E Commerce Link Building That Actually Works with Kai Cromwell

We are talking about building backlinks for e-commerce on today's episode of the show and there is no better guest for this than Mr. Kai Cromwell. Kai, you specialize in SEO for e-commerce and more specifically for Shopify. Uh, and this is your second time back on the podcast. So, thank you. Thank you. Welcome back on. Thank you for having me. Yes, it's uh it'll be fun. Um, where should all e-commerce founders build links? From where or to where? From where? We'll get we'll get to two where in in a little bit, but but what what are your top uh sources for backlinks for e-commerce? Sure. So, uh and I hate to be the whole it depends guy, but it really depends on how much time you want to spend, how much money you have. Um I think for so I kind of split brands into a few different camps. If you're a totally new brand, start the last few months. Like, I would just exhaust as much content as you possibly can and not spend any money on links because I think you're just going to be disappointed. Um, if you are in a spot to spend links, you don't have time, use a marketplace. If you really want to build links, you have the time but no budget, link exchange, cold email. Um, if you've got the time and you really want to scale it up and you want to own all of it, cold email yourself. Um, I've done all the options across the years. Um, currently about 80% cold email, 20% marketplace, but I'd say that marketplace is not like we're not like going we're not like logging into marketplace and placing orders like we've just exchanged deals off the back end um, and kind of like privately negotiated. Um, so many ways to do it though. Um, I like some marketplaces more than others. Like what? Cold email's cool. Um, Restwiz is probably my favorite marketplace. I think in terms of affordability and amount of links you have. I don't want to really badmouth anyone else, but I've tried the rest. I think you should just you should just use Press, honestly. Um, I not I don't have an affiliate code. I'm not sponsored. I honestly just think that's best option. Um, totally depends on what you need though, right? Like there's other platforms that have certain websites, right? Press press does not have all of them, but I think they have the best range for the best price. That's my that's my belief. Um I have a really good buddy of mine who actually helps us build our internal or build our backlinks. Um and he tells me about all the crazy markup stories that like market places pay him money to pay links or to build links for them. They turn around and mark up his fees by like 80 90% to the end customer. So, like I've seen $200 links go for like well over $1,000 before. So, like I think press is where you start if you're a marketplace. And I think minimum dollar amount to spend to be worth your amount of time I would say is around $1,000 a month on links. $1,000 a month. And so, how many how many good links are you going to get for that? I would say you should be getting about four to five. I think you should be in like the 150 250 per link range. And then you mentioned you mentioned email as a tactic actually you know before before we even go to email. So like what are mistakes that people make when buying links uh with like with marketplaces? Um there's a handful. Um talk talk about metrics for sure. I think there's so many metrics that um the the usually the biggest issue with with metrics in marketplaces is that the metrics are outdated. um they pulled them in one time, you know, they don't update regularly. So, you could be looking at like a DA50 site that has 50K traffic and you're like, "Wow, that's awesome." And if you don't if you don't cross reference it against Hrefs, you would not know that it's a DA50 now 5K site. Like, you would have no idea that the metric changed. So, first thing you need to do is definitely check to make sure the metric is accurate. Um I would assume I would like to assume the platform is not inflating metrics. I would have liked to just assume they imported it at the time of reference and it was accurate and it just never got updated. But obviously I can't speak to that. Um I think I'm a big we're a big we like to do a lot of link insertions. That's like 90% of our stack. Um a lot of people like to just do guest posts because they think they have more control and stuff like that, but obviously you you run into the issue of the page never getting indexed potentially and obviously never getting traffic is the more likely um outcome. So people are like, "Wow, I get this article published on, you know, MSN or whatever, right?" Which is like a super commoditized site now. Maybe the page goes live for a day, then it's gone forever. Like not exactly the the best win to have. Um, so like link insertions are where I would go. I think again press has the most flexibility around that. Um, outside of just like the domain rating, domain traffic metrics, I think looking just at those two is a very narrow-minded view. You should really evaluate the entire site on your own within HFS. Domain rating and domain traffic levels will give you like a good starting point. You can set filters on the platform to look for them, but you should QA every single site individually on your own. Look at the amount of inlinks to outlinks. Um traffic history. You should look at traffic distribution across pages. Um all these kinds of things which you can very easily do in HFS and Semrush with very little effort. Takes you maybe 20 seconds and will save you probably several thousand over the course of a year. So worth every penny. You can also use like the HFS API. Now obviously they've added that for a bunch of you know lighter users. Um so yeah those are the mistakes. Those are the mistakes. Those are the most common ones I see. Let's let's end there. This method of marketing is so effective I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. What are like red flags on links to avoid? So like maybe you look at the organic traffic and you see that it just spiked down and it's like, you know, 75% of what it was and it hasn't bounced back. Anything that looks too good to be true, I generally would stay away. So like um I know we've we run into a lot of links we QA that are like like not suitable for work l like not suitable for work content or like celebrity scandals, celebrity photos, celebrity like houses, house photos are weird like people just like programmatically build these pages and like the traffic looks insane, right? And then you look a week later and it's totally crashed. Um so avoid that. Any like rapid growth you should stick away from. Um why traffic's been um cuz the link too good to be true. Yeah, too good to be true. Um second thing, domain traffic history any I wouldn't be able to link on anything that's been like has any major declines in the last 6 months. It can be slightly declining. You know, I usually take like 20% as kind of like total decline over a six-month period I think is still safe. Um, and again like 20 is the if it's 21 that does not make it bad. Like 20 is a rough kind of number there. Um, yeah, any con any website that covers content that you don't really want to be associated with. That's less of an SEO thing, more of just like a general, you know, site hygiene thing. Like if they talk about, I don't know, gambling or sex or whatever else, right? You don't want to be associated with that. Like just don't build a link, right? Simple as that. Um, those are the big things. Um, if you're looking at link insertions and you see a page that already has like 30 links on it, don't be link number 31. Like find a new page or find a new site generally. Um, yeah, those are probably those are probably the big red flags. Um, and also like if you're looking at like link ratio, if they've got the number is like one and a half. So like for every one link that um, every one backlink they have, they can't link out more than one and a half times for every backlink. Right? Again, it's 1.6, not the end of the world. But if it's like four external links to every backlink they have, like don't look at that. Like that's probably link farm and probably just going to either waste your money at best case or get your site in trouble worst case. What sort of topical relevance do you look for in in the links that you get? So we build link insertions once we've basically run like a domain level QA on it and it's passed our metrics there. We basically look at we basically go find a page that in based on the URL slug or the keywords that it ranks for that is covering a topic relatively adjacent to us. Um and then we basically validate that it has some level of traffic and is the traffic level or traffic history has been you know relatively consistent and that's that. Um, I will say we're probably not as particular as we probably as other people may be or maybe even as we should be um, transparently about topical coverage. I'm really looking to see that the domain met our requirements and that the page also met our requirements is relevant to us and has traffic and ideally has traffic in the same target country we're trying to rank it in. So like if we're trying to rank a US site, the page is traffic to the US, trying to rank an Australian site, same thing. What does a good link insertion look like and what does a bad link insertion look like? a good one looks organic, a bad one looks obvious, I would say. Like to sum it up, um, we'll probably talk about this a little bit more later on, but like the safest way to go about it is like brand mentions, um, or like, uh, branded anchors, excuse me. So, there's a lot of ways you can work that in. You can get pretty creative. You can use quotes, real or fake quotes. Um, depending on the page, it really depends on the page content, right? It depends on the page content and obviously your target page. Um, but it should look natural at the be at best. It should should not look stuffed into the top or have a sense that doesn't make any kind of sense around it or before it or after it. Like it should fit in pretty pretty organically. And I know it's not overly specific, but I think you just kind of know sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. you just kind of know it feels this this feels forced. This is it reads bad. And you're also expecting that you you want the page that you get a link from to to rank and to actually get real traffic and so you want people to click on your link and so you want it to you want it you want it to to sound good. Um yeah, I remember just one last thing on that like when we when we first started our agency like I was queuing building most of them and queuing the rest of the links and like remember looking for link insertions like you know you're you st you're staring and it's the same problem in marketplaces too but like you're staring in spreadsheets all day like you get tired you get bored you get lazy and like a lot of a lot of errors happen you know as you kind of get lazier or your quality decays so like if you're looking at a site and like it mets it meets your requirements but like you found like only one page on it that like has traffic is relevant to you, but you can't find a way to make the link work in there naturally. Like you need to find a new site. Like don't just don't try to get don't try to just like stuff it in there at the end because you're take a look at the spreadsheet. Like go to bed, close the laptop, whatever. Yeah. Come back the next day, find a better link. Like it's not it's not worth doing it. Yeah, that's great. That's great advice. And you when you step away and you have a fresh mind like you stop making these dumb dumb decisions. Yeah. You see that from everyone. You so you said you were using email as well. Yeah. So yeah. So we use like a basically hybrid um internal external team for our link building now. Um but all the links pretty like 89% of links we build are all derived from cold email as the source. Um, if you use cold, if you cold email people, you will get the best price. The trade-off with cold email is the infrastructure that you have to manage, right? You've got to buy all these domains, warm them up, um, you know, send all this stuff, you got to find the contact data. All this stuff has to happen. Um, there's tools out there that are there's tools out there that are good at finding contact leads. Apollo's okay, but it's built off the back of LinkedIn. People running publishing sites typically aren't using LinkedIn as their point of reference for their emails, so the data is broken. You can use Hunter.io is a really popular one in the SE community. I've never really had any good success with finding like good contact quality at scale. Um, crazily enough, the best quality you'll ever find I've ever found is just VAS opening up the site and looking through the web content. Um, the about page, the contact page, the footer, like usually it's buried there. And unfortunately, a lot of those contact scraping tools just don't pick it up. Um, so yeah, cold email though, like it's a lot of infrastructure to manage. You've got to find the data. Those tools can run you a couple hundred bucks a month. You've got to send the emails. you've got to think about domain reputation, all this kind of stuff. Um, so it's a lot to manage. Um, but if you're going to go if you're going to go build like thousands of links a month, like that's the way to do it. And that's what the market places do. Like if you want the infrastructure owned and you want the best price and you're prepared to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on your company or as a freelancer, agency or whatever, cold email is the way you should go. Just be aware it's going to be a very intensive upfront and expensive setup, but it's going to pay dividend. It's going to pay off over time for sure. Um, yeah, that that's cold email in a nutshell. There's I cut my teeth on cold email doing lead generation for my agency early on, which is how we kind of scaled into the link building stuff. Um, yeah, that that's that's my that's my knowledge of cold email. Um, I would say don't if you're doing it on behalf like we don't mention our clients when we email people and we're saying usually like hey we've got a few clients at work because if you pitch on you should offer to pay upfront first um you get way higher replies and two you should also say I have probably a few people that will pay for it because you you'll get a discount price. Type of what what type of people are you emailing? Um, are you emailing like legit journalists at the top like top uh news publications or is it niche blogs that that you're We're far more in the niche game for us. We are Yeah, I mean it's hard to say like what specific kind of sites. I'd say more like DR30 to 60 and then super topically deep um you know uh food websites, fashion websites, travel websites, like things like that. Basically anything left from the HCU that's stabilized out um we like. And what about having a natural backlink profile? Where what are mistakes that people make and they have like a just a it's a really bad looking backlink profile? Like what is what Yeah. What is a a natur a natural backlink profile look like to you? Yeah. natural um branded homepage anchors is like the most common. That's the most organic looking. If you really get your internal linking right, honestly, you could probably you could probably realistically get away with like 100% of just like brand homepage links. Um we don't do that. We're like we're good at internal linking, but I'd say we're probably like, and this number's actually increased over the years. Um it used to be like 50% branded home page, now it's like 80%. Um we're just I would say airing more on the side of caution. Um just as things continue to change. Um unnatural though, like more than a handful of links to a product page or collection page in e-commerce or Shopify, you know, if you're like trying to just blast links to a single page to get it to rank, like it's it's not going to work. Um, I've I've talked to a lot of brands who have like some of the marketplaces, some of the done for you link building services, we I'm sure we both know they've, you know, they've paid for them and like generally if you're doing a done for you service of link building through a platform, like they are just trying to max out profitability on you. They don't really care what happens to your website. Um, and if you're not any of the wiser, you know, and you don't give them any direction or guidelines or whatever, like they're just going to build links how you tell them. And they won't tell you if it's a bad idea if you want to build 100 links to the product page. Like they will just go do it. Um, generally I'm sure there are exceptions to that rule to those service products. But that has been my experience. And so I thought a bunch of brands who were like, "Yeah, we spent like 10k on links the last like 3, four years. All the product pages, nothing happened." And sorry to tell you, but you probably just wasted like 10k. um like probably gone. Nothing positive happened. If anything, probably negative effects of it. Um but yeah, um product pages is don't build links to product pages in e-commerce. You could build them to category pages, but I would do them at a very conservative ratio. So, let's say you want to build like two or three links to a target collection page. I would spread them out over the course of, you know, I don't know, a couple weeks. It could be two, three, four, five weeks or more. Um, if you build those two links though, you should also be at the same at a over the same timeline building probably three to four times as many links into the collection page or sorry, excuse me, into the homepage. Um, we used to operate like 50/50 if we like really wanted to push fast. So, we used to be like, you know, five collection page links, five homepage links, but that just you're really rolling the dice there. Um, so like for 10 links, two or three to the collection, the remaining to the homepage over the same timeline, um, is probably the best way you can balance it out. Can you talk again why why you shouldn't build links to product pages? Um, they seem to get ignored. Um, collection pages seem to be treated, category pages get treated a little bit differently. Um, to tell you the truth, I don't have the answer to it. Um, why they get ignored, I just I just know they don't. Do you do you um and do you build links to maybe like pillar pages, hub pages? Yeah. Um we do often. Um it totally depends on the size of the brand, depends on the size of their product catalog and the number of collections and overall page we've got invested. Um but definitely um we also like a lot of people I think ignore blog content links as well. Um, but in when used correctly, like if you've got a blog that was really really really well done and it's, you know, starting to get a lot of traction and you build a couple links to it over time, like it is going to be it's going to kind of mimic like a I don't want to say vir a viral moment, but like it's going to it's it would be understandable that that blog is going to continue attracting links as it continues to grow in traffic. If you build links in the blog post, like it's not transactional. It looks fairly organic. It's not nearly as, you know, um I don't say monitor, but not nearly as like gamed as you would be to build a building back links to collection pages, but again, if you use internal links correctly, you can funnel all of that link juice directly out of the blog post into your transactional pages and give a pretty immediate boost um right there. So, doesn't work for everyone. Like, some brands aren't blog content heavy. Some brands just can't get a lot of traffic out of the blog content. Totally depends on your category, right? Like if you're writing I was talking to a brand this morning um who invented a product and like no matter what kind of blogs a guy writes like unless he's at the very very top of the funnel like he's probably not going to get much traffic. So like that strategy wouldn't work for him, right? But if you're in like a YML niche and you manage to rank super highly for you know like creatine is super hot and like consumables are super hot in the DDC space right now. Like if you manage to outrank like you know a medical journal and like the benefits of creatine like you should scale the hell out of links to that page because it would look like it is going to attract them organically and you could really use internal links to leverage that into ranking your product pages or your collection pages again depending on the brand website and setup. Do you also ever think about branded searches as in so you're like scaling links but you're not increasing branded searches? Does that ever become a problem? We don't work with any brands where that is the problem. Um, all of our brands spend tens of thousands, many of them hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions of dollars on Meta per month. So, it's pretty rare that branded search is not going up. Um, but they're but they're getting enough branded searches that it's still like Yeah. Most of most of the brands we work with, most brands with like if you open search console, their top terms are all branded. Like when we send out reports, like it is not like we have to filter out branded search. It's not because it might affect the reporting, it's definitely affecting the reporting if you leave it in there. Yeah. Yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense. And and then Okay, so you said for where you build links to, you said it's the homepage. Um, you said sometimes blog posts, especially if you have a blog post that's doing well, you're going to juice that up because it will look more natural. Uh, sometimes pillar pages, sometimes category pages and not product pages. And then, um, how about how about anchor text? What do you think about for anchor text ratios? branded most of the time we'll do branded plus like branded plus exact match or branded plus near match for for going to category pages or collection pages um for going to blog posts almost always contextual I don't really look at anchor text distribution across the entire site very much more so just on specific pages and again like because we're building so many pages so many links to our homepage we stick with branded we don't really have to think about it um is there a more efficient way to do it probably there is um for us with the amount of brands we work with, it works for us. So that's kind of how we that's kind of how we think about it. And so okay, you're doing um you're doing like a lot of niche blogs when you're emailing. How do you ever do you ever also do just like news? Like um yeah, any any Yeah, I guess just in general like any news sites maybe you could find an angle that would be topically relevant to something that's trending in the news and then you can pitch yourself along with that angle. Um, do we? No. Have we before? Yes. Um, we spent probably the better better part of six months working on like a digital PR muscle of our agency. Um, unfortunately to no avail. Um, I was wildly overconfident how easy I thought it might be and uh, it is not easy. we don't do much news anymore. Um, again like and this this is what applies to me and for us. If you are running like if you're do if you're link building for your own brand. I think you just find a couple things that work and do that 90% of the time 80% of the time and then the other 10 20% can be experimentation. Okay. For us we work with like 35 40 brands at a time. For us, we're trying to find things that work consistently without breaking, without, you know, I don't want to say messing up the status quo, but like keep things in homeostasis for our agency and for our clients 99% of the time. Um, so if you're like your own brand doing it, your own company doing it, yeah, you should do all those kinds of things. For us, we found it works and it works most of the time, like majority of the time. So, we just do that. Um, we do digital or we do um press releases, excuse me. Um, depending on the brand every every quarter if we want to run like traffic to a page, like a new page, we'll do it. If you got a new like totally new brand, we've got a few brands that have like come over from Amazon and just launched DDC or like PE firms are just launching a new website or whatever. So, like not our typical client, but they've got a lot of money and they're ready to play. So, for them, we'll do press releases. And again, not sponsored, but to plug Press Viz, we run like an entity stack on new websites as well, which is pretty effective. Um, yeah, that's about the most diverse. What did you say you're using for press for press releases? Um, we've used a couple. I think the one one I'm currently using is King Newswire. I think it's okay. Uh, press by the way, press wiz. So, um, somebody who who took, uh, my course, Compact Keywords, he he has an ecom site and he's doing 100K a month in revenue and he's his links like he's relying on press a lot and uh, yeah, he loves it. Um, and then like I've seen people doing some pretty cool things with um, like AI. I have this article on my site uh, the AI system to find relevant journalists, land coverage and earn ongoing high authority backlinks. And I've seen some people do like they sell like uh pet toys for example and they've found some really cool angles with the prompts in there to to get relevant like news journalists actually reporting on them. Um which has been like amazing. And then something else that a lot of people I don't know if you ever think about this. Um, something else that a lot of people don't do, especially with like any anybody who reports on them, is once you actually have success with a journalist, then you follow up every month or two asking them. Yeah, that's huge. Yeah. I I would say like not I mean kind of a parallel here, but like most of the links we build are from people we've already built them for or built them from, I should say. like we're like we are running cold email to try and constantly get new contacts but most things links we're building are from sites we've already paid before found before QAed before and we feel comfortable with them we've negotiated pricing there's a level of trust there right um yeah I mean like with news you don't have to think about this element because generally new sites are pretty much always stable but if you're like you're going to go back and build a link from someone just like a point something to think about you've already built from you want to reqa that site again just before you build it again because otherwise like you're going to run into the same issue with market places where they don't update their data. Um so we have a database like just because it got QA once does not mean it's QA forever, right? So something to consider. Um that's a little bit stepping back a few minutes ago in our conversation, but news websites you have to think about that. But um yeah, we had we probably ran like probably tried like 50 releases. I think we had like two articles really take off and get coverage. Um and it's always the ones you never expect. Like we spent a lot of time and money and hours on some, no dice, and then like spun up one. Um we had a client selling like really expensive hot tubs and um wrote an article about like million billionaires building like these like um afterlife bunkers like people like you know to survive the apocalypse and stuff. And we were like, "Yeah, like we didn't like you're not going to put a hot tub in an apocalyptic bunker, but we were selling to the billionaire crowd and it worked and we picked up Yeah. tons of coverage." Um, a couple years ago now, but like I wrote that one on Chatty Boutique because I like seen an article about it that morning and I was like, I'll just try it out. And of course, you know, one of 50 or two of 50 worked. So yeah, news is great. If you can get it, it's great. I mean, there's people out there who are excellent at it. Um for us again like we're looking at scalability and repeat like repeatability I guess. Um so you'll yeah you can do all these things just be prepared to spend a lot of time on getting them right or dialing them in. I I prefer much just pay the money and be on with it and work on other parts of you know the agency or you know results or things like that for clients you know. So can you talk actually to the people who they don't have we're talking about spending the money but they don't have a lot of money to spend on links and actually yeah they they just want to they want to get the best links that they can and all the links that they need to get so they can start ranking for some keywords that are going to bring them purchases and then then maybe then they can reinvest and yeah so they don't really have big link building budgets. What should they do? Like what are what are critical elements that that every website needs? Like social links for example, every single social link you can build, you should build it. Any any free platform out there that you can build a link on, you should. Um there's tons of ways to get it. Um I mentioned PressWiz does entity stack. It's good. It's expensive, but it's good. Um there are some people on Twitter that have like the sneaky backlink lists. Um, I don't know how I don't know the efficacy of it, but they're totally free and a lot of them are do follow and you can really juice your DA DR if you're into that kind of stuff with them and you give yourself some really good foundational links. Um, step up from all those free ones, link exchanges. Um, I know a guy that runs an agency and it's like web design and SEO and I believe he only does link exchanges. There are I think people overthink the exchanges. I think they're so caught up in, you know, it has to be relevant to me. We don't want to do AB all the time, whatever. Like there's a lot of people out there who want links. Um, you can join Facebook groups. You can join WhatsApp groups, Discords. I think at one point when I was like when the agency was like myself plus a VA, I'd say like half our links and we were doing like 4050 a month. Half our links are probably exchanges at the time and they're effective. You got to take time obviously to communicate in the groups and all that kind of stuff, but they are free. We had another client who ran like an online nursing company. They sold all kinds of plants and trees and stuff. He spent I think like 3 hours every morning before he went out to his actual nursery on Harrow just earning links left and right. Time consuming as hell. Um, but I mean if you want the links and you want the good ones, like that's the way to do it. Um, I don't think there's any shortcut to good links. Like you either got to put the time or the money in. Unfortunately, there's no there's no third option. So, um, yeah, you invest with your time or you invest with your cash really. One of the best one of the best links that I got from helper reporter out, source of sources, these types of places. It was a Healthline link and I and I got that and it was just you saw my rankings like a week later just spike up so dramatically. This one Healthline link and it made an immediate and crazy difference. Yeah, yeah, Harrow was good. We were doing that for clients for a bit back in like 2020. Again, this like our agency was a tenth of the size it is now. like we had the ability to try a bunch. We were trying so many new things cuz we just like really wanted traction anywhere we could find it. Um but yeah, we had we had Harrow for a bit. We were getting a lot of good links. Um not all of them are great. You're going to land some Hero links that are like DR10 like if you if you don't pay attention or whatever. Like there's some there's some weak sites out there. But we we got a few Healthline. We got one or two at WebMD ones. Um we got a Vogue one. So they exist. They're they're kind of diamonds in the rough, so to speak. But there's tons of SAS platforms out there now that do like um you know top or like they'll go find reporters and find stories that are relevant to you. Like you can accelerate it. Um it's also simultaneously raised the bar though because if everyone can now, you know, 10x their volume to reporters, reporters have to, you know, find a way to minimize by 10x to filter out all the noise and stuff. So more competition, yes, but I mean the links are still available. You just got to work harder for them, I would say. Yeah. So if you were to for if you were to give um just like an over we've been talking about this a lot, but just like an overview for like a newbie on what makes one link more valuable than another link. Just like the the quick like top two things that make one link more valuable than another link. And it's and you're speaking to someone who's who's like just starting with link building. they have an e-commerce site. It's not very old. And and they're now and you're talking about all of these different paid link acquisition tactics and you know that these people don't know what they're doing, but they so badly want to be able to to do some of the things that you're talking about. What would you tell them? So, if you're first starting out, first off, first off, spending the money on link building, you have to be prepared to, let's say it's $200 link, you have to be prepared to put down that $200 and be prepared to wait and probably, you know, that $200 is going to come back in many, many months and you're not even going to see it show up on your P&L. It will probably um if it's a good link, but it won't it won't be it won't have flashing lights on it. you know, won't be immediately obvious to you. Um, when you're looking at like comparing two links, like if you're looking to pay for one, you know, you've got the budget for one but not both. You should look at I would say to simplify everything we've talked about, ignore domain authority. Domain traffic should be steady or trending up and to the right, ideally over the last six months. Traffic distribution. Traffic should be somewhat evenly distributed across most of the pages. You shouldn't have like one or two pages getting 95% of traffic, for example. And the pages on those websites, two to three or more of them cover somewhat relevant to your niche. Um, and if you've satisfied all those conditions on both websites, pick the one if you're building a link insertion where the page has higher traffic. That's what I would do, assuming they're the same price. Um, kind of back to what I said earlier about like if you're just starting out, like I would scale the hell out of content best you can. Maybe not scale like not scale content, but do as much as you can with content because it's pretty much free. Um, similarly, I would exhaust as many free link options as you possibly can before you hit an amount of time you're spending either per day or per week where you're like, I cannot run my business. I cannot do anything else. I need to step back and start spending the money instead of spending my time. So like I mentioned that hero example of that guy who's doing like three, four hours a day in the morning. Like he hired us when he was like I cannot do this every day for the rest of my life. So like when you hit that moment, you're like I'm spending way too much time on email or on marketplaces. Take a step back, start spending the money, spending some money, work your time back, and then at some point you'll ideally be spending just your cash and ideally very little to none of your time. Right. So, my last question, this this is kind of a hard question because you built so many links uh just in your life. You had so many good stories, but I I I just want to know like if you have any favorite stories for link acquisition and any like also creative tactics that that like creative like creative link building tactics are some of my favorite stories too. Anything that you can share there? um creative. I think like some of the tools I've seen people come up with lately are pretty cool. Like you can build a calculator for literally anything now or like you know uh my favorite one. Yeah. Um it was year it's probably my first full year running the AC. We were with a cookie company out of um the Toronto area and I met the CMO or the time COO on Twitter. I think he's a C I don't even know what he is now. He's higher than that. Um we were doing cold outreach um cold email and I reached out to one of the emails we had sent was to a food blogger. This is prehcu food blogger in the in Canada. And this company that we were working with, I think, had two or three locations. And one of them was like, they'd been around for like a hundred years. And one of the one of the locations was like a few minute walk from this this guy that we ended up in his inbox for his like childhood home. And he loved the cookies since he was a kid. Had so much nostalgia wrapped around it. Um, and he was like, his link price was $3,000. Um, which is crazy and it was a good site to be fair. And I was young and dumb a little bit, but it worked. I was like, how about 300 bucks and the recipe to the cookies? And I used Chatty BT to make up a fake recipe for the cookies and paid him 300 bucks and he got the link. We got the link. And about two weeks later, two weeks later, he sent me back and he's like, "These cookies are amazing." So, Ch apparently gave him a pretty decent recipe. Oh my gosh. Um, that's probably my most that's probably my favorite one. That one stands out. Um, the other thing to take away too is from that story outside of maybe not don't be duplicitous like I was, but every price is negotiable on link building. Um, you should always ask the question. No, if you like if someone says 200 and you're like, "How about 150?" They're not going to walk away because you said 150. Like they'll just tell you no or they'll meet you at 150 or somewhere in the middle. Um, but they build so many links like their their volume game is so much higher than you could possibly imagine. They are fine to lose 50 on a link to acquire a potential customer in the future for another link. So, I think you should always ask. Um, you may not get as lucky as 3,000 to 300, but you can definitely knock off 50 to 100 bucks depending on the link um size. Um, that's my favorite creative otherwise nothing that stands out. Those are those are probably a blend of creative and favorite stories though. I I like growing up uh in New York being from New York City, there's so many journalists here and I would go out of my way to make friends with journalists even if I really hated their guts. Even if like I really just I did not enjoy spending time with this person. Oh my gosh, you're so funny. dude does stuff like that. I think Yeah, I um yeah, link building is funny. There's so many there's so many people building links. Um the industry grows every year, but like you can buy the same you could buy the same link on the same website from 30 different people. So like if you run into someone you don't like, like some someone else sells it. Um the other thing too and like underrated part and I've come around on this more recently. your website like if you want to earn links from like news sites like if you want to earn them or get link exchanges or even like premium paid links from reputable sites like I would say your website has to be worth linking to. Um you know like you should build you should write worthwhile content. Your site should look like it was built in this decade. You should have good product reviews. Like no amount of link building and SEO can really overcome like any of those things I think at the end of the day. So, you know, um I just put out a YouTube video like a couple hours ago. Um and it wasn't the title, but it was kind of centered around this ethos. So, like you can't really take any shortcuts. Like everything really plays into the next thing. So, if you're doing SEO and you're like, "Oh, I have a ton of money. I just started my company. I'm just going to spend a ton of money on links and not do the other stuff." Like, you're going to waste your money equally as bad as someone else, you know, who doesn't know what they're doing. So take care of the content, the web design, the reviews, like good branding, all that kind of stuff, and the link the link building will be supplementary on top of that, but it is definitely not a a replacement, I would say. Amen to that. Actually have um I have one I have one last question that I thought of. Are there any linkable assets that you've seen that that have have just really taken off? Um, and like everyone says calculators and you mentioned calculators, but maybe there's something there's some something else that was just like really creative and got a lot of links. went viral. Not Yeah, not in the not in the DDC world that I've seen. Like nothing that we've built, I would say, is like what I would consider viral. Um, a couple years ago, someone was running paid ads to an SEO checklist and then they just it was on a subdomain and they were like, "We're just going to put them on our main domain." And I think the SEO checklist like just went like totally ballistic um vertical and it got a ton it got a ton of links. I think the people I know that are the best at like digital PR and like a blast and stuff like that, they spend a lot of time not on Google. They spend a lot of time on like Instagram and Tik Tok and like in current events and things like that. I myself don't spend any time on those platforms um just cuz I I don't want to quite frankly. you know, if you're if you're really up to date with like not necessarily pop culture, but trends and you have the time and means and capacity to build assets in real time that align with anything in your niche, uh you can do crazy amounts of link building that way. Um I know I'm sure you do a lot of that on Tik Tok and Instagram as well. So yeah. Oh yeah. Um, yeah, if you spend time like like if you launch a DDC brand for example, um, or you have a DDC brand, right, and you're talking about like let's say you sell creatine or you sell like furniture, whatever, like just go curate your feed to whatever you sell and like just only like create a separate Tik Tok or Instagram account, curate your feed specifically to like that ecosystem and every time there's a new like, you know, someone has a bad take or a hot take or a new product, like just cover it. Um, you could you could be your own mini news site in some ways, I think, um, without having to create linkable assets and things like that. so yeah, I've seen I've seen that work a lot. I've not really seen it with my own two eyes on TDC, but I'm sure it's doable. I just think DDC sites um, that's just not their focus. But, you know, B2B sites, um, I think you can have a lot of value there. If you're a local site, I mean, you can cover your own community, your own town. like you could be another point of news and you can generate a lot of links that way. I'm I'm certain. And I really like what you said before about making a brand that's worth linking to having the reviews. I don't I don't like it. I don't like saying it cuz like I hate the advice. It's like I hate I hate it. I hate the SEO advice. It's like build a real brand because I think it's a bit of a copout on I think it like excuses the SEO from doing their job. M but at the end of the day like you can't you can't outwork like if you got a product with bad reviews and like exorbitant pricing or what like you're just not a good fit in the market like SEO can't fix you but neither can paid neither can email neither can affiliate like none of those things are going to fix you right um SEO is really supplementary as a channel um at least in the e-commerce world I'm sure other people have different opinions about that in other channels or other niches or other verticals but in my experience it's supplementary it's definitely not a standalone I think you can get you can you can make some money with a with a really bad brand, but like if you want the outsized wins, like if you want to have like something that that where you're making just so much, you have complete freedom. You can buy anything that you want. You're trying to have a good brand. Yeah. I we one example is a brand we work with. We've worked in the THC category a handful of times and that's super competitive on SEO because you obviously can't run paid. And some of these brands, I mean, they've all spent, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars on SEO over the years, links, content, agencies, like the works, right? And this is one brand that came out of a um like a brand aggregator. Like it's one of a it's a portfolio brand basically. And they invented this new kind of product. not new. It was basically like a new design of a of a very um established product. They won all these like product design awards. Um they they like were covered in like Forbes and all these like huge websites like right as they launched. Um I think they had a Kickstarter at one point maybe. Um very little SEO done and they ran they've ranked number one for we've ran we've worked with them for nine months now. They've ranked number one all nine months. very little fluctuation and honestly like I'm being honest like it's mostly a link building strategy. Um some topical content going on for sure, but it is just that good of a product and like everyone believes it that I I think honestly if I'm being honest like that's doing most of the heavy lifting, not the SEO part. You're awesome. Thanks for coming back on. Appreciate it. I'm going to have all your links in the description for this show. I'm also going to put in uh a link to our first episode together when you first came back on. Um but just uh for anybody who doesn't even want to go into the description, where should they go and find you? Yeah, Twitter, LinkedIn, um Kai Cromwell on both platforms and my agency website is newies.co. Um if you're a shopper brand that wants to work with agency, um that's where to find us. Let's go. Thank you again, Kai. This is Appreciate it, man. Thank you. This is episode 1 of the Edward Show. 1,029 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.