How To Sell SEO with The Apprentice Winner Mark Wright

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: How To Sell SEO with The Apprentice Winner Mark Wright
Host: John Wright
Guest: Mark Wright
Published: Fri, 01 Mar 2024 02:13:00 +0000
Duration: 31:31

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: I think a lot of consulting I do now or coaching work I do with SEO or digital marketing agencies is I say to them, you are great at what you do. But when you're with the customer, when you're pitching, you make everything understandable for them. You make them feel important because people don't like to feel stupid. And when you start going in with all the digital marketing jargon, all of a sudden you create an us and them environment. And the business owners just thinking, I don't get these people. I don't like these people. They're asking me for money and I just don't get it. And I think that's where I've had a lot of success in my career.

[00:00:37] John Wright: I'm going to share this with all of my SEO friends that do SEO agency, they need to hear this.

[00:00:43] John Wright: Thank you. Listen, a few years ago, I wouldn't have told you because it was my secret source, but I've sold my SEO agency for many millions of pounds and many tens of millions of dollars. And now I can say it happily.

[00:00:57] John Wright: I'm John Wright, and you're listening to affiliate BI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by StatStro.

[00:01:07] John Wright: Welcome to the affiliate BI podcast. Today, we've got a special guest, Mark Wright, who is the winner of the UK apprentice 2014. He founded Climb Online, an SEO agency. He's the UK entrepreneur of the year in 2018, and he's the investor. And he's also the founder of WriteOn Properties and WriteOn Investments. Mark, welcome to the show. John, it's great to be with you. Thank you so much for having me. So we're obviously going to talk about the apprentice because I'm a big fan of it. I wanted to ask how you got started into SEO and the story behind saying, what the hell, let's just, let's apply for the UK apprentice.

[00:01:45] John Wright: Well, John, it was more luck than it was good management. I was working as a personal trainer, um, 20 years and 20 kilos ago. And, um, basically I started working at the college where I did my personal training certificate and the college was doing really bad. They were posting terrible results in two or $3,000 a month in sales. And it was going bankrupt company. And the owner came to me and he was in desperate need of getting more sales. And he said, we need to be advertising. We need to be getting more students. And I said, where are we advertising? And he said, we're in the yellow pages. And it was like this old book with yellow, literally yellow pages.

[00:02:25] John Wright: And people used to open it and call from it. And that was dying. And Google had just came out and I said, listen to the guy, Don, you need to be on Google. And I taught myself how to do some PPC and some SEOs. And in three months of being ranked number one on Google for the term personal training college, we went from $2,000 a month in sales to $240,000 a month in sale. And it was like that light bulb moment. I think that every entrepreneur or business person has where you're like, this is going to be something. I don't know what this is yet, but it's going to be something. And that was really the catalyst for me to drop everything and go

[00:03:04] John Wright: headfirst into digital marketing. And I started working at a, at a big agency. I really disagree with the way they treated their staff. I disagreed with the way they treated their customers, but I loved digital marketing. I enjoyed it. I was good at it. I understood it. And for the first time in my life, I didn't do very well at school. I didn't do very well at sports. I was always searching for what I was good at or what I felt comfortable doing. Work always felt to me like work, but when I found digital marketing, it was the first time that I was really good at something and work didn't feel like work, I could happily stay and worked till nine, 10 o'clock at night. And I didn't know that was possible.

[00:03:42] John Wright: And I've heard people talk about love what you do. That's easy to say. It's really hard to find something you love. And digital marketing was the first time I found that. And, uh, that at that point I was living in London and I was working in a big agency with 500 employees and the guy on the desk next to me said, Hey, bro, let's try out for the apprentice. And I said, what's the apprentice? He said, it's a TV show where an old man yells at you. And I hadn't heard of Alan sugar. I hadn't heard of the apprentice. I hadn't seen the TV show, but I went with my friend, Blake, to the tryouts along with 75,000 other people.

[00:04:21] John Wright: And I went through the most grueling two month process of whittling it down from 75,000 people to the 20 that went onto the program in series 10, which I became famous for going on and winning and becoming one of the most successful winners of that show to go on and create a business with Alan sugar over the next eight years in digital marketing.

[00:04:44] John Wright: Yeah. That's an amazing story. Congrats on that. I want to talk about something you just said there, which is you found at an early age, love what you do and you're right. It's easy to say that and not feel it. And I'll share my quick story where I'm 45 and I feel like I've finally figured out over 20 years of doing everything. I've done SEO consulting and I'm always going to not like I'll lose going up against you in the SEO space, but I like SEO. So I've done design consulting, affiliate marketing, but engineering and software is where I belong and I'm lucky that I found that after 20 years.

[00:05:21] John Wright: How do you just explain that to people where you say it, but I think a lot of people, they don't feel it and get it until they run into this. Firstly, congratulations on, on, on that because we're very lucky and we fall into a rare category because most people spend so much of their life grinding it away, either a nine to five or a job they hate because they've got bills. They have to pay a family they have to provide for and they keep turning up into this life of really misery that they're not enjoying or not achieving their full potential when I speak at schools or when I do work with charities

[00:05:59] John Wright: like the princess trust, what I say to kids is fail quickly and try as many things as possible. If you're watching the clock to look for five or five 30 for home time, that's a pretty good indication. You're not in the right career. You should be missing lunch by accident. It gets to five o'clock and you can't believe it's five o'clock because you've been so immersed in what you're doing because you want to learn everything there is to do it and you might be hearing this and that sounds absolutely impossible from where you are currently. And I've been in that position. I used to hear people say, love what you do. I hated all my jobs.

[00:06:37] John Wright: I was crap at all my jobs until I found the right job. Doesn't matter who you are, what your circumstances are. There will be something that is meant for you. That could be being a fireman, a police officer, a mother, an engineer, whatever it is, continue to try things. And if you hate it, move quickly and move on to the next thing. Try things, offer your time for free. Do apprenticeships, do trades, whatever it is, just try lots of stuff. And eventually you'll get into something and go, this doesn't feel like working. And that's a good hint that you found the right place. Going back to the UK apprentice, I actually didn't think Lord Sugar would pick your project.

[00:07:17] John Wright: I've got an SEO background. I'm like, I don't think he goes for these types of things. And surely there must've been so many applicants where it's, I'm going to do a digital agency. So I think you had to have found your way through that whole process. But what do you, what do you think he said? Let's try something different. I think it was two things. I think timing was on my side and the SEO and digital marketing space was exploding and Lord Sugar's no fool. He knows that even if he doesn't fully understand it, that there's money on the table. And if you can link up with someone or invest in someone who does understand it, that's a good opportunity to create a great business. And that's what good investors do.

[00:07:55] John Wright: The other thing that goes always, and has always been in my back pocket as a successful person in digital marketing, is I'm good at taking complex things, complex languages, complex ideas and industries and breaking it into plain, understandable English. And people who went before and pitched agencies, people of Lord Sugar's generation talked in impression share, conversion rate, click-through rate, cost per acquisition, CPL, CPA. And it just goes over their head. And if they don't understand it, people don't like to feel they don't understand something.

[00:08:35] John Wright: So they don't invest in it. They don't go with it. And my idea was I'm going to be talking to 9 million people called viewers of the BBC.

[00:08:44] John Wright: 1% are going to understand SEO, maybe a bit more. And those people are going to hate me because they're going to think I'm oversimplifying SEO. But the other 98%, I'm going to make a complex subject more understandable for them. So my idea was to go on and say, Google, it's like a big ladder. And I can take your business and take it to the top of the ladder. And Lord Sugar was like, I get it. You get people to the top of the tree in Google. Now, I know that does a disservice to our industry, but I wasn't trying to impress our industry. I was trying to talk to people who have no idea about it. Now I got ridiculed and smashed at digital marketing conferences

[00:09:23] John Wright: for my oversimplification, but it worked with the audience I needed to work with and it helped me win the show. That's actually brilliant. And I think it's a lot of truth. Like you shared a story of how you took like your, what was it? The personal training from a few K like going bankrupt to hundreds of thousands of that story alone will make anyone want to say, Hey, here's money for investment. And I can share the story of like us as a startup doing our pitching, where I focus on the features and everything. And I wasn't getting the investment coming through, but as soon as I started saying, the reason why we came up with this idea is because we actually messed up on the SEO.

[00:10:02] John Wright: We had amazing tech. And then that story alone just like sold everything. It's, it's weird that sales comes full circle back to SEO as being an important thing that everyone overlooks.

[00:10:14] John Wright: Definitely. And I think a lot of consulting I do now or coaching work I do with SEO or digital marketing agencies is I say to them, you are great at what you do. Don't need to say all this or show all this to the customer because you're overcomplicating and you're overconfusing the customer. You do all of the brilliant stuff. And with your team, you talk the tech language and you can say things until you're blue in the face. But when you're with the customer, when you're pitching, you make everything understandable for them. You make them feel important because people don't like to feel stupid. And when you start going in with all the digital marketing jargon, all of a

[00:10:53] John Wright: sudden you create an us and them environment and the business owners just thinking, I don't get these people. I don't like these people. They're asking me for money and I just don't get it. And I think that's where I've had a lot of success in my career. I'm going to share this with all of my SEO friends that do SEO agency. They need to hear this.

[00:11:13] John Wright: Thank you. Listen, a few years ago, I wouldn't have told you because it was my secret source, but I've sold my SEO agency for many millions of pounds and many tens of millions of dollars and now I can say it happily. Awesome. Uh, so what, what did you get out of the business partnership with Lord Sugar as a mentor and yeah, that that's quite the person you get to pick the brain of.

[00:11:37] John Wright: Yeah. Unbelievable. Because if you think about Britain, there's probably, he's probably arguably one of the most or the most successful living entrepreneur, you probably got Richard Branson and Dyson up there, but Alan's definitely one of those names. And I got to work with him on a daily basis for eight and a half years. And the first and foremost thing you get from a great mentor is accountability. You get someone on the end of your emails, on the end of the phone, pushing you constantly to achieve the objectives of the company and a reason why a lot of startup businesses start small and stay small is because they've got too much

[00:12:14] John Wright: of the equity and nobody's keeping them accountable saying, Hey, last month you said you would do XYZ. Where is it? And that pushing you to be accountable is a big element. Now Lord Sugar speaks in my language. He's tough, very tough. He's very goal and sales orientated and that works well for me. And he just brings years and years of experience. So he structured my business with me. He taught me how to hire good accountants, lawyers, how to market ourselves, you know, what to look for in great team members, how to structure commission structures and share schemes and all of that stuff that comes with 55 years of business experience.

[00:12:52] John Wright: And when I first won the apprentice, if you said to me, you could take 250,000 pounds or business mentoring ship, ship at 20 years old, I would have taken that 250,000 pounds. You asked me now as a 34 year old that has seven companies and scaled and sold them, et cetera. I would always take the mentoring ship because mentorship, sorry, because business is a game of experience. The more experienced one is the more successful one is and that experience you can't buy, you have to serve that time and learn from great people.

[00:13:27] John Wright: And Lord Sugar accelerated my career by probably 20 years in terms of what was downloaded to me and experience. What would you say? I know you've done some mastermind groups. Would you say masterminds are something similar where maybe we're not getting access to like someone as prominent as Lord Sugar, but would you say this is a great way to level up and have other people put that accountability on you as well?

[00:13:54] John Wright: I wouldn't say it's a great way. I'd say it's an essential way. Having working with mastermind groups, mentors, having a board in your company. These are all little things that get overlooked because they're seemed as, I don't know, geeky or nerdy, or I don't have time for. And then you wonder why you're staying where you're staying is accountability groups and mastermind groups have been paramount to my success. And all I would say is be mindful of who's in those groups. You want people that are hungry for success, that are goal led, orientated people and that hold each other to accountability where there's no bluff in the room.

[00:14:32] John Wright: It's all no tacit approval. You said you would do this. It's not done. Why is it not done? Or really tough stuff, tough love, because in this world that we're living in now, it's going the opposite direction and you can't say too much or you can't hold people too accountable because it might offend them. Now business, I'm afraid to tell you, doesn't work like that. It is an accountability ladder and you must work it that way. So you're the director and investor of Make More Noise Limited. And I believe it's a digital PR agency. So you can tell us what the agency does beyond SEO.

[00:15:09] John Wright: I wasn't a big believer in PR, believe it or not. I thought it was all fluff and bollocks reports and all of this sort of stuff. Oh, we've got you in this magazine and 500,000 people read it. So that's how many people saw it. That sort of stuff. And I always questioned it, but then I signed up with a great PR agent and agency, and all of a sudden I got listed on Forbes. I got a feature in this great magazine and we got loads of leads. Then I won this award, entrepreneur of the year. This, all the stuff that you rattled off at the start, that was all PR. And what I found is it gave me credibility as an entrepreneur. It gave my business credibility and more leads and customers organically.

[00:15:50] John Wright: But it gave me juicy, sweet PR links to my websites, which had high domain authority and increased the rankings of my website. So I found PR to be a great machine for everything I needed to be for a digital marketing and a holistic profile raising thing. And I then bought 30% of the company. It continued to do well. And I increased my shareholding to 50% because they did such a great job of my PR. And now I'm gone from not a non-believer to the preacher.

[00:16:25] John Wright: I just find that ironic given that the UK apprentice would have given you the best PR and my belief is that good PR is beyond link building. The links are amazing for what they do. But I believe people buy from people and that PR actually amplifies. So if you're getting that traffic, it's not just that you're getting the traffic. You have the links to rank, but the fact that someone does read you in Forbes, they're likely to buy almost whatever it is you're selling.

[00:16:54] John Wright: A hundred percent. And the problem with shows like the apprentice, yes, that was ridiculously successful for me and hugely groundbreaking because I won. For the other 19 contestants that didn't win, they have a very different experience, the way they were edited, the way the cookie crumbled. So then maybe isn't as fortunate as it was for me. Where PR is great is you can structure and craft the light in which you're promoted on the magazines or interviews or the radio, the TV you choose to do with your PR, it can be very focused on who you want to be and

[00:17:33] John Wright: focused as an indig, as a digital person, as a business leader, whatever it is. And that's where it's fantastic. And you're a hundred percent right. I think most businesses don't see it for what it can really be for them. One as a profile builder, but just as a successful way to gain new traction and clients. I saw on LinkedIn, you said, if you're not having haters and trolls, you're not doing something right. And then tying that into PR, I know in doing my podcast, like I haven't got any haters or trolls yet, but I think it stops a lot of people from getting started doing video, getting uncomfortable, being a guest on someone

[00:18:07] John Wright: else's show, what would you say about that aspect of being an important way of controlling your own PR and creating it?

[00:18:16] John Wright: This really used to phase me, particularly when I first started, when I was just starting out and I had 90 followers or friends on Facebook before I had hundreds of thousands that I do today. And I used to see people saying bad things about me. Oh, his voice is weird. Oh, why did he do that? Oh, he looks like this. And you're like, I don't know this people. Why are they saying that? And that, and it would really upset me and hurt me. And I'd want to comment back to them. And the more successful I got, the more followers online I got, the more hate. Intrinsically as one went up, the other went with it just by pure numbers, really.

[00:18:53] John Wright: And what I found is that there's no hater. I've never had anyone troll me that's doing better than me. And there's probably a hint in that. A lot of these, a lot of these people have issues themselves that they're using a mirror really, and that they're showing who they are in that environment. And I always found that the better I'm doing and the more successful I am, the more trolls I have, and I almost use it like a barometer of success. Because if I wasn't doing well, when I wasn't doing well, when I had no money and nothing, no one was yelling at me. Now I have a little bit and I have some haters.

[00:19:30] John Wright: So I use it as a good gauge to tell me that I'm doing things in the right direction and I'm doing well. And I've gotten really good at ignoring it. And I, to be honest, I used to see everyone and I don't see any now. And it just comes with the territory. I'm always looking for patterns of people and businesses for when they've got success. So I'm looking for the signatures. I know. And I wanted to ask you, what are those signatures of success for you and your businesses and maybe even take it as far as what you've seen in other people that you've noticed and you paid attention to?

[00:20:05] John Wright: A great question. Um, it's a fantastic question because success, although it appears to come in all different shapes and sizes in the industry, it's often wrapped up in very similar type of people. And what I've found is those people are always goal orientated. They write their goals down. They have goals. If you ask them what their goals is or what their vision board is, they might have a different word for it, but they'll have it. They'll know what they want out of their business, their life, their health, whatever it is, they're very detail orientated, successful people that detail orientated to people. And I'll give you two examples.

[00:20:43] John Wright: If you write Lord Sugar an email, he will write back in five minutes. He is a multi-billionaire that gets hundreds of emails a day and he writes back faster than most low level executives on a $60,000 salary.

[00:20:59] John Wright: Fast people, successful people respond quickly and they make themselves available. We're doing this interview here. It's nine o'clock at night here in Australia. And I know it's very early in the morning for you. You need to make time to do things. No one has time. Time is our biggest enemy. You create time. You'd be goal orientated. You'd be focused on those goals and you get things done quickly and you get a lot done in a day. And they love what they do. We bring it right back to what we talked about at the start. If you speak to anyone who's got to the pinnacle of their industry, they're an expert in it. They've studied their industry over time. They've studied other successful people and they've stayed in that

[00:21:38] John Wright: industry for a long period of time. And I think if you can do all of those things or even just a number of them, you'll go a very long way.

[00:21:47] John Wright: And I want to ask if you've ever got involved in affiliate marketing or aspired to give in your experience at SEO, digital PR and how these things, they're pretty closely related.

[00:22:00] John Wright: Yeah. I've really done affiliate marketing on a lower level, just some advertising for clients and as their wider strategy. However, for me, affiliate marketing is getting more and more entangled with influencer marketing and all the other strands of marketing that we're seeing and with, and I started in this business, the only game in town was called Google and the Google network, the GDN, and now there's hundreds of thousands of games in town and they've all got pretty decent audience numbers.

[00:22:36] John Wright: So now more than ever, what's important is profiling who you want to talk to.

[00:22:42] John Wright: Eyeballs matter, but more importantly than the number of eyeballs that see something, it's who we're talking to because your product might only work for a certain person. And now I'm more in tune than ever because of things like the iOS updates and the privacy stuff that we're seeing.

[00:23:02] John Wright: Most of my companies spend most of our time in marketing, talking about demographics, who do we want to talk to and what do we want to say? Because you can spend an awful lot of money and lots of different platforms and get nothing out of it. And that's where I think affiliates is important to me. Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned influencer because I interviewed Chris Walker, who's a B2B sales expert. And he talked about how there's a difference between affiliates and influencers where influencers they're creating demand and affiliates. They just sit at the bottom of the funnel capturing it, which is great to do. But I think in a perfect world, you'd be able to have both. What would you say to that?

[00:23:42] John Wright: I, and that's what I was thinking about a lot is they're almost becoming one. We spoke about digital PR and SEO and how those over the last year, they used to be seen as two completely different things, and now it's very hard to tell which one's PR and which one's SEO. I think what we're seeing with the rise and the power of influencers, you've only got to look at something like the Cadesh, the Cadeshians or prime energy drink or any of that stuff.

[00:24:12] John Wright: What affiliate marketing is doing is just where traffic goes. You put an offer. Let's break it down into its simplest form.

[00:24:22] John Wright: What's the difference from Logan Paul selling boxing, and then all of a sudden you buy an energy drink off the back of it. For me, at its purest form, that is affiliate advertising.

[00:24:34] John Wright: He's just the beneficiary.

[00:24:38] John Wright: Exactly. If you ever need a company to invest in that does affiliate marketing, I'll send you a pitch deck. Thank you very much. You're a fascinating guy. I'd love to hear more. Thank you. I always talk about SEO as being one of the first aspects of business intelligence in affiliate marketing, where you think about tools like even the basic one, Google analytics, Google search console. These are advanced things and tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs that have been around a long time. What's your take on these as being like the, I call them the OG BI tools of affiliate marketing?

[00:25:12] John Wright: It's an essential stack. When I start any company in any industry, by the way, any of my companies, I own a flight training school, PR companies, marketing, business, property. If you go into any of them, they all have the same suite of products. And the more I've consulted other businesses and sat on hundreds of business boards, you realize that most businesses are the same. They have their, the same issues. Doesn't matter what industry is. And people like to say, Oh, it's not done that this way in this industry, or we're a bit different as a business or our products a bit different. And let me tell you, that's garbage.

[00:25:52] John Wright: There is no excuse for not having big data or good data in your company, in your organization. And the more data you have that tells you what's going wrong in your company gives you opportunities to make it right. And generally when I go in and buy a company, we're able to add so much value and so much profits just by turning on data systems.

[00:26:14] John Wright: I want to pick your brain. A question that came to mind is you've got different projects you work on. Like you've got your digital PRA agency, you've got your property investments, you're an investor, and I'm sure you have other projects. How do you balance these things and what advice would you give to people that they want to get into your place, but maybe they have to do one thing well before they can actually take on others? How do you balance this?

[00:26:39] John Wright: It's another fantastic question. My life hasn't always been like this. And you answered the question at the end of your question. You need to get one thing cooking and doing really well, because I think you get focused on chasing so many different things that nothing works and you're just becoming busy going nowhere quickly. And I was like that when I was younger and then I put everything to one side and focused on just my agency until I got it to a really decent size. That provided me a good income to invest, to work with other people.

[00:27:18] John Wright: Then I sold that business and that created a large amount of capital to go and do what I do. But through that process, that developed me through the mentoring of Lord Sugar and just years working as the CEO of a company, that gave me management skills, accounting skills, all of that sort of stuff.

[00:27:37] John Wright: Be more practical and in tune with my time. I'm very ruthless with how I work my days and diarize meetings, et cetera. And I know my limitations. I was one of those people that tried to do everything myself when I first started. And now I understand what I'm good at and what I enjoy and what I'm not good at and what I don't enjoy and anything I'm not good at and don't enjoy. I hire somebody else. That's someone else's job. And the things I want to do or I'm good at, that's my job. As I've developed my career, I'm spending more time doing the things I enjoying and am good at and hiring more and more people to do the other stuff.

[00:28:17] John Wright: And it works fantastically well, but that I needed to spend many years at the cold face, building a reputation and the profitability and finances to be able to do what I do now. Yeah. I think a lot of people, they chase, it's almost like a lottery ticket. They want the success. They don't want to spend the hours or the time or the slow growth getting there. They all want the fast growth. And I'm guilty of that myself where I've wanted all these things. And even for my company and doing pitches to investors, they say, I want you to narrow your focus and get really good at the one thing before you jump onto other things.

[00:28:54] John Wright: And listen, we all do it. It's not, we all make that critical mistake, but I sit across every day meetings from people that are much smarter than I am. And I listen to them speak about different topics and they're on a completely different level to me, but they've never experienced the same level of success. And I put it down to being ruthlessly focused on one thing at a time until I've been able to achieve it. And you'll be shocked how far that can take you substantially more forward from your peers just by narrowing in your product set, your business, whatever it is, and to your, the leader.

[00:29:32] John Wright: Then you can go into other things. But as Brian Tracy says, the way you get to the front of the buffet line of life, you get in the back and you stay there long enough to be successful. Our generation particularly keeps swapping lines and wondering why they're staying in the same place. And, but it's a critical failure. A lot of people may. And last question is, what do you see the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence?

[00:29:59] John Wright: I think the future is always going to be bright because there's always going to be traffic, there's always going to be websites, there's always going to be demand. So I think affiliate marketing will change with the things like AI and maybe it'll be a more virtual experience through Apple or whatever it might be. But I think it's always going to be a prominent thing in marketing. And I wouldn't disregard it now or ever. Mark, thank you so much for doing this. I learned quite a bit in this chat. How can people get of all of you? And I want to add, you'll be able to get those links in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for having me. If you, if you go onto any social media platform and search for Mark,

[00:30:37] John Wright: right, I'm verified before, before you could pay to get the verification I was verified. But I'm particularly hot on LinkedIn. If you'd like to connect with me there, please do visit any of my websites, make more noise, write on property, write on aviation. And we would love to work with you in any of our businesses, but more than anything, I just hope that people listening to this, write their goals down and stay focused on their success, no matter what that is in their life. Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. I'll send you a pitch deck after and have a great evening.

[00:31:10] John Wright: Thank you, sir. See you later.

[00:31:13] John Wright: 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 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.