S. 2 Ep. 39 – Simple SEO Strategies To Scale Your Website Traffic

Taylorr: Welcome to another episode of Technically Speaking, we’re your hosts, Taylorr and Austin and in today’s episodes, we’re talking about simple SEO strategies that will allow you to scale your website traffic. One of these strategies is called backlinking and we have brought in one of the foremost experts on backlinking to share with us how to actually grow your website traffic, even as a solo entrepreneur, coach consultant, speaker thought leader, these lessons deeply apply to every one of us. And SEO is kind of one of those questions we get asked a ton about it’s kind of a black box for a lot of our clients and so we thought, why not have an episode breaking a lot of these strategies down. 

Coming on the show today is Farzad Rashidi and he is the co-founder and lead innovator at Respona, which is basically a backlinking outreach automation tool and it is incredible; I am kind of a marketing geek here at SpeakerFlow and this tool has absolutely blown my mind. He’ll share with us all about it, but long story short outside of creating this tool, Respona, he also leads the marketing efforts at Visme and helped that organization grow to 14 million active members and 3 million monthly visits on their website, it’s all because of these marketing strategies that he’s sharing with us on the show today. 

This is a very powerful episode, as always, stick around until the end for some awesome resources and we hope you enjoy this one. We made it. Wow. Another show, really excited for this one. Farzad, welcome to Technically Speaking, it is so awesome to have you here today.

Farzad: Thank you so much for having me, I’m excited.

Taylorr: Yeah, for sure.

Austin: Us too. This is one of the topics that we get really excited about and that our audience, I feel may not even understand the basic premise of, so this will be good, we’ll build sort of layer on layer. So, for you listeners, by the time you’re done here, you will have a really good idea of how backlinking works, that’s my promise to you.

Taylorr: Heck yes. For sure. So, Farzard, co-founder of Respona, a really cool technology, by the way, it is beautiful, next-level stuff, I’m excited to learn more about that, but how did this come to be in your experience and interest in backlinking out of all things, what had to happen in life for this to be a thing?

Farzad: Absolutely. So, for folks who don’t know what Respona is, it’s an all-in-one link-building outreach software, it helps online businesses sort of increase organic traffic from Google. So, I started my career in marketing, back in the day, at another startup called Visme, V I S M E, have you guys heard of it before?

Austin: It’s Canva-esque, right?

Farzad: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, I would’ve gotten fired if had said we were Canva. But, yes, it’s somewhat similar to Canva in a way that you can create visuals, presentations, infographics, and whatnot, but it’s predominantly built for businesses versus Canva, that’s more of a B2C software. So, it’s a little more professional-looking templates and the features are built for a company, so you plug in your brand guidelines, et cetera. So, when I joined the company, I was the first marketing hire, so there were literally a bunch of designers and engineers, and I joined it and I was like, oh, hello. And they were like, okay, we have this product, can you go sell this thing? I was like, sounds like a plan, let’s do it. 

So, I basically sat down, and we were, basically trying to figure out what would be the right customer acquisition strategy for us. So, not only just to get a few quick sales in the door at the beginning, but, predominantly, how we’re going to actually build a pipeline of customers that we could kind of scale that over time; so not only today, but what’s going to happen 5, 10 years from now. So, we had a few options, we could start doing cold outreach for sales, which we did at the beginning, and it worked fine, it’s good to get a few customers here and there, but the problem was that our price point was very affordable, so it was 14, $15 a month. 

So, it just doesn’t make any economic sense for any US-based salesperson to hire and go door-to-door and start selling, so since the success rate on those is very low. And another alternative was paid ads, and we, obviously, still do a little bit of paid ads here and there, but it’s a very expensive way to acquire customers, because they use a bidding system, and customer acquisition, customer clicks are exponentially growing over the years. And also, more importantly, we didn’t have the hundreds of millions of dollars budget that our competitors had.

So, we were a bootstrap, small team company, so didn’t have a whole lot of cash to play with there. So, we basically, we were like, okay, well, let’s say, if you’re a customer, and you guys are a potential customer of Visme. So, let’s say, Taylorr, you want to create an infographic for this episode tomorrow, you don’t already have a software or solution that already does that, so what’s the first thing you do when it comes to finding.

Taylorr: Google it.

Farzad: Exactly. Yeah. So, we knew that from day one; and one, our customers are aware of the problem they’re solving. And two, they’re actively looking for it. Where? On Google. So, as a business, and that’s also another test that I always recommend business owners to kind of go through before you even spend a penny or invest a second on SEO, is to check, Hey, are our customers aware of what we’re selling and what the problem it is that we’re solving? And also, if so, are they actually Googling for it? 

Meaning if you’re a medical device company and you sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical devices to nurses and it’s unlikely a nurse that’s sitting down on a computer is like, okay, medical device. No, it’s just idiotic to even spend any time really on SEO. But if you were a company like Visme, for example, or Respona, people are actively looking to build backlinks, they’re actively looking to create graphics, they’re actively looking to do X, Y, and Z. So, we knew that from day one, where our customers were hanging out, so we’re like, okay, instead of us becoming a household name, because that’s very expensive, let’s show up in places where people who are looking for a solution like ours would find us. 

So, what we did, basically, was just to do what other people do when it comes to SEO; we just started producing a bunch of content and put it on our website, built a lot of landing pages, did keyword research, and all that good stuff, what we call on-page SEO stuff. And guess what happened?

Taylorr: Not much.

Farzad: Nothing.

Taylorr: Wow, surprising. Really?

Farzad: Yeah, I know.

Taylorr: Was the competition fierce for ranking for those articles, that the issue was from your competition?

Farzad: Yeah. So, exactly. If you could do me a favor right now and just go ahead and Google, just one of our key terms, for example, presentation software

Taylorr: Presentation software

Farzad: In a new Incognito tab.

Austin: Okay. Yep.

Taylorr: There you go.

Farzad: Guess how many search results come up. So, when you looked at an SEO tool guess how many web pages contain that keyword. Throw a number.

Taylorr: Millions.

Austin: Tens of millions, I’m sure.

Farzad: About three and a half billion, with a B.

Austin: Whoa.

Taylorr: B, great.

Farzad: So, we were like, okay, I was just, literally, looking at this and I was looking at our Google analytics and at the time we had two visitors, I was like, I’m pretty sure one of them is my mother.

Taylor: The other one was me on my phone.

Farzad: Yeah, probably myself. Yeah. We forgot to exclude me. And, yeah, so we were like, okay, well, this is kind of discouraging, because even if you create, and everybody says, create quality content. And that’s true. But even if you’re in the top 1% when it comes to quality of content, however way you want to define it, it’s that content that adds value from a website that’s fully optimized. Even if you’re in the top 1%, if there are three and a half billion search results of that keyword, you’re still in the tens of millions. 

So, how do you go from tens of millions to the top 10, where they get over 99% of clicks, 75% of clicks go to the top three. So, it’s almost a minuscule chance for you to get there, especially as a small team with limited resources. We were like, okay, well; let’s see how Google does it, because it’s important to know what we’re going up against. So, how do they decide out of these millions of search results, how to rank them. And the way, I’m not sure what you guys noticed, but back in the late nineties, Google wasn’t the dominant search player, there were a bunch of search engines like AOL and Yahoo and Bing and whatnot. 

And the way they actually managed to beat all the other search engines was based on this algorithm called Page Rank, which basically puts emphasis on webpages that get mentions and backings from other relevant authoritative publications in our space. Now it becomes interesting, isn’t it? Because now, not only you’re reliant on the content of the page, because then you can just stuff keywords and then it just tells the search engine, no, this is good. But also, now you have to convince other people to actually talk about this thing, and it becomes very, very difficult.

So, we were like, okay, well, we know that we need to go get some backlinks to help us become more competitive. And over 90% of content on the internet has zero backlinks. So, we knew that this is going to radically increase our chances, even if we were to get a handful of these mentions; so turns out, it’s easier said than done, because not only do you have to do stuff that’s under your control, now you have to convince other people to do something for you. 

And so, that whole process was sort of done manually and what we did, basically to kind of save some time, because it’s an excruciatingly time-consuming, inefficient process, was to build a little internal tool at Visme that helped us sort of automate a lot of the dirty work when it came to research so we can focus more on actually managing the replies, personalizing the pitches, et cetera. And that led to the creation of Respona, that’s the long version of sort of explaining how it all came to be.

Austin: So, Respona was birthed from this experimentation and success inside of Visme. Did I catch that right?

Farzad: Yes, that’s right. So, we actually managed to grow Visme’s traffic to close to about 3 million in monthly organic traffic now.

Austin: Holy cow.

Farzad: In other words, if you were to pay AdWords to bring in the same level of traffic, same keywords, it would’ve cost us about a million and a half every single month.

Austin: Wow.

Farzad: In terms of paid ads, so it paid off over time, obviously, but yeah, it was a journey to get there. So, we built Respona, didn’t mean to start a new business, it was just sort of an internal tool and it just worked ridiculously well, so we released an MVP. We were like, hey, is anybody else willing to pay for this thing too? And then it turned out the answer was, yes, so we actually decided to start a separate entity and actually turn it into a business and the rest is history.

Austin: Wow, man, so cool. I love that.

Taylorr: Meeting a need. It’s so cool. Overcoming a problem, solving it, and other people seeing value in it, that’s what it’s about.

Austin: Some of the best tools out there are like that, I think Asana, the project management tool.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: If I recall, I think that someone came from Facebook, their internal engineers were using that to project manage and they’re like, well, this is fricking sweet, so we should share this with the world. And now we have Asana. So, anyway, very cool journey, and congratulations on the success too, you guys are awesome.

Farzad: Thank you.

Austin: You created an amazing tool.

Farzad: I appreciate it.

Austin: Taylorr and I, professionally, geek out about software and we were both drooling while we were looking through your site.

Farzad: I appreciate it, thank you very much.

Austin: Yeah. So, can we summarize for just a second before we move on here? I think there are a couple of key questions that we wanted to address in this episode that you did through that background. Backlinks are, essentially when another website, a different entity references your website and puts a link to it somewhere in their content, correct?

Farzad: That’s right.

Austin: In the most boiled-down version. Okay. And this is important because of Google’s algorithm, I’d be curious to hear how this may have changed over time, if at all, but Google’s algorithm prioritizes the websites that are being referenced by others, that’s the.

Farzad: That’s right.

Austin: Basic premise. Okay, great.

Farzad: Yes. So, the core has stayed the same for over 20 years, that’s how the algorithm is structured. What has changed over the course of the past 20 years has been, in terms of quality control, so Google’s becoming increasingly smarter over time, in terms of figuring out what are some of these links that are actually from relevant websites that make contextual sense in terms of relevancy, authority to your website. 

And then they put significantly different ways on different types of links that you get from different websites, so it’s become very hard to try to fake it, so the only really sustainable way that you can actually increase your traffic over time so you don’t get knocked out by the next algorithm update, is actually doing outreach in a standard white-hat way, where most companies don’t do. So, unfortunately, a lot of malpractice and negative, I would say connotation around link building and sort of the best practices in SEO really, because there are a lot of junk vendors out there like, oh, give me $2 and get you a thousand quality backlinks, and it just never works. 

So, it requires quite a lot of work to make it work and a lot of people don’t want to spend the time to get it done, and so they kind of resort to some quick hacks that sort of, are not really sustainable over time.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: Does it actually hurt to go that path?

Farzad: Well, there are Google penalties and stuff, what I’ve seen over the years is that it’s not that it penalizes you; it’s more so that it just doesn’t help. So, even if it helps, it’s going to be temporary, so that’s what we’ve really seen most of the time. Yeah.

Taylorr: Right. So, as you’ve been kind of breaking this down, there’s been a lot of emphasis on how much time, that’s the core issue that you were trying to solve with building the internal tools, that building backlinks take time. And for our audience who may not be familiar with backlinks or even building backlinks, why is it such a time suck? What’s the process, generally speaking, of building backlinks.

Farzad: So, building backlinks, just basically meaning, hey, can you get other publications in your space to talk about you? And there are a variety of different strategies and ways how you can accomplish that, because link building is just a concept, it’s not at strategies, there are different types of strategies you can run. One of the examples is, what I’m doing right now. One of the strategies is called Podcast Outreach, so one of our team members, and not to say that I’m here just for a backlink, guys, I feel like that’s very offensive. Let me rephrase that.

Austin: We hear you.

Farzad: One of the side effects of me being here, obviously, we spend the time, we do quite a lot of research on the shows, make sure that the audience is the type of audience that we can add value to, and also, it’s a great way for me to make great connections and network in our space, meet with smart people like yourselves. And also, one of my team members has actually been listening to your podcast, sharing a couple of your episodes with us. So, anyway, this is not to say that I’m just here for our backlink, so hopefully, you guys aren’t offended.

Taylorr: We appreciate that, thank you.

Farzad: No problem. But just to elaborate on that a little more, so one of the strategies is, if you’re a founder or if you’re a person, or a coach, have something of expertise, there are podcast hosts out there that are actively looking for cool guests to showcase on their podcast, right? So, one of the great ways on how you can establish some of these mutually beneficial relationships is to actually find out what are some of these podcasts that you need to be on. Find a host, reach out to them and actually pitch yourself to go on as a guest and you’re able to provide enough value, then normally, obviously, it has a few benefits, going on a podcast as a guest; one, you’re getting advertising to a niche audience, right? 

So, if you’re listening to this show, you’ve heard of Respona, mission accomplished, right? Not to expect anybody to go sign up and I, actually, advise against that. There’s a lot of free educational material out there, a lot of these outreaches you can do yourself manually. Respona is there just to be able to scale things and move things faster; it’s not there to solve all of your problems. But, anyway, and also, at the same time, going on a podcast, you normally turn this into, I’m assuming, repurpose this into a written piece of content that you, normally publish on your website, and guess what, you need to mention Respona on the show notes and in the content. 

So, there you go, there is a backlink to Respona, we didn’t have to spam anybody, we didn’t have to rip anybody off, it’s a mutually beneficial collaboration they establish with other relevant publications in your space. And that’s just one out of a gazillion different ways on how you’ll be able to kind of get your name out there.

Taylorr: Right. That makes sense. And I’ve imagined outreach is a big part of this, you know? So, the time-consuming part is, that you have to prospect or have referrals, like in this case, somebody said, hey, you should totally have Farzad on your show, right? For us at least. But you have to do some level of outreach, generally, prospecting. It’s like sales, it’s still cold calling in a way, you have to make it to pitch and get a bunch of responses and get people to say, yes, and then exchange the value, so that’s where the time suck can come from.

Farzad: That’s right. So, that’s sort of what Respona does, right? So, basically, you can just, for example, the way I landed this interview, just so you guys know, one of my colleagues, Dylan, from our marketing team, shout out to Dylan, thank you.

Taylorr: What’s up, Dylan?

Austin: Shout out, Dylan.

Farzad: So, he’s a fan of your show and he, basically, actually found your podcast through Respona, so what he does is that he looks up people in our space that we respect and look up to. And Respona tells you, Hey, here are the podcasts that person has been a guest on, and here’s the person in charge of that podcast, who managed their podcast. So, all of that stuff was automatically done, and it also gives you some info about how popular that podcast is, if that’s a relevant podcast, your area of expertise, and if all of these check marks are done, then, we, obviously, have the contact information, and it’s a matter of just reaching out. 

So, Respona basically gives you a template that you can work with and gives you some snippets, in terms of personalization of the pitch, and said, hey, you know what, because it automatically tells you three things. One, this podcast accepts guests, because it’s interviewed someone in our space. Two, they’re relevant to our space, obviously, because I’ve interviewed that person, for example, I wouldn’t go on a cooking show because I can’t even scramble eggs.

Austin: I don’t know, that might be an untapped opportunity there.

Farzad: Yes. So, my family would definitely disagree with that. But, anyhow, and also at the same time, it makes your life easier, as a person who’s pitching, because then you can use that episode as a hook and actually tailor the pitch to that, so just to imply to the host that, Hey, I didn’t just blast all these podcasts to go on, I’ve done my research and actually I’m able to provide value to the audience by coming on the show. So, again, it’s a long story, but sort of, Respona automates a lot of this dirty work, so that you can now focus more on the pitch itself and make sure that you kind of personalize that and truly personalize, not just insert a bunch of variables in there, right? 

And, yeah, so that’s one way and there are, as I said, a million different ways, we have a little free average strategy hub on our website, so if you guys are listening, you can go to respona.com, at the bottom of the page, there’s something called average strategy hub; there’s a free, un-gated content open for everybody to see. And there are step-by-step instructions to different strategies that you can do most of them by yourself; you don’t need to have all these fancy tools, so you can just open up your good ole Gmail and Google and spreadsheets and get down to work and then start getting inside the life and, okay, figuring out what strategies work best for you. 

And when it’s time to scale things, you’re like, okay, now this is great, I don’t have infinity when it comes to time or resources. And Respona, then becomes a no brainer, because it’s a $99 a month software that saves you tens of hours in a week, so when you’re at that stage, and that’s something that would make sense, but before that, I don’t actually recommend anybody to sign up.

Austin: Keep it simple, build good habits.

Taylorr: Be completely there.

Austin: So, at what point should somebody even be considering this? Is it somebody like, you haven’t even made your first sale yet, is it that you’re sort of on the ramp up, is it you’re matured and now you’re looking to scale, who’s the demographic that should be looking at link building in the early stages?

Farzad: Sure. So, SEO is sort of a puzzle, so once you pick a customer acquisition strategy, you have to stick with it. So, personally, I’m horrible at outbound, I’m not a very good outbound salesperson, I’m awkward, I don’t know how to sell people’s stuff, it’s just embarrassing. So, we don’t focus much on outbound, but if you’re a really good outbound marketer and you sell a product where the price point makes sense for you to do that, either you have very huge upsell opportunities or the price points, there is some high fixed-cost or fixed-rate they can sell. Then it makes sense to just focus on outbound, man, why are you wasting your time in SEO? It’s a lot of work, just like as outbound. 

If you’re selling t-shirts or hoodies and lifestyle products, just focus on paid ads like Facebook, Twitter, right? So, let it sell until it hits a plateau and when your customer acquisition cost catches up with your LTV, but if you’re a company that’s serious about SEO, you’re like, okay, we want to build a channel. Then we would organically get traffic to our website, and we have a good conversion funnel or we know a clear-cut ROI, that if qualified people coming to our website, not just anybody, right? People that actually have some sort of intent, and then we’re able to convert them, then it becomes a no-brainer for your focus. 

Now, if you want to get some traffic to your website, be able to scale it, you need to have content keyword research, all the on-page stuff, that’s a one-sided coin, but it’s almost getting impossible, especially for competitive terms, to start getting rankings without you having a solid promotion, spend link billing strategy. So, that’s sort of a natural, I would say step-by-step, I would say, the process of figuring out what’s best for your business and sort of acting accordingly.

Taylorr: Yeah. That makes sense.

Austin: Wise words.

Taylorr: Very wise. Yeah. I like that you have a focus too on, it just depends on the business that you’re in, honestly, I think it’s easy for a lot of marketers to just pick a thing and say everyone should be doing this. But based on all of your experience, it just depends on kind of the thing that you’re running and whether or not you’d like the trouble.

Farzad: There’s a funny meme in the SEO community that there’s this guy that slaps this tape on this tank of water; I’m not sure whether you guys have seen it. We use this answer for everything, and it depends, any question you ask in SEO that’s the first thing they’re going to say.

Taylorr: I’m guilty of that phrase.

Austin: Yes, I’m guilty of that myself.

Taylorr: Yep, for sure. So, I’ve gotten the sense that it might be possible to still rank fairly well if you’re in a niche, a pretty small, not as competitive type of maybe industry. Is there a threshold where you start to notice, okay, we definitely should be doing backlinking in addition to writing good content, how do you know, let’s say we’ve already made the decision, SEO is definitely something you want to pursue, that’s going to be a good channel. You start pumping out some content, you start ranking for it too, you’re on, maybe page one, maybe not the first slot, but you’re getting on page one in some different criteria, how do you identify, this is so competitive that I definitely need backlinks in order to help bolster my website?

Farzad: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question, by the way, and the answer to that is actually quite scientific. So, there’s very little intuition involved in that, it’s mainly purely math. So, can you allow me to explain? So, when it comes to keywords, any SEO tool that you use, it could be Ahrefs, Semrush; if you’re a solopreneur just starting out, there are cheaper alternatives like Ubersuggest, right? Any tools that, basically help you identify, hey, here are a list of keywords that you could potentially rank for that are relevant to you. We have a prioritization process; I built a little formula; I used to call it The Fires Out Score and the team didn’t buy it.

Taylorr: I love that. Of course, real hard.

Austin: I stand behind you.

Farzad: And so, we landed on Opportunity Score. I’ve, actually, written a free e-book that I kind of go through this entire step-by-step process, so folks that are listening, just look up Visme marketing strategy, and it’s a free e-book you can download. And I kind of go through the whole thing step-by-step and tend to ramble a lot, it’s 160 pages, but I’m sorry.

Austin: Wow.

Farzad: But, anyhow, so here’s the shortened version. So, basically, we prioritize keywords first, based on three factors. So, once you, for example, let’s say you guys at SpeakerFlow, you’re in the coaching business, right? So, there are some certain keywords that you focus on, give me a parent keyword that you focus on and then.

Taylorr: Speaking gigs.

Farzad: Okay. Speaking gigs. So, when you look up that parent keyword through an SEO tool, let’s say Ahrefs or one of these tools, they give you a gazillion different search suggestions. So, they say, okay, how to land this speaking gig? How do I price my speaking gig? What are some of the speaking gigs in my area? Yada yada yada. So, there’s an unlimited number of these that are out there. So, where would you start? So, first, what we do is to extract all of these, put them in a little spreadsheet, and then we actually remove anything. 

So, there’s a score that these SEO tools give you that’s called keyword difficulty, which basically tells you how competitive that keyword is to rank for. So, as a good rule of thumb, you want to extract keywords that have a higher keyword difficulty than your domain authority, which is another metric from zero to a hundred that says, how authoritative is your website, right? So, it’s a fancy way of saying, hey, don’t go after keywords that are way out of your league, right? SEO is not a game to shoot for the stars; you have to take it step-by-step. 

So, start from keywords that are within your range, right within your grasp, and then prioritize them based on three factors, and that is how competitive that keyword is, how much volume it gets, and more importantly, how commercially or what’s the commercial intent or the level of commercial intent for that keyword. Because you can easily get your content rank for keywords that are completely out of whack and irrelevant, so we want to prioritize keywords that have the least amount of competition, the highest amount of volume possible, and the highest amount of commercial intent. And there’s a little formula, you can extract these metrics and pull it into this formula.

I don’t want to get too nerdy here, but then you can just sort it based on that and what we call opportunity score, and it just gives you, basically a sorted list of priorities of keywords that you can go and target. Now, for each one of these keywords, depending on that keyword difficulty that you picked, these tools, literally, tell you, hey, in order to have a chance of getting up in the search results for this keyword, you need X, Y, and Z number of quality links from relevant sites. That’s estimated. So, then we start a campaign, and the size, the amount of resources we spend on that campaign is proportionate to the number of links that we need to get in order to get our page up in the search results. 

So, it’s not to say that we do average for every single page and the amount of time we spend on promotion is, actually, directly relevant to the competitiveness of that keyword. So, it’s all a very fancy way of saying it depends.

Taylorr: For sure.

Farzad: Hopefully, I elaborated a little more on that.

Taylorr: Come full circle there.

Austin: Yeah.

Taylorr: That’s awesome, that really broke it down.

Austin: Wow. That was so much great information.

Taylorr: For sure.

Austin: So, thank you for breaking it down and plus, there’s so much of the conversation today that’s been, well, it depends, right? But this is one specific example of there’s a way to think this through strategically and I don’t know, I think it’s so easy in the marketing world to get caught by all of these silver bullets and magic wands, the pitch that’s going to make you the million dollars, right? It’s really easy to squirrel chase, but what you’ve just broken down is that there’s a time and place to do this if it suits the needs of your business, and it’s just a matter of doing it the way that is morally and ethically in line with the brand too. So, anyway, very good perspective.

Farzad: I appreciate that.

Austin: We want to round out the episode with one of our favorite questions, which is the don’t do this thing. So, what’s a common mistake that you see people make as it relates to link building?

Farzad: Oh God, I would say there are more mistakes made than actual good things that happen when it comes to link building, unfortunately, nowadays, and the reason why is, I think it’s just because it’s new, somewhat, so people are sort of just trying to figure things out. One thing I highly recommend you not to do, is to go on Fiverr or Upwork and pay someone some sort of money to get true quality, white-hat backlinks, that’s, normally never the case. 

Agencies that do this normally, that actually spend the time to have a campaign or whatnot, sorry, are normally extremely expensive, they start at 2, 3 K a month, at a minimum, because it’s just not physically possible to do a lot of the things that they need to do in order to make your campaign successful without. So, an alternative way is that if you’re cheap like us, a small company with limited resources, don’t have 3 K laying around a month to pay an agency to do this. You can start doing it yourself manually internally, it’s going to hit a point where it becomes hard to scale and that’s why there are tools like Respona that help you save a lot of time and basically be able to scale that yourself. 

So, you could kind of keep a tab on the level of quality and the average that you’re doing and the type of websites you’re reaching out to. And also, you know that if somebody else isn’t paying money for these links or touching these PBNs, there’s a lot of shady stuff that’s going on, so maintaining that level of quality control is very important.

Austin: Yeah, man. Good advice, you heard it here first, folks.

Taylorr: Good advice.

Austin: Alright. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all that valuable information today, I’m sure our listeners are super excited and some of them may be super interested in going deeper with you. So, if they want to get in touch, what is the best way to do that?

Farzad: Sure. Well, you can get in touch with me personally, I’m always happy to connect with folks; my name is Farzad Rashidi and I stick out like a sore thumb everywhere, because nobody’s name is Farzad Rashidi, so there you go.

Taylorr: That’s a good thing.

Farzad: You can find me on LinkedIn, not only my social media of choice, but if you’re looking to learn more about link-building strategies, different things that I talked about today, and we have a lot of free educational stuff on our blog. So, if you go to, Respona.com, R E S P O N A.com/blog, there’s a ton of good stuff in there, so I recommend to, actually, start there and read some education material, follow through a lot of the strategies yourself manually, without spending your budget on these tools, and then kind of take that from there.

Austin: Yeah.

Taylorr: Love it, man. Great advice.

Austin: Alright. Well, as you may guess, listeners, those links will be in the show notes.

Taylorr: Awesome.

Austin: And if you like this episode.

Farzad: Mission accomplished.

Taylorr: Right. Good job.

Austin: Taking your own medicine, man, I have to respect that, right?

Taylorr: Heck yeah.

Austin: Well, if you like this episode, don’t forget to rate it, like it, subscribe to it, and if you want more awesome resources like this, go to speakerflow.com/resources.

Outro: Thanks for tuning in today. Check the show notes for more info and see you next time. Latah.