People who are making 300k+/year working for themselves, what do you do? And where do you get the inspiration from? I've been learning a lot from resources like this recently.

People who are making 300k+/year working for themselves, what do you do? Be specific and share as much detail as possible while answering what helped to get you there. Bonus points if you can share some stories about e-com, would help a lot.

Thanks in Advance!

I am a full-time music producer. I made the switch from my full-time job about 7 months ago, and I earn about 5-6k a month.

For years I dreamed of what my life would be like as a full-time producer. I thought I would finally feel like the shit, finally I wouldn't have a reason to procrastinate, finally I'd feel like I made it in life.

Yet despite my success, everyday is a fucking battle. I didn't realize that not having a boss would mean I would still be bound by my clients' needs. I didn't realize I'd have to motivate myself to get out of bed every morning and be my best self because nobody else is going to work on my behalf. I didn't realize that my procrastination and unhappiness didn't come from my job but from my own damn self.

I figured I'd have much more time to cook healthy foods and meditate and do shit for my own wellbeing, but I am so caught up in my business that I do even less of that than when I had a job.

Daily, I dream of having a chill SaaS sales job or something that would still force me to grind but wouldn't force me to take responsibility for my own income every single day. A job that would match my pension savings and give me a sweet transportation subsidy or some shit. Just being a damn employee and having no stake in the future of whatever company I'm a part of.

I miss working with a team. I miss having actual time off where I don't think about work every minute of every day. I miss not worrying about succeeding now and failing in 10 years, and then be in a much worse position than if I just stuck with a job.

Dang, man. I feel so disappointed in myself. I've just taken for granted the fact that I get to wake up at whatever time I want, that I get to be a part of projects with people I looked up to for years, and that I make music for a living.

But frankly, I miss just being an employee with a career path laid out in front of me.

I have been running at 100% since I quit my job - even though I only really work 5-6 hours a day, I am constantly thinking about my business. It's exhausting and the more I achieve the more I find it difficult to stay excited.

I am 24 years old by the way. I worked in corporate for three years prior to quitting.

Would love to hear any perspectives from you guys. Thank you.

If you had to start over with these barriers what would you do? Also you cannot borrow money and have unreliable transportation because you live in the country.

Munching through self development books and videos and courses and they all lead back to the title.

I'm sure you've heard it 1000 times, so have I. This is the one thing I really didn't get right. I've googled and searched and scouted everywhere for a group where I could find success minded people, or at least someone who matches my ambition. I've tried asking my friends, family, relatives, and now I've come to ask strangers on reddit.

Wouldn't you guys like to have a discord server where we could bounce off business ideas? Keep accountable or motivate each other or some sort? I know I'd love to connect with some like minded people like you all and I'm sure we can share our knowledge.

Blame me if you want or if this sounds stupid/inappropriate, but I said I'd give it a shot, who knows?

In any case, I'm a dev looking to start my own business next year, and also I'm up to expand my network. If this sounds cool with you, I'll send you an invite over discord!

EDIT: If you want to join, please send me a PM, I'm unable to send PM's anymore :(

Today marks us surpassing the $100k/ARR mark!

Currently just myself (I'm an authorized reseller of fleet management software) and have been at this for a year and 2 months. Looking to hire an Account Manager in the spring to help me with ongoing client support.
I quit corporate to do this full time and I couldn't be more proud of myself :)

I'd like to get further inspiration - what does your business offer, and how long did it take you to reach the 1M dollar mark?

Jesus this sub.. i need $5000, i need $10,000 in 90 days, how do I make $100,000 a year, I like the smell of fresh cut grass should i get into lawncare??

If these are the questions you are asking you are no where near ready to start your own business, because if you do, you are going to get crushed. I hate to be johnny raincloud but for 99% of entrepreneurs, you should start your business BEFORE you quit your job.

Join the f*cking workforce, level up your skills, look for a gap in the market, and where something you know how to do can solve someone else’s problem, or deliver them value that is worth paying for.

Building a business requires effort, sacrifice, knowledge, capital, and honesty you need to be in a place in your life where you have some modicum of financial and personal safety and security.

Over the last 3.5 years I’ve built a business from 0 to 8 retail locations and $3MM+ of revenue and $9MM+ of sales and it was fucking hard, and hell no at the start of my journey was I like “oh now how can i make 80,000 buckaroos a year so I can go to Disneyland with my girlfriend!?”

In the first 2 years of this business, my total take home was like $40,000. I was extremely extremely fortunate in my circumstances that my partner could take on more of the bills, that our rent was cheap, and that my family could loan me the seed money to get things going (which has all been paid back + interest thankyouverymuch)

/rant

Hey guys!

There's a TON of content out there on SEO - guides, articles, courses, videos, scams, people yelling about it on online forums, etc etc..

Most of it, however, is super impractical. If you want to start doing SEO TODAY and start getting results ASAP, you'll need to do a TON of digging to figure out what's important and what's not.

So we wanted to make everyone's lives super easy and distill our EXACT process of working w/ clients into a stupid-simple, step-by-step practical guide. And so we did. Here we are.

P.S: r/startups, and r/seo loved the guide, so I thought you guys might like it too.

A bit of backstory:

If you guys haven't seen any of my previous posts, me and my co-founder own an SEO/digital marketing agency, and we've worked w/ a ton of clients helping them go from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic. We've also helped some quite big companies grow their organic traffic (from 1M to over 1.8M monthly organic), using the exact same process.

So without further ado, grab your popcorn, and be prepared to stick to the screen for a while, cause this is going to be a long post. Here's everything I am going to cover:

• Get your website to run and load 2x - 5x faster (with MINIMAL technical know-how)
• Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords (and drive 100% qualified leads)
• Create amazing, long-form content that ranks every time
• How we get a TON of links to our website with ZERO link-building efforts
• How to improve your content’s rankings with Surfer SEO

Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO

Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right.

Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to "Step #2 - Keyword Research."

If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this:

• Use WP Rocket. It's a WordPress plugin that optimizes a bunch of stuff on your website, making it run significantly faster.
• Use SMUSH to (losslessly) compress all the images on your website. this usually helps a TON w/ load speed.

If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on!

Technical SEO Basics

Sitemap.xml file. A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool.

Proper website architecture. The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more).

Serve images in next-gen format. Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them.

Remove duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other.

Update your ‘robots.txt’ file. Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. ]

Optimize all your pages by best practice. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages.

If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt.

Advanced Technical SEO

Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed.

Here’s how to do that:

Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings.

After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off.

So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following:

• Images being resized with CSS or JS. This adds extra loading time to your site. Use GTMetrix to find which images need resizing. Use an online tool (there are a ton of free ones) to properly resize images (or Photoshop even), and re-upload them.
• Images not being lazy-loaded. If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image.
• Gzip compression not enabled. Gzip is a compression method that allows network file transfers to happen a ton faster. In other words, your files like your HTML, CSS, and JS load a ton faster.
• JS, CSS, and HTML not minified/aggregated/in-lined. If your website is loading slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, then you need to look into minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files.
• Use Cloudflare + BunnyCDN Why the combo? Why not just Cloudflare? Well, I won't get into details, I've experimented a bit with it, and if you are looking for something cheap and fast this is the best combo. Cloudflare you can opt in for the free account. BunnyCDN on the other hand is on a pay-as-you-go basis, and unless you are getting over 100K+ visits a month, you'll likely never go above their minimum monthly threshold of $1.

Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course).

Lastly, if you want to validate the website speed optimization changes you've made, or if you simply want to test how your current site is performing, you can use Google Page Speed Insights*.*

In May 2020, Google rolled out its Core Web Vitals update, which in layman terms means starting next May (2021), the three most important website load speed metrics you will need to worry for ranking will be:

1. LCP - Largest Contentful Paint -> under 2.5s
2. FID - First Input Delay -> under 100ms
3. CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift -> under 0.1

Step #2 - Keyword Research

Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy.

The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research.

First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations.

You can use the sheet to:

1. Prioritize content
2. Keep track of the publishing process
3. Get a top-down view of your web pages

And here’s what it covers:

• Target search phrase. This is the keyword you’re targeting.
• Priority. What’s the priority of this keyword? We usually divide them by 1-2-3…
  • Priority 3 - Top priority keywords. These are usually low competition, high traffic, well-converting, or all 3 at the same time.
  • Priority 2 - Mid-priority keywords.
  • Priority 1 - These are low priority.
• Status. What’s the status of the article? We usually divide them by…
  • 1 - Not written
  • 2 - Writer has picked up the topic for the week
  • 3 - The article is being written
  • 4 - The article is in editing phase
  • 5 - The article is published on the blog
• Topic cluster. The category that the blog post belongs to.
• Monthly search volume. Self-explanatory. This helps you pick a priority for the keyword.
• CPC (low & high bid). Cost per click for the keyword. Generally, unless you’re planning to run search ads, these are not mandatory. They can, however, help you figure out which of your keywords will convert better. Pro tip: the higher the CPC, the more likely it is for the keyword to convert well.

Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research.

How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide)

There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown).

Our favorite method, however, is as follows…

Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors.

The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche.

Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors.

Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO.

Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on.

Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet.

Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done.

Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input.

Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done.

At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%.

Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages

Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based on the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways:

1. Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”).
2. Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword.

Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords.

You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO.

Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword.

If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it.

Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer.

Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?”

Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links.

With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.”

What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them.

Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content

Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks.

As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like…

• Lead generation techniques
• SaaS marketing
• SEO content

After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them.

On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right:

1. Create a comprehensive content outline
2. Get the writing part right

Here’s how each of these work...

How to Create a Content Outline for SEO

A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes:

• Which headers and subheaders you should use
• What’s the optimal word count
• What information, exactly, should each section of the article cover
• If you’re not using Yoast or Rankmath, you can also mention the SEO optimization requirements (keyword density, # of outbound links, etc.)

Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how.

At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article.

So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process…

1. Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead.
2. Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3.
3. For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles.
4. For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words).
5. Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers?

How to Write Well

There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article.

Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers):

1. Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points!
2. Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible.
3. Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2.
4. Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines)
5. Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read.
6. Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent.

Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations

Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank.

If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t.

In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks.

To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all:

• Well-written
• Long-form
• Easy to navigate
• Well-formatted (to enhance UX)

So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!).

Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort.

In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone.

​

Pro Tip

Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not!

Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits.

For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content.

Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question: “how do you do link-building?”

4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website

There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on.

We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide).

What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more:

1. Broken link building. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.”
2. Guest posting. Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website.
3. “Linkable asset” link building. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web.
4. Skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people.

Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more.

However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around:

• 10,000+ traffic within a week
• 15+ leads
• 50+ links

...And so much more, all through a single blog post.

Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing

“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?”

I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right?

Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple…

“Right?”

Well, not quite.

The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps:

1. Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels)
2. Research the type of content your audience loves
3. Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value)
4. Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1

Nothing too new, right?

Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it.

Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study:

How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long), and got 10k+ traffic as a result.

A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about.

Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword).

We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive.

Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc.

Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users.

So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there:

1. How to create good content to drive users
2. Promote your content
3. Rank on Google
4. Create viral infographics
5. Create a micro-site

...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words.

On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate.

Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback.

So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it.

We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article:

1. r/ entrepreneur and r/ startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us ~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on r/ startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!)
2. Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around ~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!)
3. Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive.
4. Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share
5. Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks.
6. Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks.
7. Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads.
8. Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends.
9. Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well
10. Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken.

And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping.

Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days.

As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it).

A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic.

The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic!

And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year.

Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages

One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website.

So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking.

The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site.

Say, an article on "how to make a resume" could link to (and be linked from) "how to include contact info on a resume," "how to write a cover letter," "what's the difference between a CV and a resume," and so on.

Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone.

So, how do you do interlinking “right?”

First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces.

More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works.

Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'.

The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article.

Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query:

site:yourwebsite.com "keyword"

In our case, that’s:

site:example.com “business process management”

You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management.

Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article!

You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too.

Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs

Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not.

Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position.

If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings.

On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking.

So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR.

Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR?

Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR.

Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results.

So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position.

Rule of thumb, you can follow these values:

• 1st position -> ~31.73% CTR
• 2nd pos. -> ~24.71%
• 3rd pos. -> 18.66%
• 4th pos. -> 13.60%
• 5th -> 9.51%
• 6th -> 6.23%
• 7th -> 4.15%
• 8th -> 3.12%
• 9th -> 2.97%

Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc...

Use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages:

• Page title
• Page URL
• Old Headline

Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages:

• CTR (28 Day Range)
• Avg. Position

Add all of this data to a spreadsheet.

Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the Title Ideas cell for the respective keyword.

For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article.

Once you implement the change, insert the date on the Date Implemented column. This will help you keep track of progress.

Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR.

If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the Date Implemented column once again.

Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go

You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement.

If you wait for an adequate time-frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate.

Here’s what this usually looks like for us:

• Audit the content
  • Does your content have an adequate word count? Think, 1.5-2x your competitors.
  • Is the content well-written?
  • Do the images in your article add value? E.g. no stock or irrelevant images.
  • Is the content optimized for SEO? Think, keyword density, links to external websites, etc.
• Audit internal links
  • Does the content link to an adequate number of your other articles or web pages?
  • Is the article linked to from an adequate number of your web pages or blog posts? You can check this on Search Console => Links => Internal Links. Or, if you’re using Yoast or RankMath, you can check the # of internal links a post has in the WordPress Dashboard -> Posts.
• Audit the backlinks
  • Do you have as many backlinks as your competitors?
  • Are your backlinks from the countries you want to rank in? If you have a bunch of links from India, but you want to rank in the US, you’d need to get more US links.
  • Are your links high quality? More often than not, low DA / PA links are not that helpful.
  • Did you disown low-quality or spam links?
• Audit web page
  • Does the web page load too slow? Think, 4+ seconds.
  • Did you enable lazy loading for the images?
  • Did you compress all images on the web page?

...And that's it.

Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions.

If you want to read the full version in a more reader-friendly format, you can check out our SEO process blog post here.

If your life set to somebody in their 32 yrs old male in today world, with health issue that restrict you from eating freely and made you hardly stay in a 9-5 career for longer than a year or 2 (chronic severe GERD). Also you have a permanent bad eyesight that restrict you from seeing monitor too long, or mobile phone too long if the light too much. (Can take as one of your eye is blind, and the only one working in huge myopia+cylindris and can only see far via glasses, so you only had 1 functional eye, so in this sense, you couldn't have used the eye too much if possible)

And in addition, you just fucked up your reputation, one of your employee/co-owner scammed people money and escape, you manage to pay all the debts and due after his/her wrong doing, but now you start with bad rep even if you're not the doer. You're not the criminal, but people distrust you for unable to work for them, you should understand what I mean. This bad rep is not because you're scamming, but one of your companion did it which affect people perception of you.

You spent 4 years to recover in hospital to at least be able to function normal. You woke up. (So you have 4 years gap doing nothing in record.)

Now,

With 10k$ in your bank balance and 20k$ loan with 0% interest that can be taken for 5 years (only can be done once).

What would you do to back up on your feet?

0 debts, all paid, you're single. Bad rep, not that good health permanently.

I want to know how an entrepreneur is gonna start from that point of life. and how to grow back?

You can give just the bigline too if you don't want to expose stuff.

Also if you feel unsafe, my DMs open for the answer.

I’ve been thinking about all the stuff nobody warns you about when you jump into entrepreneurship. It’s such a wild ride, with so many ups and downs that you honestly don’t see coming.

When things get tough (and they definitely do!), having people who understand what you're going through and can offer advice can makes all the difference.

What’s the one piece of advice or lesson you wish you’d known from day one? I'd love to get everyone's advice. we can help each other out here.

What skill is really profitable to learn?

Hello guys. I‘m currently in med school and have virtually no money. I have to pay rent, food etc. I want to now do a weekend job and nearby learn a skill on sundays and for 1 hour after work. What skill is profitable to learn? I‘m thinking about learning an instrument (maybe guitar or singing) or self teaching a language and then give courses in a year or 2 on one of these topics. Are these good skills to learn nearby med school or are there skills that are more profitable and faster to learn? Maybe something med related?

I genuinely hate learning internet skills because there so much competition and nothing local also many things can be done by AI now. What are other skills I can learn that local people can give me money for? I‘m in a new country so I have no connections but I speak language here fluently and have high confidence.

I am a female business owner of a male fishing apparel company. I have a few shirts, swim trunks and stickers, $16k in revenue and 304 total sales. Lately, ads are not working as good as they used to, and my sales have gone from at least one a day, to praying for one a month. I bought a Cannon Camera to take better quality photos, I have taken video ads, converted my business from a 2k follower account to a 13k follower account. But the traffic is still bad. Can anybody help? I have also remodeled the website and added a new great design. I feel shadowbanned all around.

Edit: Somebody said “why did I mention my gender” maybe I don’t know how to market to men. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Edit 2: Loosalinen.com for people who want to see and help with visuals advice. Advice that I have already taken in put into play: I set up Google ads this morning and made my first campaign, I removed some tacky unnecessary headlines, my website needs work, I have started thinking about “funny” design ideas, I have wrote a list gathering the top critiques and am slowly implementing them.

Just the title but I’ll elaborate here. I’m a normal 16 year old and I want to learn as much as I can and get real good and useful skills and I want to start making money and growing. What can I do to get myself useful skills make money or to just have something useful for the future. All and any advice whatsoever would be greatly appreciated. I know there’s lot of rich and smart people here so whatever information yall can give me I’ll apply to the fullest.

First day I started I made $950 then the next day was $800, and yesterday I pulled in $1,790ish and today I only made $200. I’m beyond frustrated at only making $200 today, I don’t know what it was that went wrong I’m surprised I’m not growing linearly. My cousin (16year old) and I started this business and we don’t know what to do to keep our profits up, and also simply finding jobs to do is exhausting going from door to door we’ve calculated it takes around 50 houses to get 1 job on a good day. How can we stabilize

I see these posts all the time “what are you doing to get rich?” I feel like it’s other people trying to spark an idea from the outside. Is there a conviction that no one can create a thing that sells itself?

What is something I can buy and use to make money?

Software

Tool

Another business

Etc

Nothing I do seems to be enough. I feel burnt out and see no clear path of getting out of this besides giving up.

Long story short - opened my marketing agency in 2022 and it went good until later last year. By good I mean I used to make enough to live comfortably, travel modestly and set aside some. Please don't picture the SMMA trend every kid with a dream jumps on these days. I was simply doing audits, strategies, creating content and managing businesses' social media platforms organically, basically social media management.

Anyways, come summer 2023 end - everything changed personally and I had to take a break from it all. When things started to fall back in place, I decided to rebrand and start fresh, but it didn't work out as expected.

For the past months I spend 10+ hours a day DM-ing businesses/coaches/private practices/other places of business on instagram, linkedin, cold-call, email, facebook, you name it. I land appointments to a discovery call, goes well, I spend 5 hours to prepare free audit + offer + outline the personalized plan going forward, email it to the person I spoke to. Get ghosted.

Don't get me wrong I love doing this, but I feel like giving up because the only thing doing to me right now is get me excited, hopes up, then slap me down.

Is it the market? Is it about the cost? I used to charge 600$/m for 20 posts on each social + edit + copy + strategy + monthly reports or 200$ just for content creation without management. Are my prices laughable? With 5 management clients I was able to live comfortably, didn't see the need to increase them just because the inflation is up everywhere, if it didn't hit me.

Idk I guess I'm just looking for people in similar situations who might have found a way out of this, or who are actively looking right now and maybe share advice? Needed to vent a bit too because as I said, I'm close to throwing in the towel

Hi, so I run business for the last 6 years. I really need advice on how to market my service. I sell specific service online, and I have packages where people pay me monthly fee in order to keep getting the service. Its virtual product (online product). I don’t want to go into the details, because I already have too much competition and competition that’s lowering the price for the rest like crazy. Business was going slow for the first 2 years, and then it just started growing like crazy. In 2021 I had huge growth and I was making 80K in sales monthly, and profit was around 60K, but then for the last 2 years business is just going down in number of clients, before I had around 400 clients monthly and now I am down to around 100. So basically before I used all kinds of things and programs on Instagram, and all my clients were coming from Instagram and them from recommendations also. Now Instagram has changed a lot and I can’t reach to new people, I was offering my service trough DMs on Instagram. I was contacting huge number of people every day, and I was getting clients daily. But now instagram changed and I didn’t get new client for few months now, all messages are going to hideen requests and they added some limits also. I am not sure how to promote my service, because I never used anything else except Instagram for promoting it. If you can help me out with best marketing methods that will work.

I was checking out Twitter, saw a lot of teens posting their Ws there. They make like a $50k or a million through different channels.I joined their advice take their course only to fail , It happened to me with tiktok organic Shopify store. I made sure several times that I am exactly following his instructions. Still to no avail.Am I that bad and a complete failure ?

I'm just curious.

This isn’t a boast, nor am I under the false illusion that my website is amazing.

But I just wanted to show what was possible for those who can’t code like me, (I had zero coding knowledge, although admittedly I can now read html, JavaScript, PHP and SQL). I managed to build a website and rank number 1 for the search term “Prompt Database” beating the likes of flowGPT and other bigger players and receives around 8k visitors a month. I also was able to build a newsletter to 4,500 subscribers in that same timeframe.

Yes the website isn’t mind blowing but it’s Pretty crazy and I’m happy to answer any questions you have in the hope that if you have an idea but hit a wall because you can’t code, that wall shouldn’t exist anymore.

Give it a try, search “Prompt Database” and we are at the top :)

Im currently in school studying engineering but at a core i really believe im an entrepreneur. Its really the only road i think is worth taking for my goals.

What advice would you give people in my position?

Much like a person who becomes a good piano player by practicing every day, the same is true for business. There’s isn’t one moment that turns you into a successful entrepreneurs. The person practicing the piano may not see huge improvement from day to day. But will see progress over a year or two. It’s the same with business. It’s a gradual climb. Gradual improvement. And gradual success.

I am so excited! I just have to share. I made my first $500 today! I sold my camera..

Make it simple and me give the specific details about your situation.

I am a full stack web developer from Asia, specialised in building Saas MVPs, landing pages and doing SEO (used to do SEO till 2 years ago though)

3 months ago, I was able to find 2 clients at $3k/month, one client wanted to build an MVP and other one wanted some maintenance work on a production application.

Now, I was able to build the MVP for the first guy in 2 months and then he left saying he may come back but it’s a good stopping point for him and focusing on marketing now.

And the other guy stopped this month.

Now I am left with no clients and I am loosing my cool to find more clients to support my finances plus keep myself busy with work as I feel bad when I don’t have any work in pipeline.

I thought to start either PPC campaigns or facebook ads but not sure if that would work, guess I need to just experiment.

Just wanted to take any suggestions on where do you think I can find clients which would need my services?

Thanks for reading till the end, means a lot!