I have a theory: the best SEO practitioners in the world are not consultants helping their clients get rich. Rather, they are their own clients. Or, if they do have clients, they’ve figured out a way to have them on a performance pricing model in order to share in the client’s upside.
How are these rock-star SEOs their own clients, you ask? It could be a range of things. They could be affiliates, publishers, SaaS creators, course creators, or lead generators who are leveraging SEO expertise. Or a combination of the above.
One thing is certain: they use their SEO knowledge and expertise to make money for themselves rather than helping clients make all the money and in turn getting paid for their time. Dollars-for-hours consulting is a hard slog and doesn’t scale.
Contrast that with building an income-generating asset, one that continues to produce revenue over time and can appreciate in value even when you aren’t actively working on it.
One thing I drilled into my kids’ heads from an early age was the value of building assets over working for a living. Years ago, I read in Rich Dad Poor Dad that an asset is something that puts money in your pocket every month, whereas a liability is something that takes money out of your pocket every month.
Given those definitions, what is the house that you own — an asset or a liability? Clearly, it’s a liability, unless you’ve moved out and are renting it out for more than your mortgage payment.
Technology as an Asset
One of the assets you build could be a technology that solves a real problem at scale. I created one example of such an SEO platform way back in 2003.
Based on reverse proxy technology, I named it GravityStream, and it generated revenue on a cost-per-click basis. I was paid on the value of what I delivered.
If you were thinking it was a tad ironic that I’d have chosen to run an SEO agency for 15 years given the bent of this article, it was because the majority of Netconcepts’ revenue was performance-based. We hung out our shingle as an SEO consultancy only because it made business sense to do so: prospects would come to us for consulting advice, and we were able to introduce them to our technology solution, GravityStream, as part of the sales process. Consulting was lead generation for GravityStream.
Your asset could take the form of a WordPress plugin you commission and have developed. My SEO Title Tag plugin served me well as link bait and definitely paid for itself many times over. I could have expanded the plugin and applied a freemium pricing model, but I never got around to it. Now, Yoast completely dominates the space, so the window of opportunity has almost certainly closed.
Websites as Assets
Whether an e-commerce site, online community, or content site, a website can generate ongoing revenue. A site can be monetized in a number of ways, none of which are mutually exclusive.
You could sell digital goods like e-books or courses. You could promote third-party products through affiliate partnerships. You could sell physical goods using drop shipping or fulfillment services. You could generate leads and sell them either directly or through intermediaries. You could also monetize through sponsorships, subscriptions, memberships, or advertising. Display advertising remains one of the simplest ways to get started, though it is rarely the most lucrative on its own.
An example of an AdSense-supported site is InnSite.com, a bed-and-breakfast directory I created in 1994 and sold in 2010. My success with that site inspired my oldest daughter, Chloe, at the age of 14, to create a blog about her favorite hobby at the time, the Nickelodeon-owned Neopets. Her AdSense-supported blog and game cheats site, Neopets Fanatic, generated passive income for her throughout her teens for over five years, at times reaching $1,100 per month. Now she runs her own SEO consultancy. Isn’t that how all kids should be saving for college, rather than flipping burgers or bussing tables?
Proximity Begets Opportunity
In addition to the value of assets over selling your time, there’s another key concept I advocate in wealth creation: proximity is power. This concept, popularized by Tony Robbins, is a simple one: when you are in close proximity to highly successful people, your trajectory changes.
From these individuals, you learn distinctions that can shave years off a traditional career path. More importantly, you gain access to opportunities that would otherwise remain out of reach. When your peer group includes high performers, their habits and thinking tend to influence your own.
How do you achieve this proximity? One of the easiest ways is to join groups or attend events where the super-successful gather. After I sold Netconcepts, I joined a group called Platinum Partnership, a mastermind run by Tony Robbins. It was a six-figure-per-year commitment, but it pays off. Just in direct client revenue, I made a 2x return on my investment. That doesn’t even include all the intangibles, including meeting the woman of my dreams, who is now my wife.
Of course, the dilemma with rubbing shoulders with the super-successful is that it takes money to make money. If you’re not keen on dropping six figures, consider joining a mastermind or attending elite events focused on your industry. The investment tends to return itself in ways that are difficult to anticipate in advance.
Ownership vs. Operation
How can you tell if you are an owner instead of an operator? An owner has an exit strategy; an operator does not.
If you don’t have an exit strategy, you may have built a very expensive job for yourself. You are your own worst boss, subjecting yourself to work conditions you would never dream of imposing on anyone else. The business depends entirely on your presence. If something were to happen to you, the whole thing stalls.
The distinction between being your own boss and being a business owner is that one is people-dependent, while the other is systems-dependent. Scalability is key. The real product you are building is the business itself, not just the service or product it delivers.
Introducing the New Rich
Have you heard of Frank Kern? How about Jeff Walker? Brendon Burchard? Eben Pagan? These individuals have each made eight figures through internet marketing. They sell information products, run seminars, and operate group coaching programs and masterminds.
These are what Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, calls the New Rich. The New Rich is what many online marketers aspire to: money while you sleep, and lots of it.
The New Rich are not employed by anybody. They are not even self-employed. Self-employed implies that you work for a living. The New Rich are not operators of a business. They are owners who let other people do the operating for them.
Information Products as Assets
With an information product, you are pricing the product based on the value it delivers. In other words, you are selling the outcome.
Information products today typically take the form of digital offerings such as courses, training programs, membership sites, or premium content communities. These models allow you to reach a wider audience without the constraints of physical production or inventory.
A printed book is not a bad thing to have, but think of it as a large business card rather than a primary revenue stream.
There is an established framework for doing product launches at scale. Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula was a pioneer in this space. Walker was the first to make six figures in seven days online, and he laid out the formula that launched an industry. His students have collectively done over a billion dollars in launches across hundreds of niches.
The PLF process involves what Walker describes as a sideways sales letter: you take your marketing and turn it into an orchestrated event. A significant part of a successful product launch involves co-marketing with joint venture partners, which is yet another reason why proximity matters.
When I attended Frank Kern’s List Control event in 2010, one direct result was spending time with Jeremy Schoemaker, who contacted me a week later inviting me to be the SEO expert on his Shoemoney System. These sorts of opportunities fall into your lap when you are in the right place at the right time.
Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It
You may have spent years becoming an SEO expert. Now, you are perhaps working in-house, putting your skills to use to grow someone else’s business, or working for an agency, helping clients do the same.
You might even have become a consultant or started your own agency, and still you are exchanging time for money. You only make more when you work more, and you are subject to the whims of clients who may drop you at a moment’s notice.
There is another option: turn your SEO or marketing knowledge into assets such as software, content platforms, or digital products that can scale beyond your direct involvement. The knowledge that makes you valuable to clients is the same knowledge that can make you wealthy as your own client.
