Deep Dive into Google Search Console (GSC) with Karl Hudson

the scary thing is I have quite a lot of conversations with seos and they don't even realize that you can check craw stats inside Google search console and these guys are like top guys and they've never seen that section of search consult and it's like oh you should probably do that route first but once you've done the search console route then I would definitely suggest if you can get the data either use it utilizing Cloud flare or if your server will just give you the data

because not all servers will give you the data trying to get the logs because yes you've just optimized search console and the Google bot however there's a lot more Bots out there and you want to control these Bots because actually they could be let's say for instance your time zone where most of your user as a login on is you know 4M you could have a a random bot hitting your website between hours of three and five which is actually crushing your bandwidth on your website

and slowing everything down everything down I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by St welcome to the Fate bi podcast today we're chatting with Carl Hudson who is a uk-based SEO and he's the founder of seero SEO agency Carl welcome to the show hi John pleasure pleasure to be here and so when I interview seos on this podcast um I like to ask most of them saying if if you had to build an affiliate

site with a minimal budget knowing how competitive affiliate marketing is today is it too late and well all of them without hesitation they say no problem they're they're good to go I kind of want to ask you the same question yeah so is it too late I would always obviously given the fact the huge updates have been happening recently I would probably a more on the side of caution nowadays with the whole affiliate traditional affiliate Markman struct stry um so obviously traditionally it would just be

you know you're knocking up a website typically just to promote a product um and then earning from that whereas nowadays I'll definitely be looking more at how do I create a brand around this website how does the website actually attract people who are just interested in reading the content as opposed to you know I'm trying to rank for um money keywords and getting them to click through um obviously Google hait and it always has done doorway Pages now if you think of the traditional affiliate marketing

it was pretty much set up to be doorway pages that you click on you've got all your ctas and everything basically trying to get the person straight away to click to click to click off um and that's what Google Apps it's hat it from the day do but you know over time it's been developed and how to tackle it I guess and I think this is you know the latest updates being one of the ways it is really horing in on tackling it tackling it um

so if I was to start an affiliate project obviously we're still quite involved in some affiliate stuff but some of the affiliate stuff we're now more involved in is things that already have quite a bit of brand um stuff going on so on social media um they already have a good following they've got that natural gred search volume um and then we kind of get involved at that point um so yeah the strategy would probably now be trying to build up some type of social media

and follow in some type of content that you know is good for the that type of user and encourages the user engagement signals and then going down you know maybe's email Mark so bringing in all the areas of Mark inside some email marketing funnel stuff like this to try and Horn it all in and that's how I would approach it it would take time that's the one problem with that now it's not a it's not overnight success it's going to take you know you're building a

brand right it's going to take a while um that that's my standpoint on it really that that's a great answer because I mean this is a a Hot Topic as of right now I've Got Friends sending me messages going hey you do you know someone who can help me get out of this uh Google's just destroyed my site and this is probably all within 10 days I've had three different friends saying we're screwed and I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense I think

you need to be more intentional it's it's not just brand it's intentional going okay what what value can we add and it can't be just another content site because Google's already seen that content it's like you're giving me nothing special so um probably the worst one I've seen are a few different websites that have amazing uh like digital PR style links and Google still said we don't care about your amazing links yeah I've seen that quite a few times obviously we do one of the brands

we also have a site from search through is a like a link Ting brand so we get a lot of people coming especially with the latest update you know there was a huge round of like spam penalties dished out um and when you're looking at some of these sites some of the sites you're looking and you go you know what this site doesn't really deserve this span penalty it's you know it's maybe's got a few peered for guest PS but the rest of it maybe's like

natural digital PR list well natural we doing quote digital PR listings you know what I mean and um yeah it's yeah it's if I'm being honest I feel really bad for a lot of website owners especially ones ones ones who if you look at I believe Eric lanchez posted something recently which his opinion is you know they're very much going after user engagement metrics now and that that's what they've kind of pined on so you could have fantastic content but if your whole site as a

whole doesn't have the user engagement that can pull you all down um and obviously this is it leads into why you would see Rise of the likes of Reddit quorus places like this because the users are when they're on those sites they typically stay on those sites and they're clicking around and they have their own user like flow and experience right and that's kind of what you need to try to start doing in my opinion on the on your own website it's what you should be

doing whereas obviously we touched on it before the traditional affiliate model was never set up to be like that like that so if Affiliates are at risk of being disrupted I I I got a two-part question it's like what do you seeing on the SEO Consulting side are they also getting hit bad because some of their clients have just gone bust but I'm also wondering the second part is for someone like yourself who's done a lot of personal branding are you experiencing uh more people coming

to you yes so so the first part I would say from a consultancy point of view obviously if affiliate was a big ch of a consultant's revenue stream revenue stream then hopefully that affiliate was a big super affiliate and has plenty of money in the bank to kind of pivot into something else and then obviously would leverage the consultancy skills because there's been a lot of roomors of and it's every year you've been an SEO for a while yourself Jo every single year whenever there's a

Google update seo's dead right that's all you ever here but obviously it's just seo's change it it's forever changing and I don't ever think SEO will die it's just the route that it goes down obviously you have to Pivot and change with it um so I think like from a consultancy point of view yeah I think there will be quite a few hurting at the moment we tend to deal a lot more with e-commerce sit and then the actual um SEO agency owners so you know

they tend to be dealing with a lot of the brands we do the odd brand here and their affiliate brand and things but we don't do a lot with them so we haven't really been in acted from that side and but I'd imagine a lot of Consultants have um and I kind of forgot what the second question was sorry the second one was like more like for for what you do specifically has this positively impacted you because you might be on the better side of the

fence where maybe you've uh positioned yourself to be in a better position and you've done a lot of personal branding so when people are panicking they're they're actually going who can I trust and who can I trust in SEO spaces we know that that's never easy and you know doing videos and podcasts and you know really branding your your own name I think I think these things help well that's what it was something that actually we've only really been duing myself we only been doing in

the last year probably is really ramping up the personal brand inside primarily because we almost felt about a year back that this was going to be the route that was going to be taken you know connecting actual people to the website and the brand and all these different um I know fan of Jason Bernard all these different entities and creating this sort of knowledge panel right and con then having that user that person connected to all of those entities just adds value across the board and

that's kind of the approach we started adopting and I think yeah I think it's something that people should start the hardest part with this and I still struggle with it hugely today D's a lot more extra than I am I'm the data guy I like to you've seen on like LinkedIn and things mentioned in CRA craw budget all that's I'm the guy who likes to dabble in that side I'm not the guy who likes to be on the camera although if I've had a few drinks

sometimes that changes I usually don't mind so much but like I'm a lot more introverted um so it's quite difficult for you know I think the skill set of seos typically are to be more introverted you tend to be a lot more of an inted guy right and that's a problem when it comes it's it's a problem when it comes to doing podcasts and things like that um because it's completely out with your comfort zone um so yeah I think there's going to be a definite

mind shift change with SEO as it becomes more of a sort of digital digital marketing pres I've always sort of labeled myself as a digital marketer as opposed to an SEO because I've always used pair ads as an Avenue into SEO anyway and then I'm not a social media ad exp but I dabble um but yeah I've always used paid ads and then went that route into the SEO just to hack time because you can very quickly figure out what works and you at the same

time if you can generate that that that Roi it's happy days all around because then you can keep that going at the same time as when a organic SEO strategy so and maybe the ti uh some of these initial discussions together of the B2B stuff with personal branding the B Toc um it seems like uh with video it's people are shifting how they search or look for things or how they find trust signals and it's Reddit it's Kora it's YouTube It's YouTube shorts It's Tik Tok

it's social media it's uh we've always known these things to be their own search engines on their own but it's it's kind of like this is like an evolving part of search where I I wonder maybe Google's never going to ever disappear but I wonder if their power is just going to start to drop in terms of you know their dominance in search I think this is why they're very much getting it you know that Google's also quite smart that they're quite quick to buy things

um so you know YouTube was bought by them and I imagine down the line I know there's already been the agreement with Reddit but obviously that wasn't purchasing of Reddit it was just use of data surprisingly off the back of that then all of a sudden Reddit has a huge boom in the C so I think Google's smart enough or the guys obviously that run it are smart enough to sort of pivot themselves and acquire more and more data funnels um so I don't think Google's

going anywhere I know there's a lot of people saying oh get on Bing you know they're increasing market share well the reality is yes they've increased market share but it's only a few percent that they've increased and a lot of it all around you know they were the first with the whole open the eye um so is that just a bit of a buzz I'm pretty sure I read something the other day there's already been quite a significant drop off from the launcher open Ai and

the Bing surge Trend um so you know will that continue I don't know I think obviously leading into the whole sge with Google and things like this and you know the whole generative generative experience my personal opinion on this is it's all for Google to push users down to the money making keywords to trying to get them further down that funnel and I think they'll apply SG to the top of the funnel keywords to get them down to the bottom quicker and rather than use us

sitting on trying to search you know five or six queries because each of those queries is costing Google money right whereas if they can do one query and that one query goes [ __ ] most people you know search this actually end up here have a look at these um I think that's the route they're going to go with SG I don't think in niches like I know you're quite or I was heavily involved I'm still slightly involved in G the gambling industry I don't think they're going

to be affected as much like the there's too much jurisdiction involved and very very big bins for Google to put something on that might be wrong and we've all seen you know you can manipulate EI right we're all practicing that at the moment manipulate in the eye um so I I just don't see it being applied in those niches but I do see it on the more broader keyw niches makes sense I mean what you've described is kind of like the whole journey of top of

funnel bottom of funnel and I think enough websites don't do it themselves internally and I I would say for for without a doubt I've been guilty of that in the past but um you know those are things that I try to kind of preach and going I've talked to these people and the are the things that I think are true and I think what you've explained is you know an interesting way for Google to actually move people into those funnels where the higher converting you know

phrases or keywords uh tend to be more uh bottom of funnel yeah well if you also look at like for instance in the gambling industry you know we've been having to deal with anywhere up to eight ads on the page like that is just a norm right whereas you go on normal SE and you've got two at the top so now you going to have potentially a huge SG thing which will cover you know cover quite a bit sort of top of the page criteria and

then that's only going to be used to push users further down the funnel in my opinion and because of costs as well right there's all always a cost of like retrieval element here and and it's cost in Google probably quite a bit more than it would be just to supplying the data from the databases because it's now having to run you know an an AI element which is going to cost quite a bit um so I think that's the only way in my head that they

can justify that cost is by getting the users from you know the top down to the buying keywords buying keywords essentially um yeah would you say then that if if you're an affiliate and you've been affected by any of these core updates that you would reduce the number of affiliate links I mean one of my friends who who literally just got destroyed by Google I went on the site I'm like it's beautiful contents expert um maybe not strong on the link side but one thing I

noticed I'm like I wonder if Google actually cares about how many outgoing tracking links there are on pretty much a lot of the pages yes so one of the strategies we've been adopting recently so obviously in let's just stick with the gambling examples where I've got a lot of experience in so you know your typ Gamblin affiliate site usually has a table which has about 10 links on all of those links all go out to very ious different affiliate networks Etc and that's pretty much Norm

across the site you know they might have a few banners as well on each they've got loads of outbound links across multiple pages right and it's always in prominent areas higher up in the sort of macro content so what I would be looking at straight away is a reducing down to say top three affiliate ads but then those three affiliate ads I wouldn't have them all going out from one page they would be internally linked to the actual specific review of that um product or company

then that one review page would then outlink to affiliate link that way you've you've you've just you know you've absolutely hemorrhaged all your outlinks to just having a couple of pages on your site that have outlinks out and I feel like that's going to be a better trend for users because you almost you know you've got the user on the page they interest in the offer now that user has to engage with your page he has to click a button which takes them through to another

page on your website guess what it's another user metrix they're on your site they're they're staying around they're clicking about then from that page they can click off because Google's not they're not against you clicking off but they want you to provide value to the user not just click on click off that isn't value yeah that makes a lot of sense um it it makes me rethink you know some of our B to be SEO strategies of doing affiliate program reviews and linking out so definitely

going to have to think about that one and maybe it's better to be um what's the word just kind of more on the cautious side and go we don't know what Google's going to do in the next little while but um it's better to plan as if uh more Carnage will happen well because if you also think some of these Affiliates especially in the spaces that we operate in some of the Affiliates are spending big money with Google right and they're they're spending big money on

paid ads and things like this so it doesn't make sense for Google to slap these websites too much when actually some of them are spending in big books with them and then you know or does it make sense because they may end up ramping up more of the big big books being sled I guess um but we all know you know organic is you know it's one of the biggest AWI you'll ever get when it's there but the key is obviously with with everything in business

the main people who are hurting right now are the ones who didn't diversify traffic streams if you started off from the start with a diverse traffic portfolio what of the affiliate sites we've recently bought in in the gabblin industry actually had more from social media than they did from they didn't even have SEO and that's why we've bought in because we're now the SEO arm to that business um things like this is just something that you should be looking at doing you know the whole traffic

diversity and then it doesn't really matter if an update comes around yes it might hit your numbers but you should always have a big enough pool of traffic so you will still always be making money it just might not be as much so I listened to you uh say on a clip with James douly he asked you what are your top five SEO tips for 2024 and looking here I think you wrote or you said semantic SEO AKA topical Authority uh uh structured properly back um

the site's structured properly backlinks of course uh You' like to see that there's traffic behind it and website performance um I'm going to zero in on the semantic SEO and website performance because I I remember just like looking at some of your posts on LinkedIn you talked about how performance and the tech side uh can have like an important impact on the overall performance so I just wanted to get your Insight on that yeah so um a lot of people have probably heard of cor and

if you haven't I definitely recommend you know looking up Cory um holistic SEO and now obviously he was the very first guy well second guy um but you know he's really pushing the topical Authority side and how people don't understand it now from a performance point of view it's going into the website and looking at where are well start usually first part I would always start with Google search console and look at where the the Google crawling bot is going um seeing if there's any areas

on the website it just shouldn't be wasting that crawl budget because every site has a limited amount of crawl budget and obviously you can start to see when real problems are happening when you're seeing the crawled but not indexed section of the website and that balance is becoming really really skewed now don't get me wrong the best is to have that to crawled but indexed so C but not index is zero but chances are on a bigger website you'll probably not get there but it's good

always good to have that as a really low amount and the way you do that is by optimizing what Google is wasting on crawling and you know a lot of the times with WordPress sites it's simple things like forward SL feed sl4000 for SL1 slash it's all these like separate URLs that you just kind of think oh you know they don't exist however for some reason the Google but thinks they do and goes down that sort of Avenue of it so you just have to be

wary of that and whether or not you might need a site change it could be permal links issues you know it could be adding things to Rob B St text it could be restricting things and H you access it it all depend like and this is where the SEO side would come in it would all depend on the website the technology behind it what platform what what server Etc um and how you would tackle those things but once you start tackling those things what actually starts

to happen is you start to open up the website to the craw is now hitting the pages that you wanted to crawl and all of a sudden you've got this balance of oh it's indexing more pages it's indexing more and then hopefully those who use their signals are starting to come in the website which gains the momentum you might have a few links coming in which also obviously would help increase craw budget you've got more assets linking in and then in time that should hopefully improve

the website as a whole but again this is all a you know you can restrict the crawl and stop it from visiting those pages but the crawler still needs to visit the pages to know that it shouldn't visit them and more type thing so it might hit them one more time and then it'll just not come back um things like this is like it takes time to do it's not a simple you'll do it and it's fixed you might have to do it test wait a

week or two test wait a week or do test and go that route with it so it's it gets quite technical but it's definitely worth it in the long run and you know the scary thing is I have quite a lot of conversations with seos and they don't even realize that you can check crawl stats in said Google search console and these guys are like top guys and they've never seen that section of search console where you can check crawl stats and things like this and

it's like oh you should probably do that route first learn that a little bit but once you've done the search console route then I would definitely suggest if you can get the data either use it utilizing Cloud flare or if your server will just give you the data because not all servers will give you the data is trying to get the logs because yes you've just optimized search console and the Google bot however there's a lot more Bots out there and you want to control these

Bots because actually they could be let's say for instance your time zone where most of your users are logging on is you know 4M you can have a a random bot hitting your website between hours of three and five which is actually crushing your bandwidth on your website and slowing everything down so then the when the users are hitting the website guess what the user metrics are now all skewed because the website's taking forever to load you know the CLS issues potentially all of the page

the metric issues all of these things start to come into play because the server slowing down because of database queries and all of this so I would definitely once you've done a step one which is fck the Google bot element step two then look at what else is there you know how I uses in I can with the website from a crawling perspect sorry uh from a user perspective and how are the B interacting with the website and then look at you know one by one

going through and controlling putting delays in ETC yeah you've answered a couple of my uh future questions there is great that W went on a little bit no it was perfect because I mean I'm going to jump back into would you say it'd be good to use the paid version of cloud flare to look at the server logs and yeah the paid version of C is great anywhere and really really recommend that for all of its functionality you know all of its like speed optimization functionalities

as well is really good again you still want to be fixing and looking at the server elements because obviously your server will still be handling a lot of database queries and things like this so I would definitely be looking that out and we I know recently we've been doing one on another gambling website and thankfully when I applied the fixes it seems to have fixed most of the issues so we we're slowly getting there but it's always one of them you apply the fixes and you

just have to wait and see what the crawler does hopefully it appears if it doesn't you have to come up with another way of sto me from crawling it um but yeah that seems to I would definitely suggest Cloud flare Pro and just trying to if you've got a decent Web horse usually you're able to get the server logs from that way because and that way you get a raar from the server obviously Cloud flare is like a you know a protection across the server but

I would also be trying to get the the server logs anywhere and because Cloud flare will also block a lot of bots as well out of which you can then also apply at a server level as well just to really make sure they don't hit the site you want the double fail so your server logs will catch something that cloud flare might just pi oh we just blocked it for you you don't need know what it is and it could be well we've actually been had

a had a case recently where it's it's still slightly ongo we've kind of got it under control now but where there was like you just Cloud flare was letting these users through and we were trying to restrict it to say we only want you know UK Canada New Zealand or whatever and it we still allowing users pass that were actually from other countries still so we have to apply sort of Ip lock blocks on on a server level to stop them hitting the site um as

opposed to doing it from the cloud play level and then yeah it's it it it is a bit if it's very technical it gets very technical and I would definitely see work with the dev on it because you know seos are great I'm not the best Dev but seos are very good at identifying their Sho then obviously up to work and with the the more technical people to try and make that fix happen would you uh recommend or do you use a Google looker studio for

integrating or connecting with let's say Google search console data or I I'm sure you could probably even take this Cloud flare and server data into a look your own looker Studio template so you can say all right I've got my dashboard here so for all your friends that all the SEO friends that haven't actually you know done what they need to do to go inside search console and look at some of these server issues or or these log issues um I'm kind of thinking maybe everyone

just needs a looker Studio template it would probably help I'm tend to be a bit more of a dinosaur in that regard I quite like just logging into the old search console logging into say using scream and frog audit and the the server AIT one and going through that um with like a fine tooth com that tends to be the way I do it just it's one of them where it's like there's always tools right and it's like sometimes there's be like just working with the

raw data you might because the tools might miss something I don't know if it's just like the white like the logic in the head might miss something but yeah I don't know I would definitely say like if it displays the data nicer because obviously the raw files are usually quite usually quite that's basically they're not pretty to look at and you know you definitely need some mafel when you're sat there going through a few million lines of um crawls but yeah I would definitely see a

Luca yeah the looka studio that's the replacement of the day studio right yeah it's uh I I I preferred the old name but it's I think now everyone's finally calling it looker Studio it's getting there it's just like G4 right initially when it first came about it's like oh this is so Anno but actually when you startop playing with it a little bit it takes a little bit to get things set up but you know it is pretty decent it's just annoying that you have to

set it up now whereas before it was all set up that was the problem yeah I'm I'm still getting my hands dirty with the G4 but the more I talk to people the more I'm like okay it it is better for X Y and Z reasons and you just got to accept it but there's a lot of people out there that are still pissed off yeah I tend to if I'm being honest with a lot of that sorts of like gfo and things like this I

tend just diverted my Dev and just say look set up this report that's all I need I don't need to know you know how many hours it's going to take you to make that happen just get it done whereas before it was kind of like plugging the analytics C in oh guess what we've got a report straight away very easy but now you've got events and Google tag manager and uh we just started working with that and wow that's a that's an eye opener and I

kind of think how many people are ever GNA make this happen like the first time you start touching this stuff and you go through tutorials you're like I got a headache and I need someone else to do this yeah yeah it's well it's basically it's almost like they've made it where you know an SEO previously would be able to do it now you kind of need a JavaScript developer and some type of server Dev to be able to make some of these dumb tags work you

know what I mean it triggers and you're like why isn't this working I'm I'm following this tutorial this tutorial and it's just not working and I I think that's why there's now a lot of very wealthy uh SAS companies that do the analytics for you like oh we'll just connect it all automatically all you got to do is pay thousands of dollars a month and you just have to plug in your your tag manager ID the way you go yeah so I want to Pivot on

the discussion to talk about investing because I know on your personal uh domain you've got that as one of your one of the things you do so I wanted to ask straight up what is your investment thesis what are the things that interest you today yeah so at the moment we do we've set up a few site businesses where we're actually the investment we plow money from say some of our other companies into these investment companies and then we're always on the lookout for we get

a lot of data and a lot of websites come in so sometimes we get websites that we think you know what this guy just isn't the most technical or you know there's elements of this guy's website that just needs an SEO to come in and we offered to step in and become the SEO arm there's elements there's elements where like for instance the gambling one where we you know they're fantastic at doing what they do which was the social media side and building the brand but

they just did not have a clue with when it comes to SEO so then you know we talk numbers with them and we can usually negotiate quite a good deal for all parties because we can see the added value that SEO will bring very quickly and that that kind of with that project happened very quick so within three months we were I think there was something maybe's about let's say a thousand traffic and within three months they had 45k traffic um and like that sort of

stuff is like exponential when it comes down to you know bottom line figures so you can usually leverage that against a better you know better percentage in the partnership um but that's tends to be what we try to only deal with people that we can actually work with that's the key is you know you sometimes you can go into some of the best businesses that seem really lucrative but if you can't work with the guy who you're partner partnering with and you can't really trust him

then I definitely wouldn't do business and Investments with them um so most of ours tend to be off the back of all of the leads we get is is is you know how in some cases um with D's local Network and local sites there's a lot of times where these local sites actually become reliant on the leads that are being passed through and then they actually just have an open conversation where they actually just want you to become part of the business because then that way

they're they know they're secure and you're not going to go elsewhere with the leads right so there's always that element to it as well so yeah yeah it's kind of like uh you know have some skin in the game so you can you know be our preferred partner it's it's like affiliate marketing but uh it's really the way business should be and I agree as well with the the sentiment that you you want to work with people that you simply want to work with them that

you can trust them I know in my situation of you know having to raise capital for our company it's kind of like at one point in time it there's a tipping uh point of going okay do we need the money or how desperate are we versus if we can just hold up maybe there's someone else and we were lucky that we weren't put in a situation where we had to accept a deal that I know for a fact we would have regretted well that's also the

problem right is in in times of desperation you can sometimes you know accept something that just isn't really going to work for you long term and you know it deep down and you think no it'll be fine I'll get over it but actually all that starts to happen is it starts to f and then that negativity just you're not intentionally trying for it to sort of come out but eventually it will come out and then it could be the end of the business all through a

decision that you made out of desperation so like we try obviously D is one of the main guys I work with from an investment point and we you know we we've had some big arguments big blowouts um but it's almost a good thing because you know it's setting the expectation of each party and what's expected from you and and him and then obviously there's always the boundaries right you're always trying you're both pushing each other sometimes a little bit too much and then it's like whoa

you're going to make you need to back off type thing um and that happened just in January you know there was big disagreements on some of the Investments we were doing and the Avenues were up going to go and things this and you know we were back and forth for days and days and days and but then we got past that and over and it's all great again and that's that's kind of the key of any good partnership you shouldn't be you should be able to

have like an open and honest conversation with them um and you know not try to hide things because you don't think they would approve of it it should be that level of transparency where you know they're almost like a lover like you should be that transparent with them and if you're not then there's probably a problem yeah I mean all those things like you said they will fester and then come to the service to the surface and the last thing you want is um those problems

just to simmer and then kind of blow up later on exact and it could be like something tiny that's the thing sometimes it is it starts off as this tiny little thing that if you just nipped it in the bud then it wouldn't have then snowballed into this big problem um and yeah that's kind of how we operate and it is something we always have to touch base on it's almost like every every few weeks we just have a little bit of a checkin we're quite

prone to gr away like together and just having um with other investors or directors just having like you know a spa day and having like tracks with the business so outside of business a bit of life you know house things going in your personal lives work because sometimes you're getting triggered and you're getting triggered because of everything else around you not necessarily because of that business so sometimes it's worth from a business part point of view knowing you know what he's going through some stuff at

the moment I can maybe back off a little bit or how can I help him get through it which is the key bit if you can help him get through this you know if if you have a resource on your side that can help him then if you can do that it only helps build that Bond a little bit better and that's kind of the approach we've adopted and we always try to instill in people when when we do sort of masterminds and things like this

is you know it's that level of honesty it's that level of shown vul vulnerability basically to each other um and then it just helps that Bond grow a little bit bigger yeah I I think these are the the parts of business and you know of having like emotional intelligence of being able to like read someone and it's almost like by you acknowledging the person could be going through something it's almost like you're listening as opposed to someone saying they don't listen to me and it's like

well what do you mean they don't listen of course they're listening they're listening but it it's uh the part of life that no one really talks about enough and it's kind of ironic that you just need to talk your way through it sometimes yeah it's it's it's just surprising how like I said a tiny little tiny little problem just blows up into something huge if you don't nip it in the bud quick um and that's yeah I think I think the best Partnerships kind of expand

to be like that and the added benefit to that is you can all you then have like almost a friend not just a business business partner he becomes a friend and a very close you know associate if not almost family member and that's kind of what you trying to it well what we at least try to achieve is because yeah that then just keeps everything close you know that you can trust that person that's not going to happen because he's behind it type thing you know

that's not going to happen and that yeah I don't know if that's naively on obviously our side maybe but that's how we like to do business and and that's the approach we kind of take I I think it's the way it should be done and it's kind of interesting you know you told me that you're more like a technical SEO guy and then here we are talking about like you know the where I mean the reality is this uh people make uh emotional decisions and they

justify it with logic and it's it's always emotion first not logic and it's it's kind of the approach we've actually been doing quite a bit of social media ads recently and there's there has been a few disagreements on a few different elements from d and my side and I was kind of like look I literally this was the conversation we had M before so this is fresh wounds right about four days ago we were like like we need to get a social media guy in and

do this K like yeah well look we have to be the Yes Man and I'm like yeah 100% I'll be that yes guy I have I don't I know limited amount of stuff about social media I'm willing to just be the yes guy from the exper right and then we get the experted and all of a sudden dud is questioning everything the experts saying and I'm like dude like you don't know anything about social media let the expert do what he's doing like you're only going

to annoy him right I was like imagine someone comes to like you and then asks for sorry offers their help and then you're just every like second get to them every two seconds I was like it's only going to annoy him to the point that he's going to leave and this is kind of this is very new so then he's like came back and say oh no you're 100% correct I'm just a bit impatient with it and all this and I'm like well yeah I know

but that's just how it goes sometimes and I and then one of the messages that I sent him was look you're very much doing it off feeling I don't feel this is going to work I was like I kind of want to work off data so let's launch the ads and the data will tell me if it's working or not yeah then we can make actions right now if we work off your feelings we're not going to get any launched because you're always going to feel

like that might not work this might not work well let's launch and work off the data you know you can work off a smaller data set or I think the key is obviously everyone's quite Frugal with the money you don't want to waste money right so I think that's the element of we don't want to waste the money but at the same time you have to it's almost like paid ads perspective from the Google AdWords side you sometimes have to burn a little bit money to

get the data to be able to action where to spend the money yeah um and that's yeah all of that but I mean obviously to to pitch that back to to James dly and to convince him why he should do it think about how many times that you're like this is never going to work or you're you're so strong against like something you test it and then you're like wow I was so wrong about that yeah yeah that's also the good thing is he's very willing

to if he is wrong so he kind of one of the funny parts he jumped the gun and basically ignored everything the social media guy said launched the ads himself and then the next day he goes right I've turned them off they didn't work b b poo yeah and I'll delete them all type thing and then he's said right that definitely didn't work I'm going to leave you to it now so like it's always a bit of Humble Pie as well and that that is the

great thing is that we are willing to say you know what yeah that we at least we tried sometimes I almost feel like some people are so scared scared scared of trying something that they just never take action and then they end up just in a rout of staying the same and so like for instance with the rolling back to like the personal branding and things like this you know it's something that was very uncomfortable to me at the stop but now I'm on podcasts like

yourself John like podcast owners going on various different podcasts and you know it feels a lot more natural now talking to people but at the start oh my God it was was like I was like this like swe I still get a little bit nervous like people send me question but now it's getting to a point that I I've kind of done enough of them that you know if there's a question I don't have an answer to I will just say and that's not my bag

I don't really know much about that and I think that that approach is kind of being appreciated more as AOS to me trying to BS something on on one of the podcast type thing and so like for instance with like B the business side the great thing with my and D's partnership is I'm the I'm moreo P ads guy he's definitely more business guy so you know a lot of business to shoot decisions before me and D we even Partners I was running past dly and

sort of saying do you think this is a good idea and it's almost like that connection of the business and then in times I'm now in time I'm now learning more and more about business and what should and shouldn't happen based off the knowledge that D's given us and obviously watching podcasts and things like this on business side um but yeah it's I think that's also a good combination with a partnership is trying to find you don't want like I wouldn't really want to partner with

another SEO because I just know that's going to cause all sorts of ructions he doesn't do it the same way I do it whereas if someone was say social media ads that's not something I do guess what all of a sudden we've now got SEO social media ads play ads guess what business that comes into the mix we've all of a sudden got a guy who has great business AC and can go into these big deals with or negotiate these better deals CPA models Etc and

then it all starts meshing together nicely um whereas sometimes you know you get involved in a business and it's just there's too many cooks and this is becomes the problem there's you know there's no direction there's too many CS yeah no I agree it's uh for me and my business partner it's uh we don't compete on the same level so it's like I'm good at what I do he's great at what he does and you both respect each other for that right it's it's like one

of those things it just become it becomes like a a mutual respect for each other's other's strengths and then it goes from there it grows from there and obviously over time he's hopefully all develop and grow together and you know he's all rise together hopefully that's the the plan yeah that's happened for us and uh I I know we actually we almost had a massive blow up in uh like separating as friends and business partners it's a long story but uh we we brought someone that

we thought was going to be helpful for our team and this person was just fully disruptive uh everyone was pissed off with this with this with this person I'm pretty sure he doesn't spend any time listening to podcast so I won't mention his name but it was uh I he know who it who it who it is yeah I I look back at that as going I don't regret going through that EXP experience because it put it put us to our our limit it really tested

us and we came up from it even stronger it was just like I look back at that going yeah it's not it wasn't pleasant at all but I'm like we almost needed it so we could actually hit another gear that's exactly what we did well it's to quote something that James always says he says you know the most millionaires are made in time diversity which if you look it's it tends to be the time you know the biggest recessions often then go to the biggest highs

right it's it is true time and time again and it's kind of the exact same thing example in your business there you know you had you tried to make a good decision which at the time was the best decision you could make but then in time that decision actually wasn't the best decision or the person that you got it maybe the decision was good just the person wasn't right and that's also really hard in business is to try and find the right people is really difficult

um like we have some very close team members but you know throughout the time we've had some really bad ones as well um and often one bad it's was it what's the say I love saying but sometimes I'm bad at remembering these you have chat you know telling me is there one bad one bad egg spoils the broth I think that's the same you know One Bad Apple yeah or or another saying is uh what what is it you put a a barrel of of sewage

into a teaspoon of wine and you get sewage you put a teaspoon of sewage into a barrel of wine you get sewage yeah yeah exactly it's the same it's same analogy right yeah and you know what's the other one a [ __ ] sandwich doesn't matter what you put in it it's still a [ __ ] sandwich um and that's kind of the approach yeah that we've tried to so you know our staff and wise we tend to be quite small and then we tend to we rely heavily on

our managers and then the man managers often either Outsource TOS if and when needed or they tell us if we need more stuff and then we try our best so a tool that I like to use um is called iwam and that's probably off the back of my my father was it or is he sorry he's still around he is like a life coach type thing and he involved in a tool called um infantry of work attitude and motivation I think it's very similar to like

the disc model um that mads pushes a lot of but basically you know it's looking at how is this person motivated in the workplace and as soon as you figure that out you can very quickly you can actually model your existing team in it and then you can see if bringing this person in would upset and who it would upset on the team um and whether or not they're a good fit for that team in general they might have the complete wrong patterns and motivational patterns

at the workplace and attitude that it's actually just going to totally disrupt the team and that's sometimes in big sales companies when you can have the top sales team all of a sudden are now the bottom and it's because they've had had one core staff member that actually just upset the team but no one's tell like there's just biger in and no one's saying this to you and all of a sudden the performance is just plummeting and plummeting and I don't know what's wrong and then

you sit in on it in a few days and you go that's what's wrong yeah and unfortunately sometime you know that person is they might be brilliant in in another role or just in another company and you know that's when you kind of have to deal with that um but we've been quite fortunate in that sense so yeah trying to H higher fast High fast yeah kind of a pro we do the sort more the higher slow fire fire fast and um we've we've learned some

painful lessons over the years yeah I bet so last question is what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business with business intelligence so I would say the hardest part of so as seos and generally you know marketing guys you usually pretty good with data or you should be pretty good at you know analyzing data so when utilizing that in sort of the business intelligence role you'd like to think you should be good at that however ever it's kind of

like my situation where I leverage working with dly more because he's better at the business side just CU I'm greater numbers yeah I can see that something's not working but doesn't necessarily mean I have the business argument to work out how to get it to work um and I would say with regards to affiliate and you know n it's probably going to be seos and sort of the P ads guys who are involved with that I would definitely look at teaming up with someone who just

has a little bit more business can maybe's open your eyes to you know other opportunities where you could start building your own brand you could start building your own products you know Drop Shipping became a huge thing but actually if you look at some businesses nowadays they started off as Drop Shipping businesses and now they're actually the WR brand you know been to China they've bought the products they've started to leverage that side now there's nothing to stop people doing that but I think the the

main issue with affiliate Mark was I know from way back when is tend to be lazy they want nice and easy quick wins and you know the 4H Hour Work Hour Work Week approach and it just it doesn't exist man like I can't remember the last time I worked four hours in a week like it just do I work when I go on vacation you know it just doesn't happen there isn't a 4 Hour Work week I don't know if I'm just addicted to work but

it just doesn't happen there is not a 4our work week it's a myth I would say there is a with leveraging your abilities so you can do four hours of painful work a week and by painful I mean stuff you don't really want to do but you probably have to do it and you know it's only you who can do that work and I would say you can get that down to about four hours because you know you should be able to Outsource a lot of

that to other team members and things um but I would say yeah for the future I think people just are going to have to start building building brands starting focusing on personal branding you know professional brand spending money on social media advertising you know there's plenty of huge platforms out there that Tik Tok it's all quite cheap Tik Tok and things like this pinin um even utilizing Reddit and Reddit ads I'm seeing a lot more Reddit ads nowadays especially now the traffics Ser you all of

said I guarantee their revenue numbers when that gets released is going to be huge um but yeah that's how that's what I would do what about yourself yeah it's a good question it's like I didn't realize I was becoming a data company I was like I just want to solve this problem I'm like whoa we're we're now data so the the more I go into Data it's two parts one I think more people should pay attention to it so if you're not the data person I

agree partner with someone that is and my background is engineering I should have been doing this from day one so it's kind of like you know what you're good at and I probably should have had the mind mindset to be like I should have followed your path from a long time ago but um I agree like coming back from Bright and SEO I think my the key takeaway there was just branding was really everything AI content well it can definitely affect your branding writing your own

content and avoiding AI well that's also branding going into video this is 100% branding and even just listening to some of the branding presentations of like you know hearing one person say I have clients and we're trying to beat our competition and there's a one type of competitor we can't be ones that are good with at branding and it's like okay it's we're we're hearing branding over and over again but I think it's true it's uh you know be your own brand where brand it builds

trust you know just coming off the recording from Jason Barnard it's I had no idea that doing this podcast stuff was going to be as valuable as it was and like you said it just being super uncomfortable getting started I'm like whatever it's like let's try it it took probably a good year before I realized wait a minute this is like a cheat codes here this is this is opening up so many doors that uh I think more people should do it but I my belief

is that video content is very difficult to get started with and not every founder wants to even do like written interviews and say okay I'm going to be the pseudo charismatic person so I'd say good luck to people out there to try to find a way to build that and I think people should need to look at going well what is social media it it's trust you know it's kind of like Amplified Amplified search no yeah 100% so one of the funny bits is like I've

been doing all of these podcasts and things but actually so far I haven't started my own YouTube channel I've just been yeah I'll just go on others it's fine I'll do bit LinkedIn I've created the channel but it's very blank right now very I actually had one um Vlad from ayss he mentioned messages though day I'm went dude this channel is so old what are you doing with it it had like me from like 12 year ago on it when I was doing like some VA

training video on a Google Hangout that's how old it is right and I was like oh God I look so young I need to delete and clean this up but it's I think the first step for me was getting out on these sort of you know other people's platforms because at the same time you know I can approach let's say for instance I made my own channel then I approach you you probably going to be like who's this guy he's got no subscribers no views whereas

when it goes the other way around and then you start going on interviews and you built your own channel up a little bit and having these guests and like yourself and things going on to yours then becomes something that's a little bit easier to leverage I think yeah I agree I I think we've actually got a few sales from just being guests on other people's podcasts I'm like oh how did you hear about us oh it was on olar's podcast I'm like really the like the

one thing ey gaming and she's like no that was good I mean I guess maybe there's not a lot of people talking about that specific Niche I think not a lot of people want to put their names and faces associated with I gaming but that's also I think that you've actually probably just hit on something as well which is like the hidden little bit of SEO is you know people it was always and it has always been something that you kind of just do in the

shadows like you don't really want to be shouting from the RO you know we've seen it in the latest update there's been a lot of influencers who had public sites and all of a sudden being hit right well in some of these public sites were only being announced on YouTube channels like that is where they were being announced and all of a sudden they've been hit and you're like and then all of a sudden you've got all of the you know introverts going well that's that's

why you shouldn't be doing that sort of stuff on you know and then mention it on YouTube so I think yeah I think there's a a double-edged with it and it's always you know about sort of treading carefully as well um but I don't think there's I I don't think there would be any harm to building a brand getting out there obviously just make sure you not maybe's mentioning money sites and things like this maybe stay away from that yeah but yeah just to be at

least intentional I think it's good to say okay this is my brand uh this these are my sites and I think Google wants to see more public ownership as I think when you have to of the opposite that's when it gets bad yeah no exactly so Carl thank you so much for doing this I want to pass it back to you to let uh you share how people can get a hold of you yeah so the best way now is call huton do.uk it has all

my socials and things on there and you can get in touch drop us an email on that as well at one point there was a huge mess where I had it everywhere and I was having to read out Instagram and all that but it's probably the best just call it to n at you get and then you can find my on there will'll include all of that except for maybe not the YouTube channel yet kind just not me don't click the YouTube L not yet awesome

Carl thank you so much for doing this cheers John thank you for having having us thank you for tuning in to the affiliate bi podcast I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a raing and review wherever you listen to your podcast that helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners