A lot of people who this blog will attract are people who want to make a living without leaving their couch, they want to earn a lot of money with a little effort. Well I went out and did it for you, and documented every step so that you could follow it step by step and recreate it, how does £3,100 per month for working 5 hours per week sound to you?

Alas… here is my guide on:

How to Start an SEO Agency and Make £3,000 Per Month

Well I did it in 2 weeks and this is exactly how step by step and the best part? If you cant replicate this get off my blog IMMEDIATELY! It really is that easy.

Here look – this is a screenshot of my brand new paypal account, the only payments ever made to it are shown here, I started this experiment on 12^th August, it took 2 days to make my first monehs.

This case study will show you how set up an agency and earned enough to live a very comfortable lifestyle working only 5 hours per week. I’ll give you dump files that you can copy and paste and tell you exactly how to replicate what I have done.

I’ll show you:

What tools you need

How to use them

How to get clients

How to manage them

How to be extremely lazy and still make £3000 a month on about 5 hours per week

This started off as an experiment when I was talking to one of my mates at the pub, I have built a 6 figure digital agency and was saying that I could do it again, so he challenged me. Here is the result and how you can do it too….

For those of you who are lazy and wil never put this into action then here are the steps:

1)   Use my guide that shows you exactly how to link build

2)   Join the freelance sites listed below

3)   Send them the message I have written for you

4)   Get paid

5)   Use all of the other bountiful resources at the bottom to fulfill your clients dream

Now if you’re serious and want to actually make money….

Lets get into it….

First off you need to have:

Moz.com pro subscription

Citation labs tools (all 3 tools located at http://citationlabs.com/tools)

A Buzzstream.com account [NOTE: I am now using Ninja outreach aswell, which is fucking awesome!, guide coming soon]

Go out and buy these services right now! If you can’t afford them, find a way to afford them, get the jobs first if you have to, but you NEED these 3 things to use this strategy.  They will cost you under £70 per month and they will make you in excess of £3000, well this is the recurring rate I have earned in the last 2 weeks (14^th-29^th August).

Congratulations you are already better than 90% of the SEO guys that I see. These 3 tools + you are the avengers of link building, they are essentially the heavy lifting and you are the planner (think Ironman but you don’t need the suit).

(NOTE: Want to create a proven,consistent traffic and SEO strategy (that you can sell for at least £300 to your clients) by filling in some blanks on my template? Yeah… it’s that easy! Get my Traffic Strategy Mini Product here)

Step 1 – How we build links

First off we are going to choose a position for our agency, you have various options here, you can be a content marketing agency, an outreach agency and everything else is shit, if you’re not doing one of these 2 things then you’re not a real agency in my opinion.

For the sake of this case study we’re going to be link building via outreach for our clients as I think this is the most in demand services of the SEO arsenal.

Ok so in general you only need to be able to do 3 things to run an outreach agency:

You need to know how to link build (properly)

You need to get clients

You need to make reports

The link building part

Okay so there are a couple of basic steps included in a link building campaign:

Choosing a medium to contact people, I’ve done this for you, we’re going to email them using my swipe files and then follow up by phone if we haven’t heard from them.

Finding targets, this is probably the hardest part, so I’ve basically done it for you, you will use the search strings that I provide you with to fins targets.

It is then a simple process of going through and contacting people and asking for a link, people make this out to be really hard but I honestly find it very easy and you will too.

So you want to know what to type into Google to find people who will want to link back to you, here it is….

Types of link we will be building

From now on we will be working exclusively with 4 type of links:

Broken Links

Guest Posts

Links Pages

Link Network

The meaning of each of these is below-

Broken links are our bread and butter, this gives you some guaranteed links each month for your reports.

Guest posts should only really be done for traffic but if you need to get a few extra links each month they are easy to find using the advanced operator at the in the pdf at the bottom of this post (you can even buy some if required).

Links pages, this is where we will make our money, we will target the very highest authority sites and ask them for a link because what we have will be valuable to their readers.

2 methods of link building that your competition aren’t doing

We can use 2 different techniques to get these links:

1)    the one mentioned below using buzzstream etc

2)    we will find a resource that has been linked to a lot (again our mozbar will show us anything with 100+ links), we then simply create something better and approach each and every person who links to it and show them our new version which is much better and should have their link 😉

Eventually you will all own a link network (I will show you how to build one in a future article) for now it doesn’t matter but this will give you access to 10-30 very powerful links that you will use to give your clients site the boost in serps that will keep them paying for your services.

If you can get a few of each of these types of links each month then people will be more than happy to pay you £50 per hour, it just so happens that our minimum monthly amount of time is 10 hours, this means for each new client we make a minimum of £500 per month.

Choose your angle

You need to select an angle that will be attractive to your list of targets, good examples of this are if your clients site has a unique way of doing things (a recent client was a travel agent who allowed their customers to “bid” on a holiday). You need to either use an angle they already have or create an angle for them.

This gives us an idea of where to begin our search, my angle for the client above was “the ebay of travel”. Attractive right?

Build your search string

Now who are my targets for links? Travel bloggers!

How will I approach them? Email then follow up by phone!

How do I find them? I type “travel” blog inurl:links –expedia

This is a simple search string that looks for any site with travel used in it, it will probably say blog somewhere (but doesn’t have to), it has a links page and is not on expedia. You can use your own initiative to play around with this, I have also listed some more in the pdf at the bottom of this post.

Or use this handy free tool from buzzstream http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building-query-generator

Simply fill in the 8 fields and you will be presented with a set of search strings to use, things such as guest post opportunities, directory sites in your industry and a whole lot of other queries, either way if you don’t understand what I said above or are too lazy to put them into practice then these queries should be worth a couple of thousand nice link targets, read this as “a years worth of getting paid”

Put them into Link Prospector

THIS IS A BASIC GUIDE TO DOING EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED TO WITH LINK PROSPECTOR, THERE IS A SHIT TON MORE YOU CAN DO WITH IT BUT FOR NOW THIS IS ALL YOU NEED!

Once we have a few of these “operators” we will put them into link prospector and let it do it’s thing, I find that 5 operators often brings about 1000-2000 potential link targets, this is more than enough for any campaign.

You will want to click create new campaign

Then find prospects

You then enter a name for your report, and click on “links pages” from the drop down, there are loads of options here and feel free to experiment with them but for the sake of this report I’m showing you how to build links pages links.

You can see additional options that you should familiarize yourself with, this is good for if you are trying to rank a local site etc etc

You are then free to put in your research phases so head back over to  buzzstream and choose 5 from that huge list and add “inurl:links” (or anything else that somebody might name a page to put links on, some examples are listed below) to them here

Click submit and wait for your report to generate, this can take a few minutes depending on what parameters you have in place, there are some much more advanced options available in link propspector and that guide will be coming soon, for now this is about building this 1 specific link.

As you can see this campaign has produced 2101 results of course they are absolutely useless as the search terms mean nothing, there are also some excluded results, this is because I have some results filtered out of all of my campaigns because I will never ever get a link from them, this is sites like Wikipedia etc etc

Tap that export paths button and it’ll give you a nice csv file, we are now done with link prospector for now.

Put our targets into Buzzstream

AGAIN A VERY BRIEF GUIDE TO DOIN SOMETHING SPECIFIC, THIS IS A VERY POWERFUL TOOL THAT HAS MANY USES BUT WE DON’T NEED THEM FOR THIS CASE STUDY

When link prospector has done it’s job, it can take a few minutes depending on the number of targets it finds for you, we then export it as a csv and throw it into buzzstream.

First things first, you need to enable projects, this is very important when managing multiple clients go into your settings menu and make sure you select manage projects and then enable projects. This allows you to split up your uploaded link opportunities into projects rather than use the default option, which is just a massive pile of links in alphabetical order.

Now that that is set up, set up a new project and select it from the top left drop down menu, then hit “websites” “add websites” “import from existing file”.

You then have a list of different vendors who are compatible here, obviously we have used citation labs, so click it.

We exported paths right? So select that option and upload your csv file that we downloaded earlier.

VOILA….

Once this is done, you will have all of the contact info for each and every one of those lovely prospects, click on the view in buzzbar option. This will allow you to go through each of the targets we have found and see if they are suitable to be contacted for a link.

The criteria to look for in a link target

They are not in competition with you (your competition will not link to you)

The PA is over 30 (my minimum is 50 but these are much harder to get, 30 will be more than enough to improve your clients rank)

It looks like a well-kept personal site (these are less likely to ask for money)

Contact them

You send them a personal email, in the first instance we need to approach 10 people, we will then base our next step on the responses we get, I have never failed to get at least 1 link from 10 approaches using the swipe at the bottom of this post. Edit it so that it suits your needs and send it to those first lucky 10.

The next step is to see how many have replied and been positive and make adjustments and send to 30 more, this is enough for each week. (SNEAKY MOFO TIP: put your phone number at the bottom of your outreach emails, this adds authority/professionalism to your email and will improve your response rate by a shit ton).

If after a week you haven’t heard back from these people then, if you can find their contact info give them a cheeky call and ask politely for a link. This improves link success rate by around 100%. OH MY!

To track what you are doing, you need to keep a spreadsheet updated with who you have contacted and what their response was. There is a sample at the bottom of this post. If you aren’t using a spreadsheet you’re going to get lost, trust me on this.

Mozbar (our new best mate)

Our best friend from now on is the moz bar, for every single search you do, you should be looking at the PA and DA of the front page, generally if both of these are below that of your site then you’re going to rank fairly quickly.  You should also be keeping an eye out for potential link partners, will this site link to you? You can keep track of these using the buzzmarker which will add the site to your buzzstream list of targets.

Get some people to give you money

The aim is to get 3-4 clients in month 1, which is not difficult and then to add 1-2 new clients each month from then on.

We ourselves will be doing the manual outreach ourselves, for around 5 hours per month per client, broken links and guest posting is grunt work so we will be paying somebody in India or Ukraine to do for us for around $5 per hour. When you’re being paid £50 per hour then this $5 is a drop in the ocean. You’re making a shit load of profit for sitting around on your arse.

Okay so where will you find clients, this is very easy to do and there are tons of ways to do this, by far the easiest way is to wait for people to come to you, but that isn’t an option yet, the next easiest way is to use freelance sites.

This is what I did for this case study, I used the sites guru.com and elance.com, I now make around £3100 per month from this and don’t plan on making any more as the experiment is over.

Freelance sites are your new honey pot

You simply sign up to these sites, fill out a nice profile and start applying for jobs using my swipe file, your superior application, method of doing things and some other sneaky psychological tricks included in the job proposal will get you a lot of jobs. Some people will try to negotiate with you, fuck them, if they want results, they will pay your price to get them.

Although I charge £50 per hour I have a lot of experience to backup my claims and I can show results if required, I recommend you new guys start at somewhere around £20-30 per hour, this is still money for nothing and by the time we are through month 1 you should have some nice results so that you can raise your price.

The hardest part about this is waiting for the right job to be advertised, most of them will be something like “I want first page Google for £50” forget these ones, we want people who know how much SEO is worth and know that paying you this much is an investment. We will get them results but we will do it on our terms for our price.

Now this should be the part where I say that “white hat wooly woop dawg” but in reality if you don’t have 8-12 months to provide results then a pure white hat method is not gonna do it for you. Most clients leave after 3 months if they are not receiving a decent ROI.

“Don’t expect Matt Cutts/MOZ to show you how to rank in Google, that would be like asking a guy how to get into his sisters pants”

So now I propose that we go a little “grey” and buy a couple of links, not many but enough to get you a cheeky little boost in results. If you do this in week 1 on average it buys you 5 extra months to show an ROI. so we’re gonna go out and spent some of the money you have just made on either the beginnings of a blog network or on buying some links (guide on doing this coming soon).

If we buy something like 10 sites or 10 links then we will show them results, I truly believe that this as close to white hat as you can get while still delivering results. If your client is coming from a strong position then outreach only may be the way to go but for most of the people who advertise their jobs on freelance sites will need the extra boost.

Set a consulting day so you don’t spend your whole life answering your phone to clients

Wednesdays is consulting day, you do no work but this is the only day that your clients may contact you, any other time and they are interrupting your work. This is to be explained to them once they have made their first payment, for the first few weeks they will call you each Wednesday but this will stop over time as they start to trust that you know your shit, which you do because I do and you can ask me if you have any problems.

Okay so that takes care of post number 1 and it should be enough to get you started, just look at the stats, it got me going in 2 days and within 2 weeks I have a nice recurring £3100 with virtually no work to do.

And that kids, is how to start an SEO agency. On our next exciting episode, I’ll discuss how to outsource the stuff that isn’t really worth your time… primarily guest posting and broken link building, I’ll throw in some tutorials too to help you out if you don’t want to outsource. Love, hugs, kisses and other stuff, Dan P.s. Please share this post in any social media you’re involved in or on any forums where you think it might be useful. The more traffic I get here the more motivated I will be to write more money making shit for you!

(NOTE: Want to create a proven,consistent traffic and SEO strategy (that you can sell for at least £300 to your clients) by filling in some blanks on my template? Yeah… it’s that easy! Get my Traffic Strategy Mini Product here)