How This Digital PR Link Building Agency Helps Affiliates with Fery Kaszoni

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: How This Digital PR Link Building Agency Helps Affiliates with Fery Kaszoni
Host: John Wright
Guest: Fery Kaszoni
Published: Wed, 13 Dec 2023 10:47:00 +0000
Duration: 51:59

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: Hey, Feri, I've seen your content. I think you're great. Can you help us with this site?

[00:00:05] John Wright: I said, yes, sure. I said, there's nothing to lose. I'm going to tell them, you know, 5,000 pounds a month. And if they're happy to, you know, work like this, then we'll smash it for them. Because that's a greater budget than I ever had from any client prior to that. Like clients of like a thousand pounds a month or like 500 pounds a month, which now looking back, like it's, it's not even good for a meeting. Like, wow. Send them the invoice, they pay the invoice. And then two weeks after that, another financial, like an IVA company reached out.

[00:00:40] John Wright: In the same way, say, Feri, I've seen your case studies, your content is great. And we have this website. Could you help us with this website?

[00:00:50] Fery Kaszoni: I'm John Wright, and you're listening to Affiliate BI. The Business Intelligence and Affiliate Marketing podcast brought to you by StatStro.

[00:01:01] John Wright: Welcome to the Affiliate BI podcast. Today we're chatting with Feri Kazoni. He's the Managing Director of Search Intelligence Limited, which is an amazing digital PR link building agency. Feri, welcome to the show.

[00:01:14] Fery Kaszoni: Good to be here. I'm quite excited to have this discussion and quite excited to be here. Indeed. I was waiting for, you know, all week, I was looking at like, oh, I've got a podcast at the end of the week. It's, it's great. It's on, you know, it's on Friday today, right?

[00:01:29] Fery Kaszoni: And I was quite, yeah, quite, I'm quite pumped. I'm pumped because I started doing more digging in your, your PR work, your YouTube videos, LinkedIn. And I've got more questions, but I'm going to try to make it as best for the audience, which is, or for affiliate marketers first, rather than what we need to do for a software company. We just had a quick chat before we hit the record button. And we started talking about doing things for your employees. So you said, well, you said that you, you might be interrupted at the very start with having like, you know, a Tesla being delivered. So why don't we just jump into a total side tangent and talk about what you do for your employees and why you do it?

[00:02:08] John Wright: I would do anything for my employees because they are, they are, they are the cells of our body, right? The cells of the company, of the company. And they are the liver, the heart and the lungs. So we want them to be healthy and, and prosperous, right? And if, if the lung is healthy and the liver and the kidneys, then we know that the body as a whole is, is going to be in a thriving.

[00:02:39] John Wright: So that's what I want. I want to make sure we, we give the best life to our employees because if we have the best life, then we have a body that's a performance. We have a company that's being loved by, by, by employees. And the mission that we are on as well is going to be loved by our employees because they will see the actual impact on their lives, right? And we just, I do for my employees, things that I would do to myself as a, even as a CEO, if, well, what I, what I would like to have at, at my company,

[00:03:14] John Wright: at any role, I would like to see that to our team members and good, good pay, making sure they don't have to worry about, about money. Cause I think if people have to worry about money at home and about not having time for their families, that's not healthy. That's, that's not what I would, I would love to have in, in my career. So we just want to make sure we keep them all the tools and all the, you know, environment necessary to be, and not just, you know, surviving at home, but also flourishing and just, just paying them the most that we can pay them and the most at any agency can pay them in our industry. That that's our goal.

[00:03:54] Fery Kaszoni: Yeah. And I think it's really insightful where it's kind of like, you know, not, not many people seem to have a mission statement and the mission statement by default is make money, make the most money, make the most money on the least resources as possible, but I think this is a different mindset that, you know, when I saw one of your LinkedIn posts about, you know, giving your employees, you know, covering their winter heating bills, you know, that stood out to me as, you know, not just doing it and bragging about it on LinkedIn, but sharing it and going, I don't see a lot of people share stuff like this and that to me actually, that, that stuck with me more

[00:04:32] Fery Kaszoni: than some of the stuff I read on LinkedIn all day long. Yeah. Yeah. I think it resonated with many people because it's, I think, I think it does make a direct impact on people's lives. It makes a direct, you know, it's not like, Oh, I will like some flowers. Like, yeah, flowers are great. We love flowers, but Oh, I don't have to worry about turning the heat down because my company takes care of me and, and they pay our energy bills in a, in the three months of the winter, which means, you know, that's, less things to worry about. And, and they have more mental energy to focus on, you know, delivering PR campaigns to our clients. Right. So it kind of, it's, it's give and give, right?

[00:05:11] Fery Kaszoni: We always try to see how can we free up their worries? How can we, how can we give to our employees in a way that they don't have to, they have less things on their mind so they can focus more on, on, on, you know, providing a great service to our clients.

[00:05:25] John Wright: Yeah. It's, and, and I think, I think everyone should post about things like these because it spreads, you know, kindness. I think I was just mentioning people talk, people post about their dogs dying, which is great. I mean, I mean, we all feel sorry for it. But why not all suppose about helping others, right? Why not talk about, Hey, you know, if you have a business, you can also help others. And this is just, you know, like an innovative way to help your employees that, that will have like, you know, it will have a direct positive impact on their lives.

[00:06:01] John Wright: Now I appreciate, I appreciate that, you know, not all companies are in a position to pay, you know, 70 employees, but I think many are to pay extra, you know, 250 pounds to 70 employees, which is like, you know, quite a few tens of thousands per month, but, but, but they can hopefully get some inspiration, even the smaller companies to just make a difference in people's, you know, in people's lives when they, when, you know, they work at a company.

[00:06:32] Fery Kaszoni: And staying on theme also just before we hit the record button, you mentioned sharing your best and I know this is definitely going to tie into PR and I wanted to kind of leave a comment where I started to think about who are the people that I would buy from today in terms of like services, like whether they're SEO agencies or people. And when I started coming up with the list, what I realized is that some of these people, actually not some, all of them, they all share their best information, like they're actually giving away their entire playbook. And they said, if you want to consume this for an entire year, you will have my playbook. But they give it to you in LinkedIn, in video, piece by piece.

[00:07:12] Fery Kaszoni: And that's one over trust. So I just wanted to hear your take on sharing your best.

[00:07:18] John Wright: It's, it's the best way to, like, it's the fairest way for people to get to know you. That's how you show that you are authentic and you are who you say you are.

[00:07:29] Fery Kaszoni: It cannot be hidden. Like when you share something transparently and I say, Oh, this is the client. And this is what we have done for them exactly step by step.

[00:07:40] John Wright: Nobody can say, Oh, like that's like shady or like, Oh, this guy doesn't know what they're doing. It shows exactly the results. And there's no comment. Like there's no, like, no, anyone who would have a negative opinion or like, Oh, this guy's like, you know, you know, there's like, on YouTube, they used to be, you know, like, like fake get rich, you know, get rich quick gurus who were getting rich by selling a course about how to get rich.

[00:08:10] Fery Kaszoni: It's this, this model is fully authentic because they can see all the case studies. They can see everything that we've done and they can see how, you know, they can see that we actually share the information for free. We help others. And it's just the best way to, to just build kindness around you and to, to just be able to love around you. It's, it's the best way. I think in business, long-term business, kindness is the biggest currency. Like building a positive karma around the company, around the founder and about even around even the managers. I think it's the, it's the best asset that you have.

[00:08:46] Fery Kaszoni: If you can build up no love from people, it's, it's the best thing you can have.

[00:08:53] John Wright: I feel like I should share that comment with a few other people that have the opposite philosophy, but we'll, we'll put that on the side. Uh, want to go back to the very beginning of how you got started in SEO.

[00:09:05] Fery Kaszoni: That's, that's a, yeah, that's a good one. It's been a long journey. Um, so I wasn't an SEO initially. I think I did say this one or two times. And I was actually painting cars, painting, you know, high end cars back in, in the 2000s, but, but I was fascinated by technology from a young age.

[00:09:27] John Wright: And when I was like eight years old, I set up a, and I started setting up a laboratory in the loft of our house. So I started taking, you know, radios and cassette players apart and everything that was electronics, I started taking them apart and finding out how they work.

[00:09:47] Fery Kaszoni: And then as I got to like 10, I went to like electronics competitions and at age 12, I put, you know, microphones in the house and I wiretapped them. And I was like a crazy technology child who like adults didn't even understand what, what this kid is doing. I was carrying like big bags and like broken down electronics, like radios into our, our, um, to our house. And we had like lots of tronics all over the place and I was taking them apart. So that, that's kind of, I think that that's where the, that's where the root of my log for technology comes from.

[00:10:24] Fery Kaszoni: And SEO, of course, he's a big technological kind of concept, but in, um, I started setting up some blog spot blogs in 20, 2000, I think it was 2007, 2008.

[00:10:41] John Wright: And I've seen that wrote an article. I've heard a news on the radio that they have found water on the moon. And I've wrote an article about what I've heard on the radio.

[00:10:51] Fery Kaszoni: And in the evening when I, I think I was in my lunch break when I wrote the article, I published it.

[00:10:57] Fery Kaszoni: And then in the evening, I checked the stats and I had like thousands of visitors on that article. I said, this is magic. How can this be? And I Google a water on the moon and my article appeared like on top. It wasn't like back then it wasn't like everyone like now, like everyone was an SEO and posting about everything that was trending. It was, it was something that wasn't, it was just trending on that day.

[00:11:21] Fery Kaszoni: I don't know, 10, 20,000 visitors that day on that article that I wrote in my lunch break, I was like, this is magic. Yeah. And it was like a blog spot website, like, you know, blog spot subdomain.

[00:11:35] John Wright: I said, this is brilliant. I want to replicate this. I was hooked.

[00:11:39] John Wright: And then I started creating more blogs. I started creating like automotive blogs and science. I started copying, you know, howstuffworks.com. It was quite a popular website back then. And, and I started translating it from, from English to Romanian, because I was in Romania back then. I was translating the English articles, like word by word translating them to Romania, I made lots of traffic with, with, with those, I started putting out sense on the websites and it was just brilliant and I got hooked immediately.

[00:12:11] John Wright: So that's where the love for SEO comes. And then I started, you know, getting more sites, but I, it was just my own websites.

[00:12:18] John Wright: And my first actual client was in 2014. It was a fresh as a daisy flowercards.co.uk. He was a lady from London who reached out to me somehow, I know through Facebook. I think she, I think I posted once on like Upwork saying like, Hey, I can do SEO. I wasn't like a good SEO back then. Of course, I only knew what I knew from my sites, from writing articles and ranking them and building some links.

[00:12:44] Fery Kaszoni: And she was my first client. I think she was paying me 20 pounds a month or a week. I had to check the, the old emails. It was a very, you know, but I was so glad. I'm like, wow, people actually want to use my experience of like me building article, building sites and building even like blog spot sites. They want to use that experience for their website. That's, that's pretty cool. And then she referred me to another client of theirs. She was like a fashion designer, like a couture fashion designer from London.

[00:13:14] Fery Kaszoni: And I've helped her as well. We'd like, you know, Installing like cash plugins on the WordPress WooCommerce site and optimizing the titles back then. And that was like quite, quite underutilized and then building some links with like bloggers.

[00:13:29] John Wright: And, and that's where I set up the company and research intelligence, limited company. I was, I remember before that summer, 2014, I was flying out to Corfu with my wife and I was on the plane. I was born, I was bored.

[00:13:45] John Wright: And I imagined how I would advertise my company, like having, because I think they were like Panda and Penguin updates back then and like having a Panda bear dancing with like the Google logo. And then the music play in the background. I said like search intelligence, that's going to be, so on the airplane to Corfu, I came out with a search intelligence company name and I've registered in December.

[00:14:10] Fery Kaszoni: And that's where I like officially became like, you know, a SEO business owner. And I started taking on some, some more clients. I was doing SEO audits initially. And that's what I suggest everyone should do with SEO. Like if they are starting out in SEO, SEO audits is the number one place to start from.

[00:14:28] John Wright: That's where you learn in the fastest way, where you start digging.

[00:14:32] John Wright: We start analyzing, oh, what do these competitors do? What do those competitors do? And what, what am I not doing that they do so that I'm not ranking as well? It's the best way to start. Just conduct even, even, even if, you know, even if he's for free, he's going to be in depth audits, aim for like three audits per week in your first six months, you will smash it. You will have so much SEO knowledge.

[00:14:58] John Wright: It's unimaginable. It's the best way to start in SEO. So I started doing SEO audits back then I've done, I know, I know I had days where I've done like two SEO audits. I was like fully focused. Like my brain was like, like smoking. I was like analyzing, you know, sites.

[00:15:15] Fery Kaszoni: And I think that, that period, I think 2015, 2016 was where I accumulated like the foundation of like the SEO knowledge with these audits.

[00:15:23] Fery Kaszoni: Um, I know, yeah, I know I was doing lots of them. And that's where I subscribed to SEMrush to Ahrefs. And I loved, you know, I loved the depth of knowledge that you could, you know, grab about a website with those tools.

[00:15:41] John Wright: And that's how, that's how we all started. I wasn't making money back then. Um, until probably 2019, I wasn't really making, making too much money. I was making something like, almost like, like a normal, you know, below average salary as, as probably many business owners who start the business initially can associate, you know, a reporting to your wife, like, Hey, you know, how much money did we have left this month? Well, you know, costs are high and we had to pay for these tools. And it was a, it was a big struggle at the beginning and every, every, at

[00:16:19] John Wright: the end of every month, until like 2020, at the end of every month, I almost like dreaded going, going home and, and, you know, just, I was embarrassed to say to my wife, well, I know I said the next month we might make, you know, many thousands, but you know, just this month, the next month will be better, but this month, they didn't really turn out quite like that.

[00:16:40] John Wright: And it was like an ongoing thing for many, many years. And that's because I think that was because I didn't come out from the technician mindset into the business mindset.

[00:16:54] John Wright: I was still a technician clients were like, Oh, can we do this and this and this, and I didn't have, I didn't have the, you know, experience to say to those clients, well, of course we can do, we can make the logo bigger, as you know, this is a thing in like in web development and we can make, we can do this, but it will cost you, you know, an extra, you know, half an hour of work, but I didn't have the experience to be, you know, strict with the time that I'm putting in. So I just ran out of time and the money was just, just barely enough until 2020.

[00:17:31] John Wright: Then how did you transition? I mean, we're literally talking like a short period of time of three years of blossoming into a big company. So what was it that, that changed? Like you just mentioned that you w you went from a technician to a business mindset.

[00:17:49] Fery Kaszoni: That's exactly what happened. So I was reading books, I had the books there about business and all the books that if you want to make, you know, if you want to make a successful, if you want to build a successful business, you cannot be the technician only in the business. I'm still a technician in a way, because I still work a lot in the business, but my main role is not to be a technician. Now, my main role is to be a systems operator and a systems builder.

[00:18:20] John Wright: And you should use the experience knowledge that I've acquired

[00:18:23] John Wright: to become a system operator.

[00:18:27] Fery Kaszoni: So in 2020, I started posting on LinkedIn. I said, I had a few passive income sites. They were making a few thousand pounds per month. So they made more money in 2020, like the passive income sites, made more money than what the client work did on average before that. So apart from doing the client work before 2020, I was also building online assets like income tax calculators, like a calculation calculator, and scam number sites, and they'll start making money. And I said, there's no point doing client work now.

[00:19:05] Fery Kaszoni: It's the craziness that's happening in 2020.

[00:19:10] John Wright: Let me just start sharing my knowledge with the world.

[00:19:14] John Wright: And even yesterday, I was watching one of my videos there. I was so awkward on video. Oh my God. I mean, even now, maybe I'm awkward sometimes, but sometimes I'm awkward on purpose with the wigs that I wear.

[00:19:27] Fery Kaszoni: But I was so awkward with some of the videos.

[00:19:30] John Wright: But I said, I'm just going to share the knowledge and share everything that I know.

[00:19:34] Fery Kaszoni: And I had a client and the first real client who reached out towards the middle of 2020 after posting consistently was an education client. They said, hey, Feri, I've seen your content. I think you're great. Can you help us with this site?

[00:19:51] John Wright: And I was like, wow, where did that come from?

[00:19:57] Fery Kaszoni: And I said, yes, sure. I said, there's nothing to lose. I'm going to tell them, you know, 5,000 pounds a month. And if they're happy to work like this, then we'll smash it for them. Because that's a greater budget than I ever had from any client prior to that. Like clients of like a thousand pounds a month or like 500 pounds a month, which now looking back, it's not even good for a meeting. It's not even enough for a meeting, right?

[00:20:26] John Wright: And they say, oh, sure. Send me the invoice. I'm like, wow. Send them the invoice. They pay the invoice. And then two weeks after that, another financial, like an IVA company reached out in the same way, say, Feri, I've seen your case studies, your content is great. And we have this website. Could you help us with this website? So yeah, 5,000 pounds for a month. And we can certainly help.

[00:20:53] Fery Kaszoni: And they say, yes. And then we had instantly like two clients who pay 10K a month.

[00:20:59] John Wright: And I was like, this is crazy. I have to double down on this content. But then I had to do, I have to do the work. So how, how do we deal with this?

[00:21:08] Fery Kaszoni: And then I had Michelle Aston, our head of operations now, who was messaging me on LinkedIn before say, Hey, Feri, I want to work in digital marketing. No, I've seen your content. I see your local in Whitney. Do you need some help? And I always said, no, no, no.

[00:21:24] John Wright: And when the second, I think, is it when the first, I'm not sure whether when the first invoice was paid or like the second client joined. And I say, Michelle, I even made a post about this online. They say, Michelle, I think we are, we are ready to take you on board now. And then she joined.

[00:21:40] John Wright: And then I've seen when you have a person who's passionate about your mission. Michelle was like the first actual employee who I've seen.

[00:21:49] Fery Kaszoni: She would do anything. She said she would work for free. She would do anything just to make this, you know, best make this mission a success.

[00:21:58] John Wright: And I've seen the power of that. I said, if we could find more people like Michelle, that's where we have a successful business. And then we started, we started finding new people and Michelle helped a lot. I mean, you know, find the initial key employees and that's where the big booth started when I started thinking of it as, you know, as, as you need to find the right people, you need to build the right processes. We started building, you know, processes from the problem up. So we started the processes from the problem. So we have this problem. How can we build a system around it? So it resolves the problem systematically, consistently, every

[00:22:38] John Wright: time this problem appears. So it's not just for that specific problem, but whenever we have this situation, how can we use a plug and play system where we plug it in and the problem is solved and that's where we started, you know, really, really taking off and then more clients started coming. And in 2021, so the next year we decided we're going to stop doing SEO and we'll focus on just digital PR.

[00:23:06] Fery Kaszoni: And that's when things started. That's when, when, when people started thinking of us, not like as an SEO agency who does this and does that and does that, and then they do some content sometimes and they also do this, they said, Oh, there's a specialized digital PR agency in the UK.

[00:23:22] John Wright: Who is the go to, you know, entity for this service. And then every time people think of even now, especially now, people think of the digital PR, it's our company who comes to their mind. And I think that that's where, you know, we're really exploded because we became a single service specialized agency. If you want to go to, you know, to have a, you know, I know a surgery, like, like if you want to, if you want to do some dental work, you don't go to a GP, you go to a specialist dentist, right? And that's, that's what we are in the industry. Or like the specialist where, where people come. Um, and yeah, that's where, that's where we exploded.

[00:24:03] Fery Kaszoni: Let's talk about case studies. Cause I can, I could definitely hear them from you all day. What are some of the most impactful case studies that you've made?

[00:24:13] John Wright: So impactful, impactful on, on, on the, what impactful on, on the client or on the business? I would say maybe a bit of both, but ones that you were like, you were just kind of surprised at how well they did where you aimed for something and it just blew it out of the water where you're like, wow, this is, you've either learned something that you can maybe add to your system or something that was just like totally surprised you.

[00:24:37] John Wright: Yeah. I know exactly that that specific case study that changed the course of our business. So in 2021, there was a few shortage at the petrol stations. Many have, might have seen this video. It's been viewed by like probably hundreds of thousands of times on a low platforms.

[00:24:59] John Wright: It's a, it's a car guide fuel shortage video where it was a Saturday morning. If I remember well, and it was, I was driving around, I was driving around in town, I've seen there's a big queue at the petrol stations and I said, people must be thinking of like electric cars because we electric cars, you don't have to wait in line at the petrol station. I'm just trying to think whether I had the electric car

[00:26:03] Fery Kaszoni: guide.co.uk and this is perfect for them.

[00:26:08] Fery Kaszoni: So I quickly came to office and I started writing up a little insight like, Hey, searches for electric cars exploded 1400% because there's like a fuel shortage at the petrol stations. And then I did an expert commentary and a little quote on behalf of our client in the email and pushed it out to various journalists who write about cars.

[00:26:34] John Wright: It, it, it got us like, I think 30 or 50 links in like, like overnight. It was a massive success. All the big publications big thing.

[00:26:43] Fery Kaszoni: And not just that story, but they were writing about the whole situation. Then they included a section where they quoted our client and they quoted our, you know, a little print screen that I've done on Google trends. Like, Hey, look how many people are looking for electric cars now.

[00:26:56] Fery Kaszoni: It was, it was a game changer because I said, wow, if we can replicate this. Well, like the whole team level. So not just, you know, once in like three months, but if all of our team members can actually open their receptors, the trends and look for Google trends, look for, you know, spikes in, in, in, in various, on various topics.

[00:27:17] John Wright: And they're related to our clients.

[00:27:19] John Wright: We, we could, we could win big with this one. And then we started creating processes around this and that case study really changed the course of our business. We really started getting lots of our team members doing reactive Google trends based campaigns, it changed everything.

[00:27:38] Fery Kaszoni: Yeah, that's, that's quite the story. It was almost like another question I had of like, like, what is the recipe? Like, is it something that you can replicate or put into a system? And I think it's not easy because my, my opinion or take on this is that what you're doing requires a lot of investment upfront of work in both creativity and planning, and I think, you know, from just talking to a lot of different SEOs that it's only the 1% that have success in every aspect of business, in my opinion, so it's almost like you're kind of doing with the what you're doing with the 1% will do and 99% of people, they want, they want the virality of

[00:28:15] Fery Kaszoni: that link campaign, but they're not willing to put in that both upfront work and the creativity part of it. Yep. Yep. Well, as a disclaimer, like not all campaigns are viral. So I don't think, I think most campaigns get between like eight, eight and 10 links, so that's just normal and that's, you know, that's what we consistently achieve.

[00:28:33] John Wright: But some campaigns go viral and especially if clients, you know, monthly campaigns with us, eventually throughout the year, some of the campaigns will, you know, we'll have like those big spikes. I don't want people listening, oh, fairies, the only viral campaigns. Not quite. We do lots of viral campaigns per month because we, we work on about 300 campaigns, two to 300 campaigns per month. So that's our, you know, volume. So out of 200 campaigns that we work on for all of our clients, many of them will be viral, therefore I have lots of, you know, case studies to share, but even with the case studies I'm trying to share, not just, you know, the viral ones I'm trying to share the eight links or the 10 links and then 30 links and then again,

[00:29:12] John Wright: eight links, so people don't, you know, when they come to a meeting with me, they don't expect, oh, I want like 50 links, but not really. You will not get 50 links with every campaign. In fact, most campaigns will get you like eight links.

[00:29:25] Fery Kaszoni: Yeah, but, but, but there is a system for you. There is a system to be consistent and it's just learning from past campaigns, finding the little elements that we can plug out and plug it into the process. So that next time, you know, it's a bit better and it's a bit better. That's how, that's how we do it.

[00:29:43] John Wright: Would you say as well that sometimes the campaigns that you expect to be the best, maybe aren't as good and then you have the opposite happen as well? Yeah. Yeah. We have, we have campaigns that don't, and all our links, but, but then because we guarantee links, we just launch free campaigns for the client. So the client has zero risk because we take the risk on a non-performing campaign and because we just launch free campaigns for them and eventually, no matter what we always deliver actual links. So we do have campaigns that flop and it's, it's heartbreaking. It's, it is heartbreaking and it's heartbreaking, especially for the PR executive who spent like two weeks on doing this great thing and then we

[00:30:22] John Wright: push it out and like, nothing happened. So that can happen, but it doesn't matter if that happens because we just launch new campaigns and we deliver anyway.

[00:30:33] Fery Kaszoni: I saw on one of your YouTube shorts and you did a link building campaign. I think it was dancing with the stars or dancing on ice. And I think you did something where you looked at the value of each influencer of what they were worth. And you tell me more about how that campaign rolled out and what was the end result from it.

[00:30:52] John Wright: I think that was quite, quite a while ago. I was, I think that video was about almost two years ago. We just simply looked at, it's, it's a very typical campaign where it's a very typical campaign type where we did like the most influential football players or the most influential dancing on ice stars, where we just analyze their follow account on all social media platforms. And then we calculate with an estimated tool, they're like social media earnings estimators, how much they would earn if they would make a sponsored post.

[00:31:29] Fery Kaszoni: And then we just say, these are the most influential, like the richest

[00:31:34] Fery Kaszoni: influencers in this area, because they could earn the most, if they would make a sponsored post based on this calculator.

[00:31:43] John Wright: And then we push it out. And then because it was a hot topic, journalists wanted some interesting insights, you know, they always want something that's not like boring or like, that's not like the same. So this added a little extra sprinkle on, on their stories.

[00:31:58] John Wright: And then like this person is like the most influential dancing on ice stars, even, even though they are not like the most popular on the show, they might be more influential because they have more followers and they can make more money with, with a social media post.

[00:32:14] Fery Kaszoni: Yeah, awesome. And what would you say for, would you say that LinkedIn is maybe becoming a different avenue for affiliate marketers to tap into? Because I think a lot of us, like, I know for what we both do, like we're kind of more B2B, but do you think more people can leverage LinkedIn for B2C or just being an affiliate marketing and using a channel like LinkedIn? Oh, absolutely. I mean, LinkedIn is, is crazy. LinkedIn is, if you take it seriously, if you don't go spamming people, if you really go there to give value and to build up a brand, build up an audience, LinkedIn is the shortest way, is the fastest way to build up a brand, whether

[00:32:53] Fery Kaszoni: it's a personal brand or like, like a non-personal brand, it's, it's a game changer, like in any industry. Now, I know there are influencers in any niche that make a lot of money, even just with affiliate marketing. If they provide good value, they build up. The idea is to build up an audience that wants to hear from you, right? And you can only build that up if you help others.

[00:33:23] John Wright: So if affiliate marketers want to build up a personal or non-personal brand, just look for LinkedIn too, and just go to LinkedIn to help others. If you can do that, and if you do that for many, many months in a row, eventually you'll build up a solid, solid audience, because affiliate marketing is about audiences, right? Whether it comes from Google search or whether it comes from YouTube or any other social media presence, it's about audiences. Do you have a large enough audience so you can make, you know, enough money from commissions as an affiliate marketer?

[00:33:59] Fery Kaszoni: So LinkedIn is, is one of the easiest way to be a way to build up an audience. And, but you have to put in like a lot of work. It's not like I post about, I know Ma, Ma Ling juice every day, and then people will, will follow me. I post about how, how they can have a better life, how they can have a better career, and that's yeah, it's LinkedIn is, is the most magic thing.

[00:34:25] John Wright: I would agree. I mean, I think it's benefited me immensely in the last year and half of focusing on it and just going full circle back to what we were chatting with at the beginning where you said, I'm going to make my first video. And you ended up creating your audience. I think there's a lot of people that are kind of scared of having not just their first video done, but being really critical of it. I mean, you mentioned how you look back on your video and you're going, you know, it's, it's raw, it's probably your least professional version of it, but I mean, you wouldn't have your experience in your audience if you hadn't have got started. Absolutely. You have to start, you have to put the ego aside.

[00:35:02] John Wright: And if you're not, you know, if you're not like a super, you know, super good looking person, I'm not, I don't think I'm, you know, or like, you don't like how your eyes are looking in the video, just go with it. It doesn't matter. People will not, will not not follow you because of your eyes or like whatever, you know, your ear is different. They will not follow you because you don't have value in your content. So as long as you can give value on your content, you can be as awkward in your speech, your, you know, character as, as, as you want to, if you help others, they will want to hear again from you.

[00:35:39] John Wright: So anything, the way you speak, the way you look, the way, you know, and it, it doesn't matter is the only thing that matters is what value can you share with others.

[00:35:49] Fery Kaszoni: And people will want to buy from you. My strong opinion when you, when you give out value.

[00:35:55] John Wright: It's, you know, sometimes I look at some influences, I'm almost feeling guilty for, for, you know, if, if I had to buy something and they gave me a lot, lot of value, a lot of advice upfront, I would feel guilty if I, if I bought the service from somebody else. Cause like that person helped me so much. And I had this, I had this, you know, with designers, like I've learned so much from people that how, how could I even think of buying from somebody else when this person has been helping me for years? Like it would be a sin. Right.

[00:36:28] Fery Kaszoni: And, and that's, that's how, that's how love works. Like that's how kindness works when you give it upfront.

[00:36:34] John Wright: People want to buy from you because you have helped them before, like a lot.

[00:36:39] Fery Kaszoni: And even if they don't buy from you this time around, they might actually recommend you and those people that I mentioned before that I would buy from or have bought from, I've recommended them so many times just because it's, it's the least you can do.

[00:36:54] Fery Kaszoni: Yeah, indeed. Absolutely. It's.

[00:36:57] John Wright: Yeah. As you said, so that's why, that's why, you know, when you, when influencer launch like T-shirts, you want the people want to support them and even if they're not going to wear it, they're going to just buy it so that they support, you know, support the person because he's been giving, giving, giving, giving, whether it's like entertainment, like even entertainment is giving, right? Because you give something good to their life. You contribute in a positive way into, into their lives.

[00:37:24] Fery Kaszoni: And yeah, it's, it's magic how, how it works. When you give with content, you build up the audience and they want to work with you then.

[00:37:33] John Wright: I just wrote down an idea from that comment. I'm going to jump into the next question, which is if you had to start from zero and you're going to build an affiliate site and the goal was to get it towards earning six figures a month, regardless of how much time that takes, what is your strategy for making this happen?

[00:37:52] Fery Kaszoni: It depends. What budget would you think? So am I, am I, am I starting it as, as I am now? Zero. Zero. So zero budget. Yeah. Is there a side also why you want to have the job?

[00:38:03] John Wright: Exactly.

[00:38:05] Fery Kaszoni: Like it's, it's a, you have a job, you're just doing it on the side. You have maybe zero, maybe a hundred dollars, like a hundred dollars is going to get you domain and hosting. If you think you need the domain.

[00:38:20] John Wright: Well, you would have to put in the money anyway, but it would have to come from your time. Right. Exactly. If you, if I will start an affiliate site, I will say to my wife, you know, for the next six months, you will see me very, you know, very few hours

[00:38:40] Fery Kaszoni: because I want a mission to build an affiliate site and they would have to, you know, your partner or like anyone who is involved would have to accept

[00:38:48] Fery Kaszoni: that you will not be there because you have to pay with something. There's no way you can just put up a site, press a button and get, you know, traction you have to put in the time. So I would just commit to probably five hours a day, which I know is a lot when you have full-time job or like you have some other endeavors or four times a day, four hours a day.

[00:39:09] John Wright: And, you know, just start, just start the affiliate, which, which, which niche are you thinking should, should, should I talk about which niche I would choose or, or how, how would you, you know, I want to just be more specific with the answer to your question. Yeah. I, you know, I would leave it to you. I mean, obviously your, your niche is going to be different based on your experience and I think the general advice most of us would have would be pick something that you're going to want to enjoy working in, you know, it goes without saying from the, from the SEO hat that you'd put on that you'd want to do like a lot of research and going, what is the value of this market?

[00:39:47] John Wright: And how can I penetrate something that might be competitive and have, have something that I know I can own a space in.

[00:39:54] John Wright: Indeed. I think there's different, different, it's different kind of niche, niches that you would, you will think of like, you know, like the easy niches we like long tail, not, not so competitive, which are rewarding, but not as rewarding.

[00:40:09] John Wright: Like, let's say fishing rods, which are like a very small niche and you can probably have, you know, a quick fast traction there, but, but the top level of rewards are going to be like lower than let's say, if you go for casino affiliates, right? So we gambling affiliates, the rewards are like crazy, but you need to, you need to put in a lot of like money or a lot of time there. There are some, some, you know, sub niches there that are not as competitive, so if you're clever, you can even, cause I know many people like, oh, gambling, it's fine.

[00:40:47] John Wright: Don't do gambling, but gambling is probably one of the most rewarding niches because even when you build it up, you might have somebody coming and buying the websites from you. And like for big money, we had a, we had a client, you know, ask gamblers.com.

[00:41:02] Fery Kaszoni: I know, I know the founder of it.

[00:41:06] John Wright: That's awesome. So they, we have been building, you know, they've been our client in the 12 months running up to the sale this year. I think it was in April or March when they sold it for like $40 million. $40 million.

[00:41:18] John Wright: So, and they had three websites, Ask Cumbers, Jon Slots and U Casino.

[00:41:24] John Wright: And that can happen, right? A big, big company like Gig comes to you and they can buy even, even if it's, even if you have like a thousand visitors a day or like 500 visitors a day, in the iGaming-ish, it can be worth like hundreds of thousands of pounds if you want to sell it, if, if you have the right strategy. So that's like high rewarding, highly rewarding, but you know, risky and hard to penetrate market. Or you have like the fishing rods where, you know, it's, it's not as, you know, like books or something like that, which are like lower reward, but faster results and probably, it's probably more consistent results.

[00:42:00] Fery Kaszoni: But when I was out, I would probably start somewhere in the, in the middle, if I had no money, I would only start with affiliate if I had like money, if I had like, you know, money to push, you know, content creation to technical, I think technical SEO now is becoming more and more important in the iGaming because you cannot just set up a WordPress site with, you know, whatever, in a random theme, you have to have like proper, you know, EEAT, proper schema, proper, you know, authors who also have like social presence or like real people, especially after the Google, this latest Google update, you need, you need like proper authors on the website.

[00:42:37] Fery Kaszoni: So unless you have money, you cannot really do that unless you are the author.

[00:42:44] John Wright: Which, you know, you would have to update your social media profile, right? To be like, oh, like gambling expert, like, that's fine.

[00:42:51] John Wright: So yeah, I would start with, with a smaller niche and then, and then as money starts rolling, then go maybe go into other niches as well. But yeah, it really, it really depends on how, I think this, this could be like a two hours discussion about how would you start with affiliate? Well, first of all, by domain name, of course, I identify a niche that you love to write about and you are happy for your social media, you know, presence to be affiliated with. Like, you know, you are, I think with the whole, the hobby is the best, right?

[00:43:26] John Wright: If you like course, then you might want to start an affiliate site about course, or something that you are passionate about and that you are happy to write about because you would have to associate your profile with the articles.

[00:43:40] Fery Kaszoni: Especially like after the Google initially was like, hey, just go and generate an AI image, put it there, name it, you know, Jason, whatever, doe or whatever you want it. And, and that was easy, easier. But now that, that, that game is over. There's no affiliate with AI, AI people, like fake people.

[00:44:01] John Wright: I think not everyone is passionate about SEO, but I also think if someone wants to get started, I think actually copying some of what you've done for your success is actually not a bad idea, which is learn SEO, do consulting, start doing some SEO audits, get some experience, get some money in the bank. And once you have that money in the bank, I mean, your work in learning SEO is going to be done by having pressure to, you know, do actually audits that are going to generate business. And I think once you gain that experience, you can then apply that to your own affiliate sites and basically might be able to support yourself where you actually now have a bank role to be able to play

[00:44:41] John Wright: with and say, I can now invest a bit more in content and not have to worry about having that job and sacrificing family time and everything else. Yeah. I think affiliate, affiliate is becoming more difficult for the absolute starters, because even Forbes and even lots of big publishers are now chewing into every possible affiliate keywords, even long tail now, not just like the big ones.

[00:45:05] John Wright: They're going after the long tail. Well, good luck for that guy with no budget competing with that.

[00:45:13] John Wright: The game is changing. It's still great if you have the resources and the knowledge to push. I mean, we have some affiliate clients who they have a job, but they spend five, six, even 9,000 pounds a month with us on PR. And they're only like, you know, one of them is like Aquarium. They're like Aquarium blog that talks about, you know, fish, fish and Aquariums.

[00:45:39] John Wright: Even the small niches, like those guys have big budgets for even PR.

[00:45:45] John Wright: So it's becoming very competitive, but it's still very lucrative. Like if you have the money, like then, then you can talk. You can, as you said, you can afford to have content creators, link builders, technical SEO. That's how, that's how the affiliate game is being played today.

[00:46:02] John Wright: And I think just to double down, because you mentioned for SEO, there's like technical SEO, having proper schema and proper authors. I think the authorship is going to be more important where it's not just real. I think the way realness is going to be translated is going to be more through video and it's going full circle back to being authentic and giving up value. 100%. Like the next gen affiliate sites, even the small ones will have a good YouTube channel with great, great videos. They will have a good Twitter. They will have even Facebook and they will have Instagram and they will be tied around the website.

[00:46:41] John Wright: And they're almost, they're going to be like influencers in their field. That's going to be, that's where the affiliate, you know, website business is going to like building like a solid audience, even on social media, around the brand, that's where it's going towards. I think that's the direction. That might be the key insight. And I'm definitely going to share that with a few people because I've had similar conversations. The last question is what do you see as the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence?

[00:47:19] John Wright: With business intelligence?

[00:47:22] John Wright: Well, I think it's already, it's already there, right? Because there's more and more systems and they're being built to maximize the efficiency of, you know, even the conversions and even who, you know, how they retarget people. And I think it's already there. Like I think as big and bigger budgets are coming into this field, the more, the more it's going to be intertwined with everything. Just like an affiliate business will not be just that a solo guy in the bedroom.

[00:47:59] John Wright: It's going to be a complete business system built around the, the, the, the money generating asset, whether it's a website or whatever it would be, right? It's going to be, and that's already happening. It's already happening. Like, but what do you mean by business intelligence? Like more specifically, what did you think about, what do you think of when you said this, you know, business intelligence world? It's, it's a great question because it's almost like a generic keyword and it's like, well, business intelligence is making smarter decisions based on data and my opinion is that a lot of the original SEO tools were some of the more. Like they're actually some of the only business intelligence tools I consider

[00:48:39] John Wright: an affiliate marketing today, but it's changing. So for example, you look at analytics, search console, Ahrefs, Semrush and screaming frog, I mean, we were like the SEO was like 10, even maybe 15 years ago, they were driving business intelligence in, in e-commerce, affiliate marketing, you name it. And now we're starting to see a big trend where, you know, Google acquires Looker Studio, uh, Salesforce acquires Tableau and then Microsoft has Power BI. And these companies, I mean, they're, they're math, multiple billion dollar

[00:49:16] John Wright: companies, and there's more of them in the background as just, those are just like data, business and, and BI tools.

[00:49:24] Fery Kaszoni: I think, I think, I think that that intelligence, you know, and the data will, will be, and it is already mostly used around lead generation and conversion rate optimization, I think this is, this is where, and it's already been happening, like, as you said, Ahrefs has been a, a business intelligence tool for, you know, I think a decade now, or even more and Semrush as well. So it's already, it's already been a big part of, of the whole affiliate businesses, affiliate business concept.

[00:49:57] John Wright: But I think it's going to be more and more like with the onset of AI.

[00:50:01] Fery Kaszoni: Can you imagine when you combine every data set and you plug it into an API and like into a system that's being powered by different, you know, Google and the open AI API, and then all the other ones that are going to come and they're going to work together as a system.

[00:50:16] Fery Kaszoni: It's going to be crazy. And we, we cannot even imagine what was, we already start, start building some crazy systems around, around it's, it's crazy what's going to come next year. So we already use Google and LP API and open AI API and lots of others. Ahrefs is coming in into the play to run our operations in a more efficient way. It's going to be crazy.

[00:50:40] John Wright: But of course, you want an affiliate business, but I can imagine for, for an affiliate business, I mean, it really depends on what the nature of that affiliate businesses, right? But it's, it's just going to amplify everything. It's just going to make everything more efficient and more profitable. I agree. Ferry, thank you so much for doing this. I want to pass it back to you to ask how people can get a hold of you.

[00:51:01] Fery Kaszoni: Well, just, just Google my name, Ferry, Ferry Kasoni. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn is my, is my place. I'm on YouTube. I'm on Twitter. But, but LinkedIn is where I really, you know, I really have the biggest audience and that's where I really enjoy hang out and, and sharing knowledge and sometimes sharing, you know, even parody videos where I have a wig or I go and, you know, show a rose from Titanic, some links and, and yeah, LinkedIn is my place. Awesome. I love those videos and you can get all of those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for doing this.

[00:51:39] John Wright: Good to be here.

[00:51:41] Fery Kaszoni: Thank you for tuning in to the affiliate BI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. That helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners.