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Indonesia Digital Marketing Podcast - Ryan Kristo Muljono
Semua tentang pemasaran melalui media internet. Anda akan belajar Strategi, Tips & Trick dalam Digital Marketing untuk membantu anda dalam menerapkan pemasaran melalui media digital.
Indonesia Digital Marketing Podcast - Ryan Kristo Muljono
SEO 911: The Art of Scaling in Link Building - Inside Steven Khanna’s Strategy for Growth and Sales
Ready to unlock the secrets to scaling your business exponentially? Steven Khanna, head of English markets at White Press, shares his extraordinary journey from Michelin-starred restaurants to making waves in the SEO and link-building industry. You won't want to miss how he skyrocketed White Press’s monthly recurring revenue from £5,000 to £500,000 in just two and a half years. Discover how Steven’s hospitality-rooted skills and personalized outreach strategies contributed to this rapid success and get a sneak peek into his next venture with Endorsely.
Ever questioned the conventional wisdom around SEO? Steven emphasizes the need for healthy skepticism and continuous testing. We dive into the nitty-gritty of niche-relevant guest posting and its impact on SEO performance. Learn about the sophisticated outreach strategies that Steven's team employs, the role of language in successful client interactions, and the complexities of measuring ROI in link-building. This episode offers valuable insights into how internal factors like product quality and sales can convert increased organic traffic into real business results.
Selling isn't just about charm; it's about strategy. Steven shares his insights into hiring street-smart salespeople who can creatively overcome objections and add genuine value to clients. Discover the pitfalls of over-promising and under-delivering, and the importance of setting realistic client expectations. Plus, Steven talks about his transition to Endorsely, highlighting the exciting opportunities in affiliate management and the SaaS industry. Tune in to explore effective sales strategies and meaningful client connections that drive growth in the SEO and affiliate marketing spaces.
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✨ Quote to Remember: "There’s no such thing as a failed product—only failed marketing." – Ryan Kristo Muljono
Hi, welcome back to another episode of SEO 911 with me, ryan Cristomignano. This podcast is brought to you by SEOCon Forum, bali 2024. If you haven't checked it out, you need to check at seoconid. At this conference, you will learn SEO Evolution, the next eight-figure opportunity for you to reveal in 2025. So make sure that you check it out at seoconid. The event itself is going to happen in Bali 4th to 6th December 2024. For today's podcast, we have a special guest, none other than Stephen Khanna. Stephen is the head of English markets at White Press. He's a digital gardener, a keyword maestroestro and a go-to guy when it comes to staying on top of google's ranking. Ladies, all right, please help me. Welcome, stephen canna, hi stephen hi ryan.
Speaker 2:Really good to see you, mate.
Speaker 1:A big hello to your audience as well it's really awesome to have you here in this interview. Uh, how's everything?
Speaker 2:yeah, all good, mate, all good. Uh, the sun is shining here where I'm sitting right now in our head offices. Uh, for white press in poland? Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:I mean the weather's changing a bit of chill in the air, but yeah, can't complain okay, so maybe our, my listeners haven't heard about you yet, because have you ever been to?
Speaker 2:Indonesia before. I've never been to Indonesia and I can't wait to be there December. Be on stage in your fantastic conference and hopefully add a lot of value to the audience sitting there.
Speaker 1:I believe. So I checked. I watched your presentation. I saw how you present your content. It's awesome. I can't. I watched your presentation. I saw how you present your content is awesome. I cannot wait to see you here in person. Thank you so maybe my listener is not familiar with you. Who are you? Who's this? Stephen Kanna, you can introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course, mate. So I've been in the SEO space not not that long, just two and a half years ago. My background's been running restaurants back in the uk uh, mostly michelin stars. The first five years I did with gordon rumsey this was fresh out of university, um and then, yeah, very quickly kind of rose to the ranks of general manager, became a wine sommelier and I've managed businesses upwards of 60 million pounds of annual revenue, teams of over 60 people. And then I moved to Poland what nine and a half years ago? Because my wife's Polish.
Speaker 2:The first three, three and a half years it was all about a bit of B2B sales, a bit of teaching English, until I ran into the world of SEO and link building. And that's how my adventure with White Press started, and White Press has been two and a half years. I lead the English markets there and then within 18 months, from about 5,000 pounds MRR I rose it to at the peak we did half a million pounds MRR, which is a lot of links to sell. Uh, you know, grew the team from three people to now 19, which I manage. Uh, it's been, it's been fascinating.
Speaker 2:But then my journey and I think your audience should know about this. My journey with ypress comes to an end very soon. I'm moving into different business ventures where I'm joining Endorsely, which is all about affiliate marketing like a platform and a tool, and I joined that company as head of growth or the group of companies as head of growth. So, yeah, for me it's all about sales, sales strategies, personalization, networking, equaling your net worth. Yeah, just a simple sales guy, mate, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Wow, how you get into this market Like you're only two and a half years in the white press and then you go from 5,000 000 mrr into 500 000 mrr.
Speaker 2:how you do it uh, lots of sleepless nights, 16 hours a day, 18 hours a day, mate. No, but obviously there's a lot more to it. You know, uh, in order to summarize it quite well, all I did was I took certain approaches which worked in the restaurant world, carried them over to the SEO space, got my product knowledge completely fantastically done. When it comes to anything with link building whether it's your link velocity, anchor text, diversification you know which kind of links really move. The needle link profile needs to be a good combination of do follow, no follow, so you're not really leaving any footprint for Google. So the first three months was all about education, then trying to find the gap in the market which is the ideal buying persona, and once you've got those figured out, then it's all about building outreach strategies and how to personalize them, and a lot of that used to be through cold calling, linkedin messaging, obviously lead magnets driven through my marketing team, lots of emailing. But all of that had a personalized approach to it, and I'll give you one small example If I had to use Apollo and Sales Navigator, if I had to use Apollo and Sales Navigator, and if they, if, if they gave a result of Ryan yourself, I'll tell you how I'll go about it.
Speaker 2:I'll stalk you on Facebook, I'll stalk you on LinkedIn, I'll stalk you on your website to know everything about Ryan, and then my custom email or call would be extremely personalized. So let's assume from the top of my head you love playing tennis and you love eating. I don't know Mexican food. So my outreach strategy would be based on that personal connection, because for me sales is all about liking people, because people buy from people and this phraseology I've used a lot in the past, like trust equals to business. So if they like you, they'll trust you. If they trust you, they'll give you their business. And if people kind of understand that mentality and approach quite quickly, then maybe even half a million is not enough. You can scale it up to a million, to two million, to be honest not enough.
Speaker 1:You can scale it up to a million, to two million uh, to be honest. Wow, this that sounds simple, but I know it's not that easy, especially you're. You're doing uh on the white press. Is the link building services correct? Correct, uh, in your perspective? Whether is it because of your? Is it?
Speaker 2:because of your service is different or how you market is different. Of course our product, which is primarily a marketplace, of course it stands out and there are some fantastic USPs, whether it's, you know, doing international link building in 30 markets, and all of that. So the product is strong enough, for sure. Yet you know we're up against it. You know, know we're the bottom of the barrel. Uh, when it comes to seo, you know, end of the day, I never sugarcoat it.
Speaker 2:White press is a bunch of link builders. So what's the biggest key there is trust. People don't want to listen to link builders. So if I happen to come across as a trustworthy fella, whether it's through just millions of miles away trying to do uh or do discovery calls, or when I go into conferences and I meet people like yourselves, like charles floyd, like matt diggity or kyle roof, the idea is not to sell anything. The idea is just to have a good relation there. And once that relationship is built, the business conversation normally is initiated by the opposite person. And the standard mistake a lot of SEOs or a lot of entrepreneurs in SEOs who've never done sales in the past is they jump into either technicalities or trying to sell way too quickly.
Speaker 2:Sales is all about. It's a game of chess. It's about reading minds. It's about reading personalities. You have to be able to say the right thing at the right time without faking it. You know you still have to set expectations right from the beginning, but if you're genuine, you know you can deliver the KPIs. Then it's all the matter of winning the trust and convincing that person that white press is head and shoulders above compared to any other link building agency. And that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 2:The last six months. Me personally I've not done a single sales call. Outreach sales call is because I get leads coming in every day from all over the world. Every time someone talks about listen mate, I'm looking for a trustworthy link builder. Do you have someone? Yeah, I go to Steve from White Press. He'll sort you out. And it's all about networking SEO community, leveraging the contacts you've got, and my WhatsApp blows up every day with people asking for things. So, yeah, that's all I've done. Sounds simple, I know, but it does take a lot of energy, you bet so, uh, what's the currently situation at white press?
Speaker 1:how? How's the business uh going?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, uh, year-on-year growth. We're still about 45 percent. Of course, we've had a hit since the Google updates. Obviously, a lot of websites, organic traffic was wiped out and a chunk of our inventory was affected as well. But then we very quickly diversified. We started doing digital PR. We've changed our approach to a lot of SaaS websites and we're approaching them with a very different strategy in order to compensate for the inventory we lost. We've also started doing what I call it as guest posts on steroids, which is power posts. So guest posts start ranking at least for the long tail keywords, so people get ROI quite quickly. You know AI being leveraged, so people can kind of do an entire media planner. Every little helps in order to compensate. So if I say in terms of targets, yeah, we're probably below our targets this year, but then our targets were very ambitious from month one anyways. Hence, yet if an outsider sees, sees it mate. It's 45 percent growth.
Speaker 1:My markets alone is 69.8 percent growth year on year, so I don't think anyone should complain really yeah, because, because the changes is so uh, I will say the changes in google's algorithm and in the world through the AI. Everything is moving so fast and I know it's so hard for people to keep up to date with the changes and everything. Like what you said you change the strategy, you change the inventory and everything.
Speaker 2:How you can keep up with all these changes well, there's a lot of reading to do, to be honest. But then, apart from the reading, we've got a really strong testing team at white press. So we really don't believe what people at google are telling us. For us, seo has always been the world for me personally at least, seo is a world of it depends. So just because someone's telling me and I don't care, with all due respect to google that's how it should be done, I'm not going to believe it.
Speaker 2:If you look at some of the top seos out there, the reason they are all respected is because they go and test it, whether it's laura mipsom from kyle roof, whether it's charles lord with parasite seo, whether it's rank and rent model from James Dooley. And that's exactly what we do as well when we build our case studies as to what things would help move the needle. Through relevant case studies, like recently we figured out, strangely enough, within the Google algorithm, if you're doing guest posting on websites niche relevant, of course, between DR15 to DR2929, that seems to move the needle a lot more quicker. So when we're doing basic audits for the website and coming up with an action plan, we tend to recommend those kind of websites a lot more because we've actually got proof of study there, so you know a combination of reading being on the ball, but, but keep testing, keep testing, because you can't just simply believe what people are saying.
Speaker 1:Well, that's one thing. Of course, we learn a lot from the others SEOs, with all these things but yeah, that one part the testing part is not my job, so I'm really looking forward for WordPress movement. What's new in WordPress? So what?
Speaker 2:is the biggest challenge that you face for doing this as your staff. Uh, if I had to specifically stick to link building is proving the roi for a for a period of time which is 12 months, keeping them engaged but, most importantly, finding those absolutely stunning gems, the websites where people can get those backlinks. And I think a lot of my team's time goes into outreach. You know it's coming up with research, uh, and I'll give you a simple example within our outreach team, we've got inbuilt like 14 mini strategies of how we could reach out to certain websites in order to convince them. You know bb the link, bb the raven link builder. She uses lots of cat memes, for example. You know something along those lines.
Speaker 2:But it's deeply researched where I jump into it as well where we come up with certain templates, certain phraseologies, certain emotional triggers. You, language is all about evoking a certain response from a human being. End of the day, we're all emotional animals, let's face it. I don't care if someone's a millionaire or billionaire, we are all emotional animals. So if me and my team happen to speak a language with certain words which the target website would understand, that's what makes it and since we've kind of grown these outreach strategies. Our conversion rate we were getting those links has increased rapidly and I can sit here proudly and say for link building to do these custom outreach with quality content, our conversion rate mate it's over 37. That is phenomenal that's really good.
Speaker 1:You're mentioning about the roi of link building. How you measure it? If you don't mind to share?
Speaker 2:yeah, of course, of course, um, of course. When you're doing link building, it's a based on domain level, for sure, um. However, because we've been doing it for 11 years, we could clearly see that certain big brands I can name a couple of them because I don't have ndas with them the decathlons and the new balance, for example, based on the organic traffic increase which we gave within the last 12 to 18 months, that organic traffic equated into more leads, which then equated into more leads, which then equated into more orders, and because I personally had that relation with them, we showed what we could show on the SEO part of stuff and they were very happily sharing data that, based on the work we did, they clearly got a lot more leads coming back, and for that that information is pure gold and, of course, I take permission from them that can we use it as case studies with our other clients, and that's what it comes down. Business owners. All they want to see is okay, mate, I had invested 100 000.
Speaker 2:How much am I getting? 2x, 3x, 4x, 10x, you know? Organic traffic, yeah, it works up to a certain point. What's after that? You know?
Speaker 1:so well, how, if they, how if uh, if you get the I, the uh data from them about the growth, it's gonna be awesome. But how, if they cannot give you the data? How you uh, how you make it uh, how you calculate the?
Speaker 2:roi in.
Speaker 1:Most companies will have no ideas about the backlink and roi yeah, that's where.
Speaker 2:That's where account management comes into the place. You know, because I sometimes I put the question back to those people. I said well, we're sitting on a call, you're wanting to do link building with us. Clearly you would have had a strategy indoors as to what ROI can you expect by doing link building. And I said I'm not going to lie here and promise you stupid amount of numbers there which I have zero control on, but what I can guarantee you is it does move the needle. It doesn't increase organic traffic and if you start ranking within the top five on SERPs, clearly there'll be more clicks going your way.
Speaker 2:Based again on these case studies, what happens after that depends on how good is your internal sales team, how good is your internal marketing team, how good is your internal marketing team, how good is your actual product? Because, let's face it, seo is a form of digital marketing. Marketing's job is to get people in those. Whether they are actually converted depends on the strength of your product or the service you're offering. Because if they expect SEOs to be responsible for sales, then that's clearly it's like I'm the new sales team, that in it I'm not really your digital marketing team and I think a lot of entrepreneurs make that mistake. They overstep the mark and they make the marketing teams really responsible for the revenue, which should not be the case. Marketing's job is to bring the leads in. After the leads, it's people like myself or your sales team who work their magic in order to close that.
Speaker 1:That's the same challenge that I have. Most companies come to us asking for boosting their sales when we're only boosting the marketing. I think most of there's a common mistake from the business owner or marketing that don't understand what the process is it correct, correct.
Speaker 2:And I, the way I've explained it to you, ryan, that's exactly how I explain it to them, and I'm in the privileged position of sales, so I actually make them think they're like oh yeah, actually he's right, yeah, it's my sales team's job.
Speaker 2:So a lot of that comes into education as well, because just because someone's sitting on a multi-million pound brand happens to be the CEO with all due respect to that gentleman or the lady I'm not intimidated at all because I'm confident of what I'm talking about. And now, as long as you're confident, you've got conviction, you've got data to prove that, then it just comes as a matter of educating the client that what you're expecting is completely irrelevant. You know you can't get tomato soup by having a recipe of a mushroom soup. You know the expectations are not aligned at all and sometimes it's about pushing back and say, if that's what you think, then clearly we're not the best partners. I leave it there it is. Once your strategy changes, come back to us, and it's happened a lot of times to me where two months down the line they've come back and said yeah, actually you were right, mate. Yes, let's do it, because the other agency we signed up screwed and burned us after a month and a half.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what you said just now is so easy. I can see that you're so experienced in this area, because I know to say that to the client is like my team. Say that into the client, it's like my, my team. When I say to tell this, this thing to the client, they say like, oh really, should I tell them that way? I still want the business. And you say to push away. Yeah, they don't get it.
Speaker 2:I I must make sure that they listen to this podcast I, I think, I think a lot of sales people, and I'll tell you, ryan, there are not a lot of clever sales people out there in the world. Sales is not about you go to a certain university and get education. You look at some of the most fantastic sellers. Go to a fish market on a Sunday. These guys or girls, they're very clever in what they're saying when they're shouting out to the public. Sales is all about being street smart and to be street smart, the hiring process has to be correct.
Speaker 2:Now all my sales team, anyone who comes in with a CV of, oh, I sold X amount, five figures, six figures but I say, yeah, great, but what were you selling? If it was an established brand, then I'm sorry. You don't really need a sales guy, do you? Because the brand does the job already. So I actually look for people who had decent amount of success selling a shitty product. So before, before white press, I was selling the shittiest wine ever made on god's green earth. It was like 80 euro cents a bottle. We were selling and my targets were stupid Air One, which was selling seven to nine truck loads of wines and one truck takes 32,000 bottles. I'd sold that in year one in July. Now, those are the kind of people I'm looking for.
Speaker 2:And sometimes I do that where I'm sitting having interviews with people and I tell them come prepared for some sort of a role play, and I give them certain situations which are like shit, odds on, and I know they're going to lose it. But what I'm trying to see is how creative they are to overcome objections and, at the same time, kind of educate me as well. So I think that funnel of hiring has to happen in a very strategic manner that you're getting and I'm going say, I'm gonna quote something and I apologize for my language which is going to be part of my wascon conference when it comes to hiring hire an army of those guys who would get in bed with anyone if they can deliver and they see, see the value in it. You know sales guys have got to be, they're going to need to smell the business, but in a way that it does not harm the brand. Sometimes my sales managers are going and trying to promise something and I said, how the fuck do you think I'm going to deliver or we're going to deliver all of that? And then I jump in and I write an email back to the client or jump on an email to course correct. It's okay to take calculated risks, but if you're taking risks knowingly, you can't deliver.
Speaker 2:The amount of brand damage that does is just incredible. One of my restaurants, big Argentinian steakhouse back in the UK, we did a market analysis One customer having a bad experience. It was equaling 13,000 pounds of annual revenue loss because one person, psychologically with a bad experience, goes and speaks to 10 different people oh, I did this and I did that. So if you take 10 people eating out at a restaurant three times a week in the UK and you calculate the average spend, that equates to 13,000 pounds. That's one client. So people have got no idea. When people leave agencies with a bad taste in their mouth, the amount of brand damage which is being caused is just absolutely ridiculous and that's why the after-sales service, the, the expectations being set from the beginning, are extremely important.
Speaker 1:Wow, let's make meetings definitely. Get it to learn more about you, more from you yeah, so next to the, your new role as the growth of, uh, the head of growth at endlessly what yeah what is it about?
Speaker 2:why is it and?
Speaker 1:what's me? What makes you move from white press to androcy?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, mate, link building obviously has got its own limitations. To be honest, I was bored selling links. To be honest, you know, there's not a lot more progression, and Endorsely is all about affiliate management. So primarily it's an affiliate management tool. So any SaaS out there who's got an affiliate program and they want to track their LTVs, their CPAs for every affiliate plus the payment method, all the integration happens. But then there are two other levels to it.
Speaker 2:We've got a fantastic holistic network of affiliates who are part of our inventory and any SaaS can tap into it, pay a certain fee in order to have those deals or outsource the entire affiliate management program to us, because one of the biggest issues with SaaS is they can't really manage their affiliate program quite well and there's a lot of money left on the table. So we've got influencer marketers in our inventory. We've got some fantastic affiliates thanks to my new boss, jamie. Jamie, at the age of 25, was the youngest affiliate millionaire in the world and the bloke was 25. So clearly he knows how to leverage content strategies and who are the right people to go to in order to, you know, scale up a certain brand.
Speaker 2:So we're coming up with a bank when we market launch it sometime in October, up with the bank when we in, when we market launch it sometime in october. Uh, hence I was excited that definitely I want to be part of this growth because I love building things from the ground up. Of course it's a challenge, but listen, if it costs me another five years of my life and few more gray hair and a bit more high blood pressure, fuck it, I'll do it, man.
Speaker 1:That's good. So is it and honestly it's full or on affiliate? But because this is the podcast about SEO, what is your perspective about affiliate in SEO world? Will it be like I know a lot of people are doing affiliate through their SEO things, but what's your perspective in years? Come here's to come.
Speaker 2:Yeah, listen, affiliate would. No matter what people say, affiliate sector has still a lot more to achieve, no matter what Google did with the updates and all of that. You already see, after the course correction which Google did recently, some of the sites are coming back up as well, you know. And whether you look at the adult sector, you look at the gaming and the gambling sector, you know affiliation there is so important and there's so much money in that sector. For me, I don't care what people say, affiliation, uh, the affiliate industry would still have billions in it. May I mean worldwide, the affiliate industry is worth, as of today, 17 billion dollars, so clearly there's a lot of money yeah, there's.
Speaker 1:There's tons for uh, tons to share for people. Yeah. So at the end of this year, december, I can't wait for you to come to SEOCon in Bali. What are you going to discuss at this conference?
Speaker 2:What am I going to discuss? I'm going to go a little bit more deeper into what I've said, a bit more targeted description of what I think works when it comes to sales and how to grow agencies. Because you know it, ryan, the biggest pain point with every SEO agency out there is I don't have enough customers. I don't have enough clients, how do I grow my sales? So I just want to present my opinion of what worked for me. If people find value, value in it, fantastic. But I'm not going to fluff around, I'm not going to go around the point without getting to the point. My idea is if your audience, every person, comes out with two actionable golden nuggets when they go and apply it to their business, they either save £5,000 every month or they jump from four figures to five figures quite quickly. I think my job's done. You know SEO community. If I could be a part of some people's growth, happy days.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, who needs more client? I do. Yeah well, who needs more client? I do. I think most businesses really need it and we need to know how to make it faster, easier, painless, a bit painless, but yeah, every business needs more sales, I believe, for those who want to go to another level of their agency. Well, Stephen, it's a pleasure to discuss with you, to have this interview. I really learned a lot in this past 30 minutes. I got tons already. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge my pleasure.
Speaker 2:Ryan, thanks once again for inviting me and I can't wait. You know, I'm really looking forward to Bali. My missus might come along with me as well. We'll see how it goes, but yeah, let's see. But thanks once again for having me. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Cheers, buddy cheers it's a great interview between me and steven. I got two or three aha moments while interviewing him and I hope you get that aha as well. Once again, this podcast is brought to you by SEOCon Forum Bali 2024. If you haven't checked it out, you can check it out at seoconid. Must come conference for you SEO specialist, seo manager, marketing manager, business owner If you want to gain the knowledge to reveal the eight figure opportunities in 2025. Knowledge to reveal the eight figure opportunities in 2025. Check it out at SEOConid, or you can. Or you can check the description on the description box. I hope you enjoyed this interview. No-transcript.