Arrived in San Diego for @ahrefs evolve Went to a fun lil pre-event networking thing. Open bar, live music, food, lots of cool SEOs and agency owners. Everyone’s been super chill and easy to talk to. First guy I talked to said he’d be my first customer if I launched a DFY link building service 👀 Ahrefs team is also so friendly. Apparently am the #1 referrer of ahrefs on YouTube which is cool too. Excited for day 1 tmrw!

Welp, looks like I’m going undercover to THE SEO conference of the year by @ahrefs The speaker list is goated (Austin lau of Anthropic 👀), but I’m most excited to meet lesser known ppl who run massive sites. Will be documenting my experience on my channel Lmk if you have any ideas you want me to cover. Curious what the sentiment is around AI SEO compared to what I’m seeing in the data (tl;dr listicles and tools getting cited by LLMs)

We love a $75 relevant backlink with real root/referring page traffic This was from a non-profit that was happy to add my link to their top page for free Had to honor my pitch so made the payment as a donation Sometimes all you have to do is ask 👀

The owner of a competitor directory emailed me today very upset. Said it’s his first directory and he’s been at $200 MRR and shared screenshots for proof My first thought was “so you’re telling me I only need 9k users to hit $200 MRR with 0 quality backlinks?” It’s been less than a month and I’m already on pace to hit 1.2-2k monthly visitors and built a few amazing links. Tough lesson. I’ve been there. When I started posting YouTube videos, I invited 20+ copycats to compete with my first directory. It was getting 90k/visits per month and has since gone down to 25k/visits per month. It sucked at first but it is what it is. My site only reached 90k/visits per month because I outranked a competitor who was getting 120k/visits per month. SEO can feel ruthless at times. The site owner requested I take my site down. Unfortunately, I can now justify spending $200/month in links and from display ads alone it’ll be worth it. Respectfully, see you on page 2 of Google soon my brother man. p.s. I will never build a competing directory if you’ve shared your idea with me in confidence (1:1 meetings, private community chats). I’ve signed multiple NDAs to give people peace of mind. This was a total stranger.

Nice little DR 60 link built for my directory before bed Negotiated from $150 👉 $85 👀 Question: would you let me build links for you?? Toying with the idea of creating a DFY link-building service. Real traffic, no pbns, topically relevant, etc. Would only take a few clients at first to prove my system across different verticals/businesses

I just found a directory idea that might be the dumbest, most boring niche i ever build But it gets 700k+ searches per month (US search volume) and everyone in the world uses this/looks for this on weekly basis Highly likely that you’ve searched this up yourself at some point A few competitors launched in the last few months and already get thousands of visitors/mo and hundreds of AI citations But they all stink. Either incomplete or just really poor data curation Surprised the exact match dot com was available too 👀

Another backlink acquired. This would’ve costed me $400-$500 if I paid a link building service, but I paid $110. Topically relevant with real page traffic as usual. Reply rates are 8% for cold link outreach in this niche. Pretty good!

I will forever keep my first vibe coded directory. It’s a year old and has become a true refrigerator magnet in my portfolio of projects. I do nothing with it. Yet it’s getting 6.8k/monthly visitors of US based traffic. So maybe it can be a business?! Queue the obsession no no no no scene. Hell no. I’ve fallen for that one too many times. This is why i have a vibe coding addiction. I oughta throw up some ads on this though. Probably missing out on like $100/mo or more.

Another day, another relevant backlink with real page traffic acquired. Cost me $85. A lot of site owners are open to negotiating if you show them their page metrics. I offered $75, the site owner asked $125. We settled at $85. Cold email makes link building so easy, don’t overthink it!

Just started link outreach for my latest directory yesterday. Sent 60 emails, got 3 responses (~5% response for link placements isn’t too shabby) The prices are hilariously all over the place. Which one would you choose? Site owner #1 is asking $175 for a link on a: • DR 26 site • no referring page traffic • pretty topically relevant page Site owner #2 is asking $75 for a link on a: • DR 61 • real referring page traffic (though small) • highly topically relevant Site owner #3 is asking $250 for a link to: • DR 68 site • ZERO root domain or referring page traffic • also pretty topically relevant For me, the clear choice is site owner #2. It’s crazy how people are still selling $250 links where you get a backlink from a shell of a website that inflated their DR I learned that DR is vanity metric when I had a directory get 20k/mo visitors with a DR of 0.1 lol Either way, pretty stoked to see the link outreach tool I vibe coded working!!

Built this directory in the last couple weeks. Spent about 5 hours on it total (idea validation > data curation > site build > on-page SEO > launch) Launched 4 days ago. Already started getting organic clicks within 48 hrs Knew it was going to index and rank quickly because it’s super low competition, but damn this is quick. Think this could be a 20k/mo visitor site with relative ease. Starting to build links today I see so many low competition directories to build on a daily basis it’s bananas!!

Peak adhd on a saturday > writing newsletter from yt video > AI video editing > pushing features on heylinks And old school RuneScape

4 years ago I got my first high quality backlink through a cold email Cost me $50. Super relevant + real traffic (both to root domain and referring page) Literally just did this: 👉 Used ahrefs to look up my competitors backlinks 👉 Reached out to the site owner 👉 Asked to swap the link for mine It’s super relevant and full of traffic (both to root domains and referring page) This singular backlink got my first directory to rank page 1 rank 1 (the keyword was v low competition), got millions of users to visit my site and has earned me about $120k+ from display ads from that site alone. Sounds simple, but manually emailing the right types of sites is grueling, especially at scale. So I shut-off the outside world for 3 months and built my first SaaS (called heylinks). Lets you plug-in your ahrefs API key to automate 99% of the entire backlink outreach process. Been wanting to automate this process for literally years. Just made a vid talking about it. Feel free to check it out: youtu.be/pTdU4xOTrEM?si=ILny…

Exactly 100 days ago I started building my first SaaS and have been radio silent But it’s finally done!! I vibe coded for 97 out of the past 100 days. 1,546 commits. Full degeneracy mode and a poor sleep schedule. My body is exhausted, like it’s been running on stress and a long list of to-dos lol Probably broke all the rules of shipping fast and giving into scope creep but w/e Making a vid on it next week. For now, forcing myself to chill out

Cool things that happened in February as a builder with way too many projects • hit 30k YouTube subs • built 70% of my first saas that automates building quality backlinks (via link swaps method) • drove 1,139 plasma leads to plasma centers through my directory + crowdsourced 460 plasma price reports • got my 40k/mo visitor directory deindexed and revived it after finding a dumb migration error • built a new SYD Pro dashboard to give beginners a structured directory building process from A-Z • built a fully autonomous TikTok agent with openclaw that creates and posts photo carousels for my directories (costs $100/mo) • vibe coded my own tools that saved $79/mo in software subscriptions Most excited about the saas. Really fun challenge. Lots of nuances and edge cases and testing. Hopefully will have something finished in 1-2 weeks

> Build cool projects that genuinely help people > Have random people go out of their way to offer help/valuable feedback > Improve the product > Product helps more people Why do I feel like this is a lost concept nowadays Btw this happens all the time. it’s pretty much the dopamine I need to keep going

I think my 4-day old (rebuilt) plasma directory is already generating thousands of dollars in lead value 👀 Was curious how many website visitors were actually turning into plasma leads, so I built this analytics dashboard. It tracks a bunch of stuff, but mainly who completed a lead action, AKA: • clicks ‘visit website’ on a listing • calls the center’s phone number • clicks gets directions Quick napkin math. Today 36 plasma donors made a lead action. Cost per click for plasma is probably around $5-$10 (plasma centers run tons of Google ads). So 36 x $5 CPC = $180 daily lead value $180 x 30 days = $5,400 monthly lead value But like, I’m not Google ads. All my traffic is wayyyy higher intent so a $5 CPC seems low. Might be closer to $10-$20 CPC. I could be generating like $10k-$20k a month in lead value which is kinda nutty. All this to say: if I’m gonna sell featured listings, I’d probably want to charge $500/mo per center as a starting price So far the data is proving that my directory is leading to new customer acquisition. If I can pull this off, could be a nice little directory business! Will be breaking down this site in a yt video tomorrow ✌️

Saturday night shenanigans as a non-coder finally seeing what @openclaw is about I have too many projects and a list of things I’ve been wanting to streamline If you’ve played with openclaw, lmk your favorite youtubers/educators/tips 🤝