Promote, Or Die! Podcast - Who's Alan and why start a content promotion podcast?

In this intro episode, I talk about how I came to work in SEO and link building/content promotion specifically.

The main 4 phases that led me here:

Phase 1 – office job + band
Phase 2 – office job + part-time online freelance work
Phase 3 – full time freelance + link-building agency
Phase 4 – content promotion podcast + new agency services

Resources:

My interview on Starter Story, goes over a lot of what i discuss on the episode:

https://www.starterstory.com/seo-link-building-agency

The two updates to the original article:

Transcript:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Promote or Podcast, my name is Alan Sylvestri. I’m the founder at Growth Gorilla. And so what I wanted to do in this episode is give you a quick overview and background about myself and what my plans and goals are for this podcast as well.

The way that I see the last 15 years of my life is divided into four different phases. Phase one started in 2009. I was working at my first ever full-time job , as an employee, and I was an electric engineer in this company back in Italy, which is where I’m originally from. So at the same time I was playing with my band.

I played the guitar and sang in a band called Never Alone for 15 years. At that time I started playing guitar since I was 12 years old, . So that was my main obsession, my main passion. So we got to the point where it was really difficult to play music with the band while at the same time keeping the day job, uh, because we needed to ask permission every time we wanted to go on tour.

Needed to ask Permiss. Three months in advance to get two weeks off. And so it was starting to become a problem, right? So then after that I started, uh, looking for opportunities to find work online. So essentially what I wanted and what I was looking for is some kind of job that would gimme the freedom and the flexibility to be able to just go out and play with my band.

while at the same time generating some kind of income, right, to be able to pay my expenses. So I started looking for online opportunities. I stumbled across all sorts of things under the sun. I started, uh, uh, to work on like publishing Kindle books on Amazon. Then I stumbled across, uh, creating products for Amazon fba.

Uh, so all of those didn’t really work, but they taught. A lot of very useful skills. Uh, this is when, uh, some of the things that I still do, uh, as of today, are very important and where I kinda learn I’m from. So the skill of seo, search engine optimization, I started learning that, working on optimizing the Kindle books to rank on Amazon, working on optimizing the products to rank on Amazon for FBA as well.

I realized there, a whole world of search engine optimization that I could explore. This led me to affiliate website, particularly affiliate website that generated revenue , uh, through Amazon affiliates. So I found this training course called The Rankings Institute.

I bought the course, it costed like $1,000, , and I vividly remember it at that time, that was the most expensive. Online thing that I ever bought. Like it was incredible to me the fact of spending so much money for something that wasn’t tangible and that was just online. Uh, but I still took the plunge,

uh, so the course, uh, turned out to be actually really good. Uh, so I started learning how to create. Website from scratch, first off. So I learn about WordPress, I learn about affiliate websites, how there’s generate revenue, how you optimize for seo, uh, the content, but also the links, which kind of leads me to phase two.

Phase two is starting essentially when I get this email from the guy that, uh, was, uh, doing the online training course. He sent me this email and he was like, Hey, Alan. I thought of starting my own project, my own authority site, and I noticed that you’re doing really well with your own site. So at that time, my own site that I started from scratch, started generating some revenue, was doing around two, $300 a month, which was very good for someone that that was.

Just starting out. So it was like, uh, yeah, I’m starting this project. Would you like to be a partner, uh, with me on this? I’m essentially looking for someone that can do the work. Uh, so essentially, uh, he was putting out the money and investment on the site, and he was looking for someone that could do the work and implement all of the strategies.

So for me, uh, this was a great learning opportunity. I was just looking for someone to kind of mentor me and teaching me all the different skills and being able to practice all of these skills with bigger budget behind my back as well, uh, uh, which at the time is kind of what I was lacking, right?

Because I was just making money from my office job that wasn’t really paying super well. The band, uh, was , uh, more of an expanse than anything else at the time. Uh, so yeah, I was mainly looking to learn skills and, and improve on the SEO kind of aspect of my skillset. Um, so I started working on the site, uh, with this guy.

We worked on the site for like two, three years together. And we got, uh, to the point where the sign was making around $2,000 a month, which was very good. Uh, uh, the guy started paying me a monthly, kind of hourly, uh, salary, uh, based on the work that I was doing. so this got me to the point where I was like almost making more money from this part-time job than I was making from the office shop.

So, around 2017, I decided to quit the office job, and start doing this stuff full-time. Uh, so this is basically where phase three starts. I was doing this freelance s e slash affiliate website, uh, kind of management work for just this one person full-time, full-time meaning, like five hours a day, right?

It was anything crazy. But this got me, uh, gave me the time to explore some of my passion to play music a little bit more. Uh, uh, uh, but most of all to learn and to improve on my SEO skillset,

so I kept also working on my own site, which got to the point of making around $500 a month. That was a very good, kind of combined income for me, right? So at this point, I was making around, uh, $3,000 a month between what the guy was paying me for the site and my own site, uh, which was more than I was making in the office job.

Uh, so this was really cool, so at that point I started thinking, if I’m doing this for just one person, what’s stopping me from doing this for multiple clients and making more money? This is when I started diving into the agency world. Uh, so I didn’t really love the idea of having clients, but then I was talking to my brother who was working as a freelance copywriter for B2B SaaS companies, and he was telling me how most of these people are like nice people to work with.

How they already know what SEO link building. . So you don’t really have to do the hard sell, uh, with most of them. Uh, so I started talking to people. I got involved into SAS groups. I met my very first client into a Facebook SAS group, and I was offering him to do the link building work for like $400 a month, which was, uh, terrible.

Uh, but it gave me the first experience with an actual client working on another site and working with, uh, an actual business. Okay. Uh, so at that point it was just myself doing all the work. I had developed my own link building process by working on the affiliate site together with, uh, the guy that was paying me part-time.

The way that I came across developing my own system is because the site that I was working on was publishing a ton of content, and I’m talking about like 20 to 50 articles a month. Very good, high quality content, but we got to the point where we realized that the content wasn’t really ranking that well.

And the main reason we figured was because we, uh, were lacking back links, right? So, I had to sit down, find a way to get all of that content to acquire back links. And this is how I sort of came up my process for doing a link placement in existing content.

So, uh, , uh, phase three, at this point I’m working with one client, just myself, and I’m still working, uh, with, uh, the authority side . . Uh, so I decide to, , uh quit, uh, the work with the authority side because I want to work full-time on this agency thing.

I started realizing that some of the process that I was doing was kind of repetitive and I didn’t really need to do it myself. So I finally was able to delegate some of it to the very first team member who is still with us today. So shout out to rj. So RJ gave me a ton of help. He was able to take some of the more repetitive tasks, uh, basically off my plate.

This gave me more time to look out for more clients, uh, again, more revenue in the door. Uh,

at this point, I was following Ryan Stewart and I just bought his training course on how to create a link building agency, and I really loved the way that he was, uh, dividing the different roles in the team into an assembly line kind of process.

Right. . So he had the strategy person, then he had the link prospecting team and the outreach management team. This is essentially the foundation. of how I created Growth Gorilla and what we still do today so the next step for me after hiring RJ to delegate some of the link prospecting was to find someone to do the outreach management.

So this leads me to phase four. This is where in 2018, I moved to the uk, uh, . Um, this was a huge boost for myself personally and for the agency as well. Things really started to scale up. We got from five to, I would say like 10, 15 clients, uh, as of last year.

And this is where, uh, we developed and really improved on our own positioning and process and everything that we do for clients.

So we developed, uh, the roadmap process as well as the Lincoln I report. These are the two main strategic aspects that kind of differentiate us from some other link building vendors or agencies who mainly just do what the clients tell them to do, right?

We come in as a content promotion and strategic link building team for the client. We help them find the best possible pages to build back links to, to be able to increase the traffic and signups within the next uh, 90 days typically

the team is now 10 people, uh, plus me. I also transitioned, uh, one of our outreach managers to doing, uh, strategy together with me. Uh, so shout out to Yona here. Uh, this has been very helpful, so that I can do things like this, the podcast, and doing more marketing I’ll say as well.

This brings me to phase four, uh, the way that I see the agency progressing, and also one of the reasons why I decided to start this podcast is really because I think in uh, Link building is kind of limited, is becoming a very crowded space. There’s a lot of people that are just asking for money to place backlink.

There’s a lot of link farms and so it’s very difficult, very competitive, and what we wanted to do is to expand our services into other kind of areas, we really think, that to be able to promote your content effectively, get it out there in front of the right people.

You need to just be able to differentiate and to adopt all sorts of different types of content promotion, which for me, this is everything from digital pr, tooling building uh, to content distribution, to content repurposing, right?

So the reasons why I decided to start this podcast and my plan and goals for this, and hopes as well, is number one, to help other, uh, B2B content marketers or marketers in general.

To get their content out the door, getting in front of the right people with the best strategies for the different types of content that they are producing. Number two, for me to connect with some awesome guests and some awesome people, but also to learn from them so that we can apply some of these things into our own work

so I really hope this was interesting, and if you found any value, feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on Twitter at Aji Gorilla, or you can find us on our website, my growth gorilla.com.

This is promote or guide the Content Promotion podcast. So if you’re a marketer, if you’re someone that’s just producing content, content creator and need to get the content out the door in front of the right people, stick with us, follow the episodes, leave our review, cuz that’s gonna help us to be able to rank higher and be found by more people so that we can continue doing the show.

And yeah, I’ll see you there.