SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 520: Agency Hits $6M 2016 Revenue Helping 60 Clients with SEO with PowerDigitalMarketing CEO Nick Bjorn
26 Dec 2016
Chapter 1: What is Power Digital Marketing and how did it start?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
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Chapter 2: How did Power Digital Marketing achieve its first year revenue?
In fact, I liked it so much, I bought the whole business. Go try it for free at thetopinbox.com right now. Nathan Lackey here. Today's episode is 520. And coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to hear from Chuck Solari, who built a $5.5 million burger business and is now doing monthly subscriptions called Burger Boxes. Nathan Latke here. What's up, guys? Our guest today is Nick Bjorn.
He is an entrepreneur by trade and digital marketer by evolution with over eight years of professional agency experience. He's gained a national and global perspective on the evolving digital world with an emphasis in search engine optimization or SEO. Nick is a co-founder of Powerful Digital Marketing, which is based in San Diego, California. Nick, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, let's do it. All right. Tell us first, what is how we're digital marketing do and how do you make money?
Chapter 3: What services does Power Digital Marketing offer to its clients?
How we make money? Well, we're a full service digital agency. Uh, we were created about four years ago. We found this, I found this company with my two other business partners, Grayson LaFrance and Robert Rodriguez. Um, you know, I can't say enough about our partnership. You know, uh, Grayson handles our business development and team management.
Rob handles the finance and I handled the marketing. So I got a lot of good blocking and tackling in place. We've grown to about 37 employees pretty organically in the last four years. And we service everything from SEO, pay-per-click services, paid social ads department, community management for social. We've created a PR department for outreach. We have a content department.
We have web services. So we really, we have a lot of different channels that we pull upon to create custom strategies for our clientele.
Chapter 4: How does Power Digital Marketing structure its client contracts?
And what you said you founded the company in 2012? 2012. Yeah. We just had our fourth year anniversary about five days ago. Congratulations. Take us back to that first year. What was first year revenue?
Oh my gosh, first year revenue was about 500K. We were shooting to make 250. So, you know, we did pretty well. You know, we were able to double what our goal was for the first year. But very humble beginnings. We literally started this company in a urinal factory. Like, you know, that created waterless urinal cartridges.
For the women in the audience that don't know what those are, those are in the men's room and they're basically a cartridge that you pee into.
Chapter 5: What strategies does Power Digital Marketing use for SEO success?
So very humble beginnings for Power Digital.
What was, take us forward a few years, what was your 2015 total revenue?
Uh, 2015 we capped last year was 3.2 million.
And what do you think you'll do here? We're almost wrapped up in 2016. What do you do in 2016?
We're going to do over six. So we, we, we've been doubling just about every single year. We're going to miss that a hundred percent double where, you know, we're not gonna be able to double this year, but we're going to be in that 90%.
Yeah. What is your kind of average kind of client relationship? Is it a retainer or per proposal per contract? How's that work?
Uh, typically we do six to 12 months contracts, you know, that, that really allows us to be able to forecast our business in a more meaningful way. And, uh, you know, it also creates a lot of value.
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Chapter 6: How does Power Digital Marketing utilize link building for client growth?
You know, a lot of things we do, they don't happen overnight. So we need a little bit of runway with those contracts.
And what are the size of those contracts typically?
Uh, you know, we have things starting off at maybe, uh, you know, 5k is probably a minimum that you're looking at 5k to 6,500, um, to get involved. And then that's, that's monthly. And then we have, uh, retainers that are 50 K plus a month.
Okay. So it's a wide range.
So it's a wide range, but we usually were shooting between that eight to 12 K mark is a kind of a sweet spot for our agency.
And if you just go back to, I guess, October of 2016, what was monthly recurring revenue just in that month?
October of 2016. Yeah, so like a month ago. A month ago, what was our recurring revenue number? Jeez, I have to look at my financial for you. I don't have that pulled up for you right now.
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Chapter 7: What are the challenges of targeting specific keywords in SEO?
Okay, let me ask you differently. How many clients are you working with currently? We have about 60 clients on tap right now. Okay, got it. So 60 clients. So is it fair to say, can I do 60 times a minimum of 5K a month and say you're doing at least 300K in monthly recurring revenue?
Absolutely. I think it's probably 364 or something like that. Got it.
got it got it got it very good um and when you give me the six million goal for 2016 does that include uh kind of annual contracts that have been you know cash has been collected through maybe you know mid 2017 if they were annual contracts wait one more time apologize if you if you signed a contract this month for 10 a month and they paid 120 grand for the next 12 months are you including the full 120 grand in that 6 million goal or do you split it up and divide by 12.
No, we include that going forward into that goal. Got it. So that's cash, not necessarily accrual. Okay, got it.
Actually, let me backpedal on that one a little bit.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Nick share about his personal journey and future goals?
Yeah, we're going to close our books out at the end of the year. So we'll take the 10 grand into December and we'll count that for this year. And then we're going to close our books in our fiscal year. We'll start January 1. And then we'll start counting towards our new revenue goal, which we believe is going to be somewhere between 10 and 11 million.
Got it. So you already have booked revenue against the 10 and 11 million if you have annual contracts that go into 2017? Yeah. Absolutely. Got it. That makes good sense. Okay. Very cool. Um, tell us an example of a client you recently worked with so we can get a better understanding of specifically what you do.
A client that we specifically work with. Well, we have a lot of different clients. We have everybody from, you know, Berkshire Hathaway is a client of ours. You know, if we're looking at fortune five all the way down to, um, you know, a venture backed startup from San Francisco.
Um, but you know, maybe highlight one of our, uh, a fun client that we have that we've had for like almost four years now, they've been with us forever is a soccer loco. Um, They're maybe not as well known. Who is it? Soccer Loco. So they're a soccer provider in the US, but they're the biggest provider of Nike and Adidas soccer equipment.
So their name probably doesn't ring a bell, but what they do is actually quite substantial from the e-commerce perspective. Um, and you know, especially when you have a world cup here, they absolutely clean up. But, um, with that said, you know, really, uh, working with these clients to figure out, you know, what their strategy is going to be and figuring out w w we really customize our strategy.
So we don't silo any of our departments. We look at, okay, you know, what do we need to do here to build awareness for the client? You know, what do we need to do to convert? Um, and we really look at the needs of what they're looking to do. So for a soccer local, for instance, you know, we might plug in, you know, we've been doing SEO for them for a long time. They're organic rankings.
are extremely important to them and a big pillar in their business. We've recently started doing more of their paid ad initiatives. They're very hesitant to do those because they tried them in the past. They weren't as successful. Our team was able to dial those in in a more meaningful way, target audiences and get that conversion rate to where they need it.
Social media, of course, bringing the awareness in, really creating the community around that brand has been extremely successful.
Let's go deep on one of those. Let's go deep on SEO for a second. So according to a trap and soccer loco, one of the keywords that you're really cranking about 1200 unique views per month to their site for as cheap soccer cleats where you're placed at number two in terms of search, was that intentional or was that accidental?
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