How Matt Diggity Grew 2 Sites to Nearly $100,000 a Month with Link Building and EAT Strategies
Matt Diggity is someone that has been buying, building, and growing affiliate website for a long time. In fact, I had him on the podcast about a year ago to discuss some of his background.
Since then, I’ve stayed in touch with Matt and he started sharing more and more about the recent success of a couple of websites that he purchased.
These 2 sites have gone from making less than $1,500 a month combined to nearly hitting his goal of $100,000 per month (combined earnings) before the end of this year!
And all of this growth has happened in less than 2 years.
How did he do it? Well, that’s the focus of this brand new interview that I’m releasing today.
We dive into tons of SEO strategies, but we focus mostly on E.A.T. (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) and Link Building.
Just like myself, Matt is always working on a handful of projects. He keeps himself busy running Authority Builders link building service, Leadspring affiliate businesses (which is what we discuss mostly in this interview), The Affiliate Lab, and an SEO Conference in Chiang Mai.
Consider getting a free link analysis consultation call with Authority Builders right here.
Watch the Full Interview with Matt Diggity
You will find a general outline (or a full transcription) of the interview and the topics covered.
But in general, Matt tells the story of 2 sites in the Health and fitness space that he purchased and has now grown to nearly 6 figures a month in revenue.
You’ll hear his link building strategies and on-page strategies for really establishing authority.
Matt shares some ideas for analyzing the competition and strategies for link building that he has not shared anywhere else before.
Get a Free Backlink Consultation with Team Diggity
When I asked Matt if he and his team at Authority Builders would be interested in helping out the Niche Pursuits audience, I was shocked when they offered to go as far as analyzing anyone’s website that wanted for free!
You can book a strategy call to discuss your website, a potential backlink strategy, and to analyze your competitors with someone on Matt’s team (from Authority Builders).
Doing a free 30 minute call with you could set you on the right path to understand the types and quantities of links you should be building and much more.
Obviously Matt and his team can’t offer this forever, so this offer is available just this week. (As long as you book a time this week, they will do the free consultation call in future weeks; just no new calls booked after this week).
Book a Link Building Strategy Call Right Here
The First 50 to Book a Call Get an Anchor Text Analysis
I actually hired Matt and his team for one of my sites to do a link building analysis and to start getting links. I’ve been super impressed with the depth of their analysis and I’m certain you’ll get the same quality on your call.
Because of how in-depth an anchor text analysis is, Matt is only allowing the first 50 to get the FULL anchor text analysis (in addition to the competitor and link building analysis).
Everyone after the first 50, still get the consultation call – just not the anchor text analysis.
NichePursuits Subscribers Free Consultation Call Includes:
- A fully comprehensive competitor link analysis required to rank.
- Custom Strategy Session Tailored For Your Site
- Link and Content Velocity Analysis
- An exact anchor text road map for your backlinks. (limited to first 50)
All Niche Pursuits audience will get a link gap analysis and power categories strategies, etc. You’ll get a detailed report that will tell you how they would run the link building campaign.
You can use their team or execute their ideas yourself. It’s a no-pressure offer.
Advanced SEO Campaign Management
Below is not a beginner SEO tutorial. Matt is an engineer by trade. His SEO strategies are highly thought out and produced with precision and documentation.
When it comes to building affiliate sites, most stay away from health and fitness niches as they are incredibly competitive and sometimes feel it’s impossible for any type of SEO campaign management.
Matt took on the challenge. He bought a small health and fitness site and hopes to grow it to someday compete with sites like BodyBuilder.com, one of the most recognized brands in their niche.
Spending $45,000 to buy a site
Matt purchased two health and fitness sites through private sales. One through a classified advertisement and the other through Empire Flippers.
When he purchased, neither site was generating that much traffic, and between the two of them barely made a thousand dollars a month. The total purchase price was about $45,000. (Approximately $4-6k for the first site, and the second was around $40k.)
The sites are now on pace to earn $100,000 per month by the year’s end!
Every step of the way, the team was thinking about the acronym “EAT”. Every post, image, link building opportunity needed to provide expertise, authority, and trust to compete in this niche.
Expertise, Authority, Trust: SEO Link Building Services
Matt provides link building services and is a former engineer.
To provide this authority and trust in the health and fitness space, Matt had to get creative.
He isn’t a doctor, so he had to prove to his niche audience (and Google) that his site did have the expertise and trust to provide reliable information. Here is how he was able to do this.
1.) Build a “real” site
When you look at most affiliate businesses, they don’t look like a “real” business; they are often just pushing products at you. Matt was sure to add the basics to his sites.
The main goal for the website of a typical business is to get you to contact them. Simple things like adding a real physical address, email addresses, phone numbers, contact infoboxes, and even a google my business account were the first steps to make the sites get more trust.
Additionally, taking the extra time to add in the schema for your organization and linking to your Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. all are ways that help search engines recognize that your site is trustworthy.
2.) Creating a face to the brand with Instagram Influencers
Now he needed a face to the brand if he was going to show some real authority. The good news is every day; people are joining the ranks as an influencer marketer on Instagram, Tiktok, etc.
Matt reached out to these up and coming influencers with a unique pitch. He would ask them to be the face of his up and coming brand. In exchange, the influencer would be highlighted on his blog and would occasionally be asked to provide a Youtube video for the health and fitness site.
As this was such a win/win for the influencer and Matt’s team, the prospects’ response rate and engagement was an easy task. They took a few afternoons to complete.
3.) Sharing Images In Exchange for Links
When it came to adding more authority to the sites using stock photos was not going to cut it. To compete at a top-level, they used custom images as often as they could.
What makes this unique is they would then upload those custom images to aggregators. Free images sits such as Pexels or Unsplash. They wanted others to use their pictures, and when others would use their free image, Matt and his team would personally reach out and ask the site using their image if they would kindly give them credit with a link.
When reaching out, they would get a 3-5% response rate. At first, it doesn’t sound great. But when you compare to tasks like guest post outreach, which often gets less of a response rate and requires more work (like writing the guest post), it’s a huge win.
If you are like me and are already thinking that creating custom photos for every post sounds like a lot of work. Matt had a solution.
They went to a coffee shop, hung up a sign with their brand on it, and had a professional photographer take many photos. Each time they needed to review a product, they would put the coffee shop disguised as their office in the background and had an instant custom (and branded) photo to share with the world.
4.) Link Building with Reviews
A strategy you’ve likely heard of before, but it’s often forgotten. When writing a list post, for example, “Top 10 XYZ Products”. After the article is written, the strategy is to reach out to those ten products asking for a link back to your site.
Matt had a different approach, instead of reaching out after the article was complete. He would reach out before asking the features, highlights, or anything that their team should know about the product. At that time, he would ask for a link back.
If they provided a link, that product would get a little higher rank on the post as an incentive.
5.) How to Link Build Pitching Journalists
Can you imagine yourself sitting on the couch enjoying a little dinner watching your favorite news source, and your brand starts scrolling across the screen on national news.
That’s what happened to Matt. Since they were in the health and fitness niche, they decided to survey moms and their fitness changes and challenges during the Covid pandemic.
Once the survey was complete, they put together a comprehensive study, infographics, charts, quotes from authority figures., etc. Matt optimized the page as an exclusive news story.
There was no focus on keywords, title optimization, or even an advertisement or sidebar on this page. The goal was to leverage the data for the press.
An enormous amount of time and effort put this unique page together, so they leveraged a PR firm and were sure to get the article on the top news sites.
If you don’t have a budget for a PR firm, many also use techniques such as using HARO to get links from journalists needing a story.
When this page hit the news, the trajectory of the site completely changes. It was no longer slow growth, but it felt as if the site user algorithms had fundamentally changed, and they saw an instant uptick in traffic.
After the news-press died down on the page, they optimized the page for SEO with a title and keywords focused and landing search results.
In addition, they used the new “link juice” they had to that page to then internally link out to other keyword focused pages they were trying to rank.
Implement Link Building Strategies Yourself or Hire it Out?
Now Matt does make many of these items sound a lot easier than they are, but in reality, most of what he discussed is just an afternoon of work. It just takes discipline to complete.
If you’re still trying to decide which of these strategies will work best for your site and audience, be sure to get your free analysis from the Authority Builders team this week.
Matt left the interview with a little motivation for us. He couldn’t stress enough the feeling of value and self-worth you receive when you get to wake up every morning and work on what you want.
I couldn’t agree more with Matt and feel I’m truly blessed to work on what I want for the last 10+ years. Yes, there are days where it feels like a lousy afternoon of boring work, but that’s what it takes to push through and make it all work.
NichePursuits Subscribers Free Consultation Call Includes:
- A fully comprehensive competitor link analysis required to rank.
- Custom Strategy Session Tailored For Your Site
- Link and Content Velocity Analysis
- An exact anchor text road map for your backlinks. (limited to first 50)
Here is the Full Transcript
Hey, Matt, welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast.
Matt Diggity: [00:03:43] Thank you very much, always a pleasure. I was a good time to talk and catch up with you, by the way. I don’t want to like take away from your intro, but Spencer, like any good podcast host, he sends over some possible questions we might get into during the course of the interview.
And some of these questions are pretty bad ass. And so I’m going to step up to the plate in. Reveal a lot of stuff that I probably regret later because you know, these questions are just too good.
Spencer: [00:04:08] Well, good. I’m going to hit you hard then we got you while you’re weak. I guess we’ll get all the good stuff out of you while we can.
That’s awesome. Because people, yeah. When they’re listening in, they want to know what’s working. Right. And if you’re willing to share. What’s working on your sites and we’re going to talk about how successful some of your sites, like that’s the good stuff. So, so let’s dive into it for people listening in.
They may remember that you were on the niche pursuits podcast. It’s it was actually almost a year ago. believe it or not, it seems like it was. You know, just a couple of months ago or something, but yeah, almost a full year ago. So people listening in right now, if they want a bigger introduction to Matt and what he’s done previously and how he got started online, that whole story is in that other interview.
today I really just want to jump right into sort of tactics and strategies and what’s working really well. Right. Right now. so to kind of kick that off, just to give you people an idea where you are right now, Matt, just explain what businesses you’re in with, right now, and just give an overall sort of picture of your portfolio of businesses.
Matt Diggity: [00:05:12] Absolutely. So the main brand is Diggity marketing and that hold Diggitymarketing.com. They could be marketing as my blog and the whole motif ever since the beginning was, this is where I’m going to talk about my tested SEO technique. So I’ve, I’m an engineer by trade. And whenever I decide to integrate a new process technique system into my ranking process, it gets tested systematically.
Three of their single variable testing on fake websites or actually real live websites that are actually up and running. So I blog about that stuff a lot on diggity marketing.com and then beyond that. So I have a company called lead spring lead spring is completely set up to build rank monetize, and essentially flipped affiliate businesses.
And some people call this a media group. Some people call it an affiliate agency, but. That’s just what we do beyond that. I have a seven figure client facing agency called the search initiatives and we just rank other people’s websites. I have a backlink service called authority builders. I have teach us yo at the affiliate lab and, last year, so to speak, we ran the Chiang Mai SEO conference and three years before that.
But we’re on timeout right now, obviously, but, hopefully if we get this COVID thing worked out, we can get back up and running. Yeah,
Spencer: [00:06:25] definitely. It’s tough for everybody to kind of take a break from conferences and everything like that. I’ve heard great things. Maybe when it’s open next time. Hopefully next year, maybe I’ll make a debt down to Chiang Mai.
I’ve never been, so we’ll, we’ll keep it on the bucket list for now.
Matt Diggity: [00:06:40] Please do. We’d love
Spencer: [00:06:42] to have you. Yeah, absolutely. so. You’ve, you’ve talked a little bit privately with me about a couple sites that you have, in your portfolio that are doing really well. and so I think people are going to be most interested in hearing about those sites, kind of how you’re hands on with those, as opposed to some of the other businesses that you have, like your agency and things like that.
so let’s start at least there. I understand you have a couple of sites that are in the health or fitness niche that. Like I said are doing really well. So maybe explain how well they’re doing and just a little bit of the history of the site. Did you start those? Did you acquire those? What’s the story there?
Matt Diggity: [00:07:20] Sure. Yeah. So let’s laser focus in, on lead spring for this interview. And I think the interesting thing about the questions that you have prepared is we’re really going to get into like the ones that are doing well. Like I’m sure you and I talk about beginner SEO all the time. So let’s talk about like what it takes to get the sites to the five figure level and beyond.
So. Good. These two sites, the ones that you’re referring to, they’re both in the health and fitness niches. So the first one, I’m not going to reveal any names. I respect these businesses too, too much to throw them under the bus. But, so the first one it’s mostly focused on wellness, fitness. Of self discovery.
And I don’t know a little bit of medical too, so diagnosing like issues, side effects and stuff like that too. So in one of the most challenging niches possible, this one we picked up through a private acquisition. So one of the, my main tactics on starting new websites is. Like you have a whole bunch of options.
You can start a website from scratch with a brand new domain. You can start an expired domain, or you can start on an existing website that’s already up and running. So what we did in this case is just put out a post and saying, we’re looking to acquire a business and the health and fitness face. We’re looking for a branded domain.
We’re looking for this, this and that. White hat, backlinks, all that kind of thing. So I put out the feelers and then I got a website with an incredible branded domain. So this is like the type of brand that you would, it would just equate it to like one of the major brands on the internet. If it got big enough, like it’s just got that ring to it.
Right. So we ended up acquiring this website for about. Four to $6,000 somewhere in between there, it didn’t have, it had some Cuban it’s on page one, but no moneymaking keywords. I knew it was in good shape, but I really went for the brain. So that was that first one. And. The second site that we’re talking about, it’s also health and fitness, but it’s a little bit more directed towards the diet space.
A little bit more talking about diet. This one, we purchased off empire flippers and it was making a good 1500 a month or something like that. I believe we got it in our hands for about 40 K $40,000. So this one. Almost in the same niche, but just a little bit skewed more towards that. The good thing about this is the lessons we had learned previously from the first one we know which products are ranked pretty easily.
We know which ones convert. Well, we did duplicate. So now we’re we have keywords and we’re the number one and two result on page one for these certain supplement review keywords and stuff like that. So even though we paid a higher price, this kind of risk was offset a little bit because we knew the niche and we had some experience in it.
Spencer: [00:10:03] And so to clarify, you said the first site, you only spent four to $6,000. so, so less than five figures. correct. So, so these weren’t huge sites, you know, the other one was making, like you said, maybe 1500 bucks a month. Okay. Yeah. Just wanted to kind of set that up, go ahead. And sort of, yeah, carry on with a little bit of the history there and where they’re at now.
Matt Diggity: [00:10:23] Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, they’ve just been through the full gambit, right? So they both started out, well, the first, this one started out as just a baby site. It was outside the sandbox. Wasn’t making any money really. So you just go through the motions and you go through the various stages, content links, content links.
Technical audit, reprints, repeat over and over again, same kind of situation with the second one, but it had a little bit more of a headstart and then they get to the intermediate stage. And then what would you call it? The authority stage, where it’s just like you publish new content. You’re just ranking right away.
And now the super interesting part about these sites for me is there. I don’t have a label for this, but. But I guess they’re entering the mega authority stage. And the interesting part about this, which you’d be interested in as well is we get to apply the skills we’ve learned you and I as full stack digital marketers to sites like these.
So I’m running email funnels, I’m running Facebook ads. I got retargeting funnels. We’re doing stuff like heading merge on the sites. So a whole bunch of different. Other stuff as well, that’s making it super exciting. And that’s why we’re thinking, you know, like this first one with the household name brand, like, let’s see how big we can get it.
Let’s let’s go head to head with bodybuilding.com. Let’s go ahead with shape.com and see if we can take these guys on how much they’re making now. So I have a superstition not to talk exactly about numbers, but I can tell you our goals on these guys is to break a hundred caves by December 31st this year.
So that’s, that’s the direction we’re headed.
Spencer: [00:11:53] Per site or combined?
Matt Diggity: [00:11:55] combined, combined. So 50 K each. And, we’ve been working on these projects for about a year and a half.
Spencer: [00:12:02] Wow. So they’re good size now on a good growth trajectory clearly. if you’ve got that goal to reach that by the end of the year, and you said you’ve been working on both of them now for about a year and a half.
Matt Diggity: [00:12:15] Yeah. Yeah. And I would say in this, with this kind of niche, like in the health fitness, medical niche, the timeline is normally a lot longer. So if you were starting from scratch, it’s a lot longer. This is why I will pick up domains that are already functioning and skip the sandbox to get a little bit of a head start because that, that first traction period can tack on another year to this whole process.
Spencer: [00:12:38] Yup. Yeah, it definitely can. I know people that have followed along with sort of my public case study, it was. Basically a year before I got the site to about a thousand dollars a month, something like that. So it does. So you skip a lot of the early stages, the process, but still going from call it $1,500 a month to whatever it is.
Five figures now in a year and a half is significant. you know, a lot of people never get over that five or $10,000 a month. So I want to dig into. Why and how you were able to do that and specifically, in this particular niche, right? Because there are some additional challenges that come in the health and fitness space, we’ve all heard about your money, your life.
And it sounds like those fit into that category. When you’re talking about even getting into some medical advice a little bit on some of your sites, it sounds like, what sort of challenges do you run into and how do you overcome those?
Matt Diggity: [00:13:31] Yeah, so okay. With these kinds of niches and I think with any other, the, like, why am I on niches?
I know because like my portfolio, isn’t these two shot sites, but there’s certain behaviors you see with these two sites that the rest of the portfolio doesn’t see. And it’s almost like. The, your trajectory of growth is stable for awhile. And then an update happens. Maybe they like you, maybe they don’t, but then it just kind of texts another direction.
Maybe it’s a little bit more in the positive direction. Maybe it’s a little bit in the negative direction and it’s almost like no change happens in between those times, except except when I do something, I’ll tell you what that something is later. Okay. But it almost seems like flat growth. Or positive growth, but it’s also always like the slope of that line is always the same the whole time.
And you don’t really have that much control over it. And it’s always like, what are we doing this for? It’s almost like we’re getting this website prepared. We’re getting the content content prepared. We’re building the links. So when that next update rolls around, they’ll like what they see and then we’ll have a different trajectory.
So it’s a completely different. Situation going on here. It’s it’s like, you’re, you’re more dictated by what the new core algorithm update say than what you do in the meantime now. that’s, that’s one of the most significant things on top of that. They’re super competitive. So. Your biggest ranking factors are content velocity and link velocity.
So no matter what, we really have to like try to out hustle everyone else when it comes to content links. And usually if someone starts to pull ahead or beat us, it’s usually we slip back. And one of those categories, they’re either bigger than us in terms of content size or they’re bigger than us in terms of backlink philosophy or total number of backlinks.
So it’s a pretty big investment, lastly. As you, as you duly noted in these kinds of niches of why I’m by all Nisha is your money, your life. We have to think a lot. I thought about eat expertise, authority, Munis, and trust. And we really didn’t have like the kinds of things we do for eat. I guarantee you, the algorithm doesn’t check right now, but yeah.
When you’re in this mindset of how do we impress them on the next update? You need to start thinking ahead and think, okay, what will they be able to check in the future? Maybe not now, maybe three years from now. So like what can we do to improve our sites?
Spencer: [00:15:48] So can you give us some of your top strategies for expertise, authority, trust, you know, what are things that maybe you’re looking at right now that, that certainly, you know, are important right now, but maybe what are some of those things you alluded to that.
You know, maybe you don’t know that Google’s looking at right now, but maybe they will in the future.
Matt Diggity: [00:16:08] Yeah. Okay. Okay. I’ll, I’ll do the, what we’re doing right now first, because I’ll look less crazy and then we’ll get into how tin, how to him later. So it’s the right now, like the algorithm doesn’t have the, the resources or the code or desire.
To check up on the expertise, authority and trust of your website. Like if you say a guy named Brian Smith is author of this website and he went to Berkeley, they’re not going to go check Berkeley’s records and see like, did this guy really go here? And does he have a background in fitness? Is he really a personal trainer?
They’re not, they don’t have the capability or bandwidth or. Any desire to do that right now, but what they can do is they can check for the opposite of eat, where they just absolutely cannot figure out if there’s anyone legitimate behind this website at all. It’s just fictitional is it completely made up, are there and authors, this is machine generated or whatever.
So the goal right now is just to give all the signals that there’s some ownership behind it. And this is a level above and beyond another affiliate website on the internet. So we start with. The about page and the contact page, right? If you look at it, normal business, normal business, their main goal of the website is they want you to contact them.
So they’re going to give you a hundred different ways to do this. There’s 10 different emails that you can reach out to feedback. customer complaints, inquiries like info sales. Like we have all these different emails listed out, right. Top of that. So we’ll have a whole bunch of different authors.
So there’s not just one author for a website 10. Right. And for our fitness websites, we have, we have doctors on there. We have a, we have. Trainers. We have the marketing team, we have the owners of the website, so a whole list, a whole team behind it. Right. And different ways for you to contact each of them.
And then on top of that, so most real businesses have a physical location, or I’d say a lot of, I wouldn’t say it’s a hard requirement, especially post COVID, but a lot of places have physical locations. So we’d go out and we’d actually establish a name, address, phone number, and even a Google my business.
For our affiliate websites and then reference that on the about page. So here’s our name, address, phone number. We’ll embed a Google map and that’ll reference or actual Google my business. And then you tie that all together in the schema. So schema, you can use op organizational schema and then, you know, you enter in your name, address, phone number, and then you can also use this.
Property called same as so, same as it’s where you can list down and say, our website is the same property as this Facebook page, this Twitter page, this Instagram, all of these different places. So without a doubt, you can see here that. For our crawlers perspective and for what the robot can see, all these check boxes are filled like this is above and beyond what most affiliate websites would do.
And it looks a lot like a normal business. And then on the contact page, you do the same, like an affiliate websites contact page is just contact form seven name and then maybe a capture. And then whatever the body of the email is. But a real website, real business is going to say, you can email us here, or you can use this form here, or if you want to come into our office, here’s the map location.
So we’re just going above and beyond here. He did ask you how, how tin hat does that sound already?
Spencer: [00:19:32] I don’t know about 10 hat, but it is above and beyond. Definitely what I’m doing on my affiliate sites. You already mentioned a few things that I could be doing better there. I, I don’t think that’s crazy.
I mean, certainly talking about the schema and being able to link up all your social profiles and business pages. I think it makes a lot of sense, right? And I think it’s something that probably most affiliates are not doing. So I don’t think it sounds too crazy yet, but it sounds like maybe you’ve got more.
That is a little bit crazier.
Matt Diggity: [00:20:03] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well just, just to rewind a little bit, it’s like the stuff I just talked about now, right. It isn’t that hard to do. This is just someone shitty afternoon. Pardon? My French. It’s just, someone’s bad afternoon. And you do it once and it’s done. Right. So now let’s get into what I’m doing to future proof, my sites.
And a lot of the times when I’m doing masterminds or sitting down with folks, like you smart people in the space, like these are the kinds of questions I’m asking, like, what do you think that they’d be able to figure out with infinite computing resources? So. Now we’re doing stuff like getting real people to be authors.
Yeah. On our website. And I have a couple different techniques. So the first one is I just made a blog post about this. So this is called the influencer pitch. And you just reach out to budding influencers in your niche. So someone who’s just starting to start like a. If fitness, Instagram, or a fitness YouTube channel, you reach out and say like, Hey, I got this website, this website ranks for these different things where we’re looking to compete with these other websites.
We’re looking to grow big. We’re looking for someone to be the face of the brand. So would you be interested in coming on, we’ll put some authorship in your name and all we’re asking and exchanges. Maybe you come on our YouTube channel every once in a while and make a few videos for us. So it’s a solid win-win and we get huge conversion rate for this.
And this also works for doctors as well. So like in the health and medical niche, you can get doctors to represent your brand. You can get fact checkers. So maybe someone who’s. Currently in med school or currently going through like they’re doing their underground biology or something like that, that can do some fact checking on your articles and that it looks like that’s something that they can put on their resume.
Like, Hey, like when I applied to be a doctor or when I’m going to med school, like, look, I already have this experience. In fact, checking here. So you can reach out to these people and it’s pretty easy to do this. Like, honestly, this is also another afternoon’s work just to make these outreach emails and stuff like that.
There’s more gray hat ways to do it too. So if you’re you want a simple way to do it, go to one of the Facebook groups. Where they do a lot of client SEO. And you just say like, who has a doctor, client who has a doctor client? And then you’re going to have 40 people say, I have doctor clients message them and say, do you want a backlink from a dr.
50 website? All I’m just asking you to put your doctor’s face on the about page boom done. And then here’s your futuristic future proofing for some kind of algorithmic checking on whether people are actually expertise, authority, and trust for your website. So. That would be like EMT type stuff. And other other things I think about too, is what about, what about like custom images, right?
Like maybe that’s the sign of a real established website that can be trustworthy if they’re not using stock images. So other crazy things we’re doing is like, we’ll go to a coffee shop and we’ll hang our logo on the back wall and take 500 pictures. Right. And then when it’s time to review products, alright, we Photoshop them on top all of our pictures.
So it looks like. We’re actually reviewing the products, call that gray hat, call it whatever you want. I look at it as a high ROI way to get featured in custom images.
Spencer: [00:23:17] Yeah, I love it. I think it’s a way to establish yourself. Really as a real business, right? This is what real businesses would be doing, as opposed to just the next affiliate website.
And so I think that’s smart people, can, can take that and apply that to their business, related to eat, is link building. And I, I, I want to. Ask you, how important do you think link building is for that expertise, authority and trust? We kind of mostly focused kind of on on-page stuff you can do to establish your authority there, but certainly link-building is still important.
And when Google is making these sort of eat updates, as some people might say, is it really the links that’s causing the algorithm shifts? or is it mostly the on-page stuff that you’ve been talking
Matt Diggity: [00:24:04] about? Yeah, that’s a good question. I think. I think if we look at the history of Google, it’s always been the links that are used to establish the trust of a website.
Like that’s why Google is Google. That’s why they exist. Got a head against AOL search engine against Yahoo search engine because they put faith in this concept called a backlink, which they’re going to use as a phone from one website to another. And I think, right, like that’s still. Out of every SEO ranking signal, they’re all manipulatable.
Let’s, let’s be Frank. Everything could be manipulatable, but backlinks are the hardest backlinks from good real websites are the hardest. So I still think it’s probably the biggest signal that can be used to establish expertise, authority, and trust. And are they going to phase that out eventually? I’m sure they want to.
Right. It’s just, it’s another, I mean, the ultimate goal of Google is just to be able to read every piece of content on the internet and tell you which one’s best, but they have to rely on these factors for now. Right?
Spencer: [00:25:00] Yeah, I agree. And so, as it relates to link building, I want to spend a little bit of time here now.
because link building is something that, can either be really difficult for some people. or it can just be really time consuming, as you explained, I think we all know it’s important. some people rely on just getting sort of links naturally because they do produce great content. Maybe they do some social sharing and it does snowball and eventually, you know, their sites rank, pretty well.
I know you’re a little bit more active at link building. And you talked about link velocity a little bit earlier. so where I’m going with this is because this is a question and that I genuinely have, I sort of have my own strategies that I look at, but when I produce a new piece of content, I write a new article.
So maybe for one of your health sites, you’re doing a review on a particular product or something. And you publish that article. You’ve probably looked at your competitors to know how many words or how long, the piece of content. Kind of should be. is that the same process that you follow to figure out?
How many links do you just look at? Okay. The average number of links in the top 10 results of Google is, is 10 links to this page. So I need 10 links. Is it, is it that simple or is there a little bit more that you do to figure out how many links do you need to build to an article to rank it? Number one in Google.
Matt Diggity: [00:26:18] Right. So that’s a really good question. I mean, I completely agree with you. I think the right philosophy to have when it comes to ranking in Google is just see what already worked on page one, the answers right there. You’re playing poker with someone. And their cards are showing backwards. So what I do as far as backlinks goes, I’ll typically look at the top three rankers.
Like people look at the top five, but I don’t want to be in the top. I want to be in the top three. So the top three guys, and then I’m going to look at all their do follow different domains going to the exam. Yeah. You were all set our ranking, right? So let’s say. Website number one, this website, number one, it’s ranked number one for the keyword I want to rank for.
It’s got 10 links in the DRF, 20 to 30 category domain rating. And then from 2030 to 40, they have five links from 40 to 50. They have four links. So I have a power breakdown. So I’ve got. A breakdown per power category, then I’ll do the same for two and three. And then from these guys, I’ll have an average per power bucket.
So I know I need based on these top three guys, I need to build seven links to Yara 20 to 30. I need 12 links, 30 to 40, et cetera. And then I know how many links I have. And then I’ll just compute what’s the gap. So how many do I need to build in each power bucket to close the distance, so to speak. Now there’s some pitfalls here.
So let’s say I’m a website and I’m trying to compare myself against three D or 60 websites. So a backlink for me, isn’t the same power as a backlink for them. They got a whole bunch of power already from their whole overall demand authority and internal linking, which you know very much about. So. What you need to do is you need to multiply by a scaling factor.
And the scaling factor is exponential, like to get from a dr. 20 to 30. Is much more to get from or much less than get from 30 to 40. So there’s an exponential scaling factor that you need to consider. Also, you don’t want to what I’d like to call black sheep yourself. Like if everyone ranked on page one with 10 links, then you don’t want to be the one sending.
Right. Because that makes me stick out like a sore thumb. It’s just diminishing returns. Then you can just dig a hole from yourself for yourself. So in the kind of case you would max out on the niche or max out on how many links you need to send to that URL based on the max of the niche. And you would send more links to these pages that are internally linking to the one you want to rank.
That’s how I do it pretty much.
Spencer: [00:28:47] Yeah. I think that’s really smart. I like that strategy a lot. And so to, to follow up on that, So, if you know, you, you figured that you need X number of links in this 30 to 40 dr. Category. Let’s, let’s call it five. but you don’t feel like you can get those links. Are you going to be able to get there?
If you build, you know, 10, you know, less valuable links sort of in the call it the, the 20 to 30 range, right. Can you kind of double up on lower quality links? I know I’m kind of setting this up, but have you seen that work? Right. So if. You do get those twice as many links, but maybe they’re lower value.
Can you still rank, even though the sites maybe have a fewer, more valuable links?
Matt Diggity: [00:29:33] I definitely wouldn’t build below. Right. So if you’re supposed to build in 30 to 40 category, I don’t think it you’re doing yourself a favor by building the 20, 30 to replace replace those there’s. I like to think of links to supply different types of metrics, power, which comes from PageRank algorithm, but also relevance, which is.
Pretty easy to establish, but also trust. Trust is the one that comes from your high authority links, right? So while you might be filling the power category with the same amount or even more of the lower authority links, you’re still not getting that trust delivery, which is highly required in the health niche.
For example, like I’ve also played around with some easy, easy niches. That are more niche and don’t have any why and why all aspects and you don’t need that kind of like trust. You can rank with gray hat links you can rank with just garbage, but in certain niches, you definitely want the trust.
Spencer: [00:30:32] Yeah. So how are you acquiring these types of links, in this particular niche?
You know, these ones that are higher domain authority or dr. and maybe are a little bit harder to get.
Matt Diggity: [00:30:43] Ooh. Okay. So I just want to say like, EV these types of links are yet to build in the health, fitness, or health, fitness, or CBD niches. Like all these casino niches, like pretty much, you want to go for anything, you can get your hands on, but let’s laser in on the high authority links.
So. You can do your typical outreach. So you can outreach for guest posts and Lincoln sessions. And I think that they have their place for sure. This is where you’re going to get a bulk of your back links. And they’re going to make up the mid range of where your quality links spectrum is coming from. So most of your links are going to come from this kind of area now to get these dr.
70 and above links. So you got to kind of think outside the box. One of the first techniques I’ll be using is I use concept called social proof. So. Great sources of, of getting backlinks are who am I promoting in my affiliate Roundup pro. So I’m promoting these seven supplements. Let’s reach out to each of them and make sure that they know we’re featuring them and try to get a backlink from them.
And then you can also up the ante and say like, you know, we really liked your product. How about we give you a crafty testimonial? You can put on the homepage of your website and then just link back to us and then we’ll call it a day. Right? So now we got a dr. 80 link from a, some sites homepage. This is really starting to snowball now.
So you can do stuff like this. You can also preemptively before you actually write the content and say like, I need some more information about your product before I write about it. Can you, can you let me know? everything you know about it, like, give me your customer testimonials, what are your features and benefits, but also how about this?
What if I can get you ranked a little bit higher and I can expedite your ranking in the, in the list. Maybe you can give me a back link in the process. So you set up that link before you even write the content some other way to do it to other other things you can do is you can. After write testimonials for maybe software in your niche or otherwise products that maybe you’re not even reviewing, but they have something to do with you.
Especially when you get real influences on your website. You can start to leverage that when you start to look like a real brand, then your word is valuable here. So that’s one outside the box tactic that I’m working on right now and been doing for quite some time. on top of that is what some people would call it, digital PR.
So digital PR is when you craft some pretty awesome story about your website, something that can go viral and then you reach out to journalists in the space and you say, Hey, I’ll give you access to this story. Just forward this along to New York times, New York post Fox news, stuff
Spencer: [00:33:17] like that. So I want to hear more about this.
Of course, I can’t let you just mention New York times Fox news, Fox news, and possibly getting links and not dig into that a little bit more. So. How do you craft a piece? I mean, yeah, this is sort of the golden goose, if you will, right. If you’re able to, to really craft a piece and this is way beyond what most affiliates even think about, right.
Is, actually reaching out to real journalists that might mention your article or your website in a large publication. So how do you go about both thinking of ideas that might work and I guess. How do you actually connect with those journalists and make that happen?
Matt Diggity: [00:33:59] Right. So this is something that we’ve been working on this year.
At the beginning of this year, I, and found myself making a post on social, saying this whole thing, overboard and garbage for the fill it. And the issue is there’s no way you would need something like that for affiliate website. And I’m eating my foot right now, because it’s just remember how I told you that in these different nice, it’s almost feels like you’re only get movement during the core algorithm updates.
This is the only thing that seems to change the trajectory. And I think it has to do with these things going super viral. And getting a huge traffic injection to your site, sending off user metric algorithms and then changing the momentum mid, mid update. Right? So. How to do this. This is like we’re by no means experts on this, but what we’ve found working so far is usually the type of content that you want to put on your site is highly research based.
So something that looks like this is, this is some kind of research that got put out. And they didn’t just scrape the internet to find this. It looks like they, they did a study or surveyed some people or something like that. So when covert first hit, we made a study. Yeah. We sent a bunch of quizzes to people at home, a bunch of moms staying at home and asking, how has this affected your fitness?
So what, how many pounds have you gained? And then we broke this down to a state by state basis. We ranked the state’s top, top number one to top 50, and we had the worst States and the best States in terms of. Who’s been impacted from the state home foreign team kind of thing. And then, so this kind of information, especially at the right time, right now, it wouldn’t work as well.
But at that moment, you know, you reach out to journalists and we got published all over the place we’re on, we’re actually on Fox news. So they actually showed a video that described our story and stuff like that. it doesn’t always work. So this is, this is the one thing too. We wanted to, we still do want to productize this at authority builders, but.
It is not a hundred percent success rate. So it has to do with timing. It has to do with the cleverness of the story this has to do with what if the journalists are distracted by the election. So it’s not, it’s not consistent, but we’re working on it and we’re getting better at it.
Spencer: [00:36:09] Yeah. That’s really interesting.
Certainly it’s timely. It has the opportunity to go viral and get way more links than perhaps you thought. is, is it just as easy as finding here’s the sort of person that covers this type of story at Fox or whatever news organization, you just find those hundred people and
Matt Diggity: [00:36:26] email them. Yeah. So this is the part where.
We don’t have down, we’re gonna have to outsource this part, this, so these kinds of relationships with the journalists need to be built up over years. So this is the part that we’re outsourcing and leveraging other people’s existing relationships. Yeah.
Spencer: [00:36:43] Yup. Yup. It might be able to have contacts with authors that write at Forbes or Fox news or wherever.
and you’re right. Yeah. It’s not just somebody that, you can pick up the phone and call it. You’d probably have to have connections to be able to do that. so that, that absolutely makes sense. Oh, what, what am I missing here? I know you are doing a lot of interesting things, and have been able to, to acquire a lot of interesting links.
I just want to make sure there wasn’t anything that you were willing to share here that, I sort of glossed over. That’s worked really well on these couple of sites that you have.
Matt Diggity: [00:37:17] So the, the bread and butter of the backlinking is like I mentioned, it’s guest posts and Lincoln sessions. So that’s the most common link we’re doing citations as well.
We do infographic outreach, expert roundups. We do a lot of image outreach. So this is maybe something that’s new for your podcast. So what we’ll do is we’ll go out and we’ll, we’ll get a professional photographer to take a bunch of pictures and upload them somewhere like a Pixabay and stuff like that.
And if someone uses a photo, then we reach out to them and say like, Hey. As, you know, you downloaded this from a free, image sharing platform and stuff like that, you know, and you’re no way obligated to do this, but yeah, it would really help our business. If you could give us some, some credit for the image and we can produce more and, you know, maybe work together in the future, something like that.
So there’s, there’s white hat and there’s black hat ways to do this. So these are brands that we’re looking to nurture for quite some time. So we’re doing the white hat version and a lot of links can be gained this way.
Spencer: [00:38:16] Yeah, what’s sure. success rate on something like that, reaching out to people that have linked to an image.
And the reason I asked this is because I know, and I just haven’t had time to do it yet looking at my site on the yard. you know, it does decent on Pinterest and a lot of people will grab my images either from my site or Pinterest and. And they’ll put a copy of my image on their site without a link to my site.
I see tons of those. So I should probably reach out and say, Hey, you know, would you mind just adding, you know, the sources on the r.com? but just curious, what sort of success rate you have? Is it, you know, 2%, 10%, something
Matt Diggity: [00:38:54] like that? Between three to 5%, something like that, which is actually not that bad.
Considering most guests posts have like a one to 2% conversion and they cost money every time these are free and two to 3% is better. Yeah.
Spencer: [00:39:10] Yeah, absolutely.
Matt Diggity: [00:39:13] You
Spencer: [00:39:13] mentioned something as well. You mentioned link velocity, but you also mentioned content velocity. And so I know people listening in are probably just curious how much content you’ve put on the site.
you know, from, from where it started a year and a half ago to kind of now, and how much content are you producing on a regular basis and, and how do you determine that content velocity?
Matt Diggity: [00:39:36] We just try to outpace the main competitors in our niche. And when I say competitors, I’m looking at. The people where we want to be, not, not where we’re at right now, where we want to be.
So I’ll look and see how fast are they producing. And I want to outpace that because if we just match it, then it all always looked like this. We’ll just always be pacing each other together and we’ll always be behind. So basically we try to outrun them and in our niches, So in health and fitness, it’s about one post a day.
So we try to one new post page, piece of content per day. And yeah, it’s, it’s a beast of a system. So there’s writers writing at all times as editors turning there’s designers, uploading all the time. But any type of, I can say it like clockwork, if. Anytime that I can’t figure out why someone’s ranking above me.
Like we have better links, we have better onsite optimization and we’ve done all the things, our technical SEO. It’s always just, they have a thousand page website and we have 300 pages, something like that. It’s just so much topical relevance that is built again, as you know, from interlinking. Yeah. Get these pieces of content, linking to each other.
There’s so much. Left on the table all the time with topical relevance, internal link building, you, you’ve made a really smart decision in the industry to capitalize on that and hopefully get people to see the light. That interlinking is the key in a lot of cases.
Spencer: [00:40:59] Yeah, no, absolutely. And, of course I, I agree that, you can see, see a lot of that.
Matt Diggity: [00:41:04] I actually want to
Spencer: [00:41:05] just. Follow up to sort of the digital PR strategies that you’re using. So you are producing a piece of content and you’re putting it on your site and hopefully getting a lot of links from, from press that’s mentioning that is that piece of content, really something you’re trying to rank in Google, or you just using that piece of content as sort of, you know, a link builder that then you are internally linking out to the pieces that you actually want to
Matt Diggity: [00:41:33] rank.
Really good question. So it’s, it’s entirely linked bait, right? Even the title that you put behind it, like 45% of Americans that bubble a lot like that has no keyword volume behind. Yeah. So you set this up. Even the title is purely for click and link bait. The whole article, no sidebar, you go full with you have no money, ties links, and there are no ads running on that page.
It just completely clean. Then once that campaign’s done, then you toss in those internal links. You can put on whatever you want.
Spencer: [00:42:03] Yep. Perfect. Yep. Just wanted to clarify that. That’s what I assumed. So, very good. We have just a few minutes here. I don’t even know if we have time to jump into, I know you have another lead gen site that’s done really well also with lead spring, right?
It’s under that umbrella, as well. maybe you can just give us briefly, how well that site’s doing anything different that you’re doing there as opposed to these other. Health and fitness sites.
Matt Diggity: [00:42:30] Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, my bread and butter is affiliate, but a couple of years ago, we entered in a JV through our lead spring launch pad program with a buddy of mine, who I had known for years.
He’s an SEO, but he’s also a real estate agent by trade and he’s, he’s a gun and he’s awesome at it. So he had this vision of making an authority website that ranks nationally that’s used for lead gen for real estate. He would handle the leads. Sell houses, condos, apartments, and stuff like that. And we would rank it and generate the leads.
And the idea, I mean, is that a $1,001 million condo, right? Like the commission that the real estate agent gets on, that kind of thing is in the five figure range. So we will split that. We’ll find a fair split and we’ll inequity in the business. So that one. Right. There was a lot of new lessons that needed to be learned there.
So we’re dealing with local based SEO. We have city, we have building landing pages. We have city landing pages. We have neighborhoods, we have States, we have all these different ways. We have to silo it down and structure it. So there was, it was a architectural, like you have to be much more architecturally minded with this kind of niche.
and then also like this one took a super long time to get started. Right. So all these authority sites, if you type in. Condos in Chicago, right. You’re going to see some of the biggest 30 sites in the United States. So we had to close that gap and we saw nothing. We saw nothing for years, a year and a half, and then all of a sudden it just turned around and now we’re, we’re doing pretty good.
We’re generating good leads and it’s, it’s making good money. Definitely. Definitely impacted by COVID. Apparently people don’t want to buy houses without seeing, without seeing them, but, it’s yeah. It’s, it’s still our biggest earner for sure. Which is pretty interesting.
Spencer: [00:44:16] Yeah. And, I, you know, I assume a lot of similar principles apply, as you mentioned, you know, sort of establishing authority on your site.
Doing some link building. and so Matt, you shared a lot of really interesting strategies and I’m sure listeners wish I would dig in even more for another hour or so. but I, I actually want, I’m not sure if you know, but I actually did just in the last. Couple of weeks. I signed up for a package on authority builders, for one of my sites.
And so you guys are gonna start building some links. I hooked up with one of your guys there. And so we’ve started the process there. Like I said, it’s only been a couple of weeks, so obviously I don’t have anything to report there yet, but I am excited to, You know, have one of my sites get some links that you guys are involved with.
And I think it’s really smart. You guys have come up with, your, your ABC plus I think is what you’re calling it and which is. Basically just hands-off right. Like I pay a thousand bucks a month and you guys are out building links for my site, which I love, you know, a busy sort of entrepreneur like myself.
I always have too many projects and I’ve got software, I’ve got this podcast, I’ve got my other affiliate sites to be able to just say, you know what, here’s a thousand bucks. You guys. Build some links for me. I love it. I think it’s a great solution. what’s kind of been the feedback on that. Maybe just explain a little bit more what, you know, authority builders and ABC plus a, is that as well?
Matt Diggity: [00:45:40] Yeah, first off, welcome aboard. I think you’ll like the results feedback has been awesome. We hear success stories all the time on both new and established sites. So the process is pretty straight forward. I’ve already described half of it with how to figure out what kind of links your site needs is. By reverse engineering the top three.
So that’s how we figure out which power categories of the links we need to send your site. The other half of that is figuring out how to optimize it. So what kind of anchor texts those top three people sent? So are they super optimized? This is the niche. Very, very optimized. And we need to go in hard with target anchor text, or do we need to really go conservative?
Is it mostly branded anchor text? So. We come up with this niche specific target anchor text profile that we start to work towards over month month. So the, I think that’s half of it is you get the analysis done for you. The other half of it is, is we start supplying those links month from month from websites that we deem to be the best that we work with.
Right? So these are the ones that have solid traffic. They have great performance. We’ve seen them. Exhibit nice ranking increases for our customers before these are all websites, real websites that rank and Google that have their own rankings. Like if Google didn’t like them, they wouldn’t rank them themselves and just rinse and repeat.
And it seems like a simple process so to speak, but there’s a lot that goes into the analysis of it, which is. Interesting because this month we’re offering all this analysis that I talked about, the link gap analysis and the anchor text analysis for free, which all supply you with the link to.
Spencer: [00:47:14] Yeah. and so yeah, we are, if people want to sort of take advantage of that, like you mentioned, I’m offering that for free.
As I understand, you’re going to be able to hop on a call, with, people right. And, and sort of, discuss with them. Their website and sort of the link gap analysis. Yeah. And other issues there, to do a consultation with your team there at authority builders, And, I’ll make sure we have sort of a link that redirects to the proper link there, but we’ll go to niche, pursuits.com/authority builders.
They can take advantage of that deal. How long are you going to be offering this sort of free consultation?
Matt Diggity: [00:47:53] Yeah, so it’s a lot of work. so we’ll probably be able to offer this to the end of the month. So October 31st, I have to admit that we’ll be able to do anchor text analysis for everybody. So let’s just say the first 50 people that sign up through your link will do the anchor text analysis for, but for everyone else, we’ll do the link app analysis.
So we’ll tell you the power categories that you need to build to close gap. And like you said, to jump on a call. Well, actually sit down and explain how we come up with this, how we’d run the process. So if anything, you’ll just learn a lot.
Spencer: [00:48:24] Yeah, absolutely. So people can take that free plan. They can implement it on their own if they want, or if they want to have you guys is actually go out and build all the links, you know, based on sort of this plan.
it’s, it’s an easy, you know, sort of, you guys are all set up to do that. You’ve got the history and ability to make that happen.
Matt Diggity: [00:48:41] Yeah, absolutely. That’s that’s the whole thing.
Spencer: [00:48:43] Yeah. And, you know, it’s, it’s one of those things, like you mentioned, it’s, it’s really easy to kind of explain, okay. You need these types of links.
All of the analysis is not easy, I guess. For guys like you and I maybe we’ve been around it a long time and we maybe think that way, but certainly for people that are building sites, the analysis can be the hard part. So I shouldn’t brush over that. but I guess the point I was making is that once you get to the implementation stage, you guys have been at this for years.
You’ve got a large network of either site owners or just other relationships that does make link building a lot easier. And so that for me, I guess, is really the big advantage. Is this the time I can hand it off and let somebody like you guys take it and run with it.
Matt Diggity: [00:49:26] That’s the way I look at it too. You either exchanging time or money and a certain point in your business or at a certain evaluation of your business, you might just decide here’s what I’m good at.
And this is where I want to put my time and we’ll take care of the rest.
Spencer: [00:49:41] Absolutely. Matt congrats on the success of your businesses. Thank you for diving in and sharing a lot of those strategies with us. like I said, we could probably go on for another hour here kind of diving into all the details, but you’ve given a lot of really good, actionable advice.
I think for people that they can go and apply to their own sites, Any final thoughts? either just sort of motivational words for affiliate, you know, marketers or people building sites or any sort of final tips or strategies that I didn’t have a chance to cover here.
Matt Diggity: [00:50:16] Yeah. Maybe just a little bit of motivation.
I came from a background in electrical engineering background. It was, it was hard work and I always kind of felt like I would either be trading hap I would always be trading happiness for money, and I could say. Whether it be SEO, like we’re doing affiliate SEO, whether you’re running a podcast like Spencer or running a SAS business.
The key is that it’s yours and this kind of good feeling to wake up and know that you’re in control of your destiny and what work you put in, you’re going to get out of it. And you’re completely responsible for yourself is worth its weight in gold, right there. You don’t have to be super successful. You don’t have, I have to be, you know, you just need to be on the right path and know you’re doing the right things for yourself and taking care of your own future.
That’s that’s what it’s all about. Keep trucking away.
Spencer: [00:51:05] I agree. It’s all about having that autonomy to work on what you want, what you’re passionate about, be able to apply that to your business and hopefully be able to see the rewards both financially and timewise and just being able to yeah. Focus like you said, on, on what you want to put this on.
So, Matt, thank you so much, so much for coming on the podcast. I appreciate your time.
Matt Diggity: [00:51:24] Always a pleasure. Take care. See you next time.
Spencer: [00:51:26] Alright. Thank you.
