#27 – How charity benefits SEO

Transcript

[00:00:01] All right, welcome to this episode of Becoming Great. This is a podcast about how we run the business, Great AdCom and how me and the founder of great Ed Burgmann are growing as people and great as a company that is giving away to charity, not one hundred and twenty percent of its profit, not 150 percent of its profits, but one hundred percent of its profits to charity. Okay. One hundred percent a year. And in this episode, we are going to talk about how doing charity can benefit any business model and especially a business model that is working with a CEO that is ranking high up on Google and in that space.

[00:00:48] So let’s get into it, Eric. Remember, we are all connected in the great circle of life.

[00:01:03] So what’s the great circle of life? You know, they didn’t tell you this, but it’s actually about a C O. I’m great business model.

[00:01:14] Have you been watching Lion King?

[00:01:16] Maybe that’s where I got this metaphor to to clarify.

[00:01:22] We are running a podcast here exploring how to run a great business and how to grow into great people. And today, we are going to talk about a couple of things. Our business model and charity and how those two things go together. So to clarify this for maybe someone that is here for the first time. Eric, what is the business model of growth?

[00:01:50] So the idea with great is that we are going to make money through affiliation and affiliation means to do advertising for other companies on a commission basis. So, for example, for each client that we generate, we get a certain percent of that client’s purchase. And that’s called affiliation, and we are going to focus on doing it through through Google, mainly search engine optimization MCO, the great circle of hco, which we will explain Loop will live at a later cliffhanger and maybe to be care of us.

[00:02:30] Oh, we’re excited about this metaphor because I really liked Lion King. So to clarify affiliation then, do you have an example of another business that is doing affiliation?

[00:02:41] Yeah, sure. So affiliation is Brent hotels, and they then let you book in hotel through their Web site and they take a part of that revenue as a commission.

[00:02:55] So that’s that’s an affiliate and we are going to do the same thing. But in the casino space. So we will compare online casinos and online gambling sites in general. And we will give the viewer, the visitors, a lot of information about this so they can choose where they want to play. Similar issues, what hotel they want to stay at. And based on our recommendations and tips, they will find whatever is the best option for them. And we will then earn a commission from this. Right.

[00:03:26] I think that was clear. And he also talked about search engine optimization. So could you explain quickly what that is and why that is important for a company like right here?

[00:03:38] So search engines are Google, for example, and all the Web sites you go to online to find stuff and optimize to them means that you are doing things to get higher up in this hierarchy because Google is an algorithm just reading all the websites online. And if you build your website in the correct way, then they will like you more. So if you’re just putting a Web site out and you have no idea what you’re doing, Google is not really going to like you.

[00:04:05] So optimizing for this means to do the best you can to get on top of this. And yet the basics is that we will we want to build our Web sites so good that Google loves what we’re doing and puts us on top. So instead of doing a lot of other marketing or instead of building a lot of other products and stuff to get people there, we want everyone to find us through Google by being the best ones according to Google.

[00:04:32] All right. And there are two things we really want to give to you that is listening to this episode. First, we want to talk about how can maybe you’re running your own business or if you’re interested in SEO in general. We want to talk about a couple of things that you can do to make SEO work to your advantage. So that’s one thing we want to teach and explore here. And the second thing we want to talk about is how can running a charity? How can doing goulden actually benefit the MCO of a company? Exactly. Yes. So let’s start with some ideas for OK, so let’s say that I want to create a Web site. Maybe I want to create my own affiliation business. Do you think that it’s a good idea to begin with?

[00:05:28] Also, I can jump back into the past and we’ll start there.

[00:05:32] So the year is two thousand and seven, I think maybe 2008.

[00:05:40] And me and another friend named Emily, who I founded my previous business with, are really struggling with our own little web agency. We’ve started this company to build websites for others, and we are not managing to find the clients we need or doing the stuff we need. And with the time that we had to spare, we started building websites comparing bingo. And we had no money at all. We didn’t have that much time to put into this. So we put in a few hours here and there and kind of had fun and played with it. We didn’t have a good strategy. We didn’t really do anything. And after a few months, we had made zero money. But we’ve lost and no money either went out and then our time. So we put that project aside. And started doing other things, tried to get this web agency to work, and we failed at that. So a year later we looked into these affiliate accounts that you set up where you would get paid. And it turned out that we had made a thousand euros that year without really putting more time into than we did the first months.

[00:06:44] And.

[00:06:46] That became a very thrilling and exciting experience like, wow, this could actually work. We haven’t even put that much time into it and we started to put more and more time into it. And then after a while we started making a thousand euros a month. But we ran this as a side business a few hours every evening, few hours here and there. And it still could start growing without any risk whatsoever. We didn’t put any money into it. Ivan? Well, $10 for a domain name. That was the only money we put into it. Everything else was free. So I think that it was an amazing place to start from. We were 20 or so when we started this. And it grow into that too. A company worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And it would never have happened if it wasn’t because it was so easy to kind of get started. You don’t need to get hundreds of millions of dollars for it to be worth the hassle when you can and you can start very slowly with more or less no risk at all. And it took us three years before we get to a point where we did this full time. So to say that it’s it’s a great option for a side business. It’s a great place to start learning. And you can actually build a business with. No money at all and no real risk. So I think it’s a great place to start for business.

[00:08:05] Mm hmm.

[00:08:07] That’s a really interesting story because the you didn’t need a lot to get going. So let’s say I want to create my own Web site then and I have not too much experience. Let’s say I want to say.

[00:08:24] Clothes on Internet would be a good example. You can do that. OK, so let’s say I want to sell clothes and I want to rank high up on Google. So let’s say someone Googles for. Hmm. Yes. Some clothes that I have. What can I do to rank high on Google?

[00:08:46] Ok, so to start with, if you want to work with clothes, the best thing you can do is to start with a niche within clothes because you’re never gonna rank higher than the big brands on the word clothes, for example.

[00:08:58] You know, that’s gonna be really hard. But let’s say a good example would be New Year’s Eve dresses. So that’s like a niche kind of thing.

[00:09:09] But and it’s only happening once a year. But it means that your might be the best site out there for New Year’s Eve dresses. You’re never gonna be best for clothes, but you could be best fit for New Year’s Eve dresses or prom dresses or whatever. So you’re taking this huge market into something much, much smaller and it’s going to make it doable. Right. And then you would find affiliate systems.

[00:09:36] There are a lot of them use Google affiliate software and you can see where you can cooperate when you connect into the big Web sites to connect to ourselves or Amazon. And these places, you can put their products on your website, which is very simple. They have systems to teach you. And then you could just find whatever dresses you think, work for New Year’s Eve and you can put those on your Web site and people can then buy them because they’re looking for a dress for New Year’s Eve sort of service that I would be providing them.

[00:10:03] Instead, I use my taste for dresses and I collect kind of kind of collect information, but it’s my service. So people each year can find good looking dresses.

[00:10:16] Yes. And for example, New Year’s Eve dresses is not a category on on any website. I would well, not not on any of the big ones. It’s not really a category.

[00:10:28] The people still look for it because they want the dress for New Year’s Eve. I mean, women loves to wear a fancy dress on New Year’s Eve. At least women around me, as always, felt like, yeah, I want to kind of dress and they can usually be more sparkly or shiny or whatever. So that’s just one option that you could use where people are looking for it.

[00:10:46] Ok, so I guess what I want then is that if I type in New Year’s Eve dresses, I want my website to show on top. And how can I how can I? Where do I start? I have no idea.

[00:10:58] So there are two sides of this. The first one is the thing you do on your Web site, which is how you write about it. So you need to write in text that this is about New Year’s Eve dresses and write that like what kind of New Year’s Eve dresses do you want to have? Why is this a good New Year’s Eve dress kind of these things? Because Google is a text based algorithm, meaning that it is reading everything. It can’t look at the pictures and see the pattern like these would go. A human could look at a bunch of dresses and say, yeah, this is probably for New Year’s Eve, but the algorithm of Google can’t do that. At least it’s not doing that at the moment. Maybe the A.I. can figure it out anyway, but not how it works in the search. That’s one part of it. You need to write about it and explain it with as much text and detail as possible.

[00:11:46] Would it be good if I were the more times I’d put the word New Year’s Eve dress in there? Would that be better or.

[00:11:54] It’s. It needs to be there a few times, but it’s not like if you put it 100 times, it’s better than putting 10. So a few times. And that’s the best place to start. And the second part of this is what’s called off page SCA, which means things done outside of your Web website, and that’s mainly about links pointing towards your Web site. So Google looks at other Web sites blinking towards your Web site as a vote on your Web sites. It kind of means like OCHSS, this Web site is talking about this Web site. So if if and as fashion blog is talking about the New Year’s Eve dresses, it means that and as fashion blog is voting that this is a good site. Right. And the more votes it gets, the higher up it comes. And it’s also important cumulative votes are not equally weighted. So Anna’s fashion blog might have a it has the votes. But if you get a link from Vogue or one of the biggest fashion magazines, that vote is going to be worth a lot more. So the more powerful votes you get, the higher we rank. So what you can do then is to talk probably to Ana’s fashion blog and these kind of Web sites, because Vogue is not going to give you much attention, I’m guessing, and get them to write about you. So see what you can do to help them out or center. Send them samples or help them. Great, great, great, great pictures and great content. So they will link to you and that will take you slowly and steadily higher up in the search rankings of Google.

[00:13:23] Interesting. I think this actually turned out we didn’t preparedness. But I think this turned out into a really great example. So then great business model would work kind of similarly. But instead of selling dresses, what are we selling?

[00:13:39] Yeah, exactly. So we will talk about casino. And Casino is a highly competitive space within Google. Everyone wants to rank number one for different casino keywords because it’s so much money in it. So the word casino would probably be similar to ranking for maybe a women’s fashion or something, which is a huge key. Everyone wants to find fashion and it’s not a great place to start. If you’re doing this for the first time, but it’s a great place to go if you want to, may build something big. So we will rank for casino and we will everyone in the casino space does the first half of this very well liked writing about it, knowing what kind of information to do all of these things. All of our competitors know that. That’s the simple stuff. And the challenge is to be the best at the other stuff. How do you get websites to link towards you and vote for your site? And how do you get the highest authority sites, the biggest Web sites out there to link towards you?

[00:14:41] And this is how important is this for an affiliate? And in terms of how much will it determine your revenue?

[00:14:48] Yeah, so. So basically, if your Web site was a human, then the text and things you put on the Web site would be food. You really need it. But the links would be oxygen. So you will get absolutely nowhere without it, without food. You could at least last for a while, but without links, you’re you’re screwed more or less everything. Both of them are very important. But you’re not going to get anywhere in terms of search rankings unless you have links pointing course your sites, you could still get traffic from social media or whatever. That’s a completely different story. But Google will not put you anywhere unless other people talk about you. That’s just how the algorithm works.

[00:15:29] And so what we can do then what other casino affiliates struggle with is hopefully attract a lot of very big Web sites to talk about us because we’re giving all our money away, which means that a magazine like, I don’t know, Times magazine would never would at least very rarely write about a website about casino, because it’s kind of frowned upon. It’s not what you’re supposed to do. But when a casino site decides to give away all their money, that’s suddenly news. And them so that can be able to attract these kinds of links. And we’ve already gotten a lot of those links, not necessarily from Time magazine, but from a lot of big blogs and news Web sites and stuff like that that have thought of us as well. This is something different. This is newsworthy. They are doing something really cool and we want to help them.

[00:16:24] So how are other casinos done getting links?

[00:16:29] It’s that kind of thing, gambler blogs or where are those things coming from?

[00:16:33] So the most common way for those kinds of websites to get links are that they pay to get someone to write about them. So they go to it. They can even go to a. fashion blog because they want any link. And then they give her two hundred dollars to write about the fashion in the casino and then link towards that. So they pay with money and they get links that are not so powerful because you could never go to Times magazine and say, hey, can you write about our casino? Because they wouldn’t accept that. There are websites that would, but not the biggest ones. So our hope and we have proven it in some ways is that by giving away everything, we can benefit ourselves, by getting links back. So links that we otherwise would have to buy and pay money for. We’re now getting for free because we’re giving away the money.

[00:17:35] Ok. So one thing I have to ask then is that.

[00:17:45] Ok, so is Great is supposed to be a charity where we give away all of the profits and the way you speak now about links is that. Yes, we do give money away, but we want something in return. So it’s more of a transaction than a philanthropic charitable act. Do you understand where I’m coming from? Yeah. And you can create the trust that if you want something back, that we want to do the best with this money.

[00:18:11] I can definitely see that this challenges the trust. OK. But there is something else here. It looks like there is a hidden agenda and. In a way, there is.

[00:18:23] And at the same time, the whole idea is that this can benefit us so we can give away more because we’re not asking for anything back so that we can start making money for ourselves. We’re asking for anything back so we can give away more. So the great circle of life, as you spoke about the great SVO circle of life, will will look something like like this where we’re starting at the top. So imagine you have a circle in front of you with four different stops, and the first one is that we start by giving away money. So we start by giving away my money at the moment.

[00:19:01] We haven’t made any money out yet. And by doing so, we get publicity in the next step. So the next part of the circle gives us publicity. Because we do this, that in the next turn gives us links. So we’re ranking higher up in Google.

[00:19:20] And that means that we are making more money.

[00:19:25] Because we’re now reacting, hoping Google to actually start making money for ourselves and then we can give those money away and we’re kind of close the loop. And the more money we give away, the idea is that we will get more publicity and more publicity means higher rankings. Higher rankings means more money to give away again.

[00:19:43] And it just starts going upwards in circle of life or upwards going spiral or whatever we want to refer to it. So, yes, it can kind of challenge our trust that we want something back and that we’re doing this with an agenda.

[00:20:00] At the same time, we’re very, very open that this is our agenda and the ideas to be able to give away more and more. And we wouldn’t be able to do this if we didn’t get publicity, because if we didn’t get links towards us, we wouldn’t drank higher up in Google and there would be a limit to how far we could reach.

[00:20:20] Ok, so we kind of need to do this to have a advantage in the green ranking high up on keywords like casino.

[00:20:29] Yeah, exactly. So the competition usually does all of them does more or less the same thing. They buy links, they pay for links or they build their own websites to link to themselves. This is a very common strategy. So you kind of create votes for yourself in various ways and. Will not get links. So when I’ve been building Web sites in the past, I’ve never gotten links from really high authority Web sites. I’m never going to link from a university or a governmental institution or anything like that because they don’t.

[00:21:03] Can ask quick which which links would be the strongest. We’re talking governments or big newspapers or YouTubers or what would it be?

[00:21:13] Very easily. You can say that the more visitors the Web site have had for the longer time, the more powerful the votes they have.

[00:21:23] It’s not really that simple. So, for example, a university can be worth a lot more than a porn site, even though the university doesn’t have at all as much traffic and visitors as the porn site does. But if you want to say it very, very simple, the bigger the site, the more powerful the link. So Anna’s fashion blog is a lot less powerful than Vogue.

[00:21:42] And obviously, universities really don’t usually linked to casinos, for example, but they could link to someone writing about how charitable things they do or supporting the university or whatever research study they might be doing, which could be us.

[00:22:01] So Greg could support the research of a university, for example, in exchange for a link on their website?

[00:22:08] Not necessarily in exchange. We might do it anyway because we really believe in the research and hopefully we’ll get a link back. We’ll ask for it, but it’s not going to be a demand. It’s not like we’re gonna say if you’re not linking to us, we’re not going to fund your project because we want to fund projects we believe in. We’re going to fund them either way. And hopefully they would want to reciprocate and do the same thing for us. And we might find causes where we are supporting them only to get the link back if we think that this is it’s borderline if we really believe in this project. But if we get the link back, that’s actually worth more to us. It could take us higher up in the circle of life so we can give more to the organizations that we care the most about. Then that might happen. I’m sorry, I really like the circle of life analogy.

[00:22:54] It’s an upward spiral of life. But you know, once one challenge that I see here, since when I’ve been reading about charity, it seems like neglected causes that its causes that are not getting that much attention. Stuff like malaria or intestinal worms. No one is writing about them. And that is why it’s kind of effective to help out. So does that mean that great and would neglect courses like that because there is no chance to get publicity from it?

[00:23:26] It could mean that we haven’t tried this out in more than in theory yet, and it could mean that we will focus on the courses that gain publicity and that people care the most about because it benefits the business model. And it takes us higher up in the spiral of life. I see a DNA string in front of me now. It looks even better.

[00:23:47] It looks super, super surgical. Yeah.

[00:23:51] And it’s we need to get an animator.

[00:23:54] And then it could actually mean that we choose to neglect causes that might have been more efficient because they wouldn’t be able to benefit business model because. Well, let’s say one thing that we support that does 50 percent as much good as another organization, but they gave us we can get five times more back from doing that into this spiral. It might be worth it. And this is calculations that we will have to do along the way. And we haven’t gotten to that point yet. But it’s it’s likely that we will do end up situations where we choose to donate money to the less efficient cause because it generates more publicity.

[00:24:39] Yeah, and hopefully we’ll be in situations where we have two equal courses and then we can choose the one that is the have the highest probability for links, NPR and stuff.

[00:24:50] Exactly. So I think we explain the how charity would benefit a 0 4 great in a way that at least I can understand the way you talked about it. So let’s go back then to my fashion blog that I’m setting up.

[00:25:08] Could I benefit from doing some kind of charity work with this New Year’s dresses site?

[00:25:16] I think you could at least on a on a small scale. And what I mean by that is that you could probably find one way of getting links to be, too, if it’s a fashion website for New Year’s Eve dresses, maybe supporting smaller organization that works with, I don’t know, girls education in Africa, whatever that kind of relates to what you’re doing kind of aligns to their the audience that you’re having and saying that and you can offer to support them with, I don’t know, hundred euros in exchange for them actually writing about it. So you’re doing something good with your cause and you’re getting some kind of thing back because you might not be able to just donate money like that. You might not have those kind of financial means, but it could actually be beneficial for your your course as well. So you you might be able to get a link back to you that’s worth those hundred euros that you’re giving away. That’s not necessary. It might not be the case, but it could be the case. So it’s definitely worth considering as one of the tools to get higher up.

[00:26:27] Yeah, that makes sense, and that could be a initiative for blogs to write about as well. This company is doing these nice dresses and they’re also doing good things for the planet.

[00:26:38] Exactly. So you can get more motivated to do your daily job because you’re doing something good as well as seeing your business grow.

[00:26:49] All right. I’m John Mayer. We’re trying to accomplish the impossible task of keeping of talking for less than 30 minutes.

[00:26:57] It’s really hard because you’re so nice to talk to.

[00:26:59] And I love we both like to talk.

[00:27:03] We do. So let’s still try to keep this under 30. But before do you have something you want to wrap up? I did it great. Now, probably animated. So spiral upward spiral of life to announce something on that or any final advice for a fashion blog? I’m insist on it.

[00:27:20] I mean, anything is worth highlighting again, that I think affiliate business is an amazing place to start a company. And knowing that you can do it for just a few hours a week to get started can create a place where you can come from freedom and live the life you want. Maybe five years from now, you don’t have to quit your job to start a company. You could actually do it as a side business side of anything. And there are tons of tools that make this super easy online. If you Google and you research a little bit about it and setting up a website about New Year’s Eve dresses is a much smaller thing that it sounds like and could possibly generate some 10 20 euros a month pretty quickly. And that’s not big money, but it’s a start. So, yeah, consider starting this. If you want to come to a place with freedom, financial freedom, maybe five years from now.

[00:28:15] I get excited enough. You can do is side of all dressed as a. Yay.

[00:28:21] So let’s, uh, let’s end on that note. And we’re actually going in less than 30 minutes. I think we deserve to pat ourselves on the back. High fived the camera and do a jumping stoolie hug.

[00:28:34] Oh, yeah.

[00:28:35] And if you have any more questions about SEO or anything. And if feedback on this podcast or anything, you would love to hear us talking about it, please send us an email to podcast, as always. Cheers.