Lesson 1 – Sell before you feel ready. The biggest SEO lesson isn’t OnPage, links, or CTR… it’s charging what you’re worth. I undercharged for years, and guess what? Clients still undervalued the work and some prospects still do now!
Lesson 2 – Build authority and reputation, FAST! At 16, I didn’t have a fancy portfolio, I had Twitter, YouTube and forums… Built a reputation in public. Shared insights. Got better, faster and networked with people who leveled me up even more as a result.
Lesson 3 – Do shit others won’t… While others chased keyword density and blog comments, I was reverse engineering black hat sites ranking, exploiting SERP inversion, scaling parasite pages and pissing off the biggest white hats in the process, who were all screaming my name.
Lesson 4 – Stack leverage! – Learn a high income skill (SEO). – Build a brand around it (even a small one). – Launch a productized service, info product, or agency. – Reinvest, delegate, scale. – Sell when bored or the ROI/niche plateaus.
Lesson 5 – Master recovery + audits. I can charge even more than $1,499/hr because brands come to me after getting nuked or hit with updates and need calls yesterday. If you can revive algorithmically hit sites and reverse engineer updates, your income ceiling doesn’t exist!
Lesson 6 – Be contrarian. Everyone zigs to content + UX. I zag to links + loopholes. Understand the system to exploit it legally and profitably, then go all-in when all your stars align.
Final Lesson: SEO isn’t dead. It’s diversified. Local. Affiliate. Lead gen. Parasite. UGC. AI. Content. ECommerce. Links. YouTube. Apps… And an almost unlimited list of other opportunities in this $100 BILLION industry! Master one. Monetize it. Expand.
This game is simple: Learn SEO. Build leverage. Get loud! Then charge accordingly. Even if you’re only worth $25/hr right now… You won’t be for long if you play it right. And I started when the industry was 100x smaller, there’s no reason your trajectory can’t be better!