Branding on a budget? SEO.

Hey peeps,

If you follow our DULO newsletter, you would've seen that Marin Gerov and I take turns each week to share what's on our minds. In this week's newsletter, I wrote a short one noting that our focus for the upcoming weeks, in order to generate growth for the business, would be SEO and building an affiliate network.

When working with a limited budget (as we are) I see three good options for generating growth:

- Organic social media

- SEO

- Revenue-sharing affiliations

We will continue to post our performance visuals, to cover the first point, but we will be reducing the volume of hours spent on that and redirect more time to points two and three.

So, for this week's newsletter, and maybe for the weeks to come, I will be sharing my learnings and resources as I educate myself on SEO and setting up an affiliate network.

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Starting off, a friend of mine suggested Neil Patel as a good resource, so I've started diving into his content and thus far I've found some useful points that I want to share with you now, hopefully, they will be valuable for you as well.

A nice trick Neil mentions is that you can use tools, such as Neil's own Ubersuggest, to research your competition's top pages generating organic traffic. From there, you can see what type of content is ranking high and come up with your own content based on the findings.

There are always ways of providing better content, whether it is more informational/accurate, presented in a more interesting way, or simply more up-to-date. The goal here is to indeed provide better content, not try to hack it by copying it in any way.

You can also see what websites are linking to your competitors and try to build a relationship with them, maybe they would also benefit from reviewing your product thus making their content even better and more informative.

The goal is to always try to add value to whomever you are also asking a favor from and build a long-term mutually valuable relationship.

Even with the recent AI tools for content creation, there are no shortcuts. Yes, it can increase your output, but you can use that acceleration in content creation to open up more time for promotion. Neil mentions the golden 80/20 principle, use 20% of your time for content creation and 80% for promotion.

Again the goal of the promotion part of it would be to look at who's interacting with your competition and maybe try to get our product in front of their eyes in a valuable non-spammy way.

Another great tip is that you can use search engines to query your product/industry/competition and from there check the "people also ask" section, to see people's questions and needs and create content around that.

A second tool in Neil's arsenal is answerthepublic.com, another great way of informing yourself on what your customers are actually asking for (as well as how) and interested in, that way we can create content and value in a more guided way, instead of shooting in the dark.

In general, contrary to what most buzzworders are shouting at the moment, VALUE CREATED and RELATIONSHIPS BUILT, will always outperform quick AI-generated content crammed with keywords.

Hopefully, by next week I can share some more numbers and the approach I took as I prep our first piece of such content.

Have a great one!

JS.