Social media is also free

and they will push your content and your videos and your posts out to even more people.

So if you're not taking advantage of this right now, like you definitely need to be.

And the best combination would be to be doing SEO and social media because not only are these social platforms pushing out your content, but you can now rank in Google with your Instagram posts or your Facebook posts or your TikTok.

That stuff can rank on Google and bring people into your business.

So how do you rank? The number one thing that you need to do is be helpful.

I don't know if you guys have like a hardware store like this in your area, David, but we have something called Home Hardware here in Canada.

And so where should people focus to be, to be coming up on that, on that list?

Social media is also

free and they will push your content and your videos and your posts out to even more people.

So if you're not taking advantage of this right now, like you definitely need to be.

And the best combination would be to be doing SEO and social media because not only are these social platforms pushing out your content, but you can now rank in Google with your Instagram posts or your Facebook posts or your TikTok.

That stuff can rank on Google and bring people into your business.

So how do you rank? The number one thing that you need to do is be helpful.

I don't know if you guys have like a hardware store like this in your area, David, but we have something called home hardware here in Canada.

And so where should people focus to be, to be coming up on that, on that list?

What's going on in SEO these days? Are we on Panda or Penguin or what's going

on? I don't even know the names of the updates anymore.

I don't think they do that anymore, do they? I think for the big algorithm updates maybe, but I don't 100% know what they're doing.

And that might make me sound like I don't know what I'm talking about, but every time a Google update comes out, we're on top of it.

We have to make sure our clients aren't freaking out about something.

Um, so we know all the intricacies of it.

Um, but what's really happening right now is AI mode is taking over, right? Like Google's pushing AI and Microsoft has their co-pilot, there's Chachapati, Cloud, Perplexity, Gemini, all this kind of stuff.

The joke is that half of the people in Canada were conceived in the parking lot of Tim Hortons, right? Yeah.

What is it that AI is looking for so that you can see yourself ranked in AI? That's becoming a big thing, isn't it?

Yeah, so it's...

Ranking on AI, so whether it's ChatGPT or Google or Cloud or Perplexity or whatever it is, I want to say it's a whole different thing, but it's really more of the same.

So how did you used to get ranked in the rich snippets or the featured snippets on Google? By doing good SEO.

And it's still the same thing.

If you want to get recommended by AI, you need to do good SEO and you need to create content for real people.

Like if you're going to Claude or ChatGPT and you're saying, write me a piece of content, it's going to spit out some generic piece of crap that is never going to get picked up.

Can you discuss those points that you covered briefly?

Can you kind of jump into that sort of origin story?

yeah you just asked it asked a whole bunch of questions so first i'm not a developer i don't know how to do any code i don't know anything like that i know enough to get myself hurt and we'll just say that um but yeah so in terms of the agency um how did we start it with no funding that is a really great question so it's kind of um I was a freelancer back in the day, we're talking like 2013.

I graduated from school, don't really know what I want to do.

I ended up picking up a couple clients here and there doing some contracts at agencies.

And it wasn't until 2016.

Sorry, 2017.

I started getting my own clients enough to sustain and even so much so that I'm like working 14 hours a day.

Great.

you're qualified

yeah yeah i'm like you're trusting me to drive this big ass truck uh full of like hundreds of thousands of dollars of gear and cameras and all i'm like okay yeah let's do it um so i uh i did that for maybe like it was probably like six months but it was so inconsistent i was like making great money like 300 bucks a day or whatever it was and but like i would maybe work like two days in a week and then like not work for another like two or three weeks so i was like okay I have just enough money to scrape by.

That's not working out.

And then I met, long story short, I met this guy who was working at a publication, which is a fancy way of saying a blog.

And they were looking for an SEO person.

And I was like, cool, I'm going to pitch these guys.

And I was like, yeah, $400 a week.

go ahead please

What would you tell that person, whether it's about the importance or like it's going to take consistency? Because most people are not consistent with their blog posts.

Yeah.

So this is something that I do.

So I have a community.

We actually haven't talked about this, but I have a community called the Hey Tony Insiders.

And the people in there who are seeing the most results show up once a week.

We have a call.

Can you just take us back to like, how did Gary inspire you? Give us the lowdown.

... build a team around the world?

Actually, the first person that I hired was a friend of a friend, and, uh, we're still friends to this day.

He was employee number one.

And, uh, I was just like, I didn't have any systems in place, and this, I d- feel like this is most ent- entrepreneurs.

You're just like, "Okay.

You're gonna work for me.

I don't know 100% what you're gonna do yet.

Tell us about that.