141 Comments 16 minutes

I know I’m sharing this at the point of the year when everyone is winding down and preparing for the holiday season, but that’s exactly why I’m sharing it: So you jump-start your success in 2016 in a way you never thought possible. I know my headline may make you skeptical, but I will back up the title in a very big way. I don’t believe in writing a headline to get your attention and not fulfilling the promise in the following content.

Welcome to Inc Idea #9, where three things are happening for the first time ever.

1) I’m sharing this Inc. update as a public blog post, when I normally share them behind closed doors.

2) I will actually be following this strategy myself.

3) I almost didn’t share it because I think it’s that good but my scarcity mindset has since been eradicated after doing more research.

What holiday? It’s time to grind!

74 Comments 9 minutes

In 2010 I received an email from Adnan Ebrahim. He was telling me about this new site he had started, Car Throttle, that was starting to get some press. At the time it was getting around 45,000 pageviews per month but he wasn’t sure how to take things to the next level. (No credit here, I had no advice since I didn’t know a thing about the car space online).

Today, Car Throttle has more than 1.2 million Facebook fans. Car Memes, which he also owns, has 1.4 million. He had record traffic days last month when he reached 1 million pageviews in a day for the first time ever. The day after, traffic records were broken again.

152 Comments 18 minutes

Today I’m going to show you how I’m (probably) the only advertiser that can reach all of Moz.com’s users via Facebook. I’m also going to show you that for every industry you care about, you should have at least two fan pages to cover it. I’ll also show you how you can steal the best content ideas from any of your competitors right under their nose.

Welcome to the guide I’ve been hyping up for a long time. I call it the $1,000 Facebook guide partly because I had planned to sell this information as part of a premium product but mostly because I think it will be worth far more than that to any Facebook advertiser. If you’re looking to promote any type of website on Facebook these days, this guide will show you information I haven’t seen elsewhere.

212 Comments 19 minutes

In early 2007 I fell asleep on a bus home from college. I had a weird dream that I saw Jane Copland, Rebecca Kelley and Rand Fiskhin (all of SEOmoz at the time) sitting at the front of the bus. The conversation we had wasn’t very interesting, and it probably shows a very geeky time of my youth, but it does highlight one thing: Even at 16 I was crazy about SEO and the communities discussing it.

In the last 72 hours the SEO world has gone crazy about the news that PBN’s (Private Blog Networks) are being hit by Google. The one person I’ve looked up to all of this time, Rand Fishkin, was quick to label anyone involved in the practice as a Blackhat SEO. It was an interesting comment from someone who recently emailed me to thank me for the transparency I share in this space, but not one that I agree with. If I’m a Blackhat SEO now, I’ll continue to be one: Because I’m not slowing down the growth of my own private link network.

75 Comments 10 minutes

As a result of so much of my time being spent focused on building an SEO company and ranking websites, I’ve been fortunate to come across a number of people who are on a similar journey. Today I would like to introduce one of those people, Matt Prados, to the world. Matt has managed to build a 7-figure yearly revenue stream running his SEO business by targeting two specialist niches in the medical field.

Matt, from Southern California, is someone Diggy and I have been in touch with for all of 2014 and thought it’s about time we got him on the site to share his knowledge.

144 Comments 9 minutes

Five months ago I published what turned out to be one of the most popular posts ever on this site: A guide on how to reach 100,000,000 (that’s 100 million) unique users in just six months. The whole idea of the post was to show that people are “stealing” viral content, posting it on their site, and getting more visitors from Facebook than you ever thought possible.

I later published a follow-up article showing a reader of this website who made $100,000 in one week and I also dismissed some of the ridiculous claims by both Business Insider and a ‘Click Fraud’ video that was making rounds online. Now it’s time to do part three: What happened, and can you still make money with this model?

167 Comments 13 minutes

A few weeks ago I was one of the tens of thousands of people who enjoyed reading a blog post on Priceonomics about “The SEO Dominance of RetailMeNot”. It was an absolutely fascinating read because, being a total SEO geek, I rarely find information in this space that hasn’t been repeated 100 times before. I knew about the company already, but I had no idea about the scale in which they were absolutely annihilating their competitors.

For the thousands of popular search terms that are out there in the coupon world, you’ll see RetailMeNot as the number one search result for the vast majority of them. The Priceonomics article was a great read, but it’s clear that a number of their readers were disappointed with what the article lacked, rather than what it included. I’m always up for doing some digging into the SEO background of a website, especially when 63% of their traffic comes from search and they’re valued at $1.7 Billion dollars.

228 Comments 16 minutes

It’s very rare for me to do a follow-up post on any subject, let alone in such a short timeframe, but my recent post on Viral Nova caused quite a fuss. Pageviews wise, it was the most popular I’ve published this year but more surprising was how many emails and comments the topic received.

Many of them were to let me know about the Facebook click fraud video that’s gone viral and the articles from both Business Insider and Bloomberg on Upworthy losing Facebook traffic . I hope to dispel their claims and more in this follow-up post.

253 Comments 9 minutes

It’s so easy to think that all of the best ideas have already been thought of, but then each year something else comes along that makes you go “why didn’t I think of that?” Whether it’s Pinterest, Snapchat or even Flappy Bird, it’s amazing that new ways to communicate and play are still being “invented”. One such example that I want to share with you today is simply about giving crack to Facebook users and becoming rich because of it.

Not actual crack, of course, but crack in the form of content that they just have to share with their friends on the world’s most popular social network. What’s more amazing is that your website can look terrible, you don’t have to get any of your own images or write any of your own content, and you can be up and running with traffic in the next 12 hours. Don’t believe me? I have more than one example. Let’s go…

182 Comments 12 minutes

Back in August I published a blog post about my PPC case study where I made $1,000 profit in my first week. Paying for traffic wasn’t really something I had done too much of so I was pretty excited to add a new angle to my marketing efforts and fortunately, it really paid off.

Without a doubt, the reason I had such fast success was because I devoured a ton of information before I got started. Most notably, the threads on the Stack That Money forum. A lot of people recommended it to me and when some of them are personal friends who do six-figures per month, I decided to check it out.