Julian Goldie SEO Reviews: Upwork, Client Videos and Results

Automatic transcript of the video (brand names corrected).

Today I’m going to be interviewing Timo Spect about how he grew his agency from 0 to 120,000 euros per month as an SEO agency in Germany. He’s going to be revealing his exact process to 2x his monthly revenue, how he solved his sales problems and it’s really not what you think, plus his lone wolf mindset that nearly killed his SEO agency plus how he fixed it. Timo’s a client, we’ve been working together for a while now and I’m really excited to show you what he shares today. Let’s get into it. So where do you scale to with your agency? I’m actually sitting right now in Munich, Germany. Me and my brother together, we’ve been doing SEO work almost 14 years, which means that’s when he started. So it was 2010 back then. And I was still like in university after school. I was studying economics and I really hated it. So I had a hard time. This was a time when he started with SEO and he bought into some masterminds back then for a lot of money. He then started building out some local Legion sites, which we still have. So we rank and rent them. And then during the time where he put all the SEO strategy into these sites, I was finishing up my university. And then I got a job at a startup. They were selling gin. So gin online, gin and tonic. And so he gave me all the SEO knowledge and told me to implement it on a company. And back then they had no website. They had no Amazon listing. So I started building out the website and I started putting out the Amazon listing. So in the end, like three years later, we’ve been ranking for gin on page one in Google Germany. And also we’ve been the best selling product in the whole grocery space on Amazon. There was only like the after meal baby milk, which is the children. It’s one of the best sellers on Amazon was still selling more. But then it was also the chin. So why I’m saying this is because I had some time before my agency where I could implement and I’m really grateful for the job I had to use this knowledge. But then after two, three years there, I started with my personal brand Timo, and that’s where we built it out. The agency for ranking for just generic keywords like SEO freelance or SEO agency or SEO Agen tour, which is agency in German. And ever since then, we’ve been ranking for SEO Munich. So as you mentioned on page one of Google and also on the three pack for years now, I’ll ranking all the biggest SEO agencies out there. And that’s how we generate leads day to day. It’s awesome to see an SEO agency actually do SEO as well. But to rank top in Germany, I can imagine that’s not easy. Like you can be in with some big agencies in that space. It was a tough, it was a tough road to get there and a lot of fails and a lot of energy sucking moments, to be honest. And there’s a lot of investment, not just time and energy, but also failure and then successful moments. But in the end, it was just pure patience and then building out content and links. And without doubting this for years and years. Yeah, that makes sense. How you found, because I know a lot of people, a lot of people, particularly with SEO agencies, are scared of putting themselves out there. I think, for example, all the attention it can attract, some of it, some of it good, some of it bad, etc. Some people are worried what other people think about them if they try and position themselves as an expert for selling their services. How have you found a journey towards building your personal brand? I guess it was also a personal development process of my own persona. Because in the end, I had a hard time to get visible and to get a lot of traction online. It’s also scary at the beginning because you keep putting yourself out there and you feel like, oh, what the hell are they thinking? What could might happen to me? What is the competition doing with me? Is it really going to work? Which is one part and then the other part is what if I’m failing? What if I’m not succeeding? What if SEO is just, I don’t know, like a crazy mind fuck theory and is not working? And then it really took some personal growth and development to stick to it. And then at some point I had this twisting and the switching moment where I thought, hey, I’m ready to do this and get more visible. And as soon as I was more comfortable with the situation myself and we had more client case studies, which actually helped them to a better life or people calling us, Timo, I’m so happy this was the best decision of my life. Working with you together, I was talking to my husband. I can finally sleep again. It’s like these moments when you feel really appreciated and you’re feeling on the right path. And that’s what brings in energy and also trust to go on and on. Yeah, that’s it. I think you have to take it like one step at a time. Like for me, first, just putting my face on social media was awkward and then posting the video is still awkward. And then you just you break through these barriers. I know you said you were starting YouTube soon today. I know. I think I guess they had to drop to the place, but I had to actually it’s my first YouTube video dropping. And I had a little head start because for this year I started out with short form content. So I’ve been pushing reels on on X and on Instagram and on a tick tock for every day last, I think, three to four months past. So I get used to it, but it was still hard in the beginning to see myself talking to the camera. And I can totally understand that people who consume this content every day or see those content pieces of mine every day, that some of them are really, really annoyed by it. And I can totally understand because it’s sometime I think that the timing when it’s working is when you piss off a decent amount of people, but you attract also the more important ones. Yeah. You got to crack a few eggs to make it online. For me, the more reach we get across our social media, the more hate we attract. I think that just confirms like you’re on the right track and you’ll get more attention from everyone. So I think as you get more sales calls from social media or whenever marketing channel you use, you’ll seem to get a bit of hate, but you got to accept that part of the game. The fact is that it was easier for me building up my homepage and my website to get more organic leads than putting my face in front of social media. So it was way harder for me to go be present on social than to build out my website. That’s for sure. So for years I was hiding behind my domain and then I tried to get in front of the camera. And now the real is going like for us, we’re starting to scale that to like we post a couple of shorts on YouTube daily about SEO. But we want to scale that more across IG, across TikTok and it’s basically the same format. Yeah, sure. How have you found it working for you? There’s different types of content and I made this. We always take the same content short form piece and put it on all three platforms. So IG, TikTok and YouTube shorts. And there’s some basically I think the common sense is that the most performing ones are on TikTok from reach and impressions. But also there’s some nuggets which really perform on YouTube that don’t perform on TikTok. And there’s this total average of good performing ones on IG. Definitely. You far ahead concerning regarding social media and Julian. So I have not enough experience, but I still think the one groundbreaking thing I am, I recognize during this time is it doesn’t matter if it’s always the best content, but it matters if you break through by coming back every day. So this everyday is everyday exposure. It really helps break through because people I know and people in the industry and people also agency and colleagues of mine, they say, oh, you guys are really present or it’s really successful, right? So I think just because you’re there every day, you’re really successful. So I think being there every day really helps to show what you’re doing. Yeah. What we’ve found with YouTube or just short content in general, when it comes to short form video content, we found the, for example, with IG is a momentum game where we might have started off a hundred a day, hundred views or impressions a day. And now we’re getting up to four thousand three hundred a day. And it’s like gradually just growing nicely. And the other thing that we’ve seen is three different options, I think right now. So number one is you can create a custom made video for short form format. You record in portrait mode and it looks really nice. The other option is you can take an existing video and then you can edit it down. You get a proper editor to do it all for you. That’s currently what we’re trying to do. The other option is like a where you get like Opus clips or something like that. Out of all of those, I found the Opus clips and a short form video generators pretty trash. Like they don’t really get as many good results. And then the ones that perform best is where I’ve just recorded like custom made, but it requires a lot of your time and energy. But I think the best and most scalable middle ground that we found for short form video content across all platforms across I.G. TikTok, everything that performs the best is usually when we’ve got a really good video editor that will train for a long time and they just perfect the video itself. And that’s working really well for us. So we’re going to try and scale that in a minute. Are you also cutting down the long form content into like short form content pieces? Are you recording the short form stuff separately? Yes, I used to record the short form content myself separately. But again, it requires editing, scripting, a lot of like work from me. It’s not that scalable. And so now what we do is we will take one long form video. I actually made a video about it. See up there on my live stream. We’ll take one long form video and we’ll chop it up into the hundred different custom made pieces of content, including shorts. And that seems to work really well because we can just get an amazing editor. We train them up, we’ll coach them every single day. And then, yeah, they do really well on that. Nice. That’s working well. So where are you up to like in your agency when it comes to MMR? Like obviously you started a few years ago. You look like quite a young lad as well. I don’t know how old you are, but 35. Yeah, exactly. What’s the secret? What’s the secret to stay good looking at 35, you mean? Well, I would say ice baths. For me personally, I think it’s the ice baths. Yeah. In Munich, there’s a river called Izar, which comes from the mountains. It’s really cold and I switched to my apartment. So right now I’m living next to it with my girlfriend. So every morning I jump in there. It’s getting icy and icier. It’s not like your ice bath. I see you on your socials, but it’s still something. And then in winter it gets really chilly. I’m rolling every day to get myself because of the winter. To be honest, I’m not the biggest ice bath guy, but like to jump in there once in a while. I guess the secret to come back to your questions is I think that the biggest mind changing stuff, I experienced this year is to really have a team is what brings in new energy and awesome motivation and to be a good lawyer. Actually, that’s what brought me back, like the sense of why I’m doing what I’m doing. Because for years and years, I had like the idea of staying this one man gang or two men gang together with my brother. And we didn’t think that employees might make it more serious or less flexible, but it’s the exact opposite. So what really helped me and what’s going on in the agency this year, we increased to 13 people in the agency. And for the first time, I feel we have the right amount of people and the right amount of setting to fill in all the roles coming from link building to content to back end stuff. Also going into sales and this brings in ease and also calms me down because I know I’m not responsible for everything. That’s what was changing. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think like when you start off doing SEO, you like a lone wall. And then you take that mindset into your agency as well. At first, I see a lot of agencies who they don’t want to really want to hire. It was one guy I met. He was on the YouTube channel. I wouldn’t say his name, but this guy was working like 16 hour days every day, but by himself and everything that he was doing, he could have got someone else to do, but he just didn’t want to do it. And so he was making his life chaos. But I think that lone wolf mindset is super lonely and you just got to let it go. And the sooner you can start learning how to lead, the better. And like for me personally, we found that we don’t necessarily need like five to 10 X amount of people, but we do need to like five to 10 X amount. We get out of our people and just coach them, train them every single day, for example, like account managers and the sales team. We just train in them every single day, trying to make them better and better, measuring why. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think as a CEO of an agency, particularly in SEO, the more you can get out of your people and the more time you spend with them, like everything else gets easier. How many people are you right now at the agency or surrounding yourself? Yeah. So across the whole agency, we have 50 people. 50 people. And they all work remotely properly. Yeah. Yeah. They all work remotely. But then I personally manage five. Okay. Hey, when did you start with the whole SEO thing? And then what was the time when you really exploded in traffic and visibility? Because if I’m thinking back three or four years, I haven’t heard of a Julian Goli just wasn’t it. I don’t know. Tell me again to really hear personally from you. When did you break through? Do you mean it sounds like the agent? In terms of like agency, YouTube, all that stuff. Yeah, I was always the SEO that nobody knew. So I would go to masterminds. Like even up to 2022, I would go to masterminds. I would sit next to people who I speak to all the time now. But back then, we didn’t know each other. And we’d sit around this table and I’d be like, we’re up to this MMR in the agency. We want to get to this MMR, etc. And they’d be like, mate, how are you at that level? And I’ve never met or heard of you before. And everyone was like that. And so this is going to sound brutal, but we had a marketing team. So we had a marketing manager, ads manager. We had a video script writer, video editor, etc. Big marketing. And it was at that point, I realized there was something terribly wrong with the setup of the marketing team. That was 2022, probably November, December, by January. And this was, they were all great people, but I had to have a big clear out. We wiped out the whole marketing team, started from scratch again. And I just started publishing videos every day. I remember one video. It went from normally I would get like 200, 300 views a video early 2023. Remember one video got to 10K in 24 hours. And I was like, wow, what happens here? Crazy. I’ve never seen that before, but the dopamine rush was great. And so at that point, I was like, I’m just going to do this every single day. And if I get like 1000 views, I’m happy with that. Like even today, if I get up to 1000 views video, it’s totally fine with me. We’ll get more views out of here later anyway. And so that was pretty much it. Like probably when I started showing chat GPT like February last year. Yeah. Last one I broke through. Yeah. And it was all coming from E in school and your, your online course. That’s how that’s, I think that’s pretty much the time when we enrolled a year ago. And when we also started link building with you guys. Yeah. How are you finding that the SEO lead circle, the SEO boardroom? It’s great. As good as I have time consuming it. So a lot of some weeks, I just don’t find time because right now it was a lot about no leads and new clients and new employees. But still it’s a feel really comfortable in there. I don’t feel anybody’s holding back because I’ve been to courses. I’ve been to masterminds where they’re holding back information, crucial information. I think it’s super important to be transparent, to share everything. And that’s what I really appreciate. And I like talking to other guys and everybody’s really open. So I did take away some really good gold nuggets for me as an SEO who has been doing this for years and years. It’s not always about getting new information. For me, it’s also about re reassure myself that there’s no new information, you know, that’s what I like consuming about SEO. Okay. And if there’s tiny little piece of new information, it’ll help a lot. Definitely. Yeah. And then I try teaching it to the rest of the team. And so like in the time you’ve been running the agency, where are you up to now with your MMR? I was on that. Yeah. So we, I can tell you like development of the last two years. I think for a long time we’ve been trying to solve sales problems with more marketing. Until I finally understood that you solve the sales problems with more sales. And this was like a groundbreaking moment because during this time we doubled in monthly revenue. Congrats. And I have to talk to my colleague because I’m not 100% into it, but I think it’s like a 120K euros a month right now. Very nice, man. Congrats. Congrats on the success. It’s awesome. Yeah. And then we’ve been, we’ve been bouncing a little up and down on this level for the last last 12, 24 months, but I’m still, I have to, I got feeling that right now we’ve, we are on a base with the team and with the revenue and with the client base and also the fulfillment processes that we can easily hold this and increase, but with no rush. Okay. The most important thing for me is to have those client results as number one prior. Yeah. 100%. That’s the other thing, isn’t it? As you scale, like we found this particularly when we got to like 100K a month was at that point you start to see problems with churn rate and retention. And then that’s a whole different like ballgame. You have to start learning again. It’s fun to learn, but it’s something most agencies are sort of the six figure level won’t really think about. Yeah. What sort of stuff are you doing for sales then? To, you were talking about solving the sales problem, trying to increase that. What sort of systems have you set up for that? Okay. So in Germany, we’ve been to different sales, coachings from leading agencies and they teach us to, to really qualify more what leads you’re talking to. So we are trying to ask the question of if they’re ready to invest this X or Y amount of money because it’s eliminated the time talking to people that are not qualified to work with us. So that was a big game changer. And then we implemented also like this two step sales process where we have the first qualification call, where we setting the people. Then we have the second strategy call where we selling them actually something packed into lots of research strategy, which didn’t can take either way. And then we increased the timeframe of the contract time and we filled in some setup fee to only work with the companies that are ready to take action and responsibility and eliminate all the energy sucking ones. That’s pretty much what happened. That’s how we optimize the sales process. And then second of all, we got more visible because we, I think right now we on Google on an H-Trust, we have a three or 400 K traffic and we also internationalized our website. This is one crazy tool. I think you probably heard of it. It’s called Veclod, the translation tool where you can internationalize your website. It’s a cool back load. Yeah. It’s W-E-G-L-O-T. So we also implemented this. I think we have like 10 languages right now on the website. We’re also generating leads from overseas and willing building also for foreign countries. And yeah. And then also we came into the social media game. I think after 35 years, I finally understood what social media about. And then we retarget all the traffic into Google demand gen and YouTube remarketing. And we also started to send a filming videography team to our clients and then the recorded testimonials at the client’s space, which we upload on YouTube. And I think that’s the best proof you can get if somebody else talks about how they got successful with yourself. Yeah. Yeah. I would agree with that. I think sometimes in SEO, it can be challenging to get a referral out of your clients. But if you get a video testimonial, that solves a problem because when people come to your website, the funnels, it’s basically a referral, isn’t it? It’s basically them saying, yeah, it’s a process. You trust them. It’s a really good point. I’ve never really considered hiring a videography team and sending them out to clients. That’s a really cool idea. I like it. Yeah. And that’s what also we hear in sales calls that people are referring to the YouTube testimony videos and talking about, yeah, I’ve seen this. I’ve seen that. This is my case. Oh yeah. This feels like my case. So they feel they’re being in the right place right now. Yeah, that’s awesome. One of the things that we recommend some of the agencies in our SEO elite circle is if they don’t have clients yet, they can start interviewing potential clients or people in their industry who have been successful. And then number one, it creates content to market their SEO agency. But number two, it already opens the door to having a conversation with a potential client. I think video is just so powerful for that. I mean, that’s what we actually read now. I mean, you know, you invented that’s why I’m starting with YouTube videos to get just more trust. And in the end, if you have the YouTube video content, you can syndicate it on so many platforms. You can make it into written content. You have audio. That’s the fun part. Yeah. That’s what I love because particularly with AI, I think something that wasn’t possible 12 months ago, which you can do now is you can take that piece of content and you can always syndicate it right like you could always back in the day syndicate it. But the quality was never that good. Whereas now I see, for example, if we take a video and we plug that into a tweet, it’s better than any human could do. And it’s faster. And it gets like crazy engagement. And so I think the potential now, if you understand AI, like you obviously do, and also if you’re creating content like you are, the potential to just expand that reach exponentially is better than ever. It’s better than ever it’s been before. It just takes some time to not fill this space with fulfillment or other responsibilities. And right now, finally, me and my brother, Christoph, for running the agency, we have time to go. We’re trying to get personally more into marketing and sales, which then creates new possibilities with YouTube. Because before I always wanted to do it for years, but I just haven’t had the time. Yeah, I always find like with running the agency is like you just work on that main constraint that limits you now. And quite often when you’re starting off and you get more clients, it’s like operations is limiting you. And then it’s sales and having a good sales team. And then what I found was that marketing was like the last piece of the puzzle to solve most of the problems that we had. And so you just work on that constraint. And I would say for me personally, we tend to spend like 100 minutes a day for 100 days until that constraint is solved and then we’re good to go. The 50 people you’ve been talking about, how many of them are marketing? Three. Okay. Who also are super confident with any AI tool and you’ve been teaching them and showing them. I would say out of all of the, out of those three people, one of them is exceptional with AI. And it’s just because every single day we have this feedback tracker together. And it’s number one, make your projections mate. So number one, say how many impressions on Twitter say you want to get today versus how many do you actually get and what’s the difference by how can you measure the inputs and outputs. That’s the first thing that we trained him with. And then also everything that I’ve learned with AI, I’ve passed onto him. So all the systems, all the tools and everything like. And then, yeah, we just critique each day. It’s like a positive feedback loop. That’s very quick. He says, here’s what I think you did great today. One, two, three. Here’s what I think you can improve today. One, two, three. And we just repeat that every 24 hours. So every 24 hours he becomes extra naturally better. Yeah. And it’s crazy. We’ve got a lot of not to learn from your social media marketing. Also email copy. Really impressed with what you’re doing. Like your whole funnel is so waterproof and there’s no way to be out actually from me. Yeah. In a really comfortable way. Like it’s annoying me. It’s always bringing you value. And I feel he’s right with this point. He’s right with that point. So the argumentations, those and the people, how you picture things are always for me. Although I know basically all this stuff, it’s always a no break to get into action. And then so when we started working with you, because why not increase our capacities with a well-drained and then the one experienced. Thank you. Thanks, man. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think for us, like two of our core values is number one speed is king. So just move him really fast. Like this feedback loops we were talking about every 24 hours instead of every week. All of a sudden we can move way faster than anyone else. And then also leading with value. So number one, like even whether it’s my YouTube videos, whether it’s my team’s follow up emails, whether it’s emails we send to the funnel, everything’s like his value 90%. And then by the way, if you do want to buy from us, here’s the link to do that. Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I’m doing from you is that you are trying to out this call to action. So every time every call, there’s tiny content piece. That’s always the skate. We’re getting contact with you guys. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s all right. Oh, he was going to catch you know, mate. It was really good. Last question. If you had to start off with a social media again, what would be the one platform you’d be focusing on 100% if you’d only had one was YouTube or Instagram or if you had to start off fresh, what would it be? All over again, I would pump out one video every single day for 100 days, spend the first four hours in my day, just 100% focused on that. And then I would just showcase what I’m doing. I’d be like, Hey, guys, I learned this about AI today. Here’s what I learned tomorrow, etc. Here’s prompts. And then also, I would keep this is one thing that I really regret not doing is documenting the process. And now, for example, every single day when I’m working on YouTube, I’ll come up with three to five things that I need to improve what I learned, so that I don’t keep making the same mistakes again. And if I had done that four years ago, and not started doing that last year, the results would have been 10 times faster and 10 times better. Yeah, I think if I started from scratch, feedback tracker, marking my improvements, record every single day, and spend the first four hours on my day on YouTube. I was hoping to say YouTube, so it feels like I’m on the right track. Yes, wide open, man. If you look at someone, for example, like, Casio dash also followed our courses inside the SLE circle. For YouTube. In fact, the second part of it is him and me like speaking together. And he grew his YouTube channel from like zero, I think back in November, and now it’s growing to 30,000 35,000 YouTubers YouTube subscribers. So, yeah, and it’s awesome to see people succeed like that. I think there’s so much room for all of us to grow and to reach a lot of people and we’re all doing different things too. So massive amount of abundance here. Thanks for talking to you, Julian. I really appreciate your invitation. Appreciate it, man. Great to meet you and look forward to the next chat we have. Yeah, I’m going to see you on the conference in Chiang Mai. Yeah, looking forward to it. Yeah, speaking there and yeah, it should be a really good event. Always is. Looking forward. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Appreciate it. So thanks so much for watching. If you want to mastermind with myself, Timo and many other SEO elites, feel free to join the SEO elite circle inside there. You’re going to access to a community with over 200 SEOs and agencies. You will get access to all of these amazing courses, including how to scale your SEO plus how to scale your SEO agency. Additionally, you will get weekly calls live with me and other members inside the mastermind. Plus, if you struggle day to day, if you have any questions, if you need any help. Let’s solve them together. You can actually DM me directly here. And if you want to get a one to one SEO strategy session to white label SEO link building, feel free to put them. We’ll show you how we take websites from zero to one hundred and forty five thousand this month. Generate thousands of dollars in sales and autopilot based on what’s working for us in this free link building acceleration session with white label link building. We’ll show you how to get an SEO domination plan for your clients. You’ll discover the secrets of SEO link building. We’ll answer any questions you have. You’ll learn the best link building strategies for your website. Plus how to rank your competitors with link building, how to 10 X, either yours or your client’s SEO traffic with link building links in the comments, in the description to the SEO elite circle and the free SEO strategy session. Thanks so much for watching.