We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gabriel Elmblad. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gabriel below.
Gabriel , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
In my senior year of high school, my dad approached me about this business opportunity. Together we looked into the “Jeff Paul Training Program” In a nutshell the program was about setting up a drop shipping website, finding a unique niche or product, and finding a drop shipper to send your products to your customers.
After careful keyword research, we finally found our “niche” product. At the time the requirements for a niche product meant over 5,000 monthly searches on the name and when you type in your niche on Google you wanted less than 5 million competing web pages.
The niche product we decided to go with was “Fishing Reels”, it took us a while to find a drop shipper but eventually we found one in Alabama. The next step was getting a URL with our niche product included. We purchased www.bargainfishingreels.com and it became extremely successful within the first year.
When I was being trained, my instructor told us that 99% of the internet is a cesspool of information. Google gives each website a page rank of 0-10. Getting a Google page rank of 1 is the second lowest score next to zero. If you even could get a 1 that would put you into the top 1% of the internet.
The way I was able to build such a successful website was simple. I followed “Google’s Webmaster Checklist”
It was pretty much like following a recipe. One big takeaway from it was Relevancy. If you have a fishing website stay relevant and only post content or products about fishing.
The website started doing so well that my Drop Shipper couldn’t keep up with the demand. There was one night when I made over 10 sales while sleeping. I was ecstatic, my lemonade stand was working while sleeping, I couldn’t believe it. The demand I generated was great but my supplier didn’t have that many products. We started having to put products on backorder for people and it would take months for them to get the fishing reels. It started becoming more frequent, and eventually, I realized I was either returning or back-ordering around 70% of my orders. Also, I went against the training. The trainers said I should only sell my Niche Product and I let my drop shipper talk me into also selling fishing baits. I should have listened to my trainers, having so many extra pages and products made an exponential amount of work for me. My website had over 20,000 products, which sounds great at first but that means I have 20,000 pages to optimize and 20,000 individual keywords to assign. It became overwhelming very quickly. When you build a big site you need to have a blueprint you follow. To say this was frustrating is an understatement, it took me over a year to get it going consistently. It was a sad day when I had to close down the site. As a part of my contract with our Alabama supplier, we couldn’t sign up with any other suppliers. So unfortunately we had to close this website down. Every order started to have missing items or out-of-stock items. My supplier was very bad at communicating to me what we did and didn’t have in stock. Business is about finding ways to overcome obstacles. Sometimes you just need to find a new race.
While making another site I realized I should sell services to get website traffic. So I started reading everything I could about Organic Search Engine Optimization. I did a deep dive into Google Analytics and HTML. I started taking some web development classes as well to help me better understand my sites. I also liked the idea of selling a service as opposed to a product. As long as I can type I can provide my service. This service is also great because it can be applied to literally any business website or person who owns a website. My potential customers are no longer just fishermen but anyone who owns a website and wants traffic.
Having the ability to work with any business or website owner made me realize the potential of Organic SEO.
In a sense, it’s just like Paid Per Click Advertising. There’s no limit to how much money you can put into it.
I will tell you this though, if you put 1 million in web development vs 1 million in ads; you would make exponentially more money with web development. Once your ads are done being displayed that’s it. You have to pay another million to have ads up again. When you invest in your own website you are creating content that’s worth linking to and other developers will link to you if it’s quality content. At the end of the day, you will still have a website even if you didn’t sell anything, and you’re building something useful for the public. Every company should have a blog or video blog explaining promotions, things to look out for, special events, etc…
Also you can use snippets from your blog on your social media!
I’m telling you to invest in yourself and your company blog, build useful content worth linking to and you’ll see the difference yourself.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
If you’re getting ready to spend money on Marketing of any kind the most important factor you should be looking at is ROI or Return on Investment. I have been able to provide an ROI of ten times the investment on multiple occasions. My biggest accomplishment so far has been making a site go from 2,000 visitors in 6 months to over 250,000 views. Within those 6 months, we also started ranking for over 100 different relevant keywords and phrases across my client’s site. Results like this prove to me my work is correct.
Selling Organic SEO services is not easy at all but is worth the challenge. People want to see results right away, that’s not how Organic SEO works. Organic SEO is a slow growth. When you make a new website google will “sandbox” the site for a while. They will slowly trickle traffic to your site to see what you are doing with it as a safety measure. Once they see you are legit they will start ranking you for keywords and maybe even featuring some of your content in a special search engine widget.
Over the years I’ve realized I have a lot more services to offer other than Organic SEO or web development.
1.) New Website Build
2.) Website Transfer and forwarding (moving an old site to a new one)
3.) Local Business SEO (Brick and Mortar)
4.) Voice Search Registration
5.) Google Analytics Tag Manager installation and maintenance
6.) Youtube SEO
7.) Social Media Management & Planning
8.) Blogging only
9.) Full Website Audit with recommended actions
10.) Relevant Key Word Reports.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Over the years of learning SEO and going to college for web development, I was getting some clients but I didn’t understand the value of my work yet. I was only charging people 100$ or 200$ a month. I realized I loved being a business owner but I didn’t have enough experience yet.
I started looking at different Organic SEO agencies, Eventually, I was picked up by V Digital Services. V Digital Services is a subsidiary company of The Phoenix New Times. Here I learned the value of my work and the value of other’s seo work. While working there I would create 6-month plans of action for our clients, which would include which pages we would be optimizing, all the changes we would be making, and what their blog was going to be posting about each month. I always use a blog to funnel potential clients to parts of our website that they find interesting. Blogging is Key to Organic SEO growth.
Covid happened and they laid all the lazy people off. After about 2 or 3 months into Covid, they told us they were going to temporarily reduce our pay by 20%. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I worked there for almost a full year before all of this happened.
So I decided to become a freelance web developer and Organic SEO specialist. I had a reputation for doing good work, so when I mentioned to my friends and family that I was going solo I got a lot of support. A lot of my friends came out of the woodworks asking if I could make them a website or help them with a project.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
The reason I’m able to get consistent results is because I like to organize information in the most digestible manner. There’s a book called ZMOT written by a Google engineer, ZMOT stands for the Zero Moment of Truth. That makes you have 1 maybe 2 seconds to give someone what they are looking for. Having a site with useful buttons and the correct language can make a huge difference. When I design websites I imagine my dad trying to use it. It needs to be very streamlined. Give people the information they are looking for at a glance. How do you do that? The answer is Relevant Key Words and Key Word Phrases. When you want someone to land on your site you don’t want them going to the home page you want them going to exactly the services page or blog they want to look at. Making your customers hunt for what they want will almost always result in a bounce back to Google or another search engine.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: fishingconquest
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FishingConquest/
Image Credits
All pictures by me Gabriel Elmblad