Ranking Revolution

Doug: This episode is part two of the conversation with Alex Horsman. We talk about link building in a slow yet highly effective way based on ideas from trust me, I'm lying. That's a book by Ryan holiday. If you miss part one, be sure to check it out. We talk in depth about email marketing, one of the sales and marketing techniques that I really love and really focus in on selling and converting leads to buyers and.
Alex has a huge amount of knowledge around that area, and he's been able to work with big brands to actually test that stuff out. So part one, really, really cool. And it helps you understand how you can remove some of your dependents from Google, but today we talk about link building and it's pretty cool.
I haven't heard anyone explain their link building strategy in this way. So let's get to the interview now.

Let's move on to your link building approach. And you mentioned that this seems to work pretty well to get like brand mentions. And with media in general. So what's the approach and how'd you get the idea?

Alex: So I read a book by Ryan Holiday called, trust Me, I'm Lying.
I believe the tail end is medium Manipul. There's something along those lines, and he opens the book kind of explaining he was doing, uh, he was trying to get his client into the media, and I think it was, Tucker Max, who was a pickup artist of sorts, and he had just come out with a book and there was a billboard of him, you know, sitting in Hollywood or somewhere in California.
And Ryan Holiday actually went to the billboard and spray painted it and called him a misogynist or something along those lines and then took a photo, sent it into a journalist and said, look what people are saying about Tucker Max. And then the journalist wrote an article about it. And Tucker Max's popularity blew up and he had such a successful launch because of this, because the buzz just started going because they said, you know, somebody said, here's a misogynist.
Why did they say that? Well, because of what he said in his book. Well, what did he say in his book? Now you just distributed that across thousands and thousands of journalists. So I say all that because. Ryan outlines in this book kind of how media works in terms of, you know, you have your top tier publications, say Fox, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post.
Those are your tier one. Tier two is going to be, he describes them as like Breitbart, I think. Gawker media. There's still big media websites. They're just not the TV channels. Right. And then tier three is the blogs underneath that. And that's everyone else, right? That's me. That's you. That's anybody else on the internet or producing media.
And the way it works is. Tier 1 gets news from Tier 2 websites. or media get news from Tier 3. I can never reach out to somebody at Fox and probably get a reply. I can probably never even reach out to somebody at Tier 2 media sites and get a reply. I just haven't really been able to do it often. What I can do is reach out to Tier 3 media people all day long, and if I can get continually shared on their media, then it works up the chain.
Right. So then somebody at Breitbart or dredge report sees it on the tier three media. And then once I'm shared enough on that tier two, then it eventually makes it up to tier one. And I can get more tactical and explain the entire approach, but that's the holistic view of it.

Doug: Perfect. And we will get into those details.
I've seen. If people look around, you will see this. So I was doing research for another video for one of my other podcasts, mile high five, and they had a story on Yahoo news, right? So I read Yahoo news and checked it out. And then I went and I was like, Oh, this was syndicated from somewhere else.
And it was a. Basically either a tier two or tier three article that honestly, it wasn't that good. Like so many articles that you see. And then side note, I had, you know, company that does like PR outreach type stuff. They were like, Hey, we'll do it for you. So I actually have like a mention on nasdaq. com and Yahoo finance with a quote that I didn't say it.
But like just the PR company did it, right? So nasdaq. com, which is insane. And then Yahoo finance is pretty big, but like I said, I mean, they end up just syndicating from all over to have writers all over the place. And then you just, you quickly realize like being mentioned there. You know, I could put it on my website.
It was featured there, but it doesn't really matter that much. Okay. So tactically. How do you do this?

Alex: Cool. So, what I outlined, and I'm going to use why I outlined in my newsletter, just because it's on top of my mind. I did it, let's say you're a conservative news blogger and. And I, this is always top of my mind because of work I did with ammo.com. They usually needed to be in that conservative space. And so our goal is to get on Fox. Okay. Well, we can't reach out to somebody on Fox. So what's below that drudge report. Okay. I still can't reach out to somebody on drudge report. So what's below that. What I do to find good tier two, tier three media sites to reach out to, to get on Drudge Report is I plug in Drudge into Ahrefs and I look at their outgoing links and then looking at their outgoing links, I'm going to filter those websites from lowest DR.
And then let's say the outgoing link count is 10 plus or 20 plus. You're off to play around with that number. But this tells me two things. It tells me low DR sites that Drudge Report keeps linking to multiple times. And it shows me that somebody at Drudge Report really likes grabbing news from this site.
So I can't reach Drudge Report, but I know they like, Doug show podcast, I can reach Doug. So that is who I'm going to go and reach out to. And typically there's 10, five to 10 to 20 of these small little blogs, and if you can build relationships with these people and get mentioned on their sites, especially multiple of their sites, not just one, the drudge is going to see you, that journalist, that drudge is going to see you and they will share your work.
And then from there, once you finally get shared. You reach out to the journalist that shared your work, whether that be LinkedIn, whether that be email. And now you have an in at that tier two site. And I think it's worth noting. This is not a quick game. There's it takes a long time, right? Like you have to get shared.
I think by the time we finally got mentioned on Fox, it. Like we got probably 10 to 20 articles shared multiple times on these tier three blogs. And then finally, you know, two or three of them made it up to tier two. And then finally one made it to the cream of the crop. So it's a long term play. And then obviously we actually did, I never got a contact at Fox, even though they shared the story.
But I was able to at least get tier one and tier two stories and contacts over there.

Doug: Got it. And what, what was the success rate for just getting on tier three? You know, like you're saying, you have to get some opportunities, you have to get the at bats, only a couple are going to convert. And then, I mean, you just have to do this sort of at scale.
So. What was the success rate? How'd you take the overall approach for topics as well?

Alex: Yeah, I was not, uh, the way we were doing it was very philosophical pieces of content. It was not keyword optimized whatsoever. This was way less of an SEO play and way more of a. media play. Do you get SEO benefit? 100%.
You get links out of it like crazy, but you also get hundreds of thousands of page views if you make it to that top tier. So we had to come up with a story that was interesting. You know, you can take a book out of, you know, what digital PR I think that their topic ideation is really creative. To be honest with you, I, that's less of my skill set.
I'm not the best. I'm not the most creative. I'm more analytical and numbers driven. But it was always, philosophical questioning something we would do trending topics, you know, something that's in the news. But we would almost write as a, I would say newsworthy, right? These are news sites.
Like it has to be in the news, but we would question things and we would, we would take a hard stance. And I think whether it's political or not, it seems like I'm talking about politics, but that's just because that's where my. My knowledge and background was whether it's political or not, I think like having an opinion and creating a stance about something is vital because sure, some people are not going to like you, but there's going to be a lot of people that like you and they're going to share the shit out of your stuff.
So I think that is one thing to keep in mind when it comes to topic ideation. Go ahead, sorry.

Doug: I have a quick example. So the research that I was just doing was based on a study. So there are surveys and different studies that are happening all the time and I mean, we see this often with media because they'll take like one sliver, one little finding from like a self reported survey.
And then they'll say exercise is bad or whatever, like exercise causes heart attacks and it's like, well, it's for, you know, this specific group that they surveyed and these are super unhealthy people. It, this is a real example, but the one that I ran into the other day, there was a survey. of I think like 3000 people.
And they said the millionaires of the group felt basically identified as middle class, like a good chunk of them. So there were a bunch of headlines where it's like millionaires think they're middle class and obviously it's a little bit controversial. It like gets people thinking and they react like emotionally quickly, which is what the news stories are going after.
So, so my point is you can go and reference the original. So after I started looking, I was like, well, I don't want to see the. Kind of bad articles that are written for the, you know, mass. I want to see the original research, which you can just go follow the links and you end up at the original research.
Then you could write your own stuff and have your own stance. Maybe you want to go against the grain of what everyone else is saying. That way, like you said, I mean, you're going to piss people off, but those are the topics that media wants to cover.

Alex: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think it's, again, I mean, as real it is.
As it is, you know, if it bleeds, it leads is a real thing still. And journalists, a lot of journalists are freelancers and they're getting paid per story. And if their stories can get more page views than the average journalist, At the, you know, at the company, then they're going to keep getting work.
And so they are very much incentivized to get these stories. So finding something that is controversial, I find has been, and again, it's not controversial for everyone. You know, a lot of people agree with you, but having some sort of unique perspective and not like, don't be afraid to piss people off. As you said that's our number one thing.

Doug: How does this actually work? So if you, you have a story or an article and you contact tier three, do they, what do you tell them? Are you like, Hey, here's an article I wrote. Or are you saying, Hey, we have some information or an idea. How does that even work?

Alex: Yeah. So a lot of this goes back to my eight years ago when I first got started with link building I crafted and really good outreach emails because there was no, or maybe there was, I just wasn't using it.
There was no mail shake. There was no pitch box. There was some of these automation tools for cold email outreach. And so for me, it was a spreadsheet. And a website and I had to find the email address and write a detailed freaking pitch to this person to add a link when like doing that has allowed me to create really good email pitches and so These tier threes There's a lot of different ways to skin the cat here.
What I love doing is typically tier threes are, you know, it's a journalist who is doing this out of passion. Typically they've written a book. Typically they've, you know, put something, you know, maybe they have a donation button on their blog. Any sort of kind of, you know, it's the, how, not how to win for friends and influence people.
Psychology. Persuasion, the, what is it? Influence the psychology of persuasion. Within the book, one of the rules he talks about is reciprocity. And so I always try to get that reciprocity initially, whether it's donating to them and then showing them the transaction ID and sending them a, well, like a thank you email.
Or if it's me buying their book, the best form of reciprocity is when it's not money. If you can buy their book, if you can, like, you know, buy their book. That is a killer if they have something that's like damn near 80 to 100 percent success rate. Even if I don't get like the link, I get a reply.
So that's typically in terms of how I like the strategy for opening it. It's not always applicable, but I'm usually not leading with a story. I'm usually just starting a conversation and trying to build a relationship. And then. The story will come. So I typically try and go build these relationships.
You know, if we have a story coming out in a month, go build the relationship now, because you don't want to come off as me, me, me share my story and that initial email or that initial two or three emails you really want to be focused on them. And, you know, maybe that's promoting one of their stories within your email list.
Maybe that's promoting it on social media. Maybe that's, you know, buying their book. There's a number of, again, there's a number of ways you can skin the cat here, but that's what the initial process looks like is just getting that conversation started and getting them to know you. Um, yeah. The hard part for a lot of SEOs, a lot of SEOs don't like it on the phone or getting on zooms or doing podcasts.
So this would be, you know, you kind of got to get out of your comfort zone. I think one of the best of my friends, uh, he was a certified financial planner and his link close rate. Was amazing. And the reason was because he just put his calendar link at the bottom of every single email. And he was like, I'll jump on the phone with anyone because there's a certified financial planner.
He does that all day long. And he was like, I don't care. I don't need you know, I don't hide behind my computer screen and just email. So I think going out of the way to build that relationship Is the first step and don't lead with an article just lead with them. What's that for them do something for them?
It doesn't have to be giving them money. It works. Doesn't work as well as buying a book. Doesn't work as well as sharing a story of theirs to your email list and letting them know. And actually giving critical thoughts about their work. You know, not just this BS, loved your piece. Okay, thanks. Like actually read it like these journalists or, you know, these tier three media sites, they usually really care about what they're doing.
And a lot of the times they're not getting paid a lot, you know, they might be doing it completely out of passion. So when you can talk to them about something that they're passionate about, it goes a long ways. So does that answer at least the initial aspect of it of how I would start the conversation?

Doug: Yep. And what happens next? So you build the relationship, you guys have some communication lines open. So then what happens?

Alex: Yeah. So then the picture of the story, right. But again, you did start out with the story and from there, hopefully you've gotten this relationship with not just one website.
But with five to 10 websites, and it's much like a product launch. Whenever you pitch your story, you're pitching it to all of them at once within the same day, because you want to get them all to share it within the same timeframe, because that person on the tier two site, whenever they go and look, maybe they see it on Doug, but they didn't see it on Zach.
So maybe, you know, they see it four to five different times and then they're like, okay, let's pick this up. I did. I saw the headline. I didn't read it. But then I saw it again and again, I decided to read it. Wow. This is a really good article. Okay. Yeah. Now it's time to share. So it's as simple yet as complicated as that.
It's, um, it's really, when you talk about it, it doesn't sound too complicated, but the, it's just a lot of work. It's a lot of time, right? Building a relationship to where. They are willing to share the story. That's kind of, I think where the upfront work is. And also again, as we talked about earlier, the topic has to be interesting.
It has to be newsworthy. They have to, it has to be worth their time and related to them, right? Like I'm not going to pitch a bunch of surfing News or two or three media sites about fishing, right? They were gonna be like, what? This has nothing to do with us. So that's again, why it's helpful to map all of this out from the very get go.
If you are like, I use the drudge because it was an ammo. com, you know, and that's all kind of like conservative media, but if it was, you know, on the other side, liberal media, well, maybe you want to get on. I don't know like the daily beast, I think. Right. And so it's like, who is the daily beast linking to on a, uh, over and over again that you can build a relationship with.
And again, this doesn't even have to be political. We've done it with surfing brands, for instance, who is surfed. com or surf. com. Who are they linking to over and over again? So, the work is really, I would say almost in planning and reverse engineering where people are getting their news and again, looking at ahrefs.
But then when it comes to the actual pitching part, if you have those relationships in place and if you have a good story. It's just like rinse and repeat trying him with a story once a week. That's good.

Doug: So with the, you know, you mentioned the story, you knew there's something coming out. So is this like a syndicated situation where like you've published it on your site and then they write about it?
Or you literally writing an article and they're like guest posts, publishing it, or they write an article or like, what does that even look like?

Alex: Yeah, I, we write it on our website and that they either write a piece about it and link to it, or we let them completely copy and paste it. And then at the bottom, they just put this article was originally published on X, Y, and Z.
com over here. It's much less, again, for me, like after you get those initial shares, it's much less about link building in my eyes. It's much more about getting on those tier two and tier one websites and just getting media coverage.

Doug: Got it. Interesting. And it doesn't really matter if it's syndicated or if they write the piece, it just depends on their website.
You know, if it's their website, if they're being paid or how they're, I guess, how they're presenting the information in general on that site.

Alex: Yeah. And also, you know, it's their website. If they want to write a piece about it, I don't care. As long as it's mentioned or as long as it's somewhat of a focal point.
Again my whole goal is just to get shared 10 to 20 times. So that gets in front of that tier two or tier one media.

Doug: So what mistakes could happen? Obviously most of the time. It doesn't work. You're just like, you're taking these shots and then it doesn't hit. And then all of a sudden, like you're getting more traction.
But like, even if you do get a successful, we'll call it a conversion where they're like, yeah, we will do this story. What mistakes might happen that, you know, make it not turn out? Like you thought you don't get the page views. You thought you don't get the links. You thought that sort of thing.

Alex: We've got a couple of good stories.
I think we've had a couple of stories that actually hurt us as a brand where they, some people went into the data and we were not 100 percent with it. We should have reviewed it a little bit better and we spent a ton of time on it. But we just weren't a hundred percent accurate and that sucked because we've made it pretty far with that piece.
And it was an influx of views, but then we are, you know, customer support for the brand got quite a bit of emails as well and phone calls. So that is, I would say is the biggest thing is just make sure that you have this stuff buttoned up. If you're trying to get on Fox news, be prepared to get on Fox news or any other big media Brands.
So that's the biggest one that's hurt us is just not having our, our data as well as it could be. And then, you know, I can't say whether that has long term effects. I think people have a pretty short attention span and maybe they were pissed off as for a week, but you know, if they go to other parts of the website, they see that we're not terrible people.
But. Yeah, that, that, that's the biggest one that I can tell you we've, we've run into.

Doug: And it wouldn't have been a big deal except it was a successful campaign, right?

Alex: And then it got picked up everywhere. Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. I will say we, once you build that relationship with the tier three websites, I think again, you know, we can get shared on those a lot.
So the conversion for those is actually pretty high because we're You're, you spend so much time trying to build that relationship. But getting that, that second push, that's where the conversion is just like, eh, this might work, this might not. So I just wanted to emphasize that.

Doug: Have you been able to get introductions from like the tier three to tier two?
How does that work?

Alex: Yeah, a hundred percent. We, I actually have a couple of contributor slots on tier two sites, both underneath my name and quite a few pin names. And a lot of that is through. introductions. And one thing again, it's amazing what you can do if you just go into Ahrefs and look at their outbound links and do this on not just on a site level, but also on a journalist level.
So if I'm trying to get on the KC star here and I have a fishing website, And I go and look at the outdoor section because I know the outdoor section will link to my fishing website. Okay. Well, I want to then go and look at all of the articles that Pete Davis, I don't know the outdoor editor for the Kansas city SAR.
I want to look at who he is linking to, not just the KC SAR as a whole, but who the heck is he linking to? And then build the relationship with those two or three media sites. And It's usually just a, you know, I think, I don't know if I've ever had, actually, I can say confidently. I've never had an introduction until a tier two media site has shared.
And I've been like, you know, if I'm talking to Dave, who is the tier three owner of fishing. com and the tier two owner of KC. Kansas City Star here, the outdoor journalist. If he finally shares an article of ours from fishing. com, then I'll be like, Hey Dave, can you introduce me to Pete over at KC Star?
They just shared our article. I just wanted to say thank you. And that's how that relationship typically looks.

Doug: Perfect. And I'll give, you know, we're talking about like, blog post and written word, but quick example for me, and then we'll sort of, we'll start wrapping up, we we've been sticking around for a long time here, but my.
I have a co host. He and I are writing a book on anti productivity and laziness. And the thing is, we've had a podcast for two plus years, three years now, three years. We've had a bunch of guests on. He's been blogging for over a decade. I have other podcasts and I've been blogging for about a decade. And the thing is, we've helped a lot of people out over the years.
We have a ton of contacts. We go to in person events, we go to conferences. And when we launched the book, not only have we helped a bunch of people, but like, we have something interesting. People know us. We've built relationships for. over a decade. So we should be able to get a very high conversion rate when we're like, we have this book and we're willing to like be on your show.
You can have an excerpt and put it on your blog. Like we have all these different ways that we can approach it, but it's just through the relationship building. And we potentially can get introductions because we know a lot of people who know a lot of other people that may cover it. So like, we've. You know, we put in all this work for years that should pay off whenever we launched the book.
So,

Alex: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's your net worth is your net worth, right? That's all I'll say.

Doug: All right. Well, as we're wrapping up here same sort of question is the email marketing as we're wrapping up. Other details that we should think about when we're looking at this, trust me, I'm lying link building approach and trying to really kind of manipulate the media in, in a way that is primarily through relationship building.

Alex: Yeah, yeah, I think just everybody loves talking about 000 emails a month and pitching. All the time. It's a numbers game. I don't necessarily think it's enough. It's definitely not a numbers game. If you're doing it this way, it is in the sense of X amount of articles of yours need to be shared until you get picked up, but it's not in the sense of just blast out as many emails as you can, like you've got to be slow.
You've got to be methodical. You've got to build this relationship. Stop thinking about what's in it for you. You're never going to, this will never work. If you use a dear sir, dear ma'am email, that's like, that will never work. This is not something that I would hand off necessarily to a super junior person.
I would try and do this myself because also if they start sharing your stuff or if they're communicating, it's your brand, it's you, you know, take it seriously. Again, if you make it, Heat my words. If you make it to a tier one site and your data is screwed, be prepared. So that, I would say that's my, my biggest tip is that it's a little bit more of a slow and methodical approach versus a blast 10,000 emails with, you know, to websites with good DR and traffic
Right?

Doug: Yeah. I hate that shotgun type approach. So, yeah, good advice. Excellent. Well, we'll link up to all the places out there for you, Alex, but can you tell us where you want people to find you and the stuff that you have going on?

Alex: Yep. My newsletter, shitty SEO advice. I'm right on there each week. And then as well, LinkedIn, I tend to.
I'm posted on there multiple times a week, if not every day. So those are the two best places as of now.

Doug: Awesome. And what, what kind of work do you do? Just so people know if they follow you, I mean, maybe they sign up for the email list, like what kind of stuff might you be able to help them out with?

Alex: Yeah, right now strategy. Really when it comes to a lot of people, I've been interested in this strategy and how they can fit it into their company or into their role. So I do a lot of link building strategy because that's where I spent a lot of time in the SEO world.

Doug: Got it. And you probably don't do the implementation.
So you're, you could be a more of a visionary. You're like, here's a good strategy. You guys go work on it with your team or whatever.

Alex: Yeah, I have a lot of SOPs that I'm not afraid to share, you know, because again, I've, I've just been doing this for a long time and I can speed up the learning curve very quickly and teach junior employees and people how to, how to get this implemented.

Doug: So if someone has like a small agency with a couple of freelancers helping them out and they want to do some of this, um, trust me, I'm lying link building approach, you could give them some of the SOPs and kind of consult them like, Hey, spend time here, skip this stuff, that, that kind of thing.

Alex: Yeah, exactly.
And we, you know, we chatted on it for what, 30 to 45 minutes and I could probably chat for another two to three hours and I could go deeper depending on a particular project because, you know, the, the overall strategy is there, but it does change based off what brand and what news stations you're trying to do this for.

Doug: Very good. Well, we'll link up to all your stuff so people can follow you. And thanks a lot, Alex.

Alex: Yeah. Thanks for having me on Doug.

Doug: Thanks again for checking out this episode and thanks to Alex for sharing a story. If you liked it, be sure to check out other interviews with people like Julian Goldie, Jared Bauman. Ricky Kessler, Jason Barnard, Spencer Hawes, and there are many others. Plus, I do some solo episodes, which are a little bit shorter and usually I share some specific strategy or technique or let's face it, sometimes I just ramble on and those episodes are a little bit longer, but be sure to check those out too.
If you do like the show, make sure you're subscribed wherever you're consuming this. It sends a good algorithmic signs to the directories and the players that you use. And if you leave a review, I'll read it. That's even better. And really the best way to help out the show is if you tell a friend, tell someone that might find a specific episode useful and just send them that link and then hopefully they'll check it out.
So thanks a lot for checking it out and we'll catch on the next episode.