• • • “I wanted my income to be free from my physical location…”Branko has lived in seven countries and speaks four languages fluently. His passion for language, analytical thinking, and desire for efficient systems lead him to co-founding Chosen Data, a content and SEO consultancy for successful MarTech companies. With a global team, Branko splits time between California and Slovakia. When away from the computer, he spends time doing mountain sports or socializing.

      Questions we covered:

      • Is remote work a suitable way of working for everyone?
      • What is Chosen Data and how would he describe his role in the team?
      • How did he come up with the name Chosen Data?
      • Why did he decide to start his own business vs getting a high-paying job?
      • During the early days of Chosen Data, how did he get new clients?
      • What are some of the management challenges he faces working with a global team?
      • Are there any specific marketing challenges that you face trying to acquire clients from all over the world?
      • How does he systemize marketing ops?
      • How does he hire for his company and how does he assign teammates to specific clients?
      • Why niching down your services is extremely important…
      • What are some things hiring managers are looking for in marketing candidates this year?
      • What questions can marketers ask prospective employers to evaluate if the job is right for them?
      • How to generate backlinks for your clients?
      • Does guest posting still work?

 

Full Episode Transcript:

Kenny Soto  0:02  

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the people of digital marketing with your host Kenny Soto and today’s guest Bronco crow. Hi, Bronco, how are you?

 

Branko Kral  0:15  

Hey, thank you very much. I’m great yourself.

 

Kenny Soto  0:17  

I’m doing very well. You know, it’s a Monday can’t complain. As always, there’s always a lot of work to do, and a lot of things to learn. And today, we’re going to be learning a lot from you, which is very exciting. But before we dive into nitty-gritty tactics, strategies, and career advice, I want just to get more context about who you are as a person, and as an individual, and really get a sense of how did you get into digital marketing in the first place?

 

Branko Kral  0:46  

So is that one question or two questions?

 

Kenny Soto  0:50  

Let’s just keep it to how did you get into digital marketing?

 

Branko Kral  0:53  

Okay, cool. Perfect. Thank you. So I was working at a startup. And it was a typical startup where you kind of just do everything. And you also get to try everything. And we were able to scale the sales through E-commerce, analytics, and PPC. And they kind of just came naturally, you know, we were looking for something that would be effective on a shoestring budget. 

 

And it also interested me the most I was doing the hiring, I was looking for the premises, you know, dealing with real estate that way, I was doing some management, even some fulfillment, it was starting really small, and not super organized. And so after trying all those different areas, marketing was what interests me the most, it was that combination of numbers, and language. And that was the start.

 

Kenny Soto  1:47  

And from doing some research on you, I know that you’re a big fan of remote work. Why is remote work important to you? And what draws you to it?

 

Branko Kral  2:00  

Yeah, I would say, it’s important to me for quite a few reasons. I think everybody should be able to live where they want to live. And I think everybody who does computer work, should have the freedom to truly live where they want. I also think people should self-manage, I think as a mature individual, you should not really expect to, or have to follow directions about what time to show up at work.

And then also, if you’re self-motivated, if you truly care for what you do, you should be able to put together your own schedule. And if your work doesn’t motivate you, maybe it’s time to change something. And so then for me personally, for my team, currently, we think a lot about how can we compete, there are bigger companies that could be hiring the people that we hire, there’s, there are other projects that are our team members could be working on. 

 

And one of the values that we want to bring to the table is that we contribute to the life they have. We think work is instrumental in your quality of life. And it should contribute to the quality of life, it shouldn’t get in the way of it. Then also, for me personally, I didn’t know where I wanted to live some years back, which I’m actually still trying to figure out. And I didn’t want to have to make the decision based on my income, I wanted my income to be free from my physical location, I’ve lived in several countries, and I’d be happy to live in some of them again. 

 

And I also want to live in the mountains where the job offers and the job market gets crappy. And so again, I didn’t want to depend on where I am for my income. And Another thing that I experienced later that I didn’t quite expect is that some other local problems don’t really have to worry me if my income comes from remote work. So for instance, recently, I’ve been spending more time in Slovakia I spend my time between California and Slovakia, both of those places when I’m there, I mean, I’m in mountain towns. 

 

And I actually get some of the best of California and some of the best of Slovakia without having some of the worst of California and some of the worst of Slovakia. And that’s been great. So, in the meantime, in the process, I’ve been involved in projects that support remote work and I’ve been super happy and super proud to enable people on our team and in our co-working spaces that I’ve been a part of to work remotely if they choose to do so.

 

Kenny Soto  4:48  

You’ve been working remotely for years and you know a lot of remote workers, both in your team and also in your network as a tangent. Do you think remote work is for everyone?

 

Branko Kral  5:00  

No, no, no, I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone that definitely not, I think you have to have a clear motivation first. And then maybe you want to pursue remote work. What we found when we were doing workshops for remote professionals at this co-working space that I used to manage was that some people who would come actually were more interested in starting a business or working for themselves. 

 

And so those areas overlap. And there’s a lot of synergy between working for yourself and working remotely. But as much as I think everybody should be able to self-manage and set their own schedule, at least to a large extent. And definitely, if you work at a computer, I think working remotely has big disadvantages. And there are also some stereotypes that I don’t think hold true. 

I think if you travel a lot, you may get into a position where you’re able to work because you are remote. But then maybe you’re not traveling Well or working well, either. I just did a lot of that last year. And, so no, not for everyone. 

 

Kenny Soto  6:08  

Yeah, so I figured now when it comes to chosen data, can you tell the audience what chosen data one and two? How would you describe your role in the team?

 

Branko Kral  6:20  

Thank you for that question. I would say that, my role now is to enable everyone, I still do quite a lot of content editing, because that’s my favorite. And there are also some of the hardest to hire for some of the content lead for us in some of our clients. But officially, I’m the co-founder and the director of content. 

 

My counterpart is my other co-founder, John, who I love, he’s in New York, and he’s the director of SEO, by which we mean more tech SEO than the company is an agency with content and SEO for Martic. Super specialized that way. It’s something that we’ve shifted towards more and more, the more we’re in business, the more we narrow down, what we focus on. 

 

And another part of the company is content production for ourselves. Mostly, it’s for other websites. But we ramping that up slowly. And the goal is to make choosing era.com into a best practice resource for techie content and SEO and analytics work.

 

Kenny Soto  7:25  

Now, these past four days, I’ve been obsessed with how companies are named. And I like chosen data, I wanted to know what is the story behind the name.

 

Branko Kral  7:38  

So to be 100%, honest, it was a name that had an available domain. But you know, there’s a, there’s a bunch of those. And so we picked this one, because one, the word chosen is bold. And for us quality is one of our other core values, we actually were just reviewing the list of our values today with the entire team. 

 

And we often get hired because we do content better, or we do take SEO better than the current agency and ever want to know who the current agency is. So don’t get a bad impression of him. But we get that a lot, we will be writing a guest post for someone, let’s say on behalf of a client, but for a different website. And that different website and their content lead will tell us, hey, you guys, this was great. We need more content like that, or the process was great, we need more of that. 

 

And so they choose to work with us because of the quality. So the word chosen is bold, and we wanted to bold name, we have a bold logo, we have a bold brand, if you go to the website, it’s fully illustrated, it’s all custom, and that conveys the quality. And then data is there. Because we use analytics and are data-driven as a part of differentiating ourselves, you find quite a lot of SEO companies that are crappy. And I think all the good ones use data heavily. And we want to make it clear that we’re one of the good ones and that we care for the data and for the feedback loops for us. 

 

The best people to work with and the best people to publish for the best people to deliver our content to are those who are interested in feedback loops. And optimizing, optimizing, optimizing.

 

Kenny Soto  9:24  

Why did you decide to start your own business versus getting a high-paying job?

 

Branko Kral  9:31  

Originally because I got fired. I don’t think I’d be such a good employee. I actually used to be an employee kind of like everyone, but I always had my own project I’m not motivated by money first, which sometimes is twofold. I think I could have made more money in my life if I were I probably mean that that just makes sense. 

 

I probably would have but I care more for freedom, even if even when I have to earn it hard. You know that hard-earned freedom. I care a lot about building stuff, I was fortunate enough to hire a person who later became my partner and was also motivated by not having a ceiling and will love building systems. And to address more of the story of getting fired. When I did, of course, the first thing I thought of was, okay, I need to get a new job. 

 

But then a couple of my clients from my previous work said, Hey, we don’t care so much about working with the agency, we’d love to choose, once again, we’d love to choose to work with you. And so I started freelancing, and then it grew. So it kind of just happened to me, I never had the ambition to start an agency. 

 

Now we do have the ambition to become the best practice authority on technical SEO and content. And analytics. That’s an ambition that’s very, very intentional. But we just kept getting asked to do work. And we ended up building systems around it. Also, in the process, of I hired, I applied for some jobs in the first few years because it was hard. It was really hard. The first year is also super limited. With a visa, everything was hard. It was during my first few years in the US. 

 

And I never got him even though I was freelancing. Before I had the company, I would start almost every interview, I can’t really remember an interview where I would not get the job. I even used to train people in interview skills, resume writing, and portfolio building, and I still do some of that. But, for instance, there was one job where I applied and I ended up being the second best out of 30 or 40. 

 

But the reason I was second best was that I came to the interview super demotivated,, I had the credentials, I knew the people, and I had my references. But the morning of I read through the reports about how they prove the value of their marketing. And the way they were doing it was so terrible, they were inflating numbers. And so it just kinda wasn’t meant to be a red flag. Yeah, I loved some of the people working there. 

 

But I figured the director was just so out of place that I could not come across as motivated to get the job anymore. And so it just, I think it was just my path, you know, whether I chose myself or not. And again, with the support of my partner, I’ve been able to persist. And it’s been getting more and more rewarding during the last few years. 

 

Kenny Soto  12:37  

Outside of word of mouth, which definitely helps as a foundational channel for growing a business. What else did you do during the first two years to drive your pipeline? Get more prospective customers closed them? What did you do to stand out?

 

Branko Kral  12:53  

Oh, that’s a good one, though. That used to be very different than what it is now. And so I had a couple of clients, the couple that I mentioned because I had worked with them before. One of them was a marketing agency that needed a PPC person. So I learned some PPC, they also needed an analytics person. 

 

So I became their techie marketer, external. And you’ll find out very soon once you start marketing, that the agencies, even those who have dozens of employees are usually eager to hire contractors, it’s easier oftentimes, especially if it’s something that’s not core to them. And I like that agency was more intermediate buying. 

 

And then I figured, okay, this is great. If I just do well, if I excel in one project for this agency, they will send a few more my way, which they did. And so then I targeted other agencies, I go to conferences and conferences then became a major source of business, a person presents at conferences. And there again, I partner up with agencies. 

 

So in the first few years, over half of the business was from agencies that would hire us for a few projects each or more. And then the confidences were big. And then it slowly started changing towards getting clients from the content that we publish. Those are still some of the best ones.

 

Kenny Soto  14:26  

Now, from a management perspective, what are some of the management challenges you face? Working with a global team? And are there any specific marketing challenges you faced, trying to acquire clients from around the world?

 

Branko Kral  14:42  

So to the first part of the question, I’ll say that I don’t really find challenges there. I think if you can do management or if you’re eager to learn management, it’ll be the same or easier with people who work remotely to a large extent because the things I was saying that beginning if you’re there right to fit for remote work, by which I mean, I think everybody can work remotely, but it’s more about whether he wants to. 

 

And now, if you want to work remotely, you probably be self-managed and self-motivated. And that’ll include time management and communication. And you’ll quickly earn a lot of experience. So I don’t know, my dad has a company, he hires 40 people, and when he tells me stories about how he has to motivate people, that just sounds like it sounds super foreign to me, I never have to deal with that the people either really won’t want to do the work, or they don’t really stick around and working remotely working for themselves or working and being employed while being remote. 

 

So I think it’s actually easier to set systems because everybody is open to everything that’s online. Everybody on the team loves to collaborate, and use Slack, use Google Drive, and use Trello. And, you know, I haven’t worked in an environment other than remote in many years. But from my second-hand knowledge, getting everybody in sync is usually quicker and easier. So I would say no, not much. 

 

And then, for the part of the question about challenges in getting clients globally, well, we actually focus on getting clients from the US. We love the mentality, love the market. One of my favorite things about the US is the business mentality. And so we sometimes get clients from Canada, sometimes from the UK. 

 

Recently, by coincidence, my partner in New York actually found a company that’s part of Bratislava in Slovakia and parked in Prague in the Czech Republic that builds SEO tools. And they would be a perfect client for us sooner, we’re in the process of giving them this content offer for free. But actually, it’s a bit of a content strategy as a trial. It’s our lead magnet. So we might have and we sometimes have business from other countries too. 

 

And we have a lot of collaborations in content that are global. And we have affiliate partners who are global, but we focus on just the US. And with the connections, we have in the industry. Now that’s been working out quite well. Now, even the US is quite diverse. And it’s quite a large country, right, we have a handful of time zones, and quite a difference in mentalities from the east coast to the west coast south to the north, and such. But I find it fortunate that our industry is so much about online, and it was even before the pandemic already. 

 

And so we just need to set up for being able to prove value online, even to people who don’t know as yet. And if we can also add some, points for trust and social proof whether that’s through content by us that they’ve read on an awesome website somewhere or, or social proof through a referral, then there’s Bullseye for us.

 

Kenny Soto  17:51  

Now, I asked this question, for two reasons. One, I know other people are facing this challenge. And the second reason is I’m also facing a challenge right now as we speak. How do you systematize marketing operations in your organization?

 

Branko Kral  18:10  

So I’d say if you want to talk pure marketing operations, that’s more of the practice of managing your marketing technology stack and working on the flows of all the tools. And for us, we focus on the SEO stack. If, if you mean marketing operations as operations of our marketing company, is that what you mean? Or do you mean managing a more modern tech stack?

 

Kenny Soto  18:38  

Like we can dive into a lot of value here? So let’s start off with regardless of the stack, what are the considerations that you think about when acquiring a tool, how it interacts with the rest of your stack, and evaluating tools in general? And then we can shift into marketing operations from like a headcount perspective, what roles are important, how they collaborate, etc.

 

Branko Kral  19:02  

Okay, so our main process, and I love seeing this for evaluating marketing technology tools is that my partner owns more app sumo deals than you would expect from a healthy person. But what that allows us to do is that we test out a bunch of tools, a lot of them. And we’re also in the field, we work with a lot of Martic companies, and we have actually had a few and we still have some clients who are SEO tools. 

 

And so we’re super deep in it. But if you’re not, if your niche is not Martic I would recommend going to the big review websites like GE and testing out a few tools. What you find over time is that the tools become more and more similar so surfer market muse and a couple of others today have been like topics have been getting more and more similar. also, analytics Mixpanel and amplitude, have been getting more and more similar. 

 

When you read comparison articles about him, you find that it’s really hard to choose because they’re so similar they, I think, as the industry is maturing, the tools are getting more similar to each other kind of like it’s happened with social networks. 

 

And so what we look for is whether we actually need to, could we just use a Google sheet, which often is actually the answer? And then the cost? Are we ready to pay for this? And is it going to bring as much more money than that? Do our team members enjoy working on the tool? Or our clients? Because we are usually hired by other techie marketers? Are they? Are they familiar with the tool? And are they? Do they see value in us using the tool? Do they think we’re cool? Because we used to? Also, then do the tools integrate? Well? Do they connect? D’Amico who has been on your podcast would tell you a lot more. 

 

And I think he actually has said a bit in your podcast on your podcast about that. You need the tools to integrate radio, you can’t just have some data, here’s some data there, you need the flow of the data. 

 

And so what is the tool that connects the data? What is the tool that generates the data? And is it an open tool? Is it a part of an open stack? Or do they require you to only work with tools by their brand, kind of like Adobe does, which we’re not huge fans of? I think for some companies works great. But we represent fans of open market stacks. And I think I think I’ve said enough there so I don’t start going off on tangents.

 

Kenny Soto  21:37  

No, no worries. And when you think about like constructing a team, whether it’s for internal marketing or a team around a client account, what are your thoughts around like, these people are best in this specific situation, whether it be a new client in the b2b or b2b space.

 

Branko Kral  21:56  

Yeah, so we only hire specialists. That’s something we look for. They, need to tell us, okay, this is what I’m the most interested in, even if we need to train them more. So for instance, we just hired a data scientist. We wanted to try something new, and he’s doing reporting for us. 

 

And it’s amazing the way he thinks about it is amazing. And now he’s consolidating and standardizing our reporting, even though he didn’t do quite that before. But he’s had this background where he’s making big improvements very early on. Then. When we hire copywriters thanks to our focus, we’re able to hire just copywriters who focus on writing for tech websites. 

 

There’s a big niche in copywriting, which is b2b SaaS, we were super happy last year to find out that a lot of copywriters focus on doing just that just b2b sales. And then the market is part of b2b sales. So that’s awesome. First, so always specialists. And then we want the roles to be defined very clearly, which is in line with hiring and employing specialists. And so for instance, in our process of writing an expert article about marketing technology, or some other tech marketing, there are usually five people who are involved. 

 

And they pass on the baton one to the other as they go through the process of creating it. And so we need the tools going back to technology and the stack, we need tools like Trello, Slack, and Google Drive to connect it all, we need the person to connect it all our awesome project manager, Oscar has been doing a lot of that. 

 

And then we need the company values to be aligned. And so one of those for us is enablement, which also relates to completeness. And every person needs to deliver something that’s complete for their part. And that makes it easy for the next person to pick it up and continue with their part. The next part. We also think that the client needs to enjoy working with us and the team and vice versa. 

 

If you don’t enjoy working with people, it doesn’t usually last very long. And if they don’t enjoy working with us, as people, you know, personally enjoy working with us. It also doesn’t tend to last very long. So that’s another consideration. And we present the team early on even when we have a single point person which is standard. The client still knows at least a few other people on the team. So there are faces behind it.

 

Kenny Soto  24:22  

Why is niching down your services important?

 

Branko Kral  24:27  

Oh, yeah, this is one of my favorites. Speaking of that. So Nick Eubanks has been doing some coaching for us and I highly, highly recommend him also for the podcast, by the way, that’s a potential guest for you. Maybe he’s built a few agencies very successfully and other businesses and products and he’s a very systematic, very cool person outside of work as well. 

 

And when we’re already considering focusing on just Martic but we’re still doing health as well, which we still do a little bit, which is don’t pursue anymore for new business. Even even though we had some good results and health, and it was a passion project or a passion project, so we were considering Martic intensively already. 

 

And then they told us that what agencies do in order to avoid burning out is that you try things, you try things, and then you cut down. It’s kind of like, like, if you’re bulking up as a bodybuilder, you have periods, when you have a bulk phase, you get bigger, and then you shed the fat and you trim down and you become leaner. 

 

And so you become stronger and bigger first, and then leaner. And then it goes in and then goes in those cycles. And ever since we’ve adopted the focus on Martic, a few amazing things have happened. Some of them we expected, and some of them we didn’t. One is that it’s been a lot easier to hire, and train. As I was saying. 

 

Now when we hire, for instance, copywriters, it’s much, much easier, No, there are not a lot of people who are able to write well about technology, especially with how much variety and technology there is and how complex and expert the topics get. And so when we take the time to train people on, for instance, UTM codes, it takes some time, and after a few months, now, they’re going to be the expert on UTM codes. 

 

And, then then they can write about other analytics topics. So we build up individual team members’ knowledge, and we couldn’t do it as well if they if we were not as niche down as we are. The next thing is that it’s much, much easier to describe what we do to both our friends and prospects. 

 

And it’s also just much easier to get referrals. When I don’t know the other day, D’Amico referred an Amazon optimization prospect to us, and it is looking right now like we’re gonna lose him there. Another example of a client is rebuilding their marketing, and they need a better team than they have now. And the sale, the sales have just been so much easier to it, there’s not a lot of martech agencies, market SEO agencies, if you’re thinking if you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking of starting one, please do at least there’ll be two companies, ours will be one and yours will be the other. And then we can do some content collaborations. 

 

There are some companies that have Martic in their portfolio, but I don’t we don’t really know of one that is focused on just that. And that helps us stand out right away. And then for us, the relationship-building has been amazing. So we’ve published a lot of martech sites for our brand. We’ve published a lot of martech sites for our clients. And now if you want to publish a guest post, or if you’re exchanging backlinks, we have so many people we can go to without having to look without having to do outreach. We’ve done it already. And it builds. And then we get introduced and we get introduced again. 

 

So being this embedded in our industry, thanks to being so narrow in our niche allows us to excel more in the niche. And it’s kind of like why we use Waze instead of Google Maps, right? Is because they’re my friend just worded that way when we’re driving, and he insisted that I use Waze because Waze is much better at some very specific things that Google Maps doesn’t quite care for. I think that’s one strategy to win over much, much bigger dogs if you’re smaller. 

 

Kenny Soto  28:21  

You glossed over this earlier in the episode that you used to do resume writing and helping people with portfolios. And you’ve technically been on both sides of the table you’ve been interviewed for gigs and jobs, and you’ve also hired people who are marketers. The great resignation is a big buzzword that is going on right now. And there are a lot of marketers who are trying to find quality jobs. 

 

And even though there’s a lot of hype, around there being more jobs to fill, than there are recruits. Some people might still be struggling in getting those positions that they’re looking for, what are some high-level considerations, and points of advice that you can give to new marketing candidates out there who are looking for the right gig, but they’re just struggling?

 

Branko Kral  29:11  

So I’d say specialize and don’t be afraid to take some time to do so to really go deep in one area, the bigger and better the projects are that you are trying to get or the bigger and better the job is, the more you’re going to be interested in a specialist. 

 

And there are some specializations where even if the economy changes big time, there’s still going to be relevant. For instance, we don’t really see marketing technology or technology companies going anywhere. There’ll be fluctuations in the industry, but specialization is a safe one, and you can definitely pick one for yourself. 

 

The other thing is portfolio building. And so if you have tangible results that you can point to if you can show a chart about something you’ve done show that you did it you When love feedback loops, and show that is not just nice words that you put on a resume, but that you actually think in results and your results-oriented, your brain revolves around, okay, what is this actually going to do? What impact is this actually going to have?

 

I think it’s really hard to say no, it’s silly that few people actually apply for jobs anyway. But those that do will stand up big time, then would we also love something that I picked up from another friend who does a lot of hiring is that if you have something on your LinkedIn, I look much more on LinkedIn these days than resumes. 

 

And we actually tell people when hiring to not send us resumes, because LinkedIn is just so much of a better format that if people actually do send us a resume, we’re less interested in the end. And so the LinkedIn profile will then be something that’s interactive, easy, super easy to trust, and also shows that you’ve been working on this for some time. 

 

And if you haven’t, you can actually put it together fairly quickly and make it look like you have been working on it for some time, because at least I assume that you’ve been working on yourself for some time. So then you can put your credentials on there. And you can build a connection fast on that one. And then we highly value self-motivation and self-management, which usually surface very quickly. 

 

And we value it when the person has passionate projects. So it could be that you’re publishing, just because you love to, it could be that you’re doing your own research, or it could be radio podcasting like you are. It could be that you were original, about how you made your logo. A, it could be very simple, thanks to going to an industry event. And those will be the main things.

 

Kenny Soto  31:54  

Now, my follow-up would be let’s put yourself in the shoes of a new person trying to get a job right now and this year, what questions would you ask employers to qualify them, and to know if this is the team I want to do marketing for?

 

Branko Kral  32:15  

So I think it’s easy to get the hiring manager to talk because everybody loves to talk about their work. And so ask a few questions and then shut up and listen. I hope that didn’t sound mean. But I know for myself, that I need to practice listening. And that’s what I tell myself when I do. And I love it when people ask about company culture and about how the day-to-day works and looks and what’s valued. I love it. 

 

When somebody asks me, how would I stand out? What would make me stand out for this position? Or a question like, What can I do in follow-up? Or what have been some of your favorite projects lately? And I think at that point, the people are talking about the work so much that you will know. I would also ask about the expectations for work schedules for work locations. 

 

I would love to, if I were trying to get the job, I asked about who else I’ll be working with. I’d want to put my feelers out there for whether the job will be some, assuming we’re still in marketing, whether the job will be with some old-school marketing team that can’t tell Facebook ads from a billboard or something. Or in a team that cares for marketing operations, in a modern way. 

 

I definitely ask, especially if you’re high profile and you have the liberty to pick from jobs, I definitely ask about professional development and how the company supports that. Um, you don’t want your growth to stop with the job right? Do you want the opposite? And I think the fun companies do that. Yeah, I think I think that’d be enough.

 

Kenny Soto  34:09  

Now diving into some tactical questions here. When it comes to content, and marketing tactics, how do you systematically generate backlinks for your clients?

 

Branko Kral  34:22  

So our favorite guest posts by far, the value of the backlink is a function of how much people actually click on it. It’s not just the domain authority, it needs to be alive breathing, popular, and ideally article. And it doesn’t usually work. If you just pay for a backlink that will be published somewhere. Sometimes it does though. 

 

There are companies that do it super well. And Logan’s expenses are one of them. So we actually use that service heavily with some projects where we do not do guest posting because I don’t know budget constraints or something else if you’d like a deal for that. Hit me up pleasing. And I’ll hook you up. We’re very close with the company. Hopefully, it’s okay that I’m giving them a shout-out. But guest posts are a favorite because they’re so collaborative. 

 

And you can usually place a few. And there’s usually much more distribution that goes into guest posts, I would highly recommend putting a lot of love into each guest post and then squeezing every drop of juice out of that to help with distribution, ask the publisher about the stairs that really formed that relationship, make them care, optimize the living life out of the post, so that it ranks organic thing lists for a long, long time and so that they invite you back. Those are the best backlinks. 

 

Another thing we love to do is when the client has more than one website. And then the two are still related somehow. So a client of ours, the client I mentioned earlier, and the friend have a text stack consultancy company. So that’s one website. And then the other is an analytics tool. And there are quite a few articles that rank on both websites and link to each other. And so I know Google can penalize that. 

 

But if it’s actually relevant content, if it’s natural, you still benefit. And the last way would be backlink exchanges, but you want to make him at least triangular. And you want to be really careful about who you work with. And over time, you’ll actually find some super solid partners. Ideally, other content agencies will have other content agencies we don’t think you should not think about or consider anyone other than us. And the more active the better they are, the more websites they have. So one partner recently offered us backlinks from six different websites, even though we only had two websites to link from. 

 

But it worked out we found a way to make it happen. The two websites we had were authoritative. So it worked out great. And it’s a backlink change like that where the backlinks are relevant, come across naturally and where you are able to dial in the anchor text, ideally, are also huge.

 

Kenny Soto  37:13  

Now my last question for you was hypothetical because time machines don’t exist. But if they did, and you had the ability to go back in time, 10 years into the past, knowing everything you know, right now, how will you accelerate the speed of your career?

 

Branko Kral  37:29  

So someone thing I didn’t do that I kind of wish I had was to get a job at a bigger company. First, I think that’s ideal. If you want to start something later, maybe having that patience to be employed for a bit works out because if it’s with the right company, and they do big things, you open up your mind to big things, I had to consciously work on thinking bigger, because the last job I had, was not like that. 

 

And the background I had before I started this also just wasn’t like that. So putting yourself into an environment where you’re trained to think big by the nature of the business is amazing. And then, for building the company, I would have benefited from hiring senior people earlier instead of the people who could afford it. I forget where this advice came from. 

 

But one awesome thing I heard, I think it was actually by Ned Eliason, who built an amazing content agency. And he said you should hire people you can’t quite afford yet. Because that’s where the level-up is going to come from. It’s a big commitment to hire someone who asked for a bit more than you can do. But usually, they help you make enough money to pay for that quite quickly. So that’s another one. And then specializing I would have specialized earlier.

 

Kenny Soto  38:59  

Amazing thank you for your time and your wisdom today. And if anyone wants to say hello to you online, where can they find you?

 

Branko Kral  39:07  

LinkedIn is my fav I think that’s a super structured awesome social network, very focused. Bronco, Crowl by A and K Oh, it’s a Slavic name Crowl k r an l, and then if you prefer twitter feel free to find me there Bronco for show. Fo sho But length is best.

 

Kenny Soto  39:31  

Perfect. And thank you to your listener for listening to another episode of people digital marketing with your host Kenny Soto. And as always, I hope you have a great day.

 

Bye.