Transcript [EN]: How I Built a $1M+ SEO Agency With No Sales Team

This is Steve Toth, and he runs one of the most respected agencies around. 25 employees, seven figures a year in revenue, clients like Royal Bank of Canada and Porter Airlines. And he built all of it without a sales team. Instead, he repeated simple, actionable steps for the last decade. >> I was suddenly making $50,000 a month. >> This is a story of how he went from a FreshBooks employee to the CEO of his own multi-million dollar agency. Steve Toth, what's your story? >> It started in 2010 when I got a job at a web development company being a copywriter. The first blog I ever wrote for that company was when to redo your website. I thought it would be a good idea because we were a web development company and I was trying to target people who were rebuilding their websites. And I ranked number one. Basically, I outranked Seth Godin for an article that he had and I thought that was pretty cool and that's kind of where I caught the bug. >> Steve's first blog post sparked what would become a long-running career in SEO. The problem was that he needed to actually learn SEO. But then he found a path forward. >> A year later, I got a job at an agency as actually a social media manager, but I sat beside the SEO manager and basically just asked him questions [music] for two years. Pretty quickly into that job, I started blogging about everything that I was learning. I was very fortunate in terms of having a second SEO manager work with me at that company who was also very kind with their knowledge. I can remember asking him who I should follow on Twitter at the time [music] and I just gave him my laptop with my account logged in and he went and followed [music] everybody for me. Following the right people on Twitter. That's one of the ways that I started learning [music] SEO right from the beginning. >> It was obvious that Steve had an obsession with SEO and he'd soon get an opportunity at a fast-growing startup called FreshBooks, which would set the trajectory for his career. >> I left that agency and got a job at a different agency, applied to FreshBooks >> [music] >> and got a job as their SEO manager. And that was just a huge turning point in my career looking back at it. >> With a clear strategy, Steve managed to shock the entire business by generating traffic and revenue beyond expectations. >> We noticed [music] that invoice template was a keyword that had 300,000 searches per month. It also had hundreds of long-tail keywords associated with it. We had been bidding on that keyword as our primary keyword, and we knew if we could rank organically for that keyword, we were going to produce quite an ROI for that company. At its peak was when it was ranking number one and all those other 110 pages [music] that we created around it, they were driving $50,000 in traffic value per week. [music] I was making $75,000 a year at FreshBooks, and I got a $5,000 raise. And once that started to happen, those 650 blogs that we also published a year later, those were earning 50,000 clicks a day. The data scientists at FreshBooks [music] were looking over their shoulder and wondering, "What is this two-person SEO department doing over there in terms of all this revenue that we were bringing [music] in?" >> He started teaching SEO because he enjoyed it and started posting about campaigns on LinkedIn. One campaign in particular would lead [music] to his career break. So, you posted about your invoice template win. Can you walk me through posting that on LinkedIn? Like, what made you do it? What were you expecting? >> I didn't really think anything that was going to come from that. When we ranked number one for invoice template and I posted that on LinkedIn, I was literally waiting for our Uber to go to an escape room. I was really just waiting for that Uber that I decided to on my phone post that on LinkedIn. When I came back that night after the escape room, there was I think 200 likes or so on the post and a message in my inbox talking about wanting to hire me. It was like, "Wow, I just put $5,000 a month into my bank account [music] from one post and sharing something." It just opened my eyes to the power [music] of sharing my knowledge with other people or even just sharing my wins and my success on LinkedIn. >> Steve was already doing standout work when his invoice template post on LinkedIn changed everything. This challenged his views on the potential he had and encouraged him to move even further. >> I always thought I would need a sales guy to sign all the deals and [music] I would just be, you know, with my head down doing the strategies and and working on the websites. I'm also an introvert, right? So, when I made that post, I realized I didn't have to be a {quote} {unquote} sales person. Um I could just share my knowledge and then, you know, people would eventually contact me. >> One single post gave him a client that would kick off his independent career, but Steve didn't quit his job, at least not right away. And the way he eventually left is the thing most people get wrong. What if things didn't work out? What was actually at stake for you? >> At that time, I had saved up about $100,000 by doing freelance um while at FreshBooks. I knew that if I fell flat on my face and I completely failed at this freelance thing, I'd be okay for a year. So, essentially I kept my job until it was costing me money [music] to stay in my job. As you're thinking about wanting to become a freelancer, bank up some money [music] in the bank before you do it because for me, when I was first taking on those clients, [music] I had had one client previous to SEO Notebook. And they were paying me $1,200 a month. But by the time I had that full-time job [music] and I was getting those leads, I felt really okay with 5K month because if they didn't sign, I would [music] just have my job to fall back on. If you just quit with no plan, you're going to end up charging less and you're going [music] to say yes to opportunities that maybe you shouldn't. But if you put yourself in a strong position [music] where you have that, you know, nest egg income that you've been backing up, you can still give your clients that higher [music] number. >> With a safety net established and confidence riding high, Steve was prepared to go independent full-time. But as soon as he took the leap, disaster struck. >> The first day of my entrepreneurial career full-time was March 2nd, 2020. We went into lockdown 2 weeks later. I can remember having four sales calls on the Friday that we went into lockdown. None of those went anywhere for the first couple months. A couple of my [music] clients, including my first client CarPages, had dropped their budget in half just due to all the uncertainty that was happening in COVID, [music] but a couple of months in, I had signed uh one of those clients. Things started going really well that summer of 2020. By that time, I'd started getting really great results for clients. I had also taken on a large project with brainstation.io um that ended up earning $700,000 in traffic value, and I also helped launch signaturely.com, [music] which grew to 400,000 organic visits and ranked number one for my second 300,000 search a [music] month keyword at number one, which was online signature. I was suddenly making $50,000 a month. >> He had survived the worst possible quarter to bet on himself. In January 2021, a conversation got him rethinking his own worth, and it all came from a random crypto client. >> The crypto client had just contacted [music] me on LinkedIn after seeing some of my posts and asked me for a consultation. I have never seen this person on Zoom. I knew his name. There was very little about him online. The domain is cryptowallet.com. Like, that's not a cheap domain. So, why don't I just try charging this guy $500? So, I did that, and it wasn't really that domain that gave me the confidence to do it, but I had gotten on the phone with him. It was a 3-minute call where he paid $500, and he all he said [music] was, "I really like what you're doing on LinkedIn and what you're doing for your other clients, and I want to hire you." And I was like, "Is there anything else you'd like to know?" And he's like, "Nope." And then he just hung up the Zoom call. And I was like, "Okay, so he wants a proposal." Right now, I'm charging 5K a month. It's January 2021. I'm having my busiest month in terms of inbound leads. Let's see if he can if he bites at 10K. And I [music] sent him a proposal. It was no questions asked, 10K. There wasn't even a product for Crypto Wallet at the time. And it was really after that conversation with Crypto Wallet that I doubled [music] my price and then stuck with that and kept on increasing it. >> It was this interaction and Steve's financial backup plan that gave him the confidence to value himself more and gain higher paying clients. With Steve's rate doubled, he was in the best position of his career. But it wasn't about the money to him. The thing that actually built the business came from a set of lifelong guidelines reflected in a book recommendation. >> I decided to keep track of all the SEO strategies that I was coming up with and actually put them in Evernote. And pretty soon I had 10, 15 [music] different strategies all cataloged. Pretty much the next day I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if I just emailed one of these Evernote pages out every week. I have this idea [music] for a newsletter. So, I bought the domain SEOnotebook.com for $750, started an email list. I [music] had made a LinkedIn post. I had just shared my knowledge. I just always was very public about sharing my knowledge. The only thing I didn't do was put it on [music] a blog. In the comments of one of my LinkedIn posts, somebody told me that this sounds a lot like The Go-Giver, the book The Go-Giver. I had not known or read the book at the time, [music] but I decided to read it and it really affirmed a lot of the things that I was doing. The main tenets of that book [music] are offer more in value than what you take in payment, give everything that you know away for free without abandon, give away [music] at scale. I think that's the hard part. That's the flywheel that you have to crank at the [music] beginning, but give away at scale. Don't spend your time giving away knowledge one-to-one. Try to give it one-to-many as much as possible. The other tenant is uh let people know how they can help you [music] as you give away your knowledge. So, for me that was subscribe to my newsletter, book a consultation, [music] ask me to speak, become a client. And then the fifth tenant is just be open to receiving. Basically, I had this rule which [music] boils back down to Naval and his podcast how to get rich without getting lucky. That was this idea of setting your ridiculous hourly rate >> [music] >> and delegating everything that fell under that rate. So, at the time that meant that [music] if I could hire somebody to create a advanced spreadsheet that helped me plan internal linking and did all this stuff that [music] would have taken me a lot of time, I would pay somebody else to do that even though it seemed to me like a lot of money at the time. >> [music] >> And that was really my secret to scaling. In September 2024, we launched notebook.agency. Since that time, we've grown [music] now to 20 five people at the agency. We ended up now getting 99% of our leads through that website. >> You are one of the very few that I subscribe to and I see that you give out a ton of tactical info. Why give it away when this is what you sell? >> It was all back to that book The Go-Giver. If you share your knowledge for free at scale, good things are going to happen to you. Somebody comes up to me at a at a conference and tells me that you know they love the specific note. It all goes into my qualitative assessment of how I'm doing. That's not really something that I can describe accurately, but I have this kind of sixth sense of [music] this is something that my audience is really going to love because of all these you know qualitative bits of feedback that come in. There's a great article that's actually a quite an old article that talks about having 1,000 true fans >> [music] >> and that's all you really need to start a successful business for yourself. And I think that's really true. It does take a lot of work to get to that 1,000 true fans, but you don't need to be the biggest LinkedIn name. You don't need to have the biggest email list to have, you know, a thriving six, even seven-figure, potentially eight-figure business. You just [music] need consistency, obviously hard work, right? And you have to care about what you do. I'd been operating, you know, this agency without AI, growing it substantially, ChatGPT launched. And at the time, um, you know, I'd even had this kind of like existential crisis. What if AI suddenly takes over all search and there are no clicks and, you know, all this business that I work so hard to build, what if it all just like gets replaced and this time nobody's thinking about AEO or GEO, but I was thinking about it. Like, man, this is really going to change things [music] and, you know, in that first year of ChatGPT-4, I was wondering about what the future held in store for my business and you know, me as an entrepreneur. But I think as an industry, go back to 2025 and when we started seeing those crocodile graphs, people said it was the death of SEO. Today, you know, a zero-click world, I guess we're just influencing decisions versus trying to get people to our sites for a bunch of, you know, tofu traffic. As [music] a leader, as an expert in AI search, I felt was vital to my long-term outlook in this industry, and I think it's one of the best decisions I ever made. >> If you're someone like Steve, managing so many business avenues can be overwhelming. Luckily, there's a solution to simplify your marketing. Latitud is the AI marketing platform that lets you focus on strategy while AI does the work. The best way to show you is to start from scratch. Hey, Latitud, I need a website. I'm a real estate agent in Boston. >> [music] >> I probably need a home and about and contact page, and I guess a listings and location pages, too. Here's a photo of me. I want that on my about page. Latitud asks some questions, gets to work, requests my permissions to create a site, and a few minutes later, the site is done. No template, no page builder, no developer, just a chatbot. In under 30 minutes, Latitlo built my site, mapped a content strategy, wrote my first blog post, did the data entry, and set up my newsletter. [music] And it's going to keep writing and publishing every week, easily over $10,000 of work for less than 1% of the cost. Try Latitlo yourself, so you can focus on strategy while AI does the work. Efficient marketing on your website can be all you need to boost your business. For Steve, it didn't take much. >> If you look on the AI Notebooks site even today, [music] there's nothing flashy. It's basically just my name, a little bit about me, and a form. But I didn't let that get in the way of of launching that newsletter. I just did it. At the time when I launched it, >> [music] >> I had um banked up 6 or 7 weeks of SEO Notebook to go out on a schedule, >> [music] >> and I just poured all my energy into AI Notebook.com. Now, I would say 90% of our leads come to us wanting to talk about AEO specifically, we're getting a lot of leads of people who found us in LLMs, uh which is also amazing. Um so it's not just newsletter followers or people that I'm connected to on LinkedIn, but people are finding Notebook Agency through LLMs. You know, this flywheel just keeps on going. >> With over a decade of experience, three newsletters, and a booming agency, Steve managed to turn a sudden interest into a massive [music] career. So I asked Steve the only question that truly matters. >> Running an agency, it requires crazy hours. It can be very high stress. What are you doing this all for? >> [music] >> I'm doing it because I love SEO, and now I I love AEO. I've always had high goals. I wasn't always able to meet my goals at different points of my life. [music] For my parents, it was kind of like, are you going to be a doctor, are you going to be an engineer, or are you going to be a lawyer? I didn't start an agency or go freelance [music] to make money. I did it because I loved SEO and I love working with people and I love collaboration. I love that idea of 2 [music] + 2 = 5. The The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and I wouldn't, you know, ever start or run [music] a business that I didn't enjoy teaching people. My parents were both teachers. One of the greatest gifts of my life, [music] bar none, is teaching my daughter about the world. She's 10 now. Love that opportunity [music] of teaching her. >> As for what's next, Steve has built an AI avatar trained on his SEO knowledge. To get more from Steve, go to stevetoth.ai.