A little over 2 years ago I asked you guys regarding starting my own firm, and last night we signed our first 1-year 6-figure contract which will take us to 1M ARR next month even after losing clients to an accident and COVID. Thanks for the help, and feel free to AMA about backlinks.

Hey guys,

So, a little over 2 years ago, I got off Tinder and decided to post here on this sub that I will be launching my firm. Last night, the very agency of the first person who contacted me on Reddit (Cam, hope you are doing well mate), decided to sign a 1-year, 6-figure contract with us starting next month, thus pushing our ARR above 1 million, and helping me in starting off our new service line.

It hasn’t been a smooth ride either with an accident early last year, and then COVID this year causing a few stumbles and lost opportunities, but here are some of the most important lessons I learned over the duration:

1. Never bite off more than you can chew – It happened a couple of times that due to our greed last year, we took up clients that were beyond us from a manpower perspective. Unless you are a Hoth or a FatJoe who have thousands of websites in their kitty and an already built reputation, Outreach campaigns, especially those in a new industry can be a pain in the ass. We delivered late and lost clients on a permanent basis. This is a definite No-No.

2. In the initial days, never start off with your team remotely- I started the firm while living in Munich, and for the first year, I traveled back to India to our office sporadically. This meant my first few hires were always grumbling about me not being present and not being a proper mentor. I ended up having to let more than 50% go since their performance wasn’t up to scratch and there didn’t seem any way in which they were ready to reconcile. I started a new office where I sat full-time and coached the new hires, who are now the best team I have worked with.

3. Unless you have writers coming in from that specific industry or if the client is unwilling to share their data for content, don’t pick up a Content writing job. Optimization will always work better

4. Don’t run into creating backlinks straight away- Over the last couple of years, I observed extensively on how backlinks were impacting a page. Earlier, getting new relevant links to existing pages would almost always result in a rankings bump. However, in the last few months, optimization of the pages to which we are building links to has increasingly become a huge factor, and this is something that should always be done prior to link building for the best results, and helped us with quite a few clients

5. Never hesitate in calling off an engagement- As in every service industry, there will be some toxic clients who would want to control every narrative of the engagement. Make sure that if the client becomes too much of an issue, you are ready to let them go for the sake of your sanity

These were some of the biggest SEO related takeaways for me. In case of any other questions, especially about backlinks, feel free to ask.

Edit: Spellings

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