From Fish and Chips to a Six-Figure Digital PR Agency

you started in commercial real estate and fish and chips and things how did you end up building your agency ly I got sucked into the online space via these blog income reports that you used to see within a year I was making $1,000 a month but the first ever link that I got was New York Times if you have got trusted credentialed authors on the website the content's been reviewed if those authors are real genuine authors

and experts in their field if the content is good if all of this is good for smaller sites with just a handful of these links you get a big jump in in domain rating and we also see uptick in traffic Google's fundamentally trying to reduce its index by 40% Now by getting rid of bad content you can see AI as being this sort of poter of the information [Music] space hey guys and welcome back to the

channel and welcome back to another episode where I'll be SEO experts and entrepreneurs from around the world in today's episode I'll be talking to a friend that I met all the way back in 20202 at my pukat November conference he took a lot away from that conference and flipped and scaled his agency into a six figure a month digital BR Behemoth please welcome to the channel ladies and gentlemen Chris pantelli thank you very much for having

me Charles yeah God it seem doesn't seem like just a week ago we were in the at The pukat Mastermind does it how time has flown I know literally yeah time time time flies fast when you're having fun right and and especially when there's just continually uh things to do right and we've just experienced that with the March updates and stuff so how how are you getting on with the with the March Corin spam update so

far your clients all looking good uh yeah I mean our our sites haven't really been um affected um obviously we bu build a lot of like PR expert quote links to our own sites but um clientwise um we haven't really seen that much yet um no one's really um emailed in to say they've been affected um I'm not really seeing anyone de-indexed um so at the moment things are okay I suppose but I know a lot

of people are struggling so great yeah yeah you see it on Twitter right and Twitter Twitter Twitter is a Cess pool at the minute you got us not to stay on it for too long yeah it's it's definitely bad for your mental health on that platform for too long right now so I want to get back to your agency right so you started in kind of um commercial real estate and fish and chips and things and

stuff and all sorts of things in the UK and you hated it right and you wanted to flip into this Digital Life that you've seen from blogging and stuff how did you end up building your agency linkify so um the fish and chip shop industry was uh I could see was in um a state of decline possibly um especially with the increased like vat um the the shiting sort of trends for like consumer behavior in what

they're eating and it's a hard job as well it's a physical job you know 12 hours a day stood up um I had my degree um from University and I'd got sucked into the online um space via these like blog income reports that you used to see um so I remember thinking man this is definitely something that I can I can try you know with my like Finance background maybe I could try give this a go

um so I started a a personal finance website um and within I think with within a year I was up to like making $1,000 do a month you know getting traffic um and I thought wow this is awesome this is definitely something that I could do and I also at that time as well um had gotten into building um back links via Harrow so answer answering journalist requests um and I remember the first ever link that

I got was um that I won was New York Times um that was a do follow and I remember thinking oh this is this is good so I sort of really honed that strategy and managed to get uh boatload more links uh at the same time I wanted to do some um build some guest post links to Inner pages to try and rank some of the the money pages but I didn't have time to do it

so I wanted to Outsource that um and that's when I found my now business partner um so I hired him to do some of this guest post Outreach and he looked into my site and said hey where'd you get all of these like New York Times uh Forbes how'd you get all these links and I explained you know via this platform Harrow pitching journalist requests on Twitter Harrow quoted press plugs um and he said hey look

I've got some clients that would kill for these links can you can you do this for some of my clients uh so I said yeah I I can try on 12 hours in the fish and chip shop going finishing at maybe you know 10 11 o'clock at night and then writing arrow pictures for his clients um and we were winning links for them and we basically saw an organic demand for this um because we were you

know completing these orders for his clients they were loving it they were reing um more people were asking um and that was the time that uh covid struck so I needed to make a decision um and as as basically as soon as we saw that there was like a demand for it we tested the concept the pro that like it was something we could grow that's when um I looked to sell the shop and move into

that full-time so you've been acquiring clients from a range of kind of avenues and things what's been your best best channel so far I think you've worked with like Affiliates Twitter LinkedIn ads you've done conferences you've done everything how have you got kind of your best and biggest client so far um yeah I would say influencer so we started with a really simple strategy just um obviously if you get into this game you start following people

such as yourself um people like John dyra um followed uh these boys um and women on uh Twitter nich like ladies another one um interacted with them loved what they were doing with their content um um and decided to sort of say hey look this is something that we can do which is really valuable it's not a hard sell as well because these are like good links white hat um you know risk-free so it was really

an easy sort of sell like hey do you want us to build you a few of these for free and if you think it's good if you think think it's a good service you know promote us with an affiliate link um and that was that really allowed us to grow quickly because um it was a really uh easy uh value proposition to to meet these people we did a good service delivered a good product and then

you know other people wanted to buy it so I would say that was our initial best um customer acquisition strategy um and then um ads is is okay uh we do okay with ads but um I would say conferences and networking is just is just something which um absolutely pays back in spades uh the ROI is hard to measure and the time frames can be crazy but um doing things like podcasts um and networking going to

conferences uh pays dividends um and snowballs as well so yeah I would definitely recommend it so personal brand building kind of exercises as well right to I get your name out there along with your company name because people I also believe that people resonate significantly more with people than companies right so that's why I've always tried to stick my personal brand on things more so than having separate separated BR as well right yeah agreed and I

think I think it's all about touch points as well I think if you do one podcast uh you do another podcast um and then you go to a conference and someone goes I remember him from that once they start seeing you four five six times that's when the conversion can come so like I said it can be years you know as as long as years possibly these time frames but if you start planting all of these

seeds early that's when the it can really come to fruition yes awesome so what are some of the ways that you've increased your response and placement rates via Harrow um by reducing the number of pitches that we send um we we're living in a golden era I would say for this sort of Link building because never before has it been so easy to send pictures which means the journalists in boxes are bombarded but they are bombarded

with shite so it's actually easier than ever to stand out in amongst the with a really well-crafted um Pitch so when when when we first started um doing this uh AI was a thing but it wasn't like a scalable tool and in no way was it um it it needed a lot of human editing I don't remember if you remember tools like um there was a couple of free AI writers on like appsumo um the first

ones that came out so we were testing these and it would speed up a little bit but um the the the uh the pitch response it would speed it up it would allow us to sort of send more pitches but the quality wasn't it wasn't there um so maybe you were sending twice as many pitches but they were half as good um but because not many people were adopting um AI it meant that this increased rate

of pitching um actually had a better Roi than sending fewer pitches because we were able to send so many um and the journalist inboxes they weren't you know they weren't getting absolutely spammed but now they're getting spammed it's better to absolutely 100% uh send much more better crafted pitches um and also to uh understand your ability to win based on the the the climate you're pitch for the expert that you're pitching as the credentials that that

expert has the quality of the domain the publication the journalist that's requesting um for a source on that particular publication so the data that we collect on all of those elements allows us to be much more hyperfocused and targeted on what we're pitching and that allows us to win at a much better rate than if we were just sending as much as we could to everywhere and as as well the a lot of these platforms it's

not a curated list of of uh sourcer requ ests so hash um Jour request on Twitter um connectively harro quoted press plugs all of those platforms they they don't curate so there is uh as much um spam on the side of the requests coming in as the spam that's being sent back to those requests so you really do need to um be able to hand select those queries and know if it's a good domain um if

it's a real trustworthy site if it's a good publication if you're not just going to get an email back saying they want to do a three-way link swap or if you give them $100 they'll include a link you got to know all of this so that you are absolutely maximizing um those those requests and winning links on the absolute best Publications and now for a quick message from our sponsor search intelligence if you're looking for digital

PR campaigns what you're about to see should impress you what a masterpiece PR link building campaign with 20 links in big Publications such as the Sun Express mirror Wells online and still Landing I would say this campaign is a massive success we told the press that people should turn on their heating this summer if they want to save money next winter and we landed over 20 links in National and Regional UK Publications for a boiler client

that's crazy the campaign Hook was pretty clever it is a known fact at least in the boiler trade that if you keep your boiler off for many months it might rust and it might get you into trouble if you keep it turned off from Spring to next winter we therefore advise the Press with an expert commentary piece on behalf of our boiler client that people should turn on their boilers this summer just when the heat wave

is in full swing this way they can avoid a boiler failure next winter and save money massive Publications picked up our story including the Sun Express mirror Wells online and a few more dozen Publications giving our client links lots of links and lots of happiness hormones no wonder that so many journalists covered our story as this headline is a massive link magnet to Their audience this case study highlights the fact that a clever hook can be

applied to any insight or story to make a campaign more successful and more compelling to journalists can you imagine when people see this headline in the news you should turn on your boiler this summer there's no way they will not click on it I would click on it so this was the hook and this is why this campaign was so successful I hope this video inspired and shows you what's possible with a clever hook start with

prospecting and make sure that you get everything really really perfect then you get the perfect pitch that you already stand out and then hopefully you just continue that cycle and scale it up so that you win amazing links right that kind of process awesome perfect so what kind of success have you seen between these sort of digital PR campaigns and real world rankings and sites and and Surs especially for sites who didn't perhaps have as high

Authority links as you've been able to get them uh yeah well I mean you you do see you do see a um you see a big jump in like uh vanity metrics for smaller sites so um Dr uh and traffic as well which isn't a a vanity metric but you know an important metric but when you have a site that's a small site but it's a good site so uh in the day in in the the

this era of the March core update and spam update what we're seeing much better success with is where everything tracks through from the the website to begin with so if you have got trusted credentialed authors on the website um behind the content not it doesn't have to be um who's handwritten every content but at least reviewed the content's been reviewed if that tracks through on author profiles by lines um if those authors are real genuine authors

and um exper experts in their field and then you can include that information via like same as schema on the website um if those authors have written for other Publications that are well known um if the content is good um if if all of this is good for like smaller sites um with just a handful of these links you get a big jump in in domain rting and we also see like a really nice um either

uptick in traffic or if it's a really new site then we do sort of see that sandbox um coming out of that sandbox we also see as well um it can trigger for um I we we took a site that was uh really new and um nothing had been indexed yet and we built one one good link and uh all of a sudden the site was indexed and traffic started going up we also see um sites

that continually build these sorts of links so they have an existing High domain um Authority existing good content an existing good level of traffic we have seen across a number of clients that uh they're they're much less impacted by these broadcore updates or these um these changes that Google make it seems to hold the authority that they've already built um and I think Google probably gets a sense that if you're continually being linked to from high

Authority news Publications it sort of maintains a a level of understanding between Google and and that site that that they are still an authority um and then for sites that um that don't that already have high traffic High Authority um and they're building more of these links it it goes beyond the benefits of uh Google so obviously you're getting um really good logos for your press badge you're increasing the um trust signals that you have directly

with your customers so we're doing really well with like Ecom sites at the minute um service sites local SEO sites these these places they love to see a sexy logo on the on the front page it instills trust in the customer if they're going to buy your product your service um so it goes Far and Beyond the value that you get algorithmically from Google 100% I I totally agree as well how much are you using AI

within this kind of style of Link building and are there any specific tools aside from obviously just chat GPT that you're using as well yeah we're I mean we're moving away from chat GPT um we use AI obviously I think you'd be crazy not to you know why wouldn't you to use it um what you need to do is not use it I mean I spoke at your conference um in Dubai recently so you need to

um we talk about how you can use it but you just need to use it better than everybody else is using it um and don't use it in a van vanilla fashion so if you if you go on to chat GPT and you ask the question that the journalist has asked you're going to get the same answer that the other 500 people that are spamming these platforms are going to get and the journalist knows that journalists

are professional writers that's what they do for a living they don't even need to use a tool to check it they can see that it's been written by a by AI um other but obviously using it for ideation is fantastic and then um constructing a pitch um and then having a human um edited touch on top of that um and making sure you've got all your elements of a good pitch in there as well so like

a quotable line um some linguistic flurry uh some um an interesting hook that's going to that's going to get the journalists excited and want to include your pitch um but yeah some tools I mean we I think Gemini is really good at the minute um anthropics new model um is very very interesting um early tests for that but it's it's interesting um and then we use AI detection tools as well to make sure that as stuff's

passing uh passing Authority AI image gener ation um as well journalists always want images sometimes that's hard to come by so depending on your ethical stance on I've just been in the news today about this I don't know if you've seen the the cape Middleton image it's just been released an image and it's gone all over the assoc Associated Press and they've just um they've just had to uh like pull the image across every platform because

it's it's AI you can see it it's crazy um so yeah depending you know if someone's asking for an image of a barn conversion then you know you don't want to lose the link because you can't provide the image so the AI tools are getting better and better and better with that as well so um idiogram is one we've been looking at as well for um image generation and then obviously um the other big ones as

well so uh what's the main one it's just gone on my mind Dar mid Journey the mid Journey yeah mid journey is really good but you got to make sure they look real so um play with your prompts um yeah what what's your predictions for this whole AI future especially with digital PR God I don't know I mean whatever I say is going to be completely outdated isn't it in about a day um I think it's

in terms of PR um it's gonna allow for I think for more creativity um and uh faster turnaround time to go from idea to um to outreach but um and then also as well the sort of data that you can gather so the the really exciting thing is data campaigns I think people love data we always need new data but data has historically been um hard to interpret so it's not so hard to come by there's

loads of sources for for data um there's some amazing like no code AI tools now you can use for um web scraping and amassing huge quantities of data and then the AI tools are so good at looking at that data and then finding correlations um or interest in um points that stand out and what are interesting correlations of data that is the headline of a successful PR campaign so that is what is really really exciting so

we're looking at building um ways that we can like interact with um interact with uh agents in order to um grab data and then find correlations as well so we're in early days of TR trying to build those systems a lot of that was from your conference as well so thank you for that um but yeah I think as the weeks and months go by I think it's yeah that the access to data and the ability

to interpret data in creative ways is going to be a huge um impact with AI yeah so uh prediction forecasting and kind of ideation are kind of the main three ones for digital PR which I think I agre are going to be the the kind of the massive future and it'll be really interesting to see how those systems that you're implementing come to fruition in the next six to 12 months right because I really think that

that will massively help scale your business even more definely yeah and I think you I think you if the more data that you can build and have access to an interpret as well is going to be the the more successful that you are as a PR agency or link building PR agency um yeah and I think it's a I think it's a really cool way that I mean you get Google's like fundamentally trying to like reduce

its index by 40% Now by getting rid of like bad content so you can you can see AI as being this sort of pooter of of of the information space but it can do so much good as well I think and it's so exciting what you can um what real impactful information um that you can extract with AI that I think Google's doing its job to protect it you know I'm assuming it wants to reduce its

index size for cost-saving purposes um but that doesn't mean that we can't um use AI in creative ways in order to you know win links build Brands um and make businesses do better 100% well I appreciate you coming on is there anywhere where people can find you online uh yeah link ali.io um and then Twitter link ofy uncore just reach out to me um yeah it'd be great to connect thank you H for having me Charles

a pleasure no worries I'll put the link in description for all that down below and I'll see you guys next episode Peace