. Oh, actually, there’s one thing. Yeah, I think that the benefits are Above and beyond that of just the SEO value of the link we are seeing so much more benefits from doing this, which is things like if you are an e commerce website, or for example, if you own a local newsletter and that local, local newsletter has a landing page, you can get those three, four, five logos.
So for example you Doug have like a niche site resource page that we built some links to. We got you featured in Ahrefs, which is an amazing niche topical, like tier one resource that if you slap on your front page, if somebody goes to that page and goes, Oh, can I trust this Doug guy? He looks a bit shifty.
Oh, wow. He’s been featured in Ahrefs and a bunch of other places. you’re going to increase customer conversion, customer trust. And then as well, like I said, the large language models, you also get the referral traffic if you are getting featured on these big sites with lots of traffic. And then you’re also like getting in front of people that are reading stories that are somewhat or tightly aligned to the niche and industry that you’re operating in.
So it’s almost a passive way of networking because you never know who’s going to read it. Somebody might just be looking for the exact service that you offer or what the quote that you said might really resonate with them. They may add you on LinkedIn. You may then, you know, see that they’ve added you and it’s a, it’s a way of growing your network.
And we all know the benefits of, of that, but passively. So, but yeah, the benefits are just, it’s definitely worth doing.
Doug: Well said. So Chris you’ve been to a handful of SEO conferences here recently, I think you went to a SEO Chiang Mai or Chiang Mai SEO conference. How was that? I mean, the thing is like it’s been going on for obviously years and it, it runs the range, but my sort of circle of audience and most of the people that I was, you know, friends with there, they were more on the content side of websites and maybe dabbled with some higher level SEO, maybe agency stuff.
But I mean, from the niche site world, a lot of it has like. evaporated since the helpful content update. AI really changed things and it’s been kind of a shit show overall. So a lot of people just kind of like either lost their sites or traffic went down by 90 percent or if people were like getting started, they have gone to other areas.
So what was the vibe there in Chiang Mai?
Chris: Yeah this year there was definitely I mean, it was a positive vibe, but I think niche, niche sites is probably quite a relatively small area of, of SEO. Um, SEO is like a multibillion dollar industry. If you think about the amount of websites that utilize SEO in order to drive business, then.
You know, niche sites are, are really a, a, a fraction of, of that. So you get a lot of the top people in the room at these places, especially Chiang Mai SEO. A lot of enterprise SEO people. And then you have people on the fringes of SEO. So, I mean, SEO is just search engine optimization. There was a talk from a guy that was crushing it on YouTube.
Which is an easier search engine to rank in one could say. So yeah, the vibe was. pretty optimistic. A lot of people bullish on AI and the opportunities that that that’s going to bring. I think the problem with like the whole niche and affiliate site downfall was it was that gateway into the industry for like, you know, I’ve never done anything before.
Find something that you’re interested in. You can produce some content and you could start ranking and making money. So we all, well, many of us experienced that. Like I did, I’m sure you did a site that you just sort of learned, you almost learned what you were doing on that first site that you had as well.
But then it started ranking and it was like, holy shit. And then you’ve got ads like connected and you’ve added a couple of the feelings and then you’re like making money and you’re like, shit, I’m like, I’m an online marketer. I can, and then it was like, you got the bug and then. You know, people obviously two, three years into the journey had multiple sites.
I know people that got hit with big, big sites doing, you know, maybe a million sessions a month organic sessions a month. So making crazy good money. Even some big people that talk, you know, we’ve seen some of the niche influencers that got hit, uh, you know, tens and thousands of dollars lost. So it’s crushing.
But like I said, in the, in the, in the dawn of AI, I think it’s still a gateway for people to get involved and try things. I just don’t think it’s that. Google cut off that, that doorway of like, I don’t really know what I’m doing. Here’s some okay content. I want to make loads of money. It’s like, it’s just got that.
You can’t do that anymore, basically.
Doug: I like the way you frame that too, because you know, number one, when you’re in a subculture, You feel like it’s huge and I like to think I’m very self aware. So I, and I’m in multiple little subcultures. So I see like, you know, someone’s a huge like in air quotes influencer in that industry, but you go like just to an adjacent, an adjacent subculture, people don’t even know who that person is or what you’re even talking about, even though they’re like very closely related.
It’s interesting because you’re exactly right where like content websites were a very easy gateway where like someone is like they’ve heard about it like it kind of went mainstream because there were stories on like CNBC and you know other like national or you know, worldwide publications where like these stories are covered, where it’s like average single mom at home is like doing this business.
And there are other areas that people can get started, but like there was kind of a clear framework and road map, even though it changed over the years where like someone could start a website and start blogging and then this. Has changed so much, but it is just a tiny little portion of the industry and, you know, I guess kind of the extreme is the affiliate gathering conference that um, you know, I think, I think it usually is held in the spring.
I don’t know if it’s coming up. Cause I mean, again, the, I think no
Chris: sold it. Didn’t he, I think. Okay. Carl Robbins sold it. Yeah.
Doug: And I, I knew it was like on for sale, but basically I haven’t, I haven’t caught up. So anyway, the point is like, there were hundreds of people that were like only in that one little niche area.
And now it’s like, okay, where did those people go? From my perspective, like there are other areas to start. Obviously there’s like the local newsletter. I talked to people who are using Etsy as their marketplace, whether it’s like digital goods or like, print on demand stuff. So there are places to go with like low skill level.
It’s not as defensible, but you know, one of those things. Interesting. And then it’s niche site industry where like you got started and then there were some people who, you know, reached like a high level and then they diversified into other stuff like I did, right? Like into YouTube podcasting. Online courses.
There are other people that like continued to build their skill level only in the niche site area, the authority site area. And I mean, they probably like went way further, but like, because they only had that one revenue stream, like when they got hit, it’s like 90 percent of their income, like went away.
And they have these great skills that are, they’re not useless, but they’re not as useful as they used to be. So it’s good to the word on the street is positive. Chris, you have a conference coming up that you’re going to be speaking at can you tell us a little about that? Do you know what you’re going to talk about?
Chris: Yeah, thanks, uh, Doug, I’m speaking at SEO Estonia which is in november in yeah, in Estonia I’m going to be talking about post HARO link building. So essentially what I’ve touched on today, but much more in depth. So that will be super exciting. Just to touch on one thing as well, that you were just talking about 30 seconds ago. I think the other thing that was really, really sexy about niche sites and affiliate sites is the, like such extreme low barrier to entry for like, you can do this with.
Like 3 a month for like a blue host account. It was like, okay, that’s like a monthly commitment, but it’s like, it’s three bucks, like, or you can get 50 percent off for the first 12 months. Okay. It’s down to like 1 50, let’s say. And then it was like, everything else is your time. If you sit and write this stuff.
You can make money. You’ve paid for your dirt cheap hosting and it’s your time. So that was the real sort of draw. And then you did, like you said, you summed it up perfectly when you saw these like mom blog reports, remember these like income blog reports that you see from these mommy bloggers, maybe make like 60 K a month from their mommy blogs.
And then there was a million mommy blogs. So I think it’s a shame that that like low cost barrier to the online world is down. But I also think. If you want to do something online, find people that you trust, such as yourself, and take that, like, take that not gamble, make that investment in yourself and, like, pay for courses.
I was speaking to John Dykstra the other day, and he, um, you know, he had a lot of affiliate sites. And, you know, he’s, he, he got, lost a lot of his traffic, but he went to learn Ads and newsletter stuff. And he invested in some courses and he spends a lot of time learning and tweaking. And now he’s like re crushing it again.
So you, it’s there for us to do. We just, you know, don’t cheap out on your own investment. If it’s like, instead of a dollar 50 for a half price blue hosted, if it’s, you know, a hundred bucks for a course, if it’s something that you really want to do, then make sure you trust the person. Read some reviews and invest and give yourself the time and a chance to achieve in that area that you’re interested in.
Doug: Well said Chris. And I think like the other thing that happens is like it levels the playing field, similar to what you were saying with like, you know, coders and being able to use AI and non coders being able to use AI and like. Basically create something like I have whatever niche site skills and keyword research skills and a lot of other people do too But the thing is like everything got shuffled up.
So people that like have spent eight years working on niche sites and authority sites their They’re like leveled. So like that business model, like while they still have marketing skills and some other things, like kind of leveled the playing field in, you know, that’s what I see where someone who has no background in digital marketing, they come up and they don’t have like preconceived notions or just like, all right, I’m going to look at print on demand on Etsy or I’m doing local newsletters and I see the tools that are out there and it’s very easy for me to like get started and, you Yeah, I mean, you got to put the time in, but like, there’s no clear blueprint or framework to use like there was.
So I think in probably like a year or two, like there will be a couple like more mature, um, Like business models that beginners can get started in and it’ll be, you know, kind of like say niche sites in like 2013 or 2014 where it’s like, there’s some churn, you can get started for like low cost, it’s gonna pop up.
I just don’t know like what it’ll be. Maybe it’s AI related. You know, one thing we haven’t talked about much is just like video, like we. We see the value of YouTube and if you run an agency or you have something that you’re selling, like, you know, video and audio, there’s no better way to build trust than like hearing the person speak.
And I think, you know, that’s a, that’s a tough thing. Cause like people want to do YouTube. Or, you know, other short form video, and it’s hard to do. And a lot of times, especially on YouTube, I think some of the other platforms are different social media base where like, if you want to do YouTube, you’re going to have to like produce a lot of videos.
It’s hard. It takes a long time. You have to get over the fear of like being on video and like a ton of other things before you could even earn any money. Like you have to go through all of that stuff and it’s a barrier to entry. And it’s hard and some people do it for a couple of years and they’re like, ah, I don’t, you know, I still only have like a few thousand followers, which is a lot when you think about it.
But anyway, any observations on video? Just curious, like overall from, you know, agency wise, conferences, etc.
Chris: I mean, I love video as a, as a former we’re, we’re trying to grow our YouTube is not an easy thing. You definitely need to have a strategy, I think, or just be extremely likable and like have an audience like prebuilt, but like wants to devour your content.
But yeah, I mean, I see lots of people crushing it especially for things like lead gen people like Julian Goldie. So he just, he makes a lot of content he’s in the SEO space, but you know, he, he. It makes content about AI and you know, it’s crushing it. So I think if you can get the timings right and you’re not afraid to get on camera, that’s the barrier, I think, isn’t it?
For a lot of people not wanting to put them, put themselves out there. But yeah, there is loads of potential. I’d say niche down and everybody says the same thing. You don’t need like a full editing suite to get started. Just do it and test it and see what works. And give it a go. But yeah, I like, I like video a lot.
Very good.
Doug: Okay. As we’re wrapping up here, I think we’re, we’re pretty much at the end of time, but I want to give you a second. You mentioned you have seen some recoveries from HCU and otherwise. Can you just give us like a little taste of like what you’ve seen out there?
Chris: Yeah. I don’t think we’ve seen any full, full scale like back to where they were at and shot past it.
There’s. We’ve got some, worked with some sites in the travel space, the broad tech space, the health space, um, the, uh, Took a dip, but they didn’t, they didn’t tank, but they did take a sizable dip and that dip is, let’s say, 75 percent of the way back up to where they were. I mean, that could just be that they weren’t hit in any way.
By the helpful content update and an actual fact that was just like a normal algorithmic sort of part of their up and down, you know, traffic. But a lot of the sites that we see that, I mean, there are still loads and loads of sites killing it in Google. Like I see prospective clients all the time. I see all of our clients that get quoted in the media.
I then also see the other people that have won quotes in those articles. I’ll often look at. their websites to see, you know, what, you know, who’s engaging with digital PR and yeah, there is a ton of websites doing well, like loads of just real business websites that, you know, that sell like, I don’t know, glass doors, let’s say, and they get like 50, 000 sessions a month or occur.
Came across like a grass, artificial grass e commerce reseller the other day, who’s doing 150, 000 organic sessions per month. And not for like, you know, weird keywords that don’t make sense for like, you know, art is artificial grass. Good, like good keywords. Loads of law firms are doing well, loads of health.
Um, businesses, places like rehabilitation centers, loads of skincare and beauty products, loads of travel websites. I mean, in every vertical, there are sites that are still doing well in Google. And although it might seem like there aren’t 10 organic results on every page because of all of the other crap that Google’s put on there, I mean, they’re tech, you know, and Reddit, let’s say, which has taken up say three of the positions, there are still technically 10 spots to be on.
The first page of Google and there is still significant, significant traffic to be had. So I still think it’s, I still think it’s a game to play. I still think niche sites can work. You know, we took a client on the other day who started a site eight months ago, and it’s up to like 15, 000 sessions a month.
It’s doing this. It’s basically just a content site. It’s good content. Yeah, there’s people still playing this game as well. So this is just the rules change.
Doug: So, right. And I think I I’m curious to see like when like content websites might swing back where people are tired of maybe short form video and people want to like read a long blog, I think it’ll be like very.
Sub culture specific, like I’m in the financial independence, retire early space as well. And people still read like the classic blogs. Like if, if, um, Mr. Money mustache writes something like a lot of people will go there. Now that said, he’s been blogging for like whatever, 16 or 17 years. And like, it’s super well known, but there is, I mean, people do want to read some and it’s just, you know, everything changed so much, so fast, it’s like, You know, people are like disillusioned a little bit.
People are not interested in getting started as much, but it’s crazy. You know, someone started a blog a few months ago. They’re just doing their thing and you know, they’re making enough where like they can, they can hire you and have like a true digital PR campaign going on. So that’s
Chris: really. That’s really interesting.
And I’ll just, the final point I’ll make on that, I think that you’re 100 percent right to see if we’ll have, people have got a bit disillusioned. It feels almost like we’re in the eye of the storm now as well. Like we’re living and breathing this, especially if you’re working in this, in, if you’re working in this industry, the whole AI thing, it’s like, it feels overwhelming.
It’s, it feels like it couldn’t, it couldn’t possibly move any faster. And every day it’s moving faster. But I think we do have to take a step back sometimes. And I was on Kate Toon’s podcast the other day. And sorry, she was on our podcast the other day. And she made a really interesting point to say that, like, as much as AI is going to be, needs to be embraced, and it’s going to be a part of everything, there is always going to be the human touch.
And finding that balance, like you said, sometimes I just want to read. A blog article. Like I don’t want an AI generated response. I don’t want the facts. Like I want someone, I want an opinion on a current news event by somebody that I think knows what they’re talking about. And I think many people will feel like that.
And I think there will be a step back where AI has its place at Google has its place, search engines, YouTube video has its place. Like we’re not all of a sudden just going to be AI consuming and that’s it because. Like you said, like Mr. Money Mustache, there’s so many subcultures of industries where people respect people.
Like, I’ll read all of the niche newsletters still. So I’m on a bunch of newsletters, I read your newsletter, Niche Site Ladies newsletter, John Dykstra’s newsletter. When they come in, I’m sitting down and reading a newsletter. There’s no AI in that, unless you guys are all cheating and writing AI emails, but I don’t think you are.
So, yeah, I think it’s, you know, we have to just take a breather and see what happens, but it’s going to be interesting.
Doug: You could tell when I use AI because there’s no mistakes. All right, Chris, this has been awesome. It’s always good to catch up. We’ll link up for the cheat sheet so people can get to it.
Where else should people find you?
Chris: Yeah, Chris Pantelli on LinkedIn or linkify. io. If you want to have a chat, book a call. Or Twitter, yeah, all over. All
Doug: right, cool. And you’ve got a podcast. Do you want to plug it here? Podcast YouTube? Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. Market Movers. If you type in Market Movers, Linkify, you’ll find the podcast YouTube channel.
We’ve had some, yeah, some reasonably good guests. So come on, have a listen.
Doug: So pretty interesting. Cool. Yeah. We’ll link up to all that stuff. And thanks again, Chris.
Chris: Cheers, Doug.