In the 75th episode, Sergey Pavlovich continues the conversation with Oleg Shestakov, the founder and co-owner of Rush-analytics.ru and Rush-agency.ru.
Why is pharma 'black'?
Sergey Pavlovich (hereinafter – SP): - Why is pharma (note – pharmaceuticals) 'black'? I know that Interpol fights it very vigorously. I thought it was some sort of 'gray' — well, generics, after all, are still made in India.
Oleg Shestakov (hereinafter – OS): - I studied pharma myself. I mean, I looked at how 'black' technologies work. We don't work with pharma — we don't deal with anything illegal that could get us in trouble later. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
SP: — So, this doesn’t work anymore? In my youth, I think it did.
OS: — Once, I was directing traffic to adult sites with doorway pages. There was good money in that, it was 2009 – I just started with adult. I was directing traffic to Russian partner networks (do you remember the ones that pay via SMS)? Even then we provided content if the user entered the SMS – we delivered the content they paid for.
SP: — Now adult doesn't work practically at all. At least, I used to send spam to adult – that's how it was! Now all of that has died.
OS: — What kind of person needs to be? What type of person would pay for porn via SMS from their phone? What kind of person is that? I don't know.
SP: — Back then, a lot of money was earned on WAP clicks, WAP subscriptions...
OS: — This is a 'black' theme. Google and Yandex are still trying to survive – they ban sites that have WAP clicks; they ban them outright, just remove them from search results.
How does deception appear in paid advertising on Google?
SP: — That’s a bit off-topic. How do paid ads on Google appear, for instance, targeting pensioners: 'The government doesn’t pay you 100,000 rubles a year — find out how…'? And then they charge this poor pensioner for every step.
OS: — Well, that's infotraffic! That's not a financial organization like Forex, which needs a license. It's just infotraffic. They just buy this cheap infotraffic, funnel it to a landing page, and then call centers deceive pensioners. I think it’s totally messed up; you shouldn't do that, but it's legal — it's a legitimate business. What do you want? They can't check it. You can report advertising fraud to Google, but usually, there's nothing done.
Well, you know, you can cloak everything. Who knows, for example, what cloaking is?
What does 'cloaking' mean?
SP: — I understand the theoretical part, but I've never been able to use it. Tell me more.
OS: — From the word cloaking (to hide). That is, you can’t pass moderation in some advertising system. You can’t do casinos, for instance… (casinos, let's say, don't work – they cut them out anyway). You submit one content for moderation, conditionally some stools. So we sit on chairs, and you're selling chairs – a landing page with chairs. It passes moderation – then you switch the content. In Facebook, in Yandex, in Adwords – wherever they deceive advertising systems. The company starts to gain traction – you change the landing, change the creatives so that…
SP: — You upload porn or pills instead of stools.
OS: — You upload, and that’s it. The main thing is that it shouldn't be aggressive, so that they don't flag you for abuse.
SP: – When I hear about this, I think: why not take an easier approach? Look, I have a site: let’s say, it has pet food, vitamins – this is my site "Zoolakomka"; and I submit it for moderation (that site), and then I just change it to a porn site via FTP.
OS: — Of course, yes, you can do that.
SP: — But I was told, you know what? That they check every hour or so – the moderators who approved you, and see if anything has changed…
OS: — Well, that’s clear – it’s a whole story…
SP: — Do they really check or what?
OS: — Of course. There are checkers and bots, and everything. It’s all moderated. But what you can do is know all the IPs of the moderator offices and send them that content. Haven't you thought about that?
SP: — Through cloaking. No, I mean I know – through cloaking.
OS: — In general, this is already done industrially. There are guys who farm accounts in Facebook: they register, promote, post, and only then do they set up the ad account. It’s like in the search engine in Facebook – anti-fraud – if something is non-standard… When you were in Facebook, after two years you probably realized you could give ads and registered after getting in. I, for example, started giving ads there after 5 years.
On the first day, that guy went into a complicated Facebook Ads account and started pouring money into it – naturally, he got banned. So, this evolves, develops, and then you get these ad accounts where you start running ads, and then cloaking, meaning it gets refined. I had an interesting case: it doesn't matter how I got my hands on a specially written browser for cloaking and working on Facebook.
SP: — Like "Sphere"?
OS: — Sort of. But customized, it had the "Chrome" engine.
How to register female Facebook accounts?
SP: — Well, in "Sphere" and "Chrome" there's multi-login available, there’s "Indigo".
OS: — And when you choose "Delete all footprints", nothing remains with open code in the browser, you log in under some account. There are also… Guys, those who are into this – I won't reveal all the tricks because it might ruin someone's life. For example, do you know that all women from 20 to 30 in America are already on Facebook?
SP: — No.
OS: — They communicate on Facebook, on Twitter… Either you're on social media, or you'll never be there – either you're dead, or you have no internet, sitting in a basement. You cannot register a young woman from America on Facebook. It won’t allow you, it'll ban you, because everyone is already there.
SP: — Because all these farm accounts… Ten girls subscribe to me on Facebook in a day.
OS: — Yes, yes, it's madness! So the point is… Naturally, what do you do? You look at penetration in a specific Facebook market, see how it develops, and create accounts from there – it provides you with that. So we created an account, made a girl: we took photos from VK, named her Sasha Golshtein (pretty, with big "eyes"), uploaded it to this browser. You can't imagine! On the left, where the notifications column is, we have a video (30 minutes)… There’s a life hack: you need to add three right friends…
SP: — What do you mean by "right" friends?
OS: They must be either the same gender or different from you (there’s an instruction for this in that browser). In general, you get into the 'sajest' – you are recommended to a very large number of people because your browser maintains certain footprints from a specific country. And people start sending you friend requests, writing, commenting, when you post something within 3–4 minutes. Our column on the left (if you’re looking at the 'monik') was completely filled for 30 minutes: 5,000 real friends in an hour.
We gathered a bunch of friends. The browser was specially written to get you into the algorithm – 'Look, a beautiful girl! Come on, friend her.' A bunch of Indians and some Pakistanis were messaging us. One Indian sent us: 'I am rich. I have a cow, look.' And the second Pakistani, you know what he did? He took the face of that girl, photoshopped it into a waterfall, and sent us: 'Baby, a postcard for you!' In short, we had fun in different ways, but didn’t share anything – just enjoyed that we managed to trick the algorithm.
And the 'black hatters' – can you imagine what they do? They use smart links for all sorts of tricks. So, when talking about some 'black' methods, you always go into the strictest topics – it’s pharma, porn, essays – and see how the technologies work there. You sit down, eliminate everyone, and start exploring how these links are constructed. What else interesting about 'black' can we tell our audience?
SP: – The most profitable niches back then. For us and in the West – from the 'black' side.
The most profitable niches in 'black' operations.
OS: – Well, obviously – it’s gambling, it’s casinos, it’s sports betting, if you can get it to work.
SP: You said – 'If you can get it to work,' what, from the partnership your money?
OS: – No. If you can get it to the top. Again, we have the FAS in Russia – that’s a fun chase. It used to be easy to trick it, now it’s not. But still possible – I’ll tell you more...
It’s gambling, sports betting (betting), pharma in America, SA, and probably adult content if you have a lot of traffic.
SP: – And these dietary supplements, 'weight loss products', 'Nutra'? Is that 'gray' stuff?
OS: – 'Gray', but mainly moves 'white' – they make articles like 'How to cure pancreatitis'... Are you talking about monastery teas, goji berries?
SP: – No, I’m not talking about that. Those are scammers.
OS: – I wanted to say that too – scammers.
SP: — "Bactefort", "you have all sorts of worms, parasites"... I know these owners from "Leadbit", "Shakis"…
OS: — I don't respect this business.
SP: — Well, the guys are clever for having figured it out. They are moving forward…
OS: — No, it's a cool business! It's well-structured.
SP: — …These methods, you know – scaring people, this shock "therapy".
OS: — By the way, people make good money on this in Russia, but I have never had anything to do with this business, never even approached it. I looked at how it works – I even tried SEO just for fun, to see if a site would rank high or not: yes, it did get to the top – we just deleted the site. Yes, you can make money there, but we are principled. We would rather promote websites in Samara than engage in this – deceiving pensioners about their health.
What else is there? Take gambling – that’s if you want to go into "black" niches. We can talk about what else to do online if you don't want to engage in carding and selling "Viagra" to pensioners from California.
What to do online? How to card?
SP: — You know how many times a day I get messages: "How to card?", "Well, teach me to card!" As if I have some ad hanging out there saying, 'I teach carding!' And it really bothers me. What’s much more interesting: yesterday I released an episode – I shared themes I worked on while sitting in prison for a long time… I realize I have "YouTube", a cashback service, and there will also be one social project in my life – I won’t be overwhelmed, I just gifted those projects to people. And today I’m talking to you – I'm interested in creating something… not with crime, but really for business, doing something to help them grow, giving some life hacks to [the viewers].
OS: — You know what I'll tell you about the "black"? Look, I was thinking of telling this to the guys today. When you’re into searching (let's take search, because that's my field, I know a lot, got a lot of traffic for different people in different niches) and when you’re into shady stuff – remember, there are more engineers in search, more scientists, more resources. They will still find out what you’re twisting around, deceiving – in the end, it will catch up with you.
About "black" business
OS: — So, this can be compared to using 'black' methods to handle websites. You have, say, a hundred grand right now, a million... You could put a million in a deposit – that would give you about 73 thousand a year, right? At 7.3%, at 7%.
SP: — That's a good return. Actually, it's less.
OS: — Well, it's stable. If it's compounded interest, you could make around 70 somewhere.
SP: — In Russia last year – it was 2.5%, a maximum of 3.2% on foreign currency deposits.
OS: — No, not foreign currency! I'm talking about a million rubles.
SP: — But inflation will eat that up!
OS: — Well, that's clear... Purely yield-wise – we aren't considering inflation; you can introduce many coefficients. But you could take that million and go gamble on sports: just sit with some 'Liga Stavok' or 'Tornado', these beer halls.
SP: — You'll lose it very quickly.
OS: — You could win a lot on them: you put a million on odds of 3 (some boxer accidentally knocked out another) – you could make three million. But it's such a risk that you might lose everything.
It's the same here. Who engages in black operations? Quite smart people do: there are a lot of programmers, talented hackers, talented digital analysts, web analysts – it's a large industry. And you build that team, for instance, gather it, pouring into some 'black' casino that has no license. And at one moment, the regulator says: 'That's it, the casino is banned!' 'Google' might come in – in some niches throw you a separate alert.
SP: — It was like with porn. They cleaned search results of all pornographic content.
OS: — Paid Alones – sure, because of the numerous hacked sites.
SP: — Crypto too.
OS: — Poor people were taking those loans. Firstly, the microcredit market in the U.S. was regulated; secondly, concerning issuance – 'Google' simply came and removed all the sites, no matter what you did. It became the same with pharma: buy like 'buy Viagra', click, nothing will happen...
SP: — That's still fine. I was looking six months ago.
OS: — What was two years ago – that's another story; but it's already like this... And as a result, you're going to build this team – you'll raise some money on a 'short length', and then everything will collapse because the regulator will come.
SP: — I even enter the query 'generic Viagra'...
OS: — Well, if you type in "generic Viagra" – that's clear. But if you enter "buy Viagra," you'll see how the ranking has changed compared to what it was two years ago. If you're building something "white," like a deposit, you're growing every year – your technology is improving, your team is expanding, your capital is increasing, which you can invest in new projects, social initiatives, teaching someone something. Personally, I've graduated 250-300 students. SEO specialists.
How much does SEO training cost?
SP: — Do you have some kind of academy?
OS: — Yes, we have Rush Academy. We developed it internally at the company. Then we thought: is there any real interest in learning professional SEO? So, we decided: yes, let's go for it.
SP: — I think there are plenty of interested people.
OS: — So, we launched it offline. It just happened this past weekend, and we're doing another one in November.
SP: — Enrollment?
OS: — Yes, enrollment.
SP: — How much does it cost?
OS: — It's 20 thousand, I think, right now. Two full days just at our office. I believe that's reasonable.
SP: — Give them some kind of discount. When's your next enrollment?
OS: — November 30 – December 1. Let's make it 15 thousand for "People PRO."
SP: — 15 thousand – for those who want SEO courses. You make your own decision – I'm not persuading you. Just judge for yourselves, check out the graduation. If Oleg's words and technologies catch your interest, then please – with the promo code "PeoplePro," it's 15 thousand.
OS: — Come on over, we can work out a deal.
SP: — By the way, if a lot of people come together, I might drop by too, maybe sit with you for a couple of days and listen to something smart.
OS: — Yes. In two days, we cover everything so you can go out and be able to run your own project and earn money from it, profit from search traffic.
So, for me, it’s because I like giving people something interesting and good when they tell me: "Cool, Oleg, we made a site, we're no longer working at the factory or somewhere else, we're making money." And I also speak as a philanthropist about once a month – for students or someone else. Because I can tell people that I'm building a tech company, I'm training a team, we're evolving. I'm not saying, you know, that we're listing cards on "Pornhub" for one dollar and cashing them out. I can't tell that to the youth...
Therefore, I recommend engaging in something 'white.' Similar to sites under 'Amazon,' going to America, working in Russia either at an agency or for yourself. It's a cool thing! It's modern – you're not tied to a location, you just need a MacBook, a laptop, whatever – and you can work from anywhere in the world. And no one is watching you, no one is chasing you.
SP: — They might come to your students (and mine, if someone from our channel shows up), just to 'read' an hour-long lecture from 'YouTube.' You talked about this. I'll come by, we’ll just have some tea.
OS: — We have a tea room.
SP: — Let's have some tea, I'll just share what I know about 'YouTube.' I don't know if my results deserve any attention. I have 100 thousand in 5 months. There were five in April, and on September 2 we already celebrated 100 thousand.
OS: — Of course, it deserves attention. Three people from my circle told me about you: 'Oh, look – 'People PRO', check it out, dude, look – amazing channel'!
SP: — I think I've only learned about 40% of what I need.
OS: — Of course! Now you'll start collaborations, integrations, traffic flows. It's already a whole art.
SP: — In short, here's a person engaged in 'white' business and very closely tied to 'black,' at least seeing how it happens.
OS: — I've seen a lot of niches. If you're involved in some niche (from Russia, like with carding) and think no one will catch you, breaking a ton of sites – someday you will cross someone’s path. I know niches where people don’t travel anywhere.
SP: — Just like carders, yes.
What's the biggest money you've made from black traffic?
OS: — If you’re involved in 'black' business and get to the top in some niche… Like you: you mentioned you were DDoSed by some bastards constantly. You get to the top for some query – they start DDoSing you. Well, if you target a query like 'hunting boot review' on 'Amazon' – no one will bother you, you'll just keep making money, that's it.
Why do these projects capitalize quite well? If your site, for example, brings in 2 thousand dollars (a month), you can easily cash out – on 'Empire Flippers,' where different exchanges sell websites.
SP: — You mean like the Russian 'Teldari'?
OS: — "Teldari", yes. Only rich people sometimes buy for a 36-month ROI, for 24 months. So if you have a website that brings you two thousand dollars a month on "Amazon" – you can sell it for thirty thousand dollars.
SP: — Right away.
OS: — You can cache it, get yourself a little...
SP: — Well, you need an apartment.
OS: — An apartment, yes. Those are good assets. But you won't cache the website buyviagra.ru.
SP: — So the "white" will bring much more in the long term?
OS: — Yes. I can also tell you what else we do, what you can do. We set up an experiment.
SP: — Let me ask you one question: how much did the most of your clients earn illegally in a month, for example? One million dollars, two, ten?
OS: — I know of one team that consulted... I estimated roughly, I looked at the conversion, of course (first of all, I've never seen those people in person and just have a rough idea of the theme, I won’t name it), – they made two million dollars in a year.
SP: — In a year? Well, that's not that much. Many "white" niches bring in much more.
OS: — Yes, especially in America. In America – yes. It's hard to earn two million dollars on "Amazon" in a year. They started from scratch, created "black" projects (in the end, the regulator came in – killed the whole niche), they earned two million dollars.
SP: — Do you still recommend going to the West right away?
OS: — Of course! Yes.
About your experiment
SP: — About your experiment.
OS: — Listen, as an agency – a regular client comes to us and says: "Guys, can we do SEO? I need traffic, sales." Everyone needs traffic, right? Well, we were doing it for a while. Then we opened up paid traffic. We are now doing "Facebook", "Insta", we are also launching "YouTube", even our small production, and paid advertising on "Yandex", in "Google". And we think: we’re doing all this for clients, we’re doing well, about 95% of clients continue to work with us for more than two years. So it's not a fully two-year contract, it’s like they worked one year – then they still come back. People are happy – there are results, so it works.
Clients often leave once they've achieved everything – there's nothing more to do, they're ranking high. We won't milk the client: 'Just pay us.' Instead, we think, 'Since we know how to do this so well for clients, why not do it for ourselves?' And so we, along with our partners, came up with a great idea: over the course of a year, we decided to create 100 commercial-themed websites.
SP: — I saw some kind of challenge on YouTube – a guy says: 'Let’s quickly build a landing page in a day (like, selling Christmas trees), pour some paid advertising on it from groups (like Google AdWords, Yandex Display Network, for example), and see which niches are profitable or not.' Something like that?
OS: — No. Theoretically, that could be done...
SP: — They wanted to create 100 websites in 100 days.
OS: — Okay, I have experience – I worked as a technical director for 6 years, I have a great understanding of technologies, but I won’t create a landing page in a day or set up advertising for some complex niche. Because you definitely need to hang proper analytics via Google Tag Manager, set up all the boards, run all the ad campaigns… In short, that's nonsense, it can't be done like that. We took a year: 365 days – 100 websites.
SP: — At least three days.
OS: — Yes. At least three days.
SP: — How did you choose the niches? Did you intentionally select different, varied ones?
OS: — We simply took different niches, looking for where there was a bit of traffic. Various niches: there’s some weird niche – 'Well Cleaning' – can you imagine that? Just imagine, you dropped your coat into a well. That’s it, you can’t retrieve it – it will rot, you’ll need to excavate the well. Next – 'Horse Riding Courses', 'Helicopter Rentals', for example.
SP: — Horse riding is going to be expensive, I think. A good niche.
OS: — Yes. We ranked it well. 'Dog Walking' – we ranked it well.
SP: — There’s a lot of money in it. Horse riding is an expensive hobby, just like tennis.
OS: — 'Helicopter Rental' – we liked it, we ranked it well; now we’ll totally dominate and sell leads. The most interesting thing is that we set up 'G-Class Rentals' – now we’re renting out 'G-Class' vehicles in Moscow; 'Ferrari Rentals'. Just type in Yandex – 'Gelandewagen Rental in Moscow' to find a really solid keyword. The first site will pop up there, and we’re gathering all the traffic – that’s one of the projects. We sell leads. We just found guys who have 30 'Gelandewagen' cars, selling leads to them. So we take calls.
SP: — I get it: you send them all the requests.
OS: — Well, contractor, partner, yes.
SP: — How much commission do they roughly pay?
OS: — To get started, we're creating a small affiliate department – we're taking 10% for now. Sometimes someone approaches us...
SP: — They have a large margin; that's very little overall.
OS: — Yes. But for testing! In this niche, we're taking about 30 for testing.
SP: — How much traffic is there monthly for such a request?
OS: — I don't know, around 40 valid applications a month.
SP: — "Simlarip" (???) won't show you that.
OS: — It'll show what's from that...
OS: — From organic. 100% organic, see?
SP: — No, it shows 30% traffic for some reason... Oh, well, type-in traffic, meaning direct visits – 70%.
OS: — It's lagging. On small volumes, "Simlarip" doesn't show, keep that in mind. There's almost no social traffic there. Where it got this from is unclear.
So, we've made these things. And you can set up 3 websites in your city, even if it's a small one – "Renting a Gelly", "Gelly rental", "Gelandewagen in Samara", fill the search results and find a partner to whom you will sell the leads. What do you need to set up? IP telephony, by the way, for free.
SP: — I already showed in the last video.
OS: — Good company; if you have a referral program, let them transition, it's worthy of recommendation. Redirect calls to one of the partners, you can give one to a relative (give your relative's phone)...
SP: — They sell flowers!
OS: — We actually promoted flowers a lot – a very "meaty" niche.
SP: — What do you mean by "meaty"?
OS: — "Meaty" means there's fierce competition, a real "bloody" ocean. Well, flowers, flowers! Can you imagine the margin on them?! For example, fireplaces, boilers are being installed, any construction topics.
SP: — Plastic windows probably won’t fit at all?
OS: — We don’t take those, honestly. We won’t be able to promote them! In our expertise... They're definitely spinning PF, they're definitely spinning behaviors – you won’t succeed, that’s all.
SP: — Thousands of factory workers log in with their mobiles every hour, then they pull out the tenth mobile from their pocket, and already log in with a new operator.
OS: — Yes, that's exactly how it works. We don't take plastic windows, we don’t take steel doors or air conditioners. Principally just not.
You can create such a business in your city – make a site based on a manual. There's a website builder called "Tilda".
SP: — "Yukit" and "Tilda".
OS: — Here’s Tilda – it's good, we know it's making headway. It's SEO-ready, you can use it. A site can be created in 3 days, we did it ourselves.
SP: — Do it yourself or hire a freelancer.
Useful forums about 'black' SEO
OS: — Here are examples of earnings. Where else can you go? My first recommendation for earnings (after all these… many years in business, about ten): I believe that English is first and foremost.
SP: — Various courses?
OS: — No. Learn it yourself. It's simply a must-do. All the good information on marketing, ready business models – for example, how to create super-cool email campaigns, how to do some trigger marketing – is all freely available on the western internet, you just have to read it. If you don’t know English, you can't access information about marketing and earning online. What exists? BlackHatWorld – a forum about 'black' SEO (they don’t sell credit cards, so to speak).
SP: — Then there's the equivalent of 'SearchEngine' in our three letters, often referred to...
OS: — MFC? By the way, there’s an interesting guy I know, Yar Gromov. He has a forum about earning online at mfc.guru.
SP: In Russian?
OS: — In Russian. A great project, where they won’t send you away. There are normal, understanding people there, a very warm atmosphere. You can register. There’s some paid section, but even for free, you can gain a ton of information. But!
There are such projects in America – uk, in English – paid, free forums (membership) about 'white' niches. You can find out how to funnel traffic to Info in Brazil or Mexico and earn huge money – just an article, a case a guy wrote – you know how to do SEO. You did it – you made the money. If you don’t know English, you can’t read this. So learn English.
About books, SEO in the West
SP: — I believe it's one of the most important things that you'll find useful in life. I’m currently selling a bunch of my books. You bought them, right!
OS: — Yes, thank you for the book.
SP: — You bought it too early; otherwise, I would have gifted it to you now. And you know, people don't read at all! Many who are your age or younger (from twenty to thirty) say: "Your book was the first thing I read." Although the person has a degree. It's clear that they read textbooks, and they say, "Of all the regular books, yours was the first." Someone mentions, "I've read three books in my life, and yours was one of them." I believe that reading is a very important skill for children. It also develops observation skills. Most of what I acquire comes from reading, plus knowledge of a foreign language. All new topics, legal or illegal, appear in the West first and then come to us.
OS: – Everything must be looked at from the West. Everything that appears in Russia is imported from the West. If you can do SEO in English... Okay, the ruble is one, the dollar is 65 rubles... Of course, earnings are not 65 times higher; that's clear, but you can definitely earn 20 times more.
SP: — Even from income on YouTube or AdSense – the earnings differ by 5 to 8 times. If I had an English-speaking channel (which will be soon). Well, it's a completely different story...
OS: — Take the "surgery" niche, plastic surgery, take "insurance" (insurance), "car" or "life insurance"... Yes, insurance. There, clicks can be worth three-digit amounts.
SP: — I saw over a thousand dollars. I recently studied this issue. For clicks related to some rare form of cancer (because the insurance payouts are very high), then various types of insurance (life, car), specifically for flood (since many regions in the U.S. suffer from flooding, and floods are, I believe, even second after cancer). And imagine you have a website, just a site dedicated to cancer, for instance, various tumors, and you use SEO to share some personal experience. Maybe, God forbid, a relative was sick; you describe how it was and include various videos. And if it generates organic traffic through SEO...
OS: — It's AdSense. Of course, it won't be a thousand dollars, but a click can cost 25 dollars.
SP: — You skillfully cover it with advertising from Google AdSense, and that's it – it results in 25 dollars for a click and higher... Or legal topics are very expensive – create a "Lawyer Rating", please.
OS: — There are several unicorn startups that went public with these lawyers (you told me, I don’t remember the name of this ‘lawyer aggregator’). You can, if you understand English — it’s actually better to go there (I’ve been to America twice, not that much, I lived there for about three months) and see what they do.
I have professional defamation: when I go to Spain or France, I look at how the business operates, what can be done — bringing in leads... You just go to America, see — your friend told you: window cleaning is popular, moving... In France — ‘plumbing’; old houses, and fixing pipes costs a fortune; they have things like plastic windows, various plumbers, electricians.
SP: — I think it’s the same in England, also with old houses.
OS: — Yes. Ideally, there are some small cities — it’s better to target 300-500K in population, so there’s traffic, to have a target audience that buys something. And you can create a website for a specific city.
SP: — You mean to create a website not for all of Russia but specifically for Zelenograd?
OS: — Yes. But it’s better to do it right away in America, in California, for example. And you can also write, say, to Russians... Your friend suggested looking for clients in SEO. You can also offer ready-made leads. We tested this model: you approach a business and say — ‘There’s this SEO, let’s do it for you.’ And he says: ‘Kid, just go, because we dropped three times.’ But you come and say: ‘Here’s a phone, it will ring. I’ll come back in a month — you’ll tell me how it went.’
Voice purchase analysis?
SP: — Quick question: how will you control how many requests came from your website?
OS: — I proxy through IP telephony. I proxy the requests.
SP: — Will you listen to the recordings?
OS: — No, I use speech analytics — a robot that uses artificial intelligence to annotate all recordings.
SP: — No way! Is this an accessible, somewhat private technology?
OS: — I won’t recommend the company because they have terrible customer service. I looked at a product yesterday that I'm going to switch to — it’s called ‘Speech Analytics’, I think.
SP: — Is it from the West or Russian?
OS: — No, it was made by Russian guys. It costs two rubles per minute for recognition. If you pay a lot, it’s one ruble per minute, I tag everything...
SP: So, are you going to check by voice whether the purchase was made and how much it was?
OS: I'm going to assess the quality of the partner: "I don’t know," "I can’t help," "Mooing." This allows one to determine, for example, if the guy who answered the phone is just mumbling, taking a long time to respond...
SP: A support service, right?
OS: No. For instance, I gave my phone to a client who receives calls about 'Helicopters.' The girl who answers the phone is like, "What’s up?", kind of like, "Anything?", "I can’t help", "I’m on lunch" – you can tell from these words whether there’s a decent call center with the partner or not. We have a sales department administrator for partners who works remotely (we call him Mr. X, so the salespeople don’t know who he is, ensuring he’s not exposed) – he listens to all the calls, marks them, tags them, and creates reports; he says, "Here, the seller forgot to introduce themselves," "Here, the seller missed this or that."
SP: Cool. I didn’t even know there was such a profession.
OS: I’ve been building the sales department for 5 years, helping clients in particular. I had to learn a lot in this field. So, to summarize: try what you understand – for example, you have someone who is a great carpenter, someone who configures PBXs – create a website in Russia, you can sell those leads to someone if you're an expert. You can create a site in America for some plumbers, selling to Russians in New York who can do plumbing or any home repairs.
There’s a guy on YouTube who works as a handyman in American homes – he records a blog. Yes, that’s in demand; he earns $100 a day – sell leads. Now that’s a completely 'white,' good topic.
Life hack on how to learn English
OS: I was young and wanted to learn English. Actually, I have an interesting story about how I got into all this; I can tell you later. I had already graduated from college and was working.
SP: What did you study in college?
OS: — I studied to be a software engineer. But I can't program at all; I'm a terrible engineer but a decent manager. However, this means my brain works technically. I can write some simple code, but I can't draft an API call in Python. I can take a machine learning algorithm and train it using existing frameworks by hand, but I can't program it, I won't write the code. What was I talking about?
SP: — About English.
OS: — So, I traveled through Eastern Europe – that's Slovakia, the Czech Republic. You go into a bar (I was young), and your English is really poor, and you're trying to meet girls, and they kick you to the curb in that bar. But you know a few new words, and you have no choice in the next bar: either you speak, or you chew on your drink and get kicked out. I just walked around chatting with people, and it took off from there.
I had a funny case. I initially came to the internet later, because when I went to college (my parents are very ordinary people)…
SP: — Are you originally from Moscow?
Earning from Ultima Online, my first experience working on the internet
OS: — I'm from Moscow myself. My mom and dad are engineers. And when I started – everyone was playing computer games; there was also Ultima Online – maybe you remember it…
SP: — I remember the name, but I never played.
OS: — It was a medieval RPG; we were in the ninth grade, probably, hustling coins from that game: we set up bots, farmed, and sold, when it wasn't mainstream yet – World of Warcraft hadn't come out yet, and we were already selling. I realized I didn't want to go to that job; I didn't understand where I would go that I'd enjoy, so I wouldn't be hit by a boss with a stick, telling me, "Come on, do it!"
I started digging into how to earn money online. I went through all those clicks on banners. Then I stumbled upon Search Engines and met a guy who showed me SEO. We then started driving traffic to adult sites – we made very big money. It was 2007, and we were earning $1,500 a day.
SP: — Well, that's decent. Back then, the dollar was…
OS: Can you imagine how much it was? It was unreal. But we worked for exactly 41 days. Well, we were having fun – of course, we spent all the money somewhere. And then an upgrade came out, I think it was 'Snezhinsk' (I won't lie about which algorithm it was that came out in 'Yandex'), which removed all the content. We got banned. I then started working at a digital agency, a large one.
SP: I became an employee.
OS: Well, yes, I went to work. I worked, learned proper SEO. I had a good manager who imparted knowledge. Then a company headhunted me (I'm getting to the topic about English). It happened by chance. I was helping the salespeople: I went to meet a client, we just chatted for a long time, he didn’t buy anything, but then he introduced me… He said, 'I have a friend who just came from Germany, you need to help.' I came. After that, they made me an offer for three salaries of what I was earning at the agency, considering I was in my third year...
SP: What do you mean, 'an offer for three salaries'?
OS: I was getting a salary at the agency. They told me: 'Do you want us to pay you three salaries? But come work for us!' I said, 'Okay.' This was during my third year at the university while I was working at the agency.
How did you create your SEO agency, what do you do directly? What is the structure of the company?
SP: And you work with your brother, right? How old is he, older or younger?
OS: We are twins.
SP: I kind of figured that. You perform management functions in the company. Is your company really yours?
OS: Yes, absolutely. I'll tell you how it happened with my brother...
SP: How did you meet your brother...
OS: At that time, my brother wasn't involved in SEO at all. The whole company was structured in such a way that...
SP: Did you go to the same university? To the same faculty?
OS: Yes, he helped me pass my exams because I was already working. He wasn't involved in IT at that time – just did some tasks here and there...
And these guys invite me, saying, "Do you speak English?" I respond, "Yes." I hope Ellie watches this someday – I realize he understood everything later... I say, "Yes, yes, of course, I know!" I go to work, I have to manage in three countries, eight people across three different countries. I had to conduct meetings in English as a director. In short, I had to learn basic, technical, conversational English in two weeks, or else I would have been fired. Actually, I had to let go of a girl from England because I couldn't understand what she was saying. I said, "We don't need her" – I just couldn't grasp what she was saying.
SP: — You know, I interacted a lot in this industry with Southeast Asia: I understand Chinese people, I understand Indians, I can even understand the English, because the English articulate every word clearly. But damn, I can't communicate on the phone with Americans at all – I don't understand what they say. I tried – "Repeat again, please," "Speak slowly" – but I don't understand; I understand the English.
OS: — The same thing happened. In general, after leaving the agency, I went to this international company and worked there. Then we started an agency. I called my brother, we formed the agency, and now there are actually four partners.
SP: — What's the role of the other partners, purely financial or what?
OS: — Look, I currently oversee the development of some strategic products: I learned how to promote to the West – we built a department. For instance, we make some sales – I package the products, how our products look, what we sell in the market. I speak at conferences; I enjoy developing our brand in the public sphere.
SP: — In short, marketing is on you.
OS: — Marketing, PR, and strategic development, financial planning in the company too.
SP: — As a manager, you also have to be a strategist. I'm not a strategist, for example; I am a strategist.
OS: — In tactics, I oversee the sales department of the company and the technology department Rush Analytics. Currently, we have about 12 departments in the company, and I only oversee two.
SP: — Who exactly handles all the operations?
OS: — There is a partner, a development director – he handles the internal structure of the company and builds new products, comes up with ideas. We refine them together, package them for the sales department – and start selling. My brother is currently focused solely on the western direction. Our company now has 9 senior executives (the "tops") with groups under them, where our line specialists are positioned. It turns out that one partner deals with the company's structure, operations, working with personnel, and various internal matters. My brother deals with technology and managing expansion into western markets.
SP: — Does he know English better than you?
OS: — I think I know English better than anyone in the company because I've had to talk a lot, especially about business. Well, my English is fluent (I wouldn’t say it’s C1 or anything like that), but I can easily discuss business topics. However, I can't speak with Americans on Skype because it's kind of overwhelming, by the way. When they start speaking quickly, I sometimes don't catch the accent – Australians, Irish, and Americans.
And the fourth partner oversees all advertising production.
SP: — Various creatives, right?
OS: — No. All SEO, all the traffic generated by the agency – is managed by a separate person, specifically production: to ensure that clients have no issues, that our team doesn’t mess up, and that the client understands everything correctly to sell them something internally…
SP: — So, a controller inside?
OS: — Yes, the production manager. He is a producer (hello, Antokha!). By the way, he’s a fan of yours and loves your channel.
SP: — I’ll come to you for a lecture – let’s meet.
OS: — There is also a partner who is our management glue: organizing everything inside, the organizational structure, "the West." And I am responsible for PR and marketing. It’s good to work with partners because you can't handle it all alone. Choose your partner wisely.
SP: — But it’s essential to have diverse competencies. If you have only one competency – you’ll be stuck in the same field, getting in each other’s way, elbowing each other.
OS: — That's absolutely right. When choosing partners, their competencies shouldn’t be the same; in fact, they should be completely opposite. For example, I can come up with a product, a technology, and say, 'Go ahead!', but sometimes I don't have enough time to check the tasks. My other partner will schedule a meeting in such a way that I can't help but attend. He says, 'Oleg, we are waiting for you.' It's like regular management; there should be a rhythm in the team, meaning he builds management internally.
If I know how to sell effectively, how to package a product in sales, and teach the salespeople, I will do it. But this partner who arranges all this routine, the operations, says, 'I can't sell this, I don't know how.'
How many people do you have in your company?
OS: — Currently, there are 73. Seven people left this quarter.
SP: — Was it 80?
OS: — Yes, it was 80. Well, the western department will grow again now.
SP: — Are the shares between partners divided proportionally? Do you all have, say, 25% each?
OS: — Proportionally, I have 1% more.
SP: — Are you the main boss there?
OS: — Yes, the main boss. That's how we initially agreed, because otherwise… I think when a company is in digital, everyone is modern and young, everyone has an ego — it should be equal, equally involved.
Do conflicts with partners occur?
SP: — Do any conflicts happen?
OS: — Listen, of course they happen!
SP: — No, I mean global ones: do you ever disagree to the point of splitting? I understand that there are minor cases every day.
OS: — No, that doesn't happen. We can, of course, argue with partners, someone might get upset, but we always find common ground. They are cool guys, I trust them, I believe in them. And in many life situations (they're not just random people) they've helped me out, not only in business.
SP: — Do you argue with your brother?
OS: — With that little brat? Of course. Zhenya, hello!
How much do you earn?
SP: — Okay. How much do you earn? Everyone is interested in how much cash there is.
OS: — There's a million.
SP: — A million dollars a year, right?
OS: — More, of course. I mean in cash per month. Just tell me the amount.
SP: — Dollars or rubles?
OS: — Rubles. You can't make a million dollars in the Russian market. The market capacity is only 500 million.
SP: — Do you focus more on SEO as an agency or on your own projects?
OS: — You know, we are diversifying, trying to develop something of our own, building our assets. But right now, most of our work involves clients we’re managing. We work with many large companies.
How much will SEO for SecretDiscounter cost?
SP: — If I want you to handle SEO completely for my 'Cashback' project, writing assignments and technical tasks, and taking responsibility for the texts. How much would I pay per month, for example?
OS: — I think we would charge around 130,000 per month for such a project.
SP: — So this is 'turnkey'; I can forget about it completely? And what will I have after a year, for instance? You’ve seen the current state of my project, the traffic volume.
OS: — You will still need to provide feedback, so remember: if you go to an agency, don’t just say – 'Here, guys, the budget, you take care of it, I don’t want to get involved!' Feedback from the owner, proprietor, or marketer is essential – what do you want to achieve with SEO.
SP: — It’s clear that in my case, it’s targeted traffic.
OS: — Targeted traffic. But you will need to communicate: what are we promoting today – clothing or electronics, where do you have more cashback? Maybe we will even shift into travel?
SP: — I’m more interested in travel.
OS: — Exactly. So you need to guide us, and we will drive the traffic. Typically for large sites, it’s a contract of 110,000 per month and up, depending on the scope of work. We have a department for small projects, a VIP department for large projects like yours, which have many pages or strong competition. You have strong competition. We can get there just like that, in 2 minutes. We will need to contend with competitors a lot, do analytics, pull a lot of data. Well, the Western market is a whole different story.
First of all, we will put everything in order for you – optimize all your landing pages, write all the texts, and get you ranked as high as possible. This will take about 9 months. I think you can make a thousand a day; you’ll grow tenfold. Easily.
SP: — I probably ruined my SEO with that redirect.
OS: — You’re getting hardcore with the tweaks! What strategies are there in the West?
SP: — I was just in the short-term… You were right about the 'long term.' At that moment, I was only interested in live clients, so I used all the 'black hat' methods; I was just pumping traffic through popunders and 301 redirects.
OS: — You know how they do it in the West? You take a domain and attach it to a competitor; if their rankings drop—oh well, forget that domain; but if they improve—you detach it and attach it to yourself. There's also a tool called Link Detox—you can find the bad links that were attached to you.
SP: — Can I recover from the actions I took—301 redirects, popunder traffic with lots of iterations?
OS: — Yeah, popunder traffic is fine; who cares?
SP: — But it worsens behavioral metrics—there's a high bounce rate! Like 90% bounce.
OS: — But that's referral traffic; it doesn't relate to search, and search doesn't consider it at all. This is traffic not from search.
SP: — I thought it all counts…
OS: — Yandex excellently sees traffic segmentation and understands you're pumping cheap, low-quality traffic. Ok, why not. I'll show you the audit—you just have technical issues; I think the problems aren't with the links. If there was a problem with links, you wouldn't have Google.
Why did you decide to move from Russia to the West?
SP: — Question from viewers: why did you decide to move from Russia to the West? The answer seems obvious—because there's more money!
OS: — Yeah, and I don't like the economic situation in the country: it's unclear, hard to do business, a ton of paperwork in Russia. And the prospects for the economy to grow here, allowing me to grow with the country—there are none. It’s stagnation, clients are dwindling, and some have just shut down.
And in the West, you just walk in… Many competitive leaders in America are actually held by Russians and Ukrainians. Seriously! All the top spots are filled with sites promoted by Russians and Ukrainians, many competitive leaders. In New York, in 'white' niches. And you come in, and you inherently have more technology in your head because you fought through complicated technology in Yandex… You walk in, do this (snaps fingers)—'Oh, it popped up to the top? Well, okay.' And there, the average check is twice or three times higher.
SP: — In 6–8.
OS: — Well, if you didn't like it in America, you went to Latin America. The client didn't go there (we can't put google.com globally) – let's take you to Mexico and Brazil.
Do you promote client websites or your own in foreign markets?
SP: — Do you mostly promote client websites in foreign markets or your own?
OS: — We have our own network of websites for 'Amazon'.
SP: — What do you mean by 'for Amazon'? I’ve heard that for the fifth time.
OS: — It’s a review site, meaning you do reviews on certain products, a long-read. A person selects an electric guitar...
SP: — Is it a landing page?
OS: — They are multi-page websites. Landing pages can be promoted, you can even promote for 'Amazon', but that's a separate story. It’s better to do a multi-page site. Then you have less risk: if one page doesn’t rank semantically, another one might. We have our own sites for 'Amazon', they bring in money. Why not?
SP: — How do you monetize them? Do you just place a referral link to that specific product on 'Amazon'?
OS: — Yes, yes. Standard review sites, review websites for 'Amazon' – nothing new.
SP: — What’s the highest traffic your biggest site for 'Amazon' has in a month?
OS: — Specifically for America?
SP: — Yes. Is it all SEO?
OS: — Yes, SEO, somewhere around three thousand a day, that much traffic.
SP: — Why are these numbers 5-8 times? On the same 'YouTube', you get 5-8 times more from America. In the cashback business I've looked at: about 8 times the revenue is higher. This number 8 keeps coming up. Let's be pessimistic and not take the ceiling, let’s take the minimum – 4 times higher. Basically, that’s why I say that we need to get to the West as quickly as possible.
OS: — Yes, and people have more money, they part with their money more easily.
SP: — We spend about the same amount of time, energy, and money.
OS: — Well, we’re tired in Russia, because there are many small companies – three guys come together... They create nice landing pages, run decent ads... They throw clients off. Because they can’t, they lack 10 years of experience, they don’t know anything about search, but they sell well. They tell clients – 'We’ll do SEO for you' – and do nothing. Then the client comes to us and says: 'Let’s sign a contract with guarantees.'
SP: — That’s a delicate matter too.
OS: — And they just ruin the market. What guarantees are there in America? Do you know the joke about an SEO agency?
A client comes to an SEO agency and says:
– Do you have a guarantee?
– No way.
– You can be trusted!
How much do you earn from promoting a website targeted at America?
The market in Russia is such that people have little money. They can't take $10,000 for a channel and say, 'Well, let's test it, okay.' But in America, they can, because a company there has $2 million in annual turnover, and they don't care about those $5,000 for SEO per month. They really might not ask for a report; that's right.
SP: — So, do you have client websites in the foreign market?
OS: — Yes, just look: in Russia, the market (147 million now)… Look at the rest of the world – it’s huge and rich; those people have money to spend.
In Russia, only a small number of people have money to spend, while the rest work for them. There’s your answer as to why foreign markets.
Is Putin a good president for Russia?
SP: — Is Putin a good president for Russia?
OS: — Putin is Vladimir Vladimirovich. Vladimir Vladimirovich.
SP: — But you are an adult now; you must have some formed opinion.
OS: — What can I tell you? In terms of business (the history of the country is just long), it hasn't gotten better in the last 10 years; it’s only gotten worse. The government does nothing good for business. I can't take what a client paid me via PayPal, make a screenshot, and send it to the tax office – I'd get hanged for that. The government does nothing good. In America, you can take a screenshot, snap a photo with your phone, and send it to the tax office (there, up to $10,000). I’ll snap a photo and say, 'Here. I don’t want to issue a receipt.'
SP: — So, you don't believe in any bright economic future?
OS: — I don’t see any economic prerequisites. The ruble is falling, there’s no infrastructure development, there are no tax breaks, and VAT has increased. How are you going to work? You have huge taxes everywhere. For example, somewhere in Europe, you can take a loan at 1 or 1.5 percent for business. In America, you can use financial instruments. Here, go ahead, and they’ll approve you for overdraft at 25% – great!
SP: — And you still might not get that credit?
OS: — Yes, you can’t use financial instruments.
SP: — I have an income yield in the field — I can achieve 100%. That means I can take a loan even at 30%, but I still can’t get one. You have to bring too much (shows a lot) paperwork to get it. It’s easier for me to announce, to show… You know the company «Dodo Pizza»? Fyodor Ovchinnikov.
OS: — Guys, by the way, many invested. SEO specialists, actually.
SP: — He had just a bookstore and ran a text blog. He had a bookstore in Syktyvkar, it was doing well, then went bankrupt. But it turned out: the more you go bankrupt, the faster you rise again. And how did he attract, get money for «Dodo Pizza»? He just announced in his blog (he had a lot of readers): “Let’s chip in, make this happen”! Now I'm going to be on «YouTube», because we need to set up a sales department, a series of events — I’ll be announcing the same thing on «YouTube». And the yield before expenses — 100%. I don’t want to take a loan; I don’t want to spend time on that.
OS: — You’ll be making the decision yourself on which jurisdiction to do this in, right? Yes. Because if your income from turnover grows, up to a certain point in Russia, you won't be able to work comfortably. In America, you can work; in Europe, somewhere it’s clear; if you have a passport from the islands, you can work comfortably in the Arab world. But there, they provide these conditions; no one bothers you. In Germany, the government will say: ‘Why aren’t you profitable? Maybe we can help in some way?’ Here, they’ll tell you you didn’t pay enough taxes, because the tax office debited from your account twice; you have no money to pay – your accounts get blocked.
I don't understand all this in Russia. I believe small businesses drive technology and the country. There are no positive movements, so I think it’s necessary to go West where everything has long evolved.
SP: — It’s time to leave.
OS: — Well, we’re thinking about relocation. We currently have an office in Slovakia, and we are opening an office in Thailand (this is a ‘camp’ for the winter). We’re implementing different modern features from corporations into the company: for instance, on Wednesdays, we have a remote work day (people can work from home); and now, those who want will work in Thailand. That means we've been testing the remote work format for a long time, remote management.
Do you have people working from Russia?
SP: — So, do you only have people working from Russia?
OS: — No, we have people from Ukraine and from Belarus.
SP: — Is this all remote work?
OS: — Yes, but these are full-time employees working under official contracts. We have a remote labor agreement. There's such a type of employment contract. We only hire full-time people, we don’t have freelancers. He comes to work, checks in on the corporate chat, and he can always be called (regardless of what time zone he’s in).
SP: — In Slack?
OS: — We are currently using WhatsApp. I want to implement Slack, I want to automate everything with bots, but I don't have enough resources for all the processes. I will digitalize all processes on Google BigQuery, cloud databases, Google Data Studio - that’s dashboards.
SP: — Well, I use trials.
OS: — I also use trials for tasks, and here you can calculate the efficiency of all employees, consolidate the entire accounting into one cloud database, merge all metrics and display them on nice TVs.
SP: — I don’t even have the patience for metrics and analytics. I would be pulling my hair out if I had to complete even half of that.
OS: — And there will also be a Telegram bot. You pull from this system, the Telegram bot sends notifications to employees – for example, how much they have achieved their KPIs today.
SP: — By the way, a usual question – people ask how your company is structured – is it holacracy, is it self-management… Not at all! We have a classic, vertical, ‘red’ company with a strict hierarchy. Many of our people constantly have KPIs: standard low salaries, but everyone has big bonuses.
How much do hired SEO specialists earn?
OS: — Growth prospects?
— Always! Always, always… If you want, you take on more projects and earn more. Our SEO salaries are above market.
SP: — And what is the salary in the market right now?
OS: — The average salary in the market is 75–80, maybe more.
SP: — Thousand rubles per month… Do you have more than a hundred?
OS: — More.
SP: — Do you even hire employees from outside? How is the selection made?
OS: — We do hire some from outside.
SP: — How is the selection process handled?
OS: — Yes. HR is structured this way: we hire interns who know a bit; we have an adaptation program – all adaptation in the company is automated; we have our own internal online academies where you take tests, complete modules, and get graded.
SP: — To avoid explaining to everyone individually – you have courses already written once.
OS: — Yes, we packaged courses for the profession – it cost a lot.
SP: — Do they steal them from you?
OS: — Go ahead and steal, try to replicate my company! I don't care!
SP: — That's what I'm saying… Why am I not afraid to share ideas? First of all, I have so many… Secondly, implementation is key.
OS: — I always share knowledge. If you do it, you'll be my only competitor – let's have a beer or whiskey together, and I'll say: "Cool, man!" I enjoy it when people create and accomplish something.
Employees tried to create a competing company, and they had bad intentions. They went bankrupt in a year due to different development strategies – they don't understand how to do business! They think it's very easy and that they'll have a lot of money. Go on, pay taxes, rent an office.
SP: — But when it comes to sleeping 4 hours a night for years, they don’t think about that! I sleep 4 hours myself.
OS: — This morning I got up, I had a quarterly meeting. I finished work, then came to you for the shoot.
What are your biggest failures in business?
SP: — What are your biggest failures in business, you and your team?
OS: — We have a product called Rush Analytics. It used to look different, and we thought:
“We are SEOs, we need this.” But we didn’t know what the market needed. We didn’t do Customer Development, we didn’t ask people what they needed, and we started building. We worked on it for 4 years, spent 5 years, a million dollars – we ended up with a loss-making company. Well, in terms of euros.
SP: — Why in euros? Don't you have programmers from Ukraine?
OS: — No. Our development office is in Slovakia.
SP: — What’s the point of having a development office in such an expensive country?
OS: — Normal programmers. You can hire a programmer for 2,000 euros.
SP: — Just like I pay in Moscow or Ukraine…
OS: — I can, thanks to our unique capabilities of the technical director, hire a programmer with two technical degrees. Two technical degrees! The best in the country. For reasonable money. Because we do what we enjoy, not just what the market requires.
I decided to launch a product, I decided to launch a website – just type Customer Development into YouTube and see what it is. It's a consumer development methodology. Go and ask people: 'Do you need this? Is this a pain point for you?'
SP: — You, like Jobs, did what popped into your head.
OS: — Well, we're not Jobs, and you aren't Jobs either – those times have passed. It's clear that a phone with three 'burners' has been released. We didn't ask people if they needed it or not. We spent money, we invested.
SP: — Is it counted as one or two?
OS: — Two. Sometimes there’s a third 'burner'! It’s already a meme.
We should have brought in a good product manager right away.
SP: — I know your service. Maybe not everything about it. Where did you invest so much money? It’s clear you could spend a billion.
OS: — A team of programmers, infrastructure… What are you talking about! We are ranked about fourth in Eastern Europe for data collection. We have a ton of servers, and a lot of technology under the hood.
SP: — You need to start selling 'big data.'
OS: — We're getting there. Have you seen the captcha on Yandex?
SP: — Have you seen the captcha on AliExpress?
OS: — We don't care.
SP: — I just have a few spam projects on AliExpress. I’m a person, I can solve one or two out of ten.
OS: — It’s the same on Yandex, however, we pass any captcha ourselves.
SP: — We need to see if you can pass the AliExpress captcha.
OS: — We’ve set up our own department that manually inputs, using cheap infrastructure.
SP: — I've never seen a captcha worse than AliExpress’s.
OS: — It cost us 600,000 rubles a month to recognize the captcha.
SP: — The question is about the return.
OS: — Yes. And it all was going into the negative. We hired a product manager who came to us: 'Oleg, these metrics are not working properly. We need to change the model' (for instance, we switched to a subscription model). We changed the tools, packaged it differently, and the company started turning a profit instead of losing money. We conducted 30 interviews with our clients and realized they didn’t need this.
SP: — Should we have created a simpler model somehow?
OS: — It was just necessary to do what people need, not what we, the cool ones, imagined and wanted. Don't think you're cool – ask the people you're selling to. This was the main mistake in business. The mistake was in people, hiring executives. One more advice: if you think something is off with a person, then something is definitely off with them! Always. If you hesitate to hire, don't take them!
SP: — As my mom constantly says, she never gets tired of repeating: "The first thought that comes to mind is the most accurate"!
OS: — You see something's off, something doesn't feel right… It won't get better, it won't change, it won't learn! It will definitely be off, and you'll definitely lose money. That's how we made mistakes with financial staff and with the social media manager (I hope you see this), who had one set of goals and objectives, and that was it. We erred in hiring, we erred in the business model.
SP: — And we created an overpriced product, took a long time to develop, which is not in demand enough.
OS: — Now at least it's breaking even; we understood the model for how to develop it.
What's your main function?
SP: — The most essential function you have there…
OS: — Position checking. The most understandable for everyone: just input your keywords and see how your site is progressing.
SP: — And who are your competitors? I check on "GoGetLink", for example. I have a subscription there, and they send me reports once a month or once a week: "Your sites were at this position, now they’re at this position." You know, it’s convenient – arrows, you see the dynamics, whether it went down or up.
OS: — And most likely they're buying data from us or competitors. They won't parse it themselves. Either from "Pult" or from us. But there are also competitors – SE Ranking, which you've also seen. Ranking is a good system too, but it has a lot going on. And what you need as a business owner is to see where your site stands and what traffic it has. We also show traffic from "Metriсa" inside now, directly showing the positions that increased – how much the traffic has grown.
SP: — Well, yes, there’s still more to improve. But if I were you, to quickly recover these costs, I would start trading big data.
OS: — We've already started gathering databases if you're interested.
Burge articles for Amazon
SP: — Let's continue with client questions. Do you have a series of articles for "Amazon" in the burgh? You said there are some. One or..?
OS: — There are several of them. We spent a long time testing the model and created our own WordPress setup. Now we can just snap our fingers and easily deploy them; just scale the edition and connect.
SP: — I just uploaded different articles, and that’s it.
OS: — Yes. Our editing process is automated. Our copywriters can't submit texts… They write in our special cabinet where our robot automatically checks the correctness of the text and its compliance with the requirements automatically. You simply upload the requirements from Rush Analytics, and the copywriter can't submit their text until it’s written correctly.
SP: — Conceptually, they cannot save it, so to speak.
OS: — They can't. They are told, "Correct the mistake." So we take the 'Amazon' engine, the theme, connect the exchange (soon they will be pouring this directly into articles on 'Dad') – and there you go, the conversion is on its way!
SP: — I thought I understood something, for instance, I understand IT…
OS: — I’ve built a lot of automation in my life.
SP: — And I understand that I don't even know a third of all this, and I lack that knowledge.
What SEO strategy do you use for foreign markets?
SP: — What strategy do you use for promotion in foreign markets – content, link-building, technical SEO? What is the focus?
OS: — Technical SEO should be correct right out of the box – fast website loading.
SP: — Absolutely. Okay.
OS: — For WordPress, you install Yoast SEO.
SP: — There is a plugin.
OS: — And Clearfy cleans up the clutter. It’s a plugin that disables duplicates.
SP: — There’s Optimize.
OS: — Optimize too, yes.
OS: — In short, a clean, good site (let’s take WordPress). This includes proper content according to the type of content delivery and links that you can relatively cheaply acquire.
SP: — What’s the main priority for foreign markets?
OS: — Links. Average, decent content and good links. Links compensate for average content.
SP: — If it’s content, who writes it? Native speakers, that is, foreigners from those countries, or just translators.
OS: — For client websites – only native speakers. We have native speakers on staff.
SP: — In what languages?
OS: — Spanish, French, German, English.
SP: — Are these competent, skilled copywriters?
OS: — Yes. We had resources in Moscow for Spain. For Colombia – we employed Colombians in the office. We directly hired Colombians in Moscow and had them work in the translators' office. They cost… pennies.
SP: — What language do they speak in Colombia? Portuguese or Spanish?
OS: — Spanish. The last name was Dwayne Diaz, something like that.
SP: — Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
OS: — Diaz, I remember. I was afraid he would pull out guns on the corner, a cool guy.
How many people do you have in the foreign department?
SP: — How many people do you have under foreign in the company?
OS: — 8–9.
SP: — Will you cover the promotion department for the CIS?
OS: — No, we won't. Not yet. As long as there is a market here. We just have a pretty strong brand - Rush Agency is known because we have a good reputation. You can check the contractors – we have not had a single arbitration court case, never.
SP: — Although there are enough ramblers with SEOs?
OS: — Well, open it, take anyone and there will be lawsuits! We won't close because we see that the market can still be developed. As soon as we no longer like this market, we will relocate – move the team, that's it.
Main problems with foreign SEO?
SP: – The main difficulties you have when promoting sites abroad.
OS: — In foreign markets, we struggled for a long time with copywriters – it's very hard to find decent 'natives'. You constantly get messages from all sorts of Filipinos… The Filipinos, by the way, are okay. You keep getting messages from some 'random' Indians: 'Sir-sir, hello, my friend for you, copywriting, ching-ching-ching-ching…' It was hard to find copywriters. It was difficult to write the technologies that would allow us to build links quickly and cheaply.
SP: — But how many links can you obtain daily for your projects now?
OS: — If you really focus, you can create a network of ten sites. Just focus hard. But those are 10 strong sites.
SP: — Strong sites.
OS: — But we can, for example, just take content for free. We can find a site that has already been removed from the search results (with unique content) and take the content for landing pages for free.
Once again, why raise a PBN: links, links, and content, just content. You see a site spammed by Chinese, but the content is great, expert articles? You take it, upload it, update the pictures – that's it, free content that 'native speakers' wrote for you (0 rubles 0 kopecks).
SP: — I was even told by guys who work in the CIS to take old books from libraries that are definitely not on the internet. You scan it through FineReader and throw it out.
OS: Oh wow! This is an old topic! It won't work. Once, I bought a bunch of scans from school kids and created satellites for links. That was after the adult era. There was a whole satellite era.
Are there parallel businesses?
SP: Do you have any businesses alongside your SEO company? Perhaps an offline business?
OS: No, we don't do anything. We have a client business, we have a website, and we have Rush Analytics as a product. Currently, we don't have any other business. But everyone is developing various websites, all trying to open a pizzeria, a café... We decided to focus on what we do well and grow that - I advise everyone to do the same.
There's a book called 'From Good to Great' - a study of corporations that were good, powerful, that collapsed, and those that became great. It includes the 'hedgehog strategy': it describes how a fox tries to eat a hedgehog - it jumps on it, tries to throw it off a mountain; the hedgehog, the only thing it can do, is curl up (that's all it knows how to do); and the fox can't eat the hedgehog unless it throws it into the water. So the hedgehog strategy is to do what you know and move forward. Don't start a blockchain project if you have no clue about it - go and generate traffic! Go find new profitable partners to sell traffic to plumbers in America, drive traffic to casinos, I don't know, in Vietnam. If you can generate traffic - focus on that.
Just for fun, we discussed today - we want to set up a café in the office, just for fun to brew coffee in the office. Fun. Everyone is opening cafés - we'll open one too. But it won't cost us anything. We're not going into other businesses.
SP: Well, you can set up a hookah bar in the office then.
Where do you ultimately want to get in your business?
SP: Where do you ultimately want to be in your business? Your plans.
OS: In business? Of course, to become a rentier, lease out a lot of real estate and do nothing.
SP: A bunch of your own services?
OS: A bunch of services. I would move further into real estate. I would simply lease properties and continue buying more. In my free time, I would teach people, tell them how to do...
SP: Transfer what you know.
OS: — Yes, I know a lot; I can talk about sales and marketing. I enjoy it when newcomers arrive, just like I did 10 years ago. I can guide them on how to achieve their goals in two months instead of wandering aimlessly for four years. I would just give lectures to young people.
SP: — Go to the YouTube channel and immediately create its English version.
OS: — We bought a studio! Not as high-end as yours.
SP: — That's not mine.
SEO Trends 2019-2020
SP: — SEO trends in the foreign market for 2019-2020. The tricks have faded!
OS: — In 'black' niches, they'll be spinning PBNs because Russians are coming abroad with manipulations. They're already spinning it more intensively now. If you notice something strange in the search results, take a look; it might be a PBN. In 'white' SEO, nothing will change much. Google rolled out a new update; I just haven't checked in with the Western division yet — my brother is handling it. Our websites have grown this year; some have dropped.
Their algorithm is also called 'Your Money, Your Life,' which targets 'fake' articles about medicine. You can already get out from under the filters, but it will be harder — be cautious with medical content. I would monitor how it evolves before diving in. And I definitely would not venture into pharma or Paid Alones. Absolutely not. Because it's heavily regulated. It will be difficult; standard SEO won't work, and you'll need to study the niche deeply, invest a lot of money, and get really involved. It's not worth going there.
SP: — In short, we are not going into pharma or loans.
OS: — In America. We're talking more about America now. Someone recently launched — I read on VC, someone is offering loans for South America. Someone is pouring loans for the Philippines; it's great. I don't remember who, I won't lie, but that's working too.
What are the average costs for promotion in foreign markets?
SP: — The average costs for promoting your projects abroad per month.
OS: — Client projects? Let me put it this way: if you're making a site for Amazon, you definitely need to invest a thousand dollars a month.
SP: — And does it bring in returns? What margin? Like, remember how Portnyagin had it?
OS: — Before we figured out that it could be scalable, we spent 50 thousand dollars. Well, that’s for CMS, cloneable… You know, you launch a design, choose a button — it changes colors for another design and mixes the CSS so it cannot be...
SP: — Even on a pack of websites?
OS: — Doesn't matter at all.
What’s the margin?
SP: — What's the yield?
OS: — Well, look, if you invest two thousand, or let's say you have three thousand… But if you have that much traffic, then you can probably rake in... It really depends on the niche. We picked a bad one last time; it's highly seasonal. You can earn 3-4 thousand dollars a month. But it's tough. I wouldn't go into my first SEO business focusing on Amazon articles unless I was going straight to a course with smart people.
SP: — I would go exactly into Amazon articles.
OS: — If I knew nothing about SEO, I would just figure out basic SEO first, then head there. Because Amazon is a competitive niche. We're not the only smart ones out there. People worldwide are doing this. I wouldn't dive into Amazon straight away; I'd first learn about Russian SEO, dig around, and simultaneously learn English while heading into the foreign market.
SP: — Ultimately, the conclusion is: the sooner you get into the foreign market, the better.
OS: — Of course, yes.
SP: — The same goes for YouTube: the sooner you start your channel, the better.
OS: — Yes. Learn English, do SEO.
Do you buy dropped domains?
SP: — Do you buy dropped domains and restore websites?
OS: — Yes, yes. We buy them. We just aren't currently looking for them at auctions, waiting for them to be freed up. We know how to find in the web archive related to our niche what someone might have missed, and we can buy it for nominal value without bidding at an auction.
SP: — So this domain won't even be put up for auction yet?
OS: — Everyone has already missed it. You take it for nominal price. And you know that there is content there, there are normal backlinks, and it's not spammed—you can check all this in Rush Analytics for 100 rubles.
SP: — Why do you restore it?
OS: — A network for links, naturally.
SP: — Do you have a large link network?
OS: — For each project, we create thematic ones. If there is some kind of real estate in Spain (promoting for the UK) – we will restore thematic drops related to real estate in Spain, looking for bankrupt Spanish agencies. There are people searching for these drops, and we create a cool network.
SP: — It's not like you have 10,000 websites, right?
OS: I don't think this works in the long run. You won't be able to sell those projects later. If you want to exit these, you will hand over access to this network of sites along with it; that would be fair to the buyer. And you can leave without maintaining the infrastructure to avoid damaging your reputation. You sell everything and exit. I just believe that if you're selling a site, sell the backlinks, don't deceive people.
SP: It's not a side issue; it's essentially part of this business.
Do you negotiate directly with webmasters?
SP: And do you negotiate with webmasters if you need a backlink on a specific resource?
OS: Yes. It's difficult, very difficult. They respond rarely. There are cold marketing strategies that can be employed. Yes, we negotiate, yes, we outreach. If there's a good news hook, if there's a good large article, there’s infographics, then yes, of course. For clients, of course. We have clients who are well-known brands; if we write on their behalf (the email is on their domain – marketing@blablabla):
Do you want to collaborate with us?
Yes, of course, we’ll place the link.
How do you manipulate behavioral factors?
SP: How exactly do you manipulate behavioral factors? Many use ZennoPoster and say that they get into the top of Yandex in two weeks.
OS: We don’t manipulate behavioral factors. Not at all. As it is. We don’t manipulate. I took a site, manipulated it – it works; I deleted it. I told you about this system – it’s not worth causing too much harm.
ZennoPoster? Well, if you’re very smart, let them work. If you’re very intelligent, you can emulate user behavior, understand how it works – yes, you can manipulate. In short, either a private service or ZennoPoster, if you know how to do it.
SP: Mouse movement across the screen?
OS: Yes-yes-yes. Emulation, footprints, randomized footprints. You need to understand how this works. And generally, I would buy fingerprint parsing from somewhere and upload it; for example, from some router. There’s a Man in the Middle attack: buy footprints from hackers, don’t grab cards… If you want to do this as a researcher (it’s clear that all of this is illegal, I’m not encouraging buying anything from hackers), logically – you need to get real browser footprints, upload them to your emulator and use it. That’s how it will work.
Manipulating Google behavioral factors
SP: And what about manipulating behavioral factors for Google? The main method.
OS: — I'll just say this: yes, Google uses behavioral factors. Yes, you can manipulate it.
SP: — Is the effect slower than on Yandex?
OS: — Yes, it's slower, but it's there. Google is more inert. In my opinion, Yandex's behavioral factor works faster. Some might say otherwise. I haven't done it for the US personally; my acquaintances did.
SP: — From my department…
OS: — No, actually we never manipulate for clients, even when they ask. We say, "Guys, we won’t take responsibility for this; you’ll definitely get banned when we leave." Even if they ask, we don’t manipulate.
SP: — We figured out SEO, we figured everything out. As a gift: I have this sweater…
OS: — If you have any questions, I’ll leave my Telegram – drop me a message. I respond slowly; I don't reply quickly, but I reply to everyone.
Contest
SP: — Here, I have this sweater…
OS: — Our digital clan.
SP: — Oleg brought it, Rush Agency.
OS: — So focus on your business and the rules can go to hell, our creative side – to whoever asks the best question in the comments. I’ll come into the comments and respond from my account. Write in. And we'll leave a Telegram link there.
SP: — For the best question about SEO, about websites. The author of this question will get this t-shirt.
OS: — Not in private messages.
SP: — Yes, on YouTube, of course, under this video.
Let's do another contest. Whoever sends us the coolest project ever – the most interesting or funniest, the most creative site on the internet, in rough terms – you’ll get a free audit from us, we’ll just guide the person.
OS: — Yes, let’s do it. The condition will be that it’s a real project (not just something made up – like, selling a beaver's rear end in Australia); the project should preferably be for the West (we can help); if there are no interesting projects for the West… send any projects – we’ll choose one and do a mini-audit, just find growth points. We did a quick audit for Sergey today.
SP: — I haven't seen it yet, but I’ll take a look.
OS: — We’ll do it, help out, just growth points. We can call, take an hour to explain what to do. The one who sends the site (if I like it) will get an analysis, and for the best question – …
SP: — The sweater is cool, to be honest.
OS: — We printed it specifically.
SP: — Oleg, thank you very much. We’ll meet again soon at your company in December. With the promo code "PeoplePRO," if anyone wants to learn in their academy… What will you teach there? SEO?
OS: — We'll teach you how to understand SEO in two days, how it works, and how you can promote your website.
SP: — In the Russian Internet?
OS: — Yes, in the Russian Internet. We’re not dealing with the West for now because it’s complicated there.
SP: — 15,000 rubles with a promo code. By the way, I believe that’s reasonable because we've probably spent around three thousand dollars on SEO in the early days of our various projects. Three thousand dollars is reasonable, that's 180,000 rubles.
OS: — You’ll just understand that even if you order somewhere else— you'll realize you’re being deceived because that’s not how it works. You know that this tag is needed for this, and the 'salesman' explains it to you…
SP: — You will already understand that instead of a 'guarantee' a good SEO specialist should say: 'Bull…sh*t'!
OS: — So, he can be trusted!
SP: — They say there’s a speech analyzer on 'YouTube'. Keywords should not only be in the description (they say!)…
OS: — SEO, SEO, order SEO, buy SEO cheaply, good SEO…
SP: — SEO specialist too…
OS: — How to promote a website, SEO promotion, order SEO promotion…
SP: — How to learn SEO, SEO guarantees…
That's it, guys! Hugs. Thank you. Bye!
A little advertisement 🙂
Thank you for staying with us. Do you enjoy our articles? Want to see more interesting content? Support us by placing an order or recommending us to your friends, , a unique entry-level server alternative that we have created for you: (options available with RAID1 and RAID10, up to 24 cores and up to 40GB DDR4).
Dell R730xd at half the price in the Equinix Tier IV data center in Amsterdam? Only with us in the Netherlands! Dell R420 — 2x E5-2430 2.2GHz 6C 128GB DDR3 2x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB — from $99! Read about how
Source: habr.com
