Stewart Vickers

One of my first jobs had been a journalism role writing clickbait we posted on Facebook and shared into groups to get traffic. 

This was when most major news sites were closing down thanks to quality free content being so widely available. 

We pivoted and attempted to promote products – mostly clothing – in our content for an affiliate commission. 

I tried to recreate that for my own site based on my interest in dressing up communities like vintage, goth and cosplay.

This had some limited success – one post went truly viral after I saw a broad interview with a major costume department head where she casually mentioned she couldn’t find quality talent. 

I referenced that in an article and targeted it to some huge groups where the main topic of conversation was always the struggle to get decent working conditions and pay. 

Some 10,000 hits within 72 hours later I had certainly made a dent in the community. 

But apart from some banner ad revenue and a couple of email signups there wasn’t any long term value.

But months later I noticed some of my articles were continuing to draw in traffic over time. 

What’s more is they were even generating revenue. 

I had reported on a costume manufacturer releasing a line of costumes based on a popular game, and now that page was high on Google whenever someone searched for those costumes and I was getting a little commission on each unit sold.

That’s when it hit me. 

I had heard of SEO before but, like many people I encounter now, had thought it a kind of special sauce. 

You tick a few boxes on WordPress after you’ve written something interesting, put your topic in the keyword box, and that means you should get some traffic from Google.

This is what I see so many people assuming all the time from small bloggers to massive brands.

The major mistake we’ve all made is in assuming that anyone is actually searching for what we’ve written about. 

You have to flip it around. 

Find out what they are searching and write that. 

Do it 100 times and you have a big asset. 

You can stop churning out short term Facebook posts and dancing on Tiktok. 

You can stop pestering yourself to write blog posts no one reads. 

You can stop cold emailing and DM’ing.

That’s the kind of pointless work my colleagues and I were doing at my first insurance job. 

Random social posts and emails just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something stuck, all while paying five figures a month on ads. 

I kept on pitching SEO, but my seniors just couldn’t understand how writing blog posts equated to selling insurance policies.

Fast forward a year or two and I had advanced and refined my skills considerably and had a profitable blog on the side, which I was open about to them.

I was allowed to try a little experiment. 

I wrote a few blog posts and a week later the phones started ringing.

Now that insurance company totally smashed it.

But sure enough I soon got headhunted to a bigger insurance company. 

That’s where I saw what big SEO agencies were up to. 

Charging a fortune for things I had done in house for next to nothing. 

But given how corporations work my guidance didn’t have any authority behind it. I ended up very depressed and frustrated, building web pages for people who wanted to change a button colour or tweak a headline because the next person higher up had changed their mind. 

All while publishing blog posts on National Pie Week and other corporate fluff that looked good on Linkedin but no one was ever going to read.

They were distracted by minutiae that looked and sounded good rather than committing to the huge Power Levers that could transform the business’ bottom line.

So I quit and started what would become an incredible journey to build a six-figure agency in less than six months.