Adam Torkildson
speaker
77 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Adam Torkildson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks, Charles. Great to be here.
I had the opportunity to go to college basically for free. And so that opened up a lot of opportunities. And I chose journalism to get my degree. And I worked at the newsroom in the newspaper. And I got my first taste of publishing on the internet. And this was about 20 years ago. So 2004, 2005. And
I loved how easy it was to just publish other people's works because I wasn't the one writing most of it. I was just sort of interning and helping with publishing. But I was learning how to write at the time. And so these two skills of publishing on the internet and writing led me to, when I graduated, my first job straight out of college was at SEO.com.
And I was able to take a little bit of what I've learned in college. And then I learned a ton of stuff on the job at SEO.com. We call it the Wild West days of SEO. And you couldn't learn SEO any other way than on the job. They didn't teach it in colleges. And most people didn't even know what it was. And I was a brand new 21-year-old.
publishing content for huge Fortune 100 brands, Dell and Alpha Graphics. And they probably had no clue what I was doing for them most of the time. They just cared that their computers or their printing processes ranked high in Google. That's literally all they cared about. We could do whatever we wanted. And so we did. And I had a lot of fun doing a lot of black hat stuff.
And black hat is just an industry term for cheating your way to the top. And I know all those tricks. And I used every single one of them. Which led me to understand that Google, the search engine Google, but also the company Google, had so much impact economically on everyone's business. Google has that much of an impact. They drive 68% of all traffic. This is a stat I looked up last month.
So Google still has a gigantic share of pushing business to whoever wants to be on the internet. So... I thought, you know, that's a great place to do work is in that space where Google is such a big player. And if you know kind of how Google works, then you can make a lot of money. And you could also manipulate it and scam people in the same way.
And yeah, unfortunately, I did several times scam some people. And had to pay for it. I was sued a couple of times and basically learned the hard way that it's really important to treat people the way you want to be treated. And I had to go through addiction recovery as well as part of that process. So I've got a background in SEO and addiction recovery.
So that's led me to where I'm at today, which is I have a publishing company. We publish across about 250 websites. People come to us with their content, and sometimes we'll publish it straight up as it is, and other times we have to rewrite it. But my parents work for me, my kids work for me, and I met my current business partner in addiction recovery.
So all these life experiences have really just led me to Using what I learned on the job at SEO.com and the life experience of addiction to using it for good. And I love publishing good, positive stories. I love publishing political stories sometimes if it aligns with things that I believe in. And I love having that choice.
That's really the awesome thing is I have so much choice in how I spend my time and what I talk about online.
Yep. This is my favorite topic. And my kids have been hearing me preach about this their entire lives. And It's something that I care a lot about because I like paying it forward. I've been so blessed in my life. I actually volunteer for an organization called Score, where I just mentor other small business owners. We talk about stuff that they just may not even know.
That's sort of my motivation for doing this. I just wanted to say thank you so much for the opportunity to tap into your audience and do this for a second. So I like learning and teaching in principles a lot of times as opposed to very specific tactics, even though we are going to get into a couple of those. I want to start with some principles that I believe in. I believe that there are
Basically, if you boil it down to the most basic ideas, there are basically three rules of money. One is you have to spend money to make money. And that's always true, I've found, in my own life. And this is something I've taught my kids as well. When they want to go out and earn some money for the summer, We had to say, look, you have to go spend some money at the store buying these items.
And then you can go resell them later to all of our neighbors. And you're going to make a profit, but you have to spend money first. So building that into their understanding is critical. And that's kind of where I want to make sure we're all on the same page. Number one, that principle. Secondarily, not only do you have to spend money to make money, but...
And it's important to never spend more than you make. And this is a trap that a lot of people get into, especially young people who get access to credit. And they think that status is more important than how much they're spending on things. And that's completely backwards. Wealthy people are very aware of... the profit margins of all the things that they're participating in.
And a lot of people I know hire teams of people to make sure that what they're investing in always comes with a specific amount of profit, whether it's 10, 15, 20%, whatever that may be. That doesn't matter. Everybody has their own set of goals and the way that they believe about how money should be returned. But at the end of the day,
It's imperative that you spend less than you're making, and then you can become wealthy. I don't care what it is you do for work. Then the third principle, and this doesn't matter whether you're religious or not. This is a principle of money, and it works. It is you need to pay charity in some way, shape, or form. You need to donate to a charity. For me, I've got a 10%.
hard line, all the money I make, I pay 10% of it back to my church. And that's how I pay back to charity. And I donate to other things as well. But I don't care if you're making $10 a month or $10 million a month. Give yourself a budget for putting money towards a charity or donating to something as a percentage of your income. And you will be taken care of for doing that.
I've seen it in thousands of people's lives. So with those as our basic principles, by the way, Charles, did you want to chime in on any of those things? I saw you nodding.
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