About This Episode
Why should you consider being in a Mastermind group?
Meet James Dooley who's an SEO, affiliate, entrepreneur and investor. He credits masterminds as being the key ingredient to his success in business. He explains that you'll gain more knowledge in a mastermind group than you would attending any conference.
Full Transcript
Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: Mastermind Groups with James Dooley
Host: John Wright
Guest: James Dooley
Published: Fri, 26 Jan 2024 10:42:00 +0000
Duration: 53:42
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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John Wright: So in my opinion, the masterminds are 10, 20 times better than any conference that you can go to. And I'll try to explain why for anyone that's not been in a high level mastermind yet. So when I first started out, um, and, um, well, maybe two years of being into SEO, I started to go to these kind of SEO, whether it was like London affiliate conference, LAC for the iGaming space in London, where it was like Brighton SEO, or going to these big SEO conferences. And then I remember speaking in the bar after a couple of people had spoken. I was like, Oh, that was really good. Like, thanks for sharing that information.
John Wright: And I remember him saying, I didn't give half of half of it away. I'm not going to give all my true knowledge bombs away on stage. And I'm like, what do you mean? And there was like, buy me a drink and I'll tell you some more. And I remember buying like one or two of these SEO influences back then. I never drink and it was telling me so much stuff that wasn't being shared on stage. And I'd go back and test it. And I was like, this is what works. And it wasn't being shared on stage. And they're going, well, why would I share it on stage to every man and his dog? And then they can compete. And so then I was then it like got to a point where I was like, probably roll
John Wright: on four, five years and then I thought, actually, if I can try to get all of these, like people don't speak in back then I was, I was doing very well back then and I started to know behind the scenes because I didn't really speak on stage behind the scenes, I started to know quite a lot of these SEO influences on stage and I says, why don't we start doing like a private meetup?
James Dooley: I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate BI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Statstron.
John Wright: Welcome to the affiliate BI podcast. Uh, we today we're talking with James Dooley. He's the CEO and founder of promo SEO and fat rank, and he's an investor and he happens to organize a lot of masterminds for, uh, business owners and people in the SEO community. So James, welcome to the show.
James Dooley: Welcome.
John Wright: Yeah. Good seeing you. Uh, I want to jump straight into your story of how you got into SEO and what attracted you to the space.
James Dooley: So I actually fell into it. I didn't really know what SEO was. I knew, I knew, I knew that I needed a website and I knew that I needed inbound leads coming in from a construction company.
James Dooley: And then once the website got built, there was no traffic coming in. So, and I then started to realize that I need, um, search engine optimization of the website. Didn't really understand the full algorithms and the form was behind how you actually run the website. So then I went down the rabbit hole of trying to learn it. So started learning it around 15 years ago now. And then from there, then I just wanted to try and make certain I could get a consistent flow of quality inquiries coming through the door. Um, and then one thing led to another and we started doing a lot of what I always call neighboring niches or shoulder in niches where he's trying to
James Dooley: rank for key terms that my customers would want to rank for, which calls more business as well. And then it just led from that to we built out 50 sites and 100 sites and 150 sites and 200 sites. And then, but then we started going in almost any industry that, um, cause we knew what was doing to, um, some people say manipulate Google or feed Google's algorithms, what they want to be fed to rank to the top of Google. And one thing like to know from that, so we all started in the lead generation to be fair for our own company.
John Wright: That makes sense. And it's pretty smart. Uh, when I look at your resume, I see a lot of success on pretty much everywhere you turn on all the projects that you work on and it's quite clear that you're putting in the work. What would you say has led to your success and maybe share some insights of like, you know, why you think others maybe struggle to, um, have success in SEO and or affiliate marketing.
James Dooley: So when I go to a lot of these events, and I don't mean this in a an arrogant way, I probably, I'm one of the most successful people. It's leveraged SEO, but I've also failed by far the most. And I would, I would literally pour whoever is the most successful on, on a leader board of what they've done and how much they've earned. Generally speaking goes hand in hand with who's failed the most. So with regards to the algorithms, the algorithms are changing all the time. So when you, when you're kind of testing stuff out, you need to understand how far you can push certain parameters. So how, how many exact match anchors can you do?
James Dooley: How many like with regards to entities and entity stacking, can you do with regards to content and stuff like that? So it's about understanding how far you can go and what the formula within Google allows you to do. For you to be able to push those boundaries without getting any sort of Google penalty for you to then to be able to leverage number one rankings, because it's quite easy for anyone to get a new website onto page two or page three and the impressions are going all.
James Dooley: But actually getting it from position number five to position number four is a bit more difficult and position number four to number three is a lot more difficult and position number three to position number two is very, very, very hard. And then the final part of getting it with number two to number one is the most difficult bit. So so many people in these industries kind of talk about, oh, I'm on page one and you're like, yeah, but how many clicks are you getting? Like you need to be number one, like realistically. So what can I do? And when I'm competing with some notes, who's good and understands SEO. So keywords in title, timing, URL, and several times in the page. But what else can I do to be beating them out?
James Dooley: Which might be more LSI keywords in the content or more backlinks or more internal links, more topical authority, whatever it is that you need to do to leverage it is kind of what we're testing out every single day. But with regards to success, I would say a lot of it comes down to our testing team, which who fail a lot, who test the parameters and see what they can do, and there's no, there's no better way than having an in-house testing team in my opinion, but it is costly.
James Dooley: Yeah. I guess that may be another way of looking at it is going, you know, why have a lot of people not jumped into the SEO space? I think maybe there's a lack of comfort where you can't really go to school for it and in the school environment, you're not really setting yourself up for failure, you literally have to figure it out. And we obviously know that SEO is changing so fast that it's very difficult to even make a school out of it. Unless of course, uh, you know, with some of the friends we have in common, they have SEO courses, but, uh, you know, you're not really going to college or university to picking up an SEO degree.
John Wright: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the courses, so like, say like the affiliate lab or whatever courses there are out there, they're needing to be updated like every month. Um, so it becomes hard for some of these people that are selling courses. Cause they need to be updating them all the time. It's not like, Oh, like it used to be, Oh, I can create a PDF article and resell that same article a thousand times. And you go, Oh, this, this is quite lucrative because they're no needing to make certain of what's happening today's algorithms they're updating or why is their courses out of date? So it's, it's a, it's a tough industry at the moment. That's your industry to be.
James Dooley: I want to go back to what you said about how difficult it is to go from number four to number three. And then obviously from number three to number two is even more difficult. Um, I had a chance to interview an affiliate who is one of the more successful successful ones in iGaming and ask like, what separates you from the people that are jockeying, you know, bragging about being like, you know, the 13th best iGaming affiliate. Um, what would you say, uh, separates, you know, from what you do from the people that are maybe like five steps behind, I know one thing you commented on was what else can I do to win?
John Wright: Yeah. So there's a lot of different things and this sounds very, I treat every website that we have, I treat as a real business. So what would a real business do? Um, so with regards to real business, you try and get as much exposure as you can in as many different places as you can. So I like to call it effective frequency where you're being seen, um, all different markets of, um, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik TOK, LinkedIn, where there'll be places you can offsite, but then also make certain that, um, maybe in Google news that also you're showing up that you've got images that are showing up in Google images, that you've got videos that shown up in Google videos or in YouTube.
John Wright: So being seen everywhere and being what we cast as being only present, uh, is great because traffic actually is a massive ranking signal. So if you can get traffic from all these different places, then that's massively going to help you rank better on the website, but then you've got to make certain that the content meets the search intent of what the user wants to see. So make it so you've got the right entities and you meet in the source context of what the page is about. And then you need a lots of articles. Let's say the, the I gaming person might've been in the casino industry. You need, you can't just have five pages about casino. You need to talk about every single kind of table table game.
John Wright: There is so talking about back of rack and poker and blackjack slot games. Then there might be, I think there's something like three or 4,000 different slot games. So if you could write about a lot of the slot games that get search volume, the more pages you start to write, the more topical authority that you start to get on the subject.
James Dooley: So you've got good quality content on page, topical or for us. So lots of different articles in about the topic and the subject that you're trying to rent for off page signals with regards to traffic and social media, but links are still a massive part as well. The algorithms and stuff like that. It's just about trying to do all things to the best of your ability, because some people nowadays seem to write a few articles and don't do enough topical authority hit a load of backlinks, but there's no justification of those backlinks. There's no traffic. How can I say I have more backlinks than traffic? It just doesn't make sense. So you need to be trying to make certain everything's being
James Dooley: being done and when the Google algorithms are looking at it, they're going, I can see why they've got that many backlinks because they've got this many social signals. They've got this much traffic. They've got this many articles and it kind of doesn't fall outside of their remit of what looks spamming.
James Dooley: Yeah.
John Wright: I'm going to fast forward to another question I've written down towards the end, but I'm going to ask it right now, which is, do you think another signal that's becoming more important for affiliates is like video and podcasts where we're getting blasted with automated content? Like there's some amazing SEO and content tools out there, but do you think the new signal for authority is going to be become video?
John Wright: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. And so I listen to all your podcasts, but I've not read any of your blogs. Do you know what I mean? So I'll listen to you quite a lot on the video, but I don't really read any blogs or anything like that. Same with a lot of others. Like I'll, I'll put them on and watch and listen to them. And I also think that these two signals to a video, you've got the audio and then you've got the visual. So actually having both of those and you can, and you feel like you're resonating with them when you're listening to them and stuff like that. So yeah, I think video is absolutely, absolutely huge, especially now,
John Wright: like you said, where the age of AI coming along, people can sure know tens of thousands of articles.
John Wright: It's become easier to write a lot of content for people at the time scales. Like even being able to break down, let's say these 20 or 30 mini clips within this video that you can do with the guys to YouTube shots, or you can put it on your stories on Instagram or on TikTok, the YouTube shots where it's like 30, 40 seconds of vital information that can be cropped out. That's, that's key as well. So yes, I think, I think video is, is an absolutely huge part of 2024, especially for a lot of what we're doing with our marketing strategies.
James Dooley: It's good to hear that feedback. And maybe we already saw the signals that this was being effective, especially in the eye gaming space with, you know, the rise of, you know, Twitch streamers and slot streamers. And I think video has always been dominant. I just think that there's two things that I don't believe video is saturated yet. And I still believe that there's a lot of people that they're just not willing to get uncomfortable and do something like this, like start a podcast or say, Hey, I'm going to make a YouTube video shorts or even streaming.
John Wright: Yeah. The, with regards to video, the entry barriers, all the barriers for entries are a lot higher because there's a lot of people that don't want to do video. Where anybody can go and create AI content or come create content and stuff like that. But there's nowhere near as many people that's churning out good quality videos. So I'd say there might only be in the, in the eye gaming, there might only be 30 or 40 decent video, like producers and creators out there where affiliates in the eye gaming space, this probably a thousand. So when you start looking at it like that, you kind of going, okay, yeah,
John Wright: it is a lot easier to try to rank the videos and, um, but, but like I said, the barry's entry is a little bit harder. You've got to be able to be comfortable in front of the camera and stuff like that.
James Dooley: So another question I had was if you only had a hundred dollar budget and you had to start from scratch and build anything, uh, what would your playbook be for, you know, recreating, uh, like a seven figure business or more?
John Wright: So if I've only got a hundred dollars, you need, obviously you can't afford to buy any backlinks or anything like that. So what you need to be doing is you need to be leveraging, uh, your own time, obviously to write content. So what you'd have to be doing, or you can use AI like chat GPT.
John Wright: So I'd try to start, I'd put together, um, a topical plan and I'd put it in order of keyword difficulties. So what, what I could get to try and start ranking for, even though I've only got a DR zero brand new domain, what long tail keywords could I start getting traffic for today? So if I go and write this article, it's a really, really long tail keyword. Um, and what can I try to run for today? And I need to try and start working at my traffic tiers. So people call it like the S O have a lunch approach. So you're trying to go after low keyword difficulty terms. They try and get that traffic and keep building it up and building it up and building it up.
John Wright: The minute I started to earn any sort of commission from any of those pages that are ranking at that point, I just then start pointing to backlinks to try and strengthen up the top, the domain authority of the site. Uh, mainly just like branded home page links and stuff like that. But initially you could only do content. You could try to start leveraging places like medium, which is completely for free, um, LinkedIn pulse, which is completely for free. And then certain places where you can do what's class has been parasite. I see. So you can go and get good quality articles, um, written on those places as well, and they might be able to rank you for a little bit more.
John Wright: Like you can get away on parasite SEO because LinkedIn's got, I don't know if maybe DR 98 or whatever it is, you can get away. They can, they can start ranking pretty much off the bat for like I'd say medium competition type keywords, um, Quora, Reddit. I'd go on into onto those kind of platforms and start, someone's asking anything to do with like what the best casinos are, I try and start dropping in any kind of, um, links to my reviews of what I've done saying, Oh, I think James B. Liz casino is the best because XYZ and link through to my review about it. All that. Um, you can even put affiliate links on Reddit and stuff like that.
John Wright: And I've quite a lot actually that has, has been badly impacted by the helpful content update in September. And they'd moved to Reddit and also they started to do for the last few months is just answering questions and stuff and getting traffic from Reddit. Even though they're getting no traffic from Google traffic from Reddit through to their affiliate site. And there's some people out there doing 23, 24,000 pound a month
John Wright: just from Reddit traffic. So there's lots of ways you can do stuff that they've not spent any money on it. They just spent the time in leveraging certain platforms of where people are asking questions for stuff to do with what's the best slot game for the casino and what's the best welcome bonus at present to sign up to a new casino site and stuff like that. And if you're there and you're answering it and referring via your affiliate link, obviously you earn money.
James Dooley: So would you say for what you do for your businesses or what you teach people has the helpful content update changed your, your strategy? Have you had to react to it or have you've always had this, uh, topical authority mindset to say, look, if you're just trying to be better, you shouldn't have to be worrying about the next Google update that's, that's coming around the corner.
John Wright: So the September update hit three of our sites in a massive way. And so we, we've, we nearly lost, I think it was something like 70 to 75 grand a month, uh, across a few different sites from the helpful content update. We also had, which is quite strange, probably about a 60,000 pound uplift on domains that we wasn't touching. Like they were just park me in the back where I'm doing like five, 10 round the mall and we left him and they've shot up.
John Wright: And the weird part about this, the content, the helpful content update in September was I actually don't think, and I'm not just saying this because some sites went down because they had some sites go up as well. I don't think it was a good update. I genuinely believe that a lot of the sites that got put in place now that are ranking wasn't as good as what there was back in September. So I think there's going to be some sort of reversal. John Mueller has said several times that he's not going to be, but I think at some point with regards to like the behavioral signals, I think people
John Wright: start to like, like what was ranking previously more than what is ranking now. So like Reddit at the time started ranking for certain keywords. That wasn't even updated since 2019. So I can someone say that is the best anything when the last time it was updated was in 2019 roll on four years. What was the best in 2019? Isn't the best note. So I feel like this, they've still got quite a lot of work to do. I feel like obviously there's a lot of people that do spam Google with regards to doing blackout strategies. And they've got to try and combat that, but actually along the way, there
John Wright: was actually a lot of good sites got hit. So if anything, John, even being a hundred percent honest with you, a lot of our testing shown this, this update was almost penalized. It wasn't, but it was about like it was almost penalizing topical authority websites.
John Wright: And what I mean by that is certain people started to scale sites that were doing topical authority and the probably went a little bit too wide. So a little bit off subject. Um, the, the biggest result where people are getting recoveries now, they're actually deleting content and it's helping them get back rankings. So they've gone too wide. The cost of information retrieval within Google is that no, you've got too many pages that are not ranking that we've got to crawl and you need to, you need to sort these out. So actually a lot of it is running like getting a Google search console,
John Wright: running it for screaming frog, sorting by impressions and clicks and saying, in the last 12 months, these pages have had no traffic. Why should I keep it? Is there a reason why I should be keeping this page? Cause if it said no clicks, it's probably not helping out with my topical authority, it's probably hindering my side. And at that point should I be getting rid of it or should I be completely rewriting that article to try and get rankings?
John Wright: So like I said, it's, it's small deleting forth from your content, making it more concise. And we've, we've started to have recoveries from, from the sites that got hit in September and that's, that's how we started to recover believe it.
James Dooley: Yeah. I think there's always a lot of people out there that even if their content might be garbage and not helpful, they probably just can't fathom the idea of deleting it, whether they paid for it or wrote it. And that's a, that's their painful realization.
James Dooley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
James Dooley: So I want to go circle back to these mastermind events and I want to be the fly on the wall, uh, listening in on what goes on in them. Can you just share, um, how you started with these masterminds and yeah, just like share some stories about the experiences of what they do. And I'm sure they give you energy for learning and wanting to just, uh, you know, jump right back in the business. Sure. In, in my opinion, the masterminds are 10, 20 times better than any conference that you can go to. And I'll try to explain why for anyone that's not been in a high level mastermind yet.
James Dooley: So when I first started out, um, and I'm rolling, maybe two years of being into SEO, I started to go to these kind of SEO, whether it was like London affiliate conference, LAC for the eye gaming space in London, where it was like Brighton SEO or going to these big SEO conferences. And then I remember speaking in the bar after a couple of, a couple of people just focus, like, Oh, that was really good. Like, thanks for sharing that information. And I remember him saying, I didn't give half of half of it away. I'm not going to give all my true knowledge bombs away on stage.
John Wright: And I'm like, what do you mean? And there was like, buy me a drink and I'll tell you some more. And I remember buying like one or two of these SEO influences back then buying them a drink and it was telling me so much stuff that wasn't being shared on stage and I'd go back and test it. And I was like, this is what works. And it wasn't being shared on stage. And they're going, well, why would I share it on stage to every man and his dog, and then they can compete. And so then I was then like got to a point where I was like, probably roll on four, five years. And then I thought, actually, if I can try to get older, these like people don't speak in back then I was, I was doing very well back
John Wright: then, and I started to know behind the scenes because I didn't really speak on stage, but behind the scenes, I started to know quite a lot of these SEO influences on stage. And I says, why don't we start doing like a private meet up? We'll all go to the conference, but why don't like the day before or two days before, why don't we do a private meet up between us all and we can collaborate, synergize and share test results? Because the truth of the matter is we started to realize that
James Dooley: the, what was happening in the UK or what was happening in the US or what was happening in America or foreign markets, the algorithms was different. Especially the English speaking to the foreign markets was very, very, still to this day in foreign, you can get away with a lot of black app strategies.
John Wright: There's still a lot of certain backlinks that you can still acquire today that still work in non-English speaking markets. So when we started to learn that, and then we started to kind of educate each other about what's working in all these different industries, we started to realize that what works in finance is different to what works in, let's say, help, which is different to what works in gambling. Now that's, I always thought there was just one algorithm and the one algorithm catered for everything. And when you started realizing different nuances between the algorithms, and then you then started to look at correlation
John Wright: of what like, what your competitors have got, what you then can get away with.
John Wright: It opened up my eyes big time. And that's when then I started to travel the world, creating these private masterminds that are invite only, that we try to get people in that we can kind of, and sometimes we purposely tried to get a few people in that have got contrasting opinions. So we can argue. So these times when you say, if you was a fly on the wall, sometimes for three or four hours, there's just arguments, but the constructive arguments, but you're like, no chance I'd say this, and this doesn't work. And at the end of it, you're so drained and tired, but you've, it's been the best six, seven hours.
John Wright: You learn more in them six or seven hours than you do in months and months and months of reading, reading kind of blogs, watching videos online, because you can, you can kind of control the narrative of what, what we're talking about. So what you're weak at, you can then start asking questions about that. But why would you do this? How would you do it? And stuff like that. So because you can control the narrative and then tackle people if you disagree with them on a video, you can't really start. If you disagree with someone about something, you can't stop them in the tracks and say, Oh, I don't believe in that. When we tried it, we did this. Well, we're going to match the mind and it is very, it's constructive,
John Wright: crazy, and you've got to be able to take like feedback to say, I completely disagree and for my results, it's this, this and this. So, but you wouldn't, I would never, let's say you were speaking on stage job
John Wright: and I disagreed with something that you said on stage. I'm not going to, I'm not going to heckle you. I'm not going to go, no, you're completely incorrect. Cause that wouldn't be a good, like, you know what I mean? That's not going to be good for your personal kind of branding and stuff like that. But in a private mastermind, no one knows what's going on. There's no recordings. If I didn't, if I didn't agree with you about something in a private mastermind, I'd call you out and say, no, John, I disagree with you about that. And then we can have this debate. But that's the best way of doing it. Cause some of these people are on the speaking circuit, they're still saying the same thing as what other people said five years ago, and it doesn't work anymore.
John Wright: And they're still saying it on stage, but no one's going to call them out on stage. So people have been asked to then keep talking at these events and they're like, a lot of the time at the conference events, a lot of the high level SEO don't even listen to the shops, then they'll be at the event, but not even in the conference room.
James Dooley: No, I agree. I think this discussion I've had, uh, privately with a lot of SEOs, especially in maybe some of the eye gaming circles where it's kind of like, do you go listen to the talks and it's like, you kind of got to cherry pick who you want to listen to and you're right. I think, uh, we would all love to actually meet with that, that one person or those two people that are actually worth listening to them being, okay, let's have a drink with them. And, um, that's actually why, you know, I wanted to start this podcast in the first place, which was these high level conversations happening at conference conferences weren't being recorded. Now you're right. Uh, obviously we're not going to have too many disagreements on this podcast
James Dooley: where if you disagreed with something, it's going to happen after the fact. But I think there's some strong insights where yeah, obviously you meet people in person at events, but, uh, it sounds like masterminds are something that not a lot of people do, but I think, um, this is worth digging further into.
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, like I said, it's completely changed. If you were to ask me one thing, one reason why I have been so successful. It's not anything. I mean, I'm, I'm hardworking and I'm motivated, but it's the people around me that have educated me well, educating my team very well. I've got an amazing team around me. So even like certain masterminds about like, there's sometimes it's not just about SEO and talking about title tags and backlinks and topical authority. Sometimes the best SEOs know in the world are probably not, are not one of the
James Dooley: best, let's say technical or the people that can build a team that the team's motivated to want to learn every single day and, and they get shit on. So like there, so sometimes some of these events can be talking about how do you keep a team motivated? How'd you be a cultural architect of the business to keep the culture going and keep them happy for them not to leave? How do you onboard new virtual assistants? And how do you track whether the virtual assistants are doing exactly what you said? How do you streamline your SOPs to make sure that the direct and you know that they're working? So it's all these types of stuff.
John Wright: Like what pain points have you been through? And there might be people in that mastermind group that is a little bit more advanced than you are. And it's been maybe a few years further on and they can tell you certain things that's happened to them that you might have been running into literally. You might go, Oh my God, he's just told me that. And I would, I would have had that problem in six months time. If I didn't listen to what he's just told me, I would have had that exact same problem in six months. So sometimes it's not what to do. It's what not to do. And sometimes that can save you a lot of money as well.
James Dooley: Now, do you think this mastermind concept could apply to affiliates where, I mean, we all have friends that are affiliates, but I look at some of them and because I don't always compete with them anymore, where I sold our affiliate sites, we're now affiliate software, um, I get people sharing more stuff, but I know a lot of them don't like sharing with any of their competitors. They kind of look at each other going, why on earth am I going to tell you my top converting brand, my best market, my best trick, my best anything? Um, do you think this, uh, could still work for affiliates?
John Wright: Or like a mastermind? It does work for affiliates. There's a lot of affiliates that are in there. So there's a lot of people that do lead generation. There's a lot of people that do affiliates. There's a lot of people that do, um, like display ads, whether it's like he's always called ad thrive or media vines, stuff like that. There's a lot of people that do drop shipping. I'd say affiliates is probably one of the biggest areas of what people like who, who enters these masterminds. And the truth of the matter is John is that if you really, really, really want to be invited to the high level masterminds and you don't want to give information away, you'll never be invited again.
John Wright: So you can't be what we class has been a leech. You got to turn up and sit there and be quiet in the room and not give any value and then think you're going to get invited again to the next mastermind. You know, in fact, when you first get invited to a mastermind, you don't normally get invited what we classes being like the top table, you'll get invited to a mastermind to say, are these, are these actually going to provide value? And if you do, you're almost like work through the ranks of where, what mastermind rooms and what, who you're going to be sharing the room with. Um, and you've got, you've almost got to work yourself through the ranks of who
John Wright: provides the most information, who's testing the most, who, who is able to come up with and some like in another thing is up on stage. A lot of these people talk about websites that they've ranked would never show any evidence, no evidence whatsoever. And they can get away with it on stage because the conference kind of people that are hosting it, they don't ask for that information. So some of these people that are, I earn 200 grand a month, but they still got a mortgage on their house and you're like, no, you don't. Do you know what I mean? Like, so some, some of them are out there and, and the con artists, I'm not going to name any names, but like there's some of them that are doing that and it's just like, it's wrong.
John Wright: Where in, in the private masterminds, if you start opening up and like, I'll, I show my revenues in the private, I'm not going to show it publicly. It show every man in the dog in private masterminds. I'll go there's, there's my WordPress logins with regards to this is what I'm doing in the back end is the plugins that I'm using. There's my revenue streams from it. What you think I'm doing to improve it. Where else do you feel I could improve? It could be the commissions. Someone might come along and I might be able to educate him a little bit on SEO. But they might say, you need to start running to Canada. The taxes are a lot less than in the UK. The player values are a lot better.
John Wright: If you started to get more players in Canada for casino players, you're going to earn so much more money. Now I might not learn anything from him from an SEO standpoint. And I might help him out and everything to do with SEO, but commercially, he might have just added 50 grand a month onto my bottom line by telling me some information about, uh, or don't start promoting these that they're going to go bump in the next six months. So I stopped promoting him and six, eight months later, the, the brands gone bump and stuff like that. So getting that information from people is key. And, and I always say like your network is your net worth. And I'm a massive fabric of that.
James Dooley: I believe that to be true. And I think I'm, I'm sold on masterminds. I've been kind of looking on the outside, uh, looking in going, I think I'm missing out on some of these, whether it's SEO or affiliate ones. But, um, like I said, I talked to a lot of my affiliate friends. I think there's a certain group of affiliates that are spending more time in them and I'm definitely going to pay attention to who's doing this. So I want to jump to, what do you have a plan for this year and beyond for projects and things you want to work on and learn?
John Wright: So this year, um, I'm going quite heavily into artificial intelligence. So the, I've got, I'm looking by, I've got goals by Christmas this year. So I've got 11 months to get there.
James Dooley: I want to create eight new businesses, different businesses that led with that just leverage AI. So one of them is going to be like, let's say like an AI image creation company. So the image creation, they might only be like $5, $10 for an image, but it might be a very specific SEO optimized image. Um, so it might have like, it could be like certain content that goes in there. It could be like a YouTube thumbnail that people might want to have. The, the, we're just going down the route of whether it's like mid journey, Dali. Um, whether we're going to use like Adobe Firefly or like photo shop, but we're going to quickly be able to produce images mainly when I say, yes, you're up to us.
James Dooley: Like just explaining to them that if they go and give us like, we've got these articles, we might go, right. You need to act, you need to video neutral images on this. Um, and ideally all tagging, like the farm name should be X, Y, and Z. Cause these might be able to drive you traffic from Google images. Cause we actually drive a lot of when I spoke at the start about effective frequency, we get traffic from a lot of different sources and we're very good at ranking images as well. Um, so if we could create the images, I've already got like an image optimization around the ranks images in Google images and does not like a cabo.
John Wright: Um, the second one's going to be, um, an AI video creation production company. Now I was just saying to you before video is going to be massively important video faced like me and you talking to each other and you can see us. I think he's going to be absolutely huge.
John Wright: This is what we're going to create is going to be like a faceless video, which is going to be nowhere near as good as what we're doing now, but it's still YouTube still the second biggest changing. So if we can start generating a lot of videos that let's say you're a local plumber and you can't afford to have these videos being created, but they're might be 30 or 40 different intensive videos that are ranking in, in YouTube that people are searching, they want to get their branding in that search engine. So we're going to create an AI video production company. There's going to be, I've just invested a middle of last year into auto
John Wright: blogging.ai, which is, uh, content creation, uh, I content, marks and creation, uh, come there.
John Wright: Um, the first I went out to like, I think it was like 12 different people that I went out to for the AI writing like jar this and all the rest of them.
John Wright: And all of them came back in and it was brilliant. It was really good. Otherwise I wouldn't have invested in the tool, but then I've got like three of my team full time working with the owner to just keep trying to improve that, to keep trying to improve the problems and improve it and improve that. Make it certain that we've got the right entities on the page, the sentence correct, we're getting like the semantic triples in there. So we've got like the subject, the predicate and the objects in the correct order. So there's a lot of different things with regards to how we not just get the right words on the page, but in the right sentence format for you to be able to win the featured snippets. And we went around as a guy called Julian Golda.
John Wright: I don't know if you, if you've ever heard of him, he, so he uses auto blogging. Not AI. Like he religiously, all of his sites that he builds out, he, he uses auto blogging and we've been kind of improving it all the time. And his sites are just like every single one of them is like boom, boom, boom. I've all been skyrocketing. So I've got that, but I'm also going to create an AI content agency. There is AI written via auto blogging, but then human edited. So you get your, like a human editor that comes in spends 20 minutes.
John Wright: Just make certain the sales copies go. The sentences are broken up and stuff like that. Um, and yeah, we're trying to go all in on different things about we can leverage AI just for different ways to make certain we're staying ahead of the curve because at present in the UK, we only really deal in the UK at the moment on like lead generation and stuff. And we are at the forefront of, of what we do for lead generation in, I think over 600 different industries in total of what is what we're in. I don't, if I don't leverage AI, always are going to catch up to me. So if I don't innovate, I'm going to evaporate.
John Wright: I've got to make certain that I'm headed innovation and that's kind of my role at the moment, head of innovation. What else can we bring to the table that we can improve on to try and drive and move it forward?
James Dooley: I agree. Um, I, I decided that, uh, last month I'm like, I need to go all in for AI this year and I basically said, I'm starting to take courses, which the irony of some of these courses, they're, they're almost becoming obsolete. You know, being four to six months on the market, but I think you're right. It's a, I don't think we're going to be obsolete if we don't innovate, but I just want to not give anyone a chance to just kind of leap progress. So, um, and, and it goes to the saying, if we're going to be building tools for affiliates, we need to know what's coming around the corner to go. Can we, can we be that one step ahead to help them?
James Dooley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, definitely for sure. So I'm going to throw a kind of a curveball question your way and it's like kind of picking your brain and it's self-serving talking about it from our side. So we have affiliate program reviews and we're planning to add a lot of rich data points that I believe don't exist anywhere. So just to give you a couple of examples, um, which affiliate programs have post-backs or dynamic variables or what time zone is the data updated? Is the data updated in real time by the hour, by the day? Um, has the terms and conditions changed and things that you're not always
James Dooley: going to get just by logging into the system and it's not easy, uh, collecting this, but we happen to do that for, uh, 1200 plus gambling affiliate programs. And we're planning to go further. What do you think we could do in terms of content with these data points where I feel like if we get the data points out on our website, someone's going to take them, they're going to scrape them. And then they're going to basically produce content and maybe a rank us. Um, what do you think about using these data points and going, how can we make them work for us?
John Wright: So that's Joel. That's a great question to ask. And it's a tricky one with them being honest with you, because if you hide it, that it can't be being scraped.
John Wright: Who's going to want to ask for that data? Like, so they're not there if they're not asking for it at present, how are they going to be asking for it previously? So like, how are you going to get them to ask for it in the future? So sometimes you need to give, I would say what you probably need to start trying to do, give a little bit away. But yes, it can be scraped to know as can do, but also if you're the first to actually get it out there, you do an information gain. So Google loves the people that are first to feed Google's algorithms with this information. They all start loving your site. And it was a making your information, scraping it and using your data.
John Wright: And they crawled your site, Google crawled your site first and seen, and they learned from your site.
James Dooley: That's actually a great signal because it's information gain. And they've got the whole page of information gain. Too many people in the SEO industry just do correlation of content, which is copycat content. And they never provide anything that's unique and new to the industry. And, and how many people are actually going to start scraping that information? You probably, I don't know. You might say there's a lot, I'm not, I'm not 100% on, on the industry of how many competitors you have that would scrape it, but I would give, I would give
John Wright: valuable insights away and then maybe hide a few other bits that you definitely don't want scraping behind to say, if you want more information on this, then, then check this out.
James Dooley: Makes sense. What were you thinking? What was you thinking about doing on it?
John Wright: A little bit of both. It was actually more to be like fearless and say, you know what? Send the data out. People are going to scrape it anyways.
John Wright: There's another data set we have that we probably wouldn't do that. And I'll probably have to explain that off the record. But for that data set, we just believe that to be true. We want to build a data set that's so valuable that even for customers that are super large affiliates that say, you know what? We don't trust using Stadstrom. We have our own InEBS tool. I want to have a rich data set that their account managers have to come back to us and go, I need to know when a brand is open. I need to know when a brand is closed. I need to know when a brand has lost a license in a jurisdiction or it has gained a license and added four languages.
John Wright: I think these data points are going to be, I believe they're already very valuable to gambling affiliates as it is. So it's knowing like what's changing in, in like a day to day, for that affiliate program related to the brands, which of course, those brands are things that you heavily promote to, to players. So I just think our approach is going to be, you know, we're going to start with data. We don't know what it looks like to make it like to verbalize it, uh, if it's important, but we think we're just going to start with data and our current reviews right now are, they're basically, you know, cheap written content that I don't think is helping us right now. So I'd say, you know what?
John Wright: Let's just focus on being helpful for affiliates and go, we don't really need content and the content like this is basically our personal plan is we're probably going to rely a bit more on user generated content to say, Hey, you're the affiliate working with this program. I kind of want to hear what you have to say about them. And we want to do it in a, in a quality point of view of going, well, you have to be using our app and connected with that program in order to write a review. Like there's no like hiring, you know, people from India just to do like, you know, $2, $5 reviews that are all fake. We want to make sure that affiliate programs can't fake their own reviews. And it's actually, there's like a strong validation behind it.
John Wright: Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. That'd be a great kind of system for you to have set up for sure. And also make certain that the other part is not just what's on your site. It's what's on your kind of branded. So if someone's typing you in or someone's typing in stuff to do with, let's say, what is the best gambling software for data or how can I be kept up to date with all my gambling kind of platform earnings and stuff like that, that you showing up for all them type of things that you, you actually getting good quality articles being written about stats drone in the, they
John Wright: are the best and obviously getting a lot of guest posts for stats drone versus or whoever your main competitor is. So let's say it's lovely stats or whatever it is like nifty stats versus stats drone and this versus stats drone and this versus stats. And you get all the night was being done. Um, and obviously it's all linking back to you guys and you kind of brand jacking against your competition as well. Uh, just different ways to make certain that you promote in. That's what we, we, we always look to make certain that if someone is searching, they don't know who we are.
John Wright: That, and we, they come up against one of our competitors and us, if the Google who's better in them and then we want to make certain that we control us. We control the narrative that we are better than our competition. And not just me saying that we're better than our competition that Google all the results are saying that we have at and not only that is once you've got that and he might cost you 10, 15, 20,000 pounds to get that positive brand for, for, for your own brand, whether it's stats, drone or whatever we'll call that you're doing it for. When other people are writing about you and they're doing correlation, which is what majority of them do.
John Wright: They're all talking in a positive manner about you anyway, because they feel that that's what they need to do to run. So he kind of, you've got to try and feed the algorithms, what they want to start with, and then everybody else seems to copy. So. Yeah. No, I agree. We have a couple of comparison articles. We actually don't have the one versus nifty stats, but I think I'm going to push for that high priority. And ironically enough, one thing I noticed in our experience of trying to grow our SaaS company is the more we compare ourselves to our competitors, um, it actually resonates with, with our ideal customer more. And I actually believe that even on the affiliate space, uh, these comparison
John Wright: tools are actually a stronger driving force behind actual conversions.
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, what I would do is sometimes I won't put it on your own website. I wouldn't do, um, let's say like Nifty versus, um, I do it on other people's websites, I tried to do that post or press releases that specifically had. Stats drone being mentioned and you're trying to, to brand Jack to rank for their terms, number two behind their brand that says their brand versus your brand and they talk positively about you. That's kind of how you want to be doing. So otherwise on your own, on your own branded website, you're mentioning them and they might just go and try them out. So you'd want to get on third party websites.
James Dooley: If I was you almost like parasite SEO, don't look back to stats.
John Wright: We're planning on doing that. And I'm just kind of wondering, are my competition listening to this far into this podcast and we'll find out later. Uh, going back to what I was talking about for our plans. I know this is again, self-serving. We were looking at also doing like an annotations type of a dataset with every affiliate program. So remember when I said that this brand has now opened on this affiliate program. We want to make that so it's like a date and timestamp and it's an annotation. And at some point in the future, we'd be able to map this on a graph somewhere, whether it's, you know, um, cause you look at the old Google analytics, I missed
John Wright: those annotations where you could see your, your traffic and you could, you can put your own footnotes. We want to have affiliates having the same thing where it's like, well, what is the annotation? Well, maybe things have jumped because this brand has now added four languages. Or maybe they've got a new landing page or maybe it's decreased because they have actually left four markets. We don't know. I think this annotation would be a really interesting data point. And I think it'd be something that I just don't think there's a lot of.
James Dooley: I think that'd be brilliant. Cause then like you said, I think if someone's earnings starts to drop, they'd like to know why. And it might be one of the other reasons might be that the, um, the tax implications change. So if the tax implications change and it adds an extra 10% on, well, obviously they're, they're kind of profit margins of what they're going to earn in commission is going to drop drastically. Um, like I said, they might, they might end up not being able to take certain players in certain jurisdictions and stuff like that. Well, that might make that kind of play a value drop. Cause in that jurisdiction, there might've been very good player value and stuff like that. So I think that would be absolutely brilliant.
James Dooley: I know that my different partners would 100% want to be seen something like that. Yeah. And funny enough, one of the reasons why I even wanted to start this app when Nifty stats and stats remote were in businesses, I remember when programs, when they changed software and your old links were now invalidated. I'm like, this drove me nuts. I'm like, I swore that some programs did this on purpose because they basically flushed their old links, which now became free traffic, but they didn't have to pay commission on. And it was your responsibility as the affiliate to update the new tracking links. And I think every time this stuff changes, we actually track all of that in our own system. So I think that's another data point.
James Dooley: That's just as valuable. It's like, Hey, a tracking links are not working or you have to update the tracking links. Like they've switched from net refer to my affiliates, for example. And that changes everything.
John Wright: Yeah, for sure. I mean, like you said, the, they're trying to do everything they can to try to make certain that they make the most money and sometimes if they do counsel the certain affiliate links, and then you've got to renew it, you'll be surprised how many affiliates I sold that six, seven months, six, seven years later, I've still got the old affiliate links and they're still sending players through and they're not getting paid next. They're all links that are being detected and that is like, well, it is what it is. Do you know what I mean? So it's a, some people don't clean things up and they shouldn't think. If you can, you can have the main affiliates and make them aware of it.
John Wright: Even if it's just one week, two weeks, three weeks of them not having the right affiliate links and you, you've made them aware that it allows them to go in and prompt them to go. You need to be updating X, Y, and Z. And funny enough, like I'm jumping way too far in the future, but we're actually working on a link affiliate tool that will, if a brand goes offline, we'll give you a smart redirect rule to send it to either your best converting brand or your top list where you can say, Hey, um, something's wrong with that brand, well, it's closed. And then we'd give you that feedback. Here, here's a three brands that you can definitely go to.
James Dooley: Yeah, that'd be great. It would work very well.
James Dooley: And last question is what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence?
John Wright: So I feel a lot of affiliate sites have been hit hard, um, in the helpful content up there, everyone kept saying, Oh, it's just an attack against affiliate sites and stuff like that. And Google are trying their best to try to, uh, instead of having like what they class has been doorway sites where they kind of coming through to your up, it looks like they're going clicking straight off to a brand.
James Dooley: They try to show the brands and stuff like that initially from within the search engine and stuff. So a lot of like the best casino sites, best slot sites, best sports playing sites and stuff like that. They're still showing affiliates, but it seems to be driven by a lot of newspapers over there now at the moment and stuff like that. But I still think I do think, and they always do think that they'll always be on market for affiliates. Think affiliate marketing is always going to be huge. I do think they need to try to start changing the strategy slightly with, um, search general, the SGE kind of that's coming out as well. Um, which might mean for certain keywords, they're going to start
James Dooley: getting a little bit less clicks. So you've got to keep adapting. You've got to see what works and it might be that a present parasite SEO is working great. It might be that you can, like you said, I've got certain people that are making 20 to 25,000 bond a month just by Reddit. There's some people know that are going on to quarantine that there's actually lots of places that they can start getting traffic from and stuff like that. So you just got to try and diversify and be omnipresent. Um, and yeah, I mean, I feel like we'll always make money because generally speaking, affiliates are quite savvy digital marketers and whatever's
James Dooley: working in today's algorithms or whatever they need to do, they'll, they'll kind of tailor their needs towards that.
John Wright: I agree. James, thank you so much for doing this. Gave me a lot of energy and a lot of ideas. Uh, how can people get ahold of you?
James Dooley: So I've got a James dooley.com. So James D w O L E Y.com. Um, on there, it's got all my social media, like YouTube. I'm starting to do quite a little bit more on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and stuff like that. So the, um, if anyone would shop me an email, it's me at James dooley.com as well. So yeah, that's probably the best way is it getting older.
James Dooley: And I'll put the, your domain in the show notes. Uh, James, thank you again. Yeah. It's your job. It's good. Good talking.
John Wright: 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.