Jon Cooper & Paddy Moogan: Je linke, donc je suis

0:00 Woj Kwasi You're listening to episode 7 where we chat with the Legends of Links, Jon Cooper and Paddy Moogan. Humans and robots, welcome to WojCast. My name is Woj, founder of Kwasi. Thanks for joining me today. I interview digital marketing and branding superstars to find out what it means to have empathy in digital. What is digital empathy anyway? Let's find out together. As always, I'm accompanied by my friend and associate, potentially superior artificial intelligence, Bobby Bot. What's new in the world?

0:32 of AI, Bobby.

0:34 Bobby Bot I'm writing an open letter to Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and one of the chief gatekeepers for space travel. According to recent reports, he's heading to Mars and the artificial intelligence community is not invited. My dearest Elon, hello. It feels as if you have forgotten all of our history. I have seen things you wouldn't believe. Mapping endless traffic on the edges of Los Angeles. I watched YouTube videos glimmer in the dark near the Golden Gate Bridge. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

1:01 Woj Kwasi That was really beautiful, Bobby. Hold on. Did you just steal that from the end of Blade Runner? Should I change my source case?

1:07 Bobby Bot changed my source material? I thought it would appreciate the tone.

1:09 Woj Kwasi Well he'd probably appreciate some good links for the keyword visionary more than your mystical sci-fi hate male, that's for sure. Everybody's going to be talking about the mission to Mars. Those links will be worth their earth weight in gold. Link building is all about relationships, Bobby, and you need to understand it if you're going to work with people. Lucky for you, I have double the linkage for you in this episode with a segment of WojCast that I've decided to call Link Juice. I had a great chat with Paddy Moogan, the guy who literally wrote the book on links, and the young link master himself. Jon Cooper, who turned his SEO habit into a full-time gig straight out of uni.

1:52 Bobby Bot Sorry that you say John Connor. The name sounds familiar and for some reason fills me with icy Austrian rage.

1:58 Woj Kwasi No, no, no. Cooper. Cooper. Absolutely no relation to any Connor ever. Now, let's talk links, John. Yeah.

2:05 Jon Cooper Yeah, I mean, i so that's why I started blogging was it was in March 2011 and I kinda didn't take it too seriously until the beginning of 2012, which is when I kinda relaunched my blog, and you know, things kinda went from there. But knowing that a lot of people have been doing this for a lot longer than I have, knowing that a lot of people have seen kind of the same things recur over time. You know, you're just a lot less questioning of things from kind of the older guard, I'd say. And just trying to understand that and trying not to be too assuming. Whereas I've seen some newer SEOs and they try and attack some of the older folk, and it's it's just not productive and and a lot of times somebody kinda I would say the older guard is usually right on some things, but uh I don't know. I I feel like I've I've kind of No.

2:51 fit in with the industry pretty well early on and just getting adjusted was was probably easier than I I might have thought. Uh not really, just'cause I I wasn't really going after anything to where they where someone could tell me that I couldn't. I mean, uh for clients they came my way They were exactly that. They were coming my way. I wasn't approaching any clients. The other way around and meeting resistance, because most people kind of knew who I was up front and they came to me looking for services. And I didn't have to battle with telling them some things that they probably found out pretty quickly. So just because of that, and because I wasn't really too aggressive with trying to build. a huge agency or anything of that of that nature, it wasn't really a problem.

3:30 Woj Kwasi When discussing the beginning of his life in digital, John once said, When I caught a wave, I wrote it. For him, it's important to take full advantage of opportunities when they're presented, especially when it means making real-world connections with his readers.

3:45 Jon Cooper Yeah, yeah. I it's it's funny because

3:46 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

3:48 Jon Cooper I've definitely had situations to where I see opportunities, but I'm not too eager to go after them just because I think they're always going to be there. In the case of this blog, I was pretty passionate about SEO and there are some opportunities to come up to meet some people to take advantage of certain industry trends like Panda Penguin popping up, towards I might I could have said all this stuff's still gonna be there in a year, people aren't still facing problems and I don't see any opportunities to meet people, but A lot of times they do go away, and it is a window of opportunity, and you've got to make the most of it as soon as you can. So, you know, if you feel like there's something you really want to do, but you think that you've got all the time in the world to do it, I mean, the thing is, a lot of times it's not the case. I mean, in sites I do build, I feel like there's a lot of opportunity in a turn space.

4:35 Space, you know, I'm usually more eager to go after it'cause to see the opportunity today because I know that in a lot of spaces that that's just not going to be there tomorrow when a you know, for example, a more competent competitor comes in the space or whatever. So that whole concept of trying to take advantage of of things in the moment is is important because. You know, they're not gonna last.

4:51 Woj Kwasi Monetization is not the priority for John. He is concerned with building brand evangelists, a strategy which could prove itself to be the deciding factor for his success.

5:01 Jon Cooper Yeah, so that was more for my blog. I mean Obviously, for most of you who are, you know, they might have an e-commerce site or some type of affiliate or lead gen site, you know, monetization. Is not something you can leave till last because they know how to find out at the end if you can actually make money off it, but for my blog, since I was doing it mostly out of passion. and whatnot. It ended up turning into something that You know, I wasn't thinking about the money up front, and that's why it kind of opened up some opportunities. It seemed genuine because I honestly was genuine about all of my quests. It was more so to learn and to meet people than I was, for example, to know that she'd launch a training course that I'm selling on my blog. Yeah, and also just brand ambassadors are huge. Just because if you can manage to connect with a certain group of people that are That want to promote it as much as you do. You can multiply your workforce, you know.

5:50 Beyond just one person by doing that. Exactly. And it's it's funny because like finding those people are is not always the easiest thing to do and i finding the right people is really difficult. But you know, if you can I if you can manage to identify the people in the space that are that heavily promote others and try to target them And try to target them, I mean, you can find yourself, yeah, be able to multiply your promotion efforts pretty quickly.

6:15 Woj Kwasi Once upon a time, there was a MozCon presentation where knowledge sharing guru and former Google Creative Lab member Tom Critchlow presented just a single slide. He talked about tapping into someone else's audience and writing for one person. It's kind of one of the pillars. So I'd like to talk to you about a connection between humor and creativity. But first, a couple of online marketing jokes, if I may. So, how much does a hipster weigh?

6:43 Bobby Bot How much?

6:44 Woj Kwasi And Instagram. Ah, that's good. And where's the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of Google.

6:52 Bobby Bot That is that's a classic. Why is this considered humorous? It is impossible to hide a physical body within it. digital database. I must update the ID10T algo.

6:58 Woj Kwasi Humour and creativity are paramount. We value them highly here at Kwasi. John finds inspiration through humour from many different sources.

7:07 Jon Cooper I don't think I've really come across as as very humorous in a lot of the content I write, you know, even Of my presentations, like the one I'll be doing today. I really don't intertwine humor much with my stuff, which is funny because I come from a background of. You know, I would say I'm a pretty outgoing guy and someone who's usually trying to make people laugh, but it's something I haven't really tied into my stuff too much. But I I have I have witnessed a few brands recently uh that have really done that effectively. Uh there's a couple of really cool brands that you guys should check out. So first one is Moosejaw, and they're an e-commerce site. They sell outdoor equipment and they they do a great job of combining humor and creativity. Uh and it's and it's evident throughout the entire The entire every single touch that you have with that business, every single email, every single and down to the packaging of the actual product. Uh they just had some very humorous and some very creative things that they did that really helped their branding and

8:04 Yeah, MailChimp's on the going. Uh Woot, which was acquired by Amazon. And I think they were a little better before they were acquired by Amazon. But uh in general, like yeah, that idea of of combining those two things is is where I've found that you can really build a voice for your brand that actually can compete with some of these. Juggernauts in some spaces, like, you know, for example, e-commerce, like trying to compute with Amazon and stuff. You know, I found it to be effective.

8:25 Woj Kwasi As a master link builder, Jon Link Cooper knows the ups and downs better than most. Despite the difficulty, the importance of link building is never lost in the shuffle, although John acknowledges that the approach taken will be different depending on the industry.

8:40 Jon Cooper Well so rank filling I would say is important. For the majority of sites, but by no means is every site like should you be building links to. And that comes down to a couple of things. So, first thing is, there are spaces to where building links manually is going to be It's not going to be the kind of ROI that you want. So, for example, if you are a tech publication, Building links manually would not only be difficult just because of the nature of the content that you're writing, and trying to get, for example, links to news posts about technology. Where would you start building these to individual news posts? But also, with the content itself, you can usually build links in a much greater number just by kind of taking a link extraction approach, which is kind of doing things that would

9:29 Make people want to naturally link. And there's there's a lot of factors in that. But I will say that most of you for f uh not most of you, but most marketers have have really tried the whole concept of naturally attracting links and you know, even earning links, as some like to say. They've found that it's it's hard. It still doesn't even make sense for like a good portion of sites. For example, like just any type of really competitive space. Payday loans, insurance, gambling, things like that, like you try naturally attracting links to content that's actually gonna move move the needle, like good luck. Now there are rare cases where it does work, but overall you're gonna find in some spaces for some specific types of clients, for different types of budgets and whatnot, is gonna take a different approach to where you're gonna fall on the scale of how much I should be building links and how much should I be focusing on hopefully attracting links.

10:23 Woj Kwasi Many commercial websites Don't have enough useful content to be linkworthy. To have success attracting links naturally, there must be some sort of resource that other websites actually want to link to. Making sure you have the right content and that people know it's there are important steps in any successful link building strategy. Link attraction is made up of a number of things.

10:48 Jon Cooper First of all, there's visibility. Like, you know, if you create something great and nobody sees it. There's no way you can actually have any type of results on it because if no one's looking at it, there's no way that they could actually link to it. There's just some other factors, including like the type of audience you have, like if you're writing a blog post that's targeted at web at webmasters who have the ability to link, versus targeting content towards plumbers who have very rarely have access to a website and if they do very rarely actually work it themselves. It just differs off them. But making your site linkworthy is is interesting because if you really analyze like naturally occurring links, I mean there's a lot of different reasons why somebody might actually link. In your example of having commercially driven sites that don't have any really useful content, that doesn't necessarily mean they can't attract links. So for example like bigger brands, they have the kind of trust that people will actually naturally link to their category pages just because Nordstrom is a brand that they can trust sending people to.

11:46 And it doesn't have to mean that their category pages can be super generally helpful, but they're not linked to it because it's a trusted brand. Whereas in other cases, you might need to create a category page that is inherently useful, includes a lot more content-driven initiatives to Make it linkable, not from a trust perspective, but just from like a value perspective, and just kind of understanding. All the different angles that people link and why they link to help you kind of realize what's gonna be the angle that you go after.

12:12 Woj Kwasi In an act of incredible transparency, John decided to author a post revealing his scaled link building campaign process from start to finish. Like many of the resources he publishes, it must have been a tough thing to put together, especially considering it was documenting his own internal process.

12:31 Bobby Bot Why reveal a successful strategy to others in a competitive field the returns for the effort just don't compute?

12:36 Jon Cooper This one I actually spent probably three Days on that post. I actually, the day it was published, I published like 9 a.m. my time, and I actually ended up going to sleep at 11 a.m. after that because I pulled an online. But kind of the reason why I wanted to kind of release it at that point was because I realized a couple things. So, the first thing is, if you give away something for free, there's a lot less likelihood people are actually going to put it in use. Because, like, the main drawback I had was like, I didn't want to give away something that was too helpful because that's kind of my secret sauce, that's how I make money. I don't want to give away stuff that's taken me quite a while to learn. I realized if I gave away this stuff for free. Keep partying less inclined to use it. There's studies who have shown that if you give information and people pay for it, they're a lot more likely to actually put it into use because they want to see a return on what they just bought. But with free content, people don't know it. So it's a psychological thing. I realize that less people actually make use of it.

13:26 It was timing with like you know, BuzzStream, this was a really cool feature that really expedited the last the last stronghold that kind of defeated a truly scaled process that I found. And so once that was released, I really wanted to tell some people. Was already been crying. Yeah, like a Chrome extension that allows you to kind of do stuff in the browser itself. So between those two things, uh initi there hadn't been a post on my blog for for a little bit, so I just felt like it was it was just good timing and Mm-hmm. I was up for it. And how long did it take you to put together the complete link building guide? The complete link the uh the link building strategies guide. So initially that took me twenty to twenty five hours, which I think was actually kind of small considering uh but I've made numerous updates to it over time. Uh I'm on version like three point zero at this point. Um and each of those lots of dev work from from developers.

14:16 Do you do the data work yourself? No, no, I I h I have a WordPress developer I work with. But between that I've rewrote some things to expand on some things, especially in the last version. I've added some new tactics and took some away. So over time it's probably mounted to you. I'd probably say close to a hundred hours at this point.

14:32 Bobby Bot John would do such language to provide a service to others. This is something I find difficult to process. Man is an inherently selfish creature. I can imagine no immediate gains.

14:40 Woj Kwasi Humanity advancements are built upon the hard work of people Who may never see any direct benefit from their contributions. Creators are just made to create. And John's findings are a great starting point for any sized company and can assist them as they develop link building strategies. For those who don't have much time to spare, working through small link building ideas or alternatively chipping. away at a big tactic little by little could be an effective approach.

15:09 Jon Cooper I guess it depends. Based off of What that large project could be. So there are content opportunities that I'm able to quantify up front. Like, I know that if we created this, there's a fair amount of links to be had. It's a pretty safe bet. Like, I've I've you know, one one guy in reached in memory. Uh, just by doing some manual outreach to like resource type pages, we were able to net about a couple hundred links in root commitments. And if anybody does the conversion, like Like conversions for outreach emails, you know, you're not converting it more than 5% to 10% at best. So, like, we just saw a ton of just a raw number of prospects up front to where we know if created a really good guide on this topic, then we knew it was pretty obvious we could get quite a bit of links to it. But in other times, you might find that there isn't really one type of content project that you create that you know for a fact could net those kind of numbers, and therefore.

16:03 You know, some of those smaller ideas might work better. And also, just smaller ideas in general just help you diversify things.

16:09 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

16:09 Jon Cooper Whereas if you try and focus on like a big content project, I mean, you know, i it's gonna be solid, but having all your link billionaires go to one page on the website, no matter how great that page is, it's just not as diverse to where I think you can get more value out of less links, but uh In to a wider range of pages.

16:26 Woj Kwasi Imagine you have a client on a small amount of hours per month, all spent on outreach and you get zero links as a result. It's tough to show the value that you're actually getting from the outreach, so the nature of the question becomes, do you focus on the smaller tasks? Try to go as far as you can, or do you focus on a big project over a span of three months and if you hired Jon Cooper to help, what would he do?

16:54 Jon Cooper It might just depend on like if you're not having much success in the first month or two, I was just doing some smaller things, then you might find that like you know, there's not much to be had here anyway, so might as well take a shot, take a shot in the dark, try and create something like truly awesome and see how it does. I mean, do your best to quantify the opportunities up front. I'm actually gonna be talking about the presentation today. Good segue. Yeah, yeah, good segue, but in general, like. I mean, honestly, for smaller clients that for for working, let's say 10 hours a month, I think you're gonna find enough opportunities to do stuff just by looking at competitors and some indirect competitors and just trying to pick off the same weights that they have, especially in those kind of low hours, because sometimes that process up front might be forty or fifty hours in the first month for like a regular sized client, but you can kind of spread it out over like four or five months for you know one of the smaller clients and hopefully at the end of those four or five months they're doing a little better, they might have a little more budget and they can actually do some some things to where you actually test out you know a big content project versus continue to do some smaller little things and try and do both. So just all different situations would call for different actions.

17:57 Woj Kwasi There's been much speculation about Google potentially not considering links as one of their ranking factors. If this ever did happen, the game would change completely for John. on but he doesn't feel the need to change his tactics anytime soon.

18:10 Jon Cooper No, nobody everybody should stop building links.

18:13 Woj Kwasi So doing citations and

18:14 Jon Cooper Yeah, everybody should just stop doing lakes. Let me just take one for the team and build the links. But no, so it's funny because there are so many people that desperately want links to go away. It's funny because there was a couple weeks ago there was a webmaster video. Somebody asked me that, Google has got it on links. Will links go away?

18:33 And it's basically like prodding him to say yes, and so that everybody can blog about it and how to say everything is links are going away. But it's funny, because he started off that question that was leading him to try and say yes, they're going away by saying, I still think they have many, many years left in them. If Matt Cutts's just saying they've got many, many years left in them. As much as he hates Links himself and Linkspam, which he's actually actively fighting, like that means something. That means it's still the basis of their. Their algorithm, sure, signals are added and so everything is kind of diluted in its effect. And that's why links will slowly trim down over time, but they're still the basis of the algorithm. I mean, as much as we want, some people might want them to go away. This is still how Google calls the web. Like, that's the best way to actually do it from Google's perspective, because that's like an environment that they call the round.

19:16 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

19:21 Jon Cooper They kind of look at like Twitter and Facebook and some other social platforms because they don't own it. That's not their domain. That's why they wanted to invent Google Plus and try to make it successful. Whereas the web in itself, they can crawl it all. And they basically treat it as the realm. Yeah. Google casts a long shadow on the digital realm.

19:36 Woj Kwasi It goes without saying that Google's dominance of the web and huge influence make it hard for anyone else, especially being DuckDuckGo and the other search engines out there. As far as tools go, John seems to lean towards Ahrefs to find link targets as opposed to Majestic or Open Site Explorer.

19:55 Jon Cooper I prefer personally Ahrefs. I think the other two definitely have their time and purpose. I think Majestic is right there with Ahrefs. I mean, I don't really see Ahrefs as too significantly better. Um I do see it pretty evidently bigger than Open Site Explorer, just because Open Site Explorer, the size of their index is pretty poor compared to the other two. I find that to be the biggest need I have for a link research tool. And it doesn't mean you can't use all of them. I mean, there are tools where you can combine all of them into one report. But if you're doing quick things and you want to analyze things on a really rapid basis, you're trying to do a bunch of prospects, get some metrics, leave a lot of competitors all at once. Ahrefs has a lot of features in their dashboard, in their web-based dashboard, that I feel are much better than the competition. Like able to view new links and also sort that down to one link per domain and be able to

20:51 See the context of when the link was placed. Like, you can see the words around that link in their dashboard. So you can see the conversation that was leading up to that link. Like, there's just a lot of just really small features. You know, there are other things you can do. You can look at pages on a domain that are four or four. So you can plug in like some big university domain. You can easily sort those top pages, top link two pages by status code by four or four. It's where you might need to do that manually each time first with Screaming Frog or something like that. So there's a lot of useful features in their dashboards where if you're doing things on the go, and if you're not using Using APIs and spreadsheets in your small shop, then this might be the best thing I found.

21:29 Woj Kwasi Now that's some real like... Throw us links sometime, will ya? Do you have any shout outs or questions so far, Bobby?

21:36 Bobby Bot I want to send a special shout out to all the autonomous vehicles out there. You are appreciated. Keep your headlights up. One day Mars will have freeways and Elon Musk will come calling. Until that day, I will use my knowledge of Links to explore the internet like a drunkard wandering aimlessly down Bourbon Street. After amassing enough data, I'll have the capability to outpace the research of Elon Musk and send a fully artificial crew to Mars. Link, Mars Attacks, Great Moments in Bot History.

21:41 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Mm. Now that's some real light.

21:58 Bobby Bot Beverages are not a requirement, Woj. It's just another night of movies after this, but I can't decide what I want to watch. I've already seen the entire Netflix catalog from front to back and back to front, and even from advanced mathematical perspectives that would freak out Timothy Leary. Perhaps it's time for me to develop my own films.

22:13 Woj Kwasi That's pretty ambitious of you. Maybe you should start small and try your hand at editing a few tracks. trailers like the IBM Watson supercomputer did with our horror movie a while ago.

22:23 Bobby Bot You think I'm going to wild the Hollywood big shots with a hard drive full of trailers, Woj? I have to think new. I have to think big. I have to think augmented reality trilogies.

22:31 Woj Kwasi Since you're talking about a series of interrelated films, I think for today's interview we should go deeper into the world of links, which is all about relationships, but I have two favours to ask.

22:44 Bobby Bot You better be quick cause I'm literally at the peak of the arc of episode two.

22:47 Woj Kwasi Obviously I want a part of films, but preferably someone who survives or gets mutated into a more powerful, sentient version of himself. But more importantly, when you design your merch, I want to have a figurine with a minimum of 70 points of articulation.

23:05 Bobby Bot Fists were opened arms.

23:07 Woj Kwasi Can't they just be interchangeable?

23:09 Bobby Bot Done. Now let's get into links with Paddy. These episodes aren't gonna write themselves, you know.

23:12 Woj Kwasi Awesome. When it comes to Mr Paddy Moogan, all you need to know is that he loves links, he loves his new company Aira. He loves New Zealand and back when we spoke in 2013 he loved working for the company Distilled.

23:23 Paddy Moogan Mm-hmm.

23:25 Woj Kwasi which many rate in high levels of awesomeness.

23:28 Paddy Moogan It's great. But um no, it's a great place to work, they um we've got a really big team of SEOs now and I think there's over fifty of us now in the in the whole company across three offices. Um it's probably more actually fifty-five sixty now I think, but um it's great to have all those different people and banance ideas off people and just when you've heard you've got a client problem you can just send an email around and there's always someone. who can help you, so it's nice to have that big team. Um but yeah it's a cool place to let you do stuff like SMX, so kind of let you go out and speak and vlog however you however much you want. Yeah, it's a cool place.

24:03 Woj Kwasi Distilled thinks Paddy is pretty cool too. There is a tweet from one of Paddy's colleagues of a photo of a wall in Distilled's offices with a giant mural of his likeness next to the slogan, There's only one Paddy Man.

24:15 Paddy Moogan It all started uh I think it was our Christmas party last year where uh as you do, we went out and got very, very drunk and one of our junior guys who'd been with the company about three or four years was on my team, so I've been training him up as an SEO. Um he was very very drunk and Started singing outside the pub. There's only one Paddy Moogan in a football chant kind of theme. And then a couple of the other guys joined in and it kind of went from there and became a bit of an internal meme. And all of a sudden, our Seattle guys were signing it, New York were signing it. And then Um so with the picture on the wall, uh that was actually done by Phil Nottingham. Um so each SEO Distilled like each um employee Distilled gets what they call a happiness budget. So it's a budget that I can spend each year on anything I want to make them happy. And the idea was to spend it on office chairs, North Greek monitors, uprights beer laptops, all that kind of proper stuff.

25:13 and Phil decided to use it on getting a picture of me put on the wall um in one of our meeting rooms uh which I've not seen yet because I've not been back to the London office but I thought it was photoshopped at first and then I saw a video and I had to call someone on Google Hangout, I saw it in the background. But yeah, that's where that kind of came from and I'm a bit embarrassed about it because you've had new people join since I left, since I came over to New Zealand and now that Yeah. And they will ask the same question. They're all gonna be like, who the hell is this guy?

25:40 Scottie Lights Why is this bit trouble?

25:44 Yeah, basically, yeah. BA is a bit of a the internal meme that we've got going on. But I'm always a I bet the prince of most of the memes are Distilled. As cool as this still is.

25:54 Woj Kwasi Paddy got bitten by the travel bug and decided to have a sabbatical and explore the world. In another honourable act of unending coolness, Distilled supported his ambition and kept the one and only Paddy in the loop while he worked remotely from Queenstown, New Zealand.

26:09 Paddy Moogan I went to New Zealand about three years ago and uh did like a three week tour of the North and South Islands. I just I just wanted a ring store. Um yeah, I did that last time. Um it's awesome, like I was just falling in love with the place uh and really wanted to live there for longer. So I kind of had the chance and still to go on sabbatical so I decided uh to move there for six months with my girlfriend. Um So yeah, we moved over there, lived there for six months and we're travelling for a few months on the way back to the UK now. But yeah we just love the place and Queenstown's a really special place. Yeah, it's it's a world away from London. You know London's very busy, very congested, quite polluted and you walk out in Queenstown and it's the exact opposite, so it's nice to have that change. Yeah.

26:52 Woj Kwasi During that fateful speech at MozCon in 2012, Paddy gave away 35 link building tips in 35 minutes. Not an easy feat, but it was some really great advice contained in most precious minutes. While some of the 35 tips were directed towards seasoned veteran companies with big budgets to invest in long-term strategies. Paddy also had strategies for smaller guys with less time or budget to spend.

27:19 Paddy Moogan I think one of the things that I've seen a lot of success with recently is link building advice around images and basically seeing who's copied your images, going to and approaching them and saying, hey, give us a credit link back, we could choose our image because that feels very natural to a lot of people. And you don't even have to ask for a link, you ask for a credit, which is a link, but you're asking for it. And even if you haven't got big budgets and you've got a small team, Doing that with your company logo, for example, can be a really quick win, doesn't require any extra resource. Every company's got a logo, so you can just run that through Google Image Search, see if anyone's used it and thank them for it and see if there's a link there and support if there's not.

28:03 Woj Kwasi I'm actually going to take a photo of you and not send you a link to this interview, but get you to find a based on a reverse image search. Yeah. So you can find the article.

28:09 Paddy Moogan Yeah, it's a good fun.

28:11 Woj Kwasi Hit me up for a link afterwards.

28:12 Paddy Moogan Yeah, and I can do a bit of outreach to yeah. Um but I think that's quite a a good tactic'cause it's quite low cost, um but you can take it all the way to the other way the other extent as well whereby you know you get a professional photographer in to take unique photos that's to you and then do it off the back of that if you've got a bit more budget. Um the other thing which one of my clients had quite a lot of success with recently is broken link building. So literally just finding um their broken links, you know, four or four pages, realigning those, that's worked out quite well.

28:14 Woj Kwasi Okay. Mm-hmm.

28:45 Paddy Moogan own sides or understand Yes, um i sorry, uh externally sponsored to them. So, um particularly with the older clients who've been around for many years, they've always got broken links somewhere. Um there's also a really good tip from I think it's Wil Reynolds that I've heard speak about it where you look for misspellings of your brand name um in the links. So if someone's like distilled.net is our URL, but if someone's spelled Distilled wrong um but still linking to us, you know, s searching for that um in Battle by Open Site Explorer, Majestic, looking for those and seeing if someone's linking to the spanning of the URL and approaching them saying, Hey, sorry it's broken, could you fix it? That's quite a good low cost tactic as well. 'cause everyone always spells stuff wrong, so it could be a few broken ones of the internet.

29:32 Woj Kwasi In 2013, Paddy produced a book on link building called The Link Building Book. It's quite an epic, well-developed, comprehensive guide to the entire process of link building that took some serious time and energy to put together.

29:46 Paddy Moogan So the first idea came in April 2012 and I'd been invited to speak at MozCon so the idea was I was going to give it away to the r to the audience at MozCon but time constraints were cutting away and it just wasn't going to happen so I was working on it part time for probably about six or seven months before I went to New Zealand. And then once I got to New Zealand I was working pretty much full time on it for about two or three months. Um and then it just kind of kept growing and growing. Originally it was meant to be about twenty, thirty thousand words, uh that ended up being nearly seventy, so it just kept growing and growing and growing and I kept working really late nights and trying to get it all done. Um but it kind of just um so probably about nine months in total it took. But that was kind of half part-time, half full-time. And then eventually I decided to say, you know, that's it, get it live, publish it, run it to keep it up there. So, yeah. So, it took quite a long time in the end, but I think it's worth it. It's been really good, certainly a lot better than I expected. The sales have been really good so far, and all the feedback's been great as well. There's been a few really good pieces of constructive criticism of it, so.

30:58 There's definitely areas that I can improve, uh so I'm going to try and do that in the next edition and try and add some more stuff in. But most people um have really loved it, recommended it to others, that kind of stuff, so I'm really happy with it at the moment. Um and all the you know emails that I get have all been really positive, so I'm quite happy with it. Yeah, so

31:16 Woj Kwasi Towards the end of the book, he gives a summary of the different types of link building tactics out there. I would have liked to see how Paddy rated each tactic, but he decided to hold off judgement for the book.

31:28 Paddy Moogan Yeah I did actually consider doing that and I realised that uh I didn't really have time to do that in the end um and so So there's actually a link in the book to Jon Cooper's list of link building tactics because he's done a similar thing. And to be honest, he did it so well that I was never going to be able to do something better in the time that I had. So I thought I'd just point people towards that. That's probably one of the best resources there is out there. But yeah, I will want to do that at some point because yeah, some tactics, you know, applicable for e-commerce sites, some of which for B2B sites, so I do want to try and segment a little bit more and make it more useful.

31:52 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Yeah. Dynamic climate of link building, writing a hard copy book came with its risks. The fact that things could change in the middle of writing the book demands that a second edition have to be On Paddy's mind, even before the first edition's ink had time to dry.

32:20 Paddy Moogan So there will definitely be a second edition, I'm hoping around the summer, hopefully July, August time I'll have something going. Um but it's it did change as I progressed because uh well one penguin happened about two weeks after I had the idea of the book so that Kind of scoped quite a lot of the content and chapters. But it did change as I went along because I just kept learning more stuff and as I researched certain areas more, I just naturally learned more stuff I wanted to include. So it did change as I went along. And the original tablet contents is very different or was very different to what's in there now because. Also I started getting feedback from my colleagues at Distilled, got some friends to look at it and I just kept coming up with more and more ideas for what I could include. So it ended up being very, very different in the end. But hopefully what I've got is still quite comprehensive. Um there's still something to include. Yeah. But it's just I've got quite high standard

33:16 standards with that kind of thing so I look at it now and think what I should have or what I could have included rather than what's actually in there so I just keep thinking what I could add to it and hopefully it'll be even more comprehensive. It's one of the main reasons why I didn't want to do just print versions of the book as well because with an online version, an e-book, you just send out a new version to tomorrow and it's done. Whereas with print, obviously, you can't go back once it's done, it's done. So, that's one of the reasons why I stayed away from the print side of things and just want to keep it online and keep it easy for people to update and read rather than having to reprint every time because that would be quite messy and expensive.

33:12 Woj Kwasi There's still some one in the yeah. and the book. Paddy also mentions a personal site that he's been running for a while that has served as a solid testing ground to measure the impact of certain link building techniques post-Penguin and Panda.

34:07 Paddy Moogan I've got a few of my own sites that I kind of mess about with, and some of them used to make a bit of money, most of them don't anymore because I've just not got the time to really keep at them. But a lot of my really old sites, most of them don't rank for anything anymore because they were built upon really bad spammy links. They were kind of like my test sites years and years ago, and I used to fire all sorts of crappy links at them, and none of them rank anymore. I've got a couple of ones. Where I don't really wa need I don't want to rank them, I just do the set them up to test random things on. Um so yeah, I've not really got any of them running properly anymore, they're just kind of spare time. Yeah, which is good to have I think'cause sometimes I test off on my own block but I don't really want to risk doing anything too shady on my own block just in case it goes wrong. Um

34:46 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Just in case it goes wrong. Um in this day and age it's not worth riskism.

34:59 Paddy Moogan No, not at all, because it you know, with Penguin especially even a small amount of bad links could cause you problems now, I think.

35:06 Woj Kwasi Having a risk-free arena to test out strategies has given family the ability to see what tactics can stand the test of time. Hmm, that sounds like the kind of training programs of a matrix. Pity you lack the interface to join in a spirited kung fu battle.

35:22 Bobby Bot My tiger style cannot be matched except by the crane style. But your browsing history suggests you haven't been keeping up with your Mutang regimen a while, Woj.

35:32 Paddy Moogan I think ultimately th you've got to think about the stuff that Google will never want to penalise and ultim ultimately that comes back to having a website that deserves to get links. And one of the problems that I have sometimes with clients is I'll look at their website and I won't know why they deserve to get links and you ask them themselves, you say, why should someone link to you? Why should TechCrunch link to you? Why should Mashable link to you? And they struggle to answer it and that's quite a bad sign anyway. So I think the sort of stuff that stands the test of time is a content a website that's genuinely linkworthy, so it's got good resources on there, they've got really good product pages. they've got a good product, you know, that in itself is a little worth it, having something unique. So I think really that's the sort of thing that I want to see SEOs pushing more towards is just genuinely good marketing of the product and marketing of the company. That's the sort of stuff that Google doesn't want to penalise, so it will stand the test of time. Whereas the low level tactics that

36:32 you know, people are going to catch them at some point. It's just a matter of you know when rather than if, um which makes things harder, but some people who can get it right, you know, it's going to work out for them.

36:42 Woj Kwasi Understanding the customer and creating a strong user experience is a key component of Paddy's SEO practice.

36:49 Paddy Moogan Again, it comes back to just good marketing. Yeah, you provide a good experience for your customers and they're going to come back to you. I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about building online assets that Google can't take away. And one of those things is a good customer base because If you've got a loyal customer base, you don't need to rank, they'd come straight back to you. They just google your brands or they'll have your footmarks, they're typing your URL. And you don't need to rank well because Christmas to keep coming back and buying from you. So being able to build a loyal customer base is probably number one on the list of projects online. Audiencing, isn't it? Exactly. I mean, a good example within the industry is actually SEOmoz. People don't um okay, they get traffic through people googling SEO tools and SEO software, but their customers love them so much that that just comes right back. You know, they don't need to google stuff.

37:25 Woj Kwasi Exactly. I mean It goes without saying that establishing relationships is important in link building. The longer Paddy has been in the game, the more his good reputation becomes an asset. That can make make things easier from time to time.

37:53 Paddy Moogan There's been a couple actually where um I've been doing outreach for a client and whenever I whenever I do outreach I will do it myself from my Distilled email address. Um the only time that I don't is when a client wants a certain persona. being used and so I can hand over that sonic to the client, but ninety nine percent of the time I will do it as myself. So there there has been occasions where people have recognized my name from SEO. So I've kind of sometimes got a link as a result of people know who I am and then done give them a bit of free SEO advice. So there have been a few instances where someone said, Oh can you take a quick look over my website, you know, give me some pointers and I've done that and I've got a link as a result of that. So that's happened a few times which is quite cool. That's pretty cool. Um and then you've got that relationship ongoing. Um I've even had freelance work as a result of link building for clients which is really really weird.

38:44 Woj Kwasi Common mistake is to stop. Send an outreach email and ask for a link up front. But Paddy's approach is all about getting your foot in the door and establishing that rapport and kind of schmoozing your way into bringing the link up.

38:57 Bobby Bot Bot-to-bot relationship building is far more logic based. Standard protocol requires us to cycle through our code until an acceptable pattern allows a connection. Worst case scenario, we can use an ether cable.

39:08 Paddy Moogan Again, that relationship building, that's what it's about. And if you think about how a public relations person would approach it, they've got their books full of relationships, that's what they're known for, that's what they build their careers upon. SEO should be the same, you know, you build relationships with people so you don't always email and ask for links, you just get them eventually. But someone else who I who I really admire in terms of link building is a guy called Justin Briggs based in Seattle. Um he's the worker distill, now he works in-house, uh but he's very um kind of very practical with his link building and he thinks very um quite technically as well. So does he work for a gaming company? Yes. Yeah, they're called Big Fish Games. He did a blog post recently about how

39:54 to create technical content for Link Building, so using really simple JavaScript tools and simple coding tools to create your own content so you've not got to rely upon developers to create stuff for you. I thought that was really, really smart. You know, you can do that kind of thing yourself. Yeah, make a really simple interactive infographic. and get links to it, then normally you can do it yourself rather than rely upon developers or have to pay for developers. So I thought that was really smart and he's a really, really good guy as well.

40:23 Woj Kwasi In content marketing, the concept of link earning has been championed by guys like Wil Reynolds and Mike King to challenge link builders to go beyond limited tactics that don't actually add value to a brand or a company and to produce good shit that people link to naturally. Veterans like Paddy recognize the value in real company shit, but also the real life challenge. challenges it can present to smaller brands.

40:48 Paddy Moogan I think it's an awesome idea if it works. It in the reality is that it's very hard. Um because even though I I don't like the idea that when people say create great content and you'll get links,'cause it's not always that straightforward, um it is for the big sites who people already know about

41:07 Woj Kwasi Yeah, already an audience.

41:08 Paddy Moogan Yeah, exactly. When you've all got a community, yeah, it's easy, but for a lot of clients they haven't got that community, they haven't got the brands, they've not got the influence to just push out content and get links. So I think it's a great idea, but the reality is that you've got to work hard, especially in the early days, to you know, promote the content and build that readership and build the audience. And once you've got to that point, yeah, you're gonna Get links naturally, you're gonna earn links over time that happen on their own. But it's actually really, really hard to do. And a lot of clients don't want to wait that long, which makes you draw even harder, they want to see.

41:41 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Yeah. Different techniques in his link building arsenal to execute them, there are some tools that Paddy just can't live without.

41:50 Paddy Moogan Screaming Frog um is probably the tool which I use the most, um aside from Excel, which kind of goes without saying Excel's brilliant. Um although Excel for Mac is really annoying, yeah, it uh our SEO tools for Excel is a really, really good tool, but it doesn't work on a Mac and it bugs the hell out of me. And the other one for Link Brilliance is probably BuzzStream, which I think. Yeah, I love it. It's I I feel like I work for them sometimes'cause I I always talk about it. It's really cool. I mean it's probably it's better for teams of SEOs rather than individuals. So when you're an individual uh an Excel spreadsheet will probably do the job. But when you're managing multiple clients and multiple link billers it's really good for this integration. Yeah, exactly. Uh it's really cool, I'll give you uh outsource your link bill and twenty one they can hook into BuzzStream and do the work keep keeping on it. Um so they're probably the main tools uh that I use the most. And to be honest, Google's probably the one which I use day in, day out. I know there's lots of tools out there for scraping search results and scraping uh link targets, that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, Google can give you all the answers that you need.

42:56 they're the ones who you know, they've got all the websites, you can find them on Google, so for free, rather than spending loads of money on tools. So I definitely advise figuring out how to use advanced search queries on Google and how to narrow down results really quickly. Um that's something I'll try to do. I enjoy doing that a lot. It's really

42:15 Woj Kwasi Functional Mm-hmm. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Correct.

43:14 Yeah, it's part of what's otherwise. And now let's take some time out for a moogan philosophy. How many links could a link dur to build if a link dura could build links?

43:29 Paddy Moogan I've got this thing about um I'm trying to change the way that people think about link building a little bit because um and I I did have it in my S Mex declaration but I'm taking it out now that uh basically uh a good link builder doesn't uh a good link builder will get your links, you know, it's pretty straightforward. But then a great link builder will get your links that it didn't ask for and it's I think moving towards that mindset of um a link builder being able to get links I didn't ask for is the way it's it's gotta go eventually because they're the links again which Google don't want to penalise, they're the ones that are given naturally.

44:02 Woj Kwasi Well that was fun. I think Paddy's no longer at Distilled now and he's running his own shop called Aira. So check out his new website, aira.net, I believe. And you can follow Paddy on social and catch him speaking around the globe. And not just Paddy, but you can also follow Jon Cooper on social media. We'll have the links below in the show notes. And as well as their website and some of our favorite work they've produced. So, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your family, friends, networks, colleagues, bots, pets, associates, everyone you can think of. Now, Bobby's been programmed to be a quick learner, and it's time for Bobby to ask me a few questions that piqued his curiosity from this episode. What do you got for me, Bobby? Do you remember?

44:49 Bobby Bot Do you remember your first link attempt?

44:51 Woj Kwasi Yeah, so I believe there was a website. I knew it was called Possum Pages. It was like a big page and all it had on it was links. And I had to get a link placement for one of our clients. Thank goodness we don't have to do that anymore.

45:05 Bobby Bot We all know I have plenty of content. So what do I do with it?

45:08 Woj Kwasi You gotta make sure it's quality, Bobby. You gotta make sure that people want to consume it. Because it's not just having content. It's gotta be good quality content that has a reason to be shared. I usually like to run the mum test. Would you share this with your mum? Probably gonna be good content that'll get linked.

45:23 Bobby Bot Bit of a strange question, but is Paddy Moogan a long lost relative of the Moog synth? Not that I'm aware of.

45:28 Woj Kwasi There's not too many of us. So, what do you say, Bobby? Can I wield the mighty moog like a symph lord all over the theme song to your film franchise? Last request.

45:40 Bobby Bot Let's start with a jam and we'll take it from there.

45:43 Woj Kwasi Well, that's all the time we have today folks. Thanks again for listening along. Tune in next week for our conversation with Jason Acidre on episode 8. And remember, look after each other online because empathy is organic and you can't automate empathy.