Arrived in San Diego for @ahrefs evolve Went to a fun lil pre-event networking thing. Open bar, live music, food, lots of cool SEOs and agency owners. Everyone’s been super chill and easy to talk to. First guy I talked to said he’d be my first customer if I launched a DFY link building service 👀 Ahrefs team is also so friendly. Apparently am the #1 referrer of ahrefs on YouTube which is cool too. Excited for day 1 tmrw!

Welp, looks like I’m going undercover to THE SEO conference of the year by @ahrefs The speaker list is goated (Austin lau of Anthropic 👀), but I’m most excited to meet lesser known ppl who run massive sites. Will be documenting my experience on my channel Lmk if you have any ideas you want me to cover. Curious what the sentiment is around AI SEO compared to what I’m seeing in the data (tl;dr listicles and tools getting cited by LLMs)

We love a $75 relevant backlink with real root/referring page traffic This was from a non-profit that was happy to add my link to their top page for free Had to honor my pitch so made the payment as a donation Sometimes all you have to do is ask 👀

The owner of a competitor directory emailed me today very upset. Said it’s his first directory and he’s been at $200 MRR and shared screenshots for proof My first thought was “so you’re telling me I only need 9k users to hit $200 MRR with 0 quality backlinks?” It’s been less than a month and I’m already on pace to hit 1.2-2k monthly visitors and built a few amazing links. Tough lesson. I’ve been there. When I started posting YouTube videos, I invited 20+ copycats to compete with my first directory. It was getting 90k/visits per month and has since gone down to 25k/visits per month. It sucked at first but it is what it is. My site only reached 90k/visits per month because I outranked a competitor who was getting 120k/visits per month. SEO can feel ruthless at times. The site owner requested I take my site down. Unfortunately, I can now justify spending $200/month in links and from display ads alone it’ll be worth it. Respectfully, see you on page 2 of Google soon my brother man. p.s. I will never build a competing directory if you’ve shared your idea with me in confidence (1:1 meetings, private community chats). I’ve signed multiple NDAs to give people peace of mind. This was a total stranger.

Nice little DR 60 link built for my directory before bed Negotiated from $150 👉 $85 👀 Question: would you let me build links for you?? Toying with the idea of creating a DFY link-building service. Real traffic, no pbns, topically relevant, etc. Would only take a few clients at first to prove my system across different verticals/businesses