Best Reddit SEO Hacks That Rank Your Website

Reddit SEO hack that ranks your website in 2026—discover the exact strategy top marketers use to dominate Google’s first page.

In this video, we unveil a game-changing Reddit SEO hack that can propel your website to the top of search engine rankings by 2026. Discover how to leverage niche subreddits, optimize your content, and engage with a vibrant community to enhance your online visibility. This step-by-step guide will help you master the art of SEO through Reddit.

With Special Guest Lars Lofgren

Lars currently works with major internet brands to revamp their content programs. Clients include Automattic, Perplexity, NP Digital, and others. I either build their content programs from scratch or lead major turnarounds. If you’d like some help, contact me.

Co-founded Stone Press – We managed and built some of the largest B2B sites on the internet. Went from zero to $7M in annual revenue in about 3 years.

Former Senior Director of Growth and Product at I Will Teach You To Be Rich – Got to spend almost 4 years learning directly from Ramit Sethi and gaining a deep understanding of how infoproduct businesses work.

Former Director of Growth at KISSmetrics – Neil Patel hired me. Then I went from an entry-level marketer to running the marketing department in a few short years. This is where I learned to love SaaS.

#1 – Why has Reddit become so central to organic marketing strategy?

#2 – What made you shift a SaaS client’s organic budget away from SEO?

#3 – How should brands defend themselves against coordinated reputation attacks?

#4 – Are old-school link-building tactics genuinely working again—or just temporarily?

#5 – What is the first thing a brand should fix when its organic visibility declines?

#6 – Lars, if you could go back to the beginning of your career journey, what advice would you give yourself?

This Week’s Sponsors

Jetpack: LifterLMS

Ninja Forms: Ninja Forms

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:23.380] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 1023. In this show, we’ve got the pleasure of a returning guest and a friend of the show. We’ve got Lias Loughgreen coming back. Lias has got a fantastic career in SEO and digital marketing. He’s helped a number of very large companies and still is, like Automatic and Perplexity and a, a host of other, um, large companies that you recognize. And he also started a company called Stone Press. So, Lias, to have you back, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the audience as well?

[00:01:07.020] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, always happy to be here.

[00:01:08.800] – Jonathan Denwood

So I’ve done—

[00:01:09.820] – Lars Lofgren

Oh man, I’ve done so much shit at this point. It’s like, where do I start? No, I’ve done a lot of marketing, mostly on inbound. I’m very strong on the organic inbound side. That’s where I like to play. Went super deep into SEO for a long time. Actually built an affiliate SEO company. Did that for like 5 years. That was Stone Press, um, and that, that was quite the ride. We caught the tail end of the affiliate gold rush, and then we also got to see all of it like collapse, and the HTU come out, and we got, we got absolutely murdered and all that stuff. So that was, that was, if not fun, it was certainly entertaining and quite the story. Um, and then since then, doing a lot of fractional, like VP of marketing, um, or SEO work for some larger companies and helping them build their marketing departments. So yeah.

[00:01:53.750] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s been fun. That’s fantastic. I’ve got my great co-host with me, Kurt. Would you like to introduce yourself, Kurt?

[00:02:00.600] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, Jonathan, my name is Kurt, Kurt Von Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana No Más, and we work directly with the great team over at WP-Tonic.

[00:02:08.280] – Jonathan Denwood

How’s the foot? It hasn’t dropped off.

[00:02:10.160] – Kurt von Ahnen

The foot is killing me.

[00:02:12.360] – Jonathan Denwood

He’s been a bit grumpy lately, but I think he injured his foot. It’s not very nice.

[00:02:18.400] – Lars Lofgren

Oh man, I can deal with grumps. I appreciate some good grumps. So I think we’re going to do all right.

[00:02:23.180] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, should be a great show. We’ll be discussing Reddit. We’re going to be discussing a host of other topics around the SEO inbound marketing area. Should be a great show. Um, Lyles is a true expert, and he’s just a cool guy to talk to. So I’ll be looking forward to the show, but before we go into the meat and potatoes, we’ve got a couple of messages from our new major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:02:50.810] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:04:10.260] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. Wanna point out we’ve got some cool special offers from some of the show’s major sponsors. Plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins, technology, and services for the freelancer and small agency owner. You can get all these free goodies at wp-tonic.com/deals. wp-tonic.com/deals. So let’s go straight into it. Let’s talk about Reddit. I think it’s still pretty hot. For marketing, for organic traffic generation and strategy. But I also think it’s been overplayed a bit as well. But that’s just my feeling about it. What’s yours, Lyaz?

[00:04:59.740] – Lars Lofgren

Why do you say it’s overplayed?

[00:05:02.580] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, everybody seems to be talking, you know, still seems to be talking about it. And I think I’ve never, I’ve never really been able to get my head around it. I’ve just not been able to really get into it.

[00:05:17.610] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah.

[00:05:18.570] – Jonathan Denwood

And that’s probably why I’m saying this, because I’m not really into Reddit. So Reddit, no, I’m talking out my ass basically there, which is, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for 8 years, isn’t that unusual? It’s just, yeah, it’s just an observation. Also, there’s a lot of people on X, Twitter, on YouTube that says that you can use AI and automate everything on Reddit. Yeah, that’s perfect. And I haven’t got any time for it. I just haven’t got any time for it, lies.

[00:05:55.100] – Lars Lofgren

Oh yeah, that’s fair. So Reddit, Reddit is a weird platform. It is. And maybe I think the reason I’m more open to Reddit is because I’ve been a Reddit user for a long, long time. I still use old Reddit, like old.reddit.com. I hate a new design. I think when they finally killed the old site that, you know, was around 15 years ago and they still maintain a little bit, I think when they finally kill that, my, uh, my Reddit addiction will probably finally get killed off. But, um, so I’ve been in it a long time. I get the vibe. Uh, I remember when Reddit was like all memes. It was just those animal memes, those endless millennial memes. That was the whole homepage. Uh, those were the days. So anyway, I think I, I’ve been in Reddit a long time. I think I get it. Um, and I get the voice and I get the community and I also get the platform and how things move. I would not call myself like a Reddit expert. But it’s something that like I understand, right? Um, and because of— I mean, I never wanted to get into Reddit for a marketing reason, right?

[00:06:54.760] – Lars Lofgren

I always consider like Reddit shines like if I put my— if I’m not trying to be a consultant, if I’m not trying to like close clients, if I’m not trying to do like marketing shit for any company, if I just stand back like as an individual person where Reddit really shines is in like niche hobbies. If you have a niche hobby, there is a subreddit for you. There will be like-minded people. The marketing will be fairly, you know, kept at bay. Uh, the mod shenanigans will probably be like light, if anything. You can go find a community and everybody’s just talking about that super niche interest all the time. That exists. Problem is when you start getting into like professional and product recommendations or bigger subreddits that have massive audiences, um, that’s when all the manipulation and kind of the dark side Reddit comes out. Um, so I see a lot of— even, even as a user, a general— I have a personal account and I don’t follow any business shit at all. I just follow a bunch of different gaming subreddits and all these other niche things that I’m interested in. And it’s, it’s— I still get a lot of value out of it.

[00:07:58.630] – Lars Lofgren

But, um, so as, um, as a marketer, um, unfortunately we’ve been forced into adopting Reddit, even though Reddit’s like mainly for hobbies. That’s where it shines. We’ve been forced to find that Venn diagram overlap between our business needs and Reddit. Because Google, uh, I still think Google is not doing nearly a good enough job here, um, but Google has decided— and all the LLMs, frankly, they all over-rely on Reddit. There isn’t nearly the degree of checking and due diligence on all the Reddit content that I think there should be, and Google will just rank all sorts of shit. Um, one of my favorites subreddits, or one of my favorite terms to go check in Google just to kind of get a sense of how on top of, um, the Reddit bullshit Google is being, is like, uh, standing desks. I’ve done content on this in the past. Uh, I think I still have a blog post or two about this on my blog, but best standing desks the, um, you get a bunch of subreddits that are all ranking right at the top and they are chock full of affiliate spammers. It’s just relentless. It’s nonstop.

[00:09:13.310] – Lars Lofgren

It’s like you don’t even need to know the affiliate game to see that it’s just spam and nonsense and insanity, right? And the reason standing desks is such an attractive opportunity is because it has high volume, it’s consumer, and there’s a higher price ticket for a standing desk. You can go spend $3,000 on a standing desk right now. Uh, I mean, if you want like top of the line, but like even a standard solid standing desk is like $1,000, right? $700. Those are really interesting affiliate commissions, and it has the volume because it’s consumer. A lot of consumer product spaces, they don’t have the high ticket plus the volume, right? You usually get one or the other. So standing desk is rampant, um, and I just checked it a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been talking about how, how, uh, shitty that, that collection of subreddits are for that SERP of standing desks and best standing desks. I’ve been talking about that for years. I just checked it a few weeks ago and it’s still just relentless spam, right? It’s just endless. So there’s a lot of manipulation going on and it’s all because Google is not really doing their due diligence.

[00:10:18.310] – Lars Lofgren

The LLMs are not doing the due diligence they need to, and the stuff just goes straight to the top. I started a branded subreddit for one of my clients mainly out of necessity. I’m like, I don’t want to do a branded subreddit. I want— I just want to be— I just want to check out hobbies on Reddit. Why am I doing marketing? Why am I talking about all this other stuff on Reddit? Uh, but because the rankings are so prominent, they’re so easy, I’m like, you know what, you see, we’re struggling on our blog, we’re getting our teeth kicked in for all sorts of reasons. Why don’t we just go do Reddit, right? Like, why the fuck not? We got nothing to lose. And, um, we’re already ranking for stuff and we’re like 2 months in. This is stupid. And that’s the power of Reddit, right? So there’s—

[00:10:57.580] – Jonathan Denwood

yeah, you say that, but it’s just, it must be me, but like I put a question in, into Google and the AI overview doesn’t, and then Reddit and I click Reddit and it’s some answers about 2 to 3 years ago and they’re totally out of date. It’s totally out of date. And I thought to myself, I start reading and I glanced up and I see this stuff was posted 3 years ago. You know, stuff that’s posted 2 months ago is out of date, the state things are going. So I thought to myself, why is Google putting this almost at the top of search? You know, it’s stuff that’s out of date. It’s like free, but maybe it’s my searches. Maybe it’s me.

[00:11:44.250] – Lars Lofgren

I don’t think it’s just you. I see issues all the time on Reddit. Especially when it comes to the product recommendations. That’s where most of the manipulation on Reddit is happening, at least the manipulation I’m super familiar with, because there’s just so much potential upside if you get into the right subreddits and you get the right product mentioned. If you get your product mentioned in the right context with a few upvotes— and a lot of this stuff is so niche, you don’t need many upvotes, you don’t need thousands of upvotes, you need like 10, and then you’re at the top of the thread. And then Google automatically trusts all that shit, puts it at the top of the SERP, and it costs you a fraction of the time and effort as it would getting your product pages up there or your blog at the top of Google. Uh, like, you could skip all that work just by spending a bunch of time already, or even not even a bunch, just like a very reasonable amount of time. Um, and Google Google’s decided on a strategy of, um, basically letting or entrusting all that due diligence onto Reddit itself.

[00:12:52.550] – Lars Lofgren

And Reddit is doing more. We can talk about that if you are— Reddit has made a lot of moves in the last couple months.

[00:12:58.230] – Jonathan Denwood

I think we’ll discuss it later on during the show because I want to throw it over to Kurt. So I don’t know what your, your views on Reddit are, and then move on to the next question.

[00:13:10.040] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I just want to get the first thing out of the way, Lars. Um, I have a standing desk.

[00:13:15.080] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, so do I. It’s right here.

[00:13:18.700] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I had, I had one, but I never used it.

[00:13:22.610] – Lars Lofgren

I use it on calls.

[00:13:26.220] – Kurt von Ahnen

Jonathan’s like, standing’s overrated. Um, one of the things I really liked about how you started that answer though, Lars, was like, you were like, this wasn’t a marketing effort, this was like a thing I did, this was my, this was my entertainment, this was my scroll doom scrolling habit, whatever. And I think back, because I’m old, I think about like the popularity of Facebook as it rose. I think about that first wave of Twitter as it rose. I think about the fall of both of those, like when Facebook fan pages fell out of favor and then people tried to go to groups and then they went back to, you know, Facebook pages. And then it’s like we’ve all seen this, this ebb and flow.

[00:14:03.830] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah.

[00:14:04.170] – Kurt von Ahnen

But I think that popularity came from like, hey, this is just a cool place to hang out and you know, talk about knitting, bicycling, you know, botany, like whatever, like whatever your interest was, it created those audiences. Those audiences created that flow, and then that flow attracted the marketers. And then the marketers, like lawyers, ruin everything.

[00:14:23.710] – Lars Lofgren

And I have been a part of that, if I’m being honest. Yeah.

[00:14:27.100] – Kurt von Ahnen

Oh, I think we’re all— well, that’s just it. We’re all part of that, right? And then I think about Reddit. Now, I’m in the same boat as Jonathan. I have not figured out Reddit. I’ve tried a couple of times and I just can’t wrap my head around who looks, who doesn’t look, how things get shared, how things get upvoted. I get lost in that. But what strikes me very bizarrely, and it kind of relates to the comment that Nikita made in our comment section, um, she was talking about the sudden growth of how Google’s like, you know, up— Google’s upvoted Reddit, you know, like that just shows it more and more. And I’m really struck by that because Google is like propping up this social media channel in this way but they couldn’t prop up their own social media channels. I mean, Buzz and Circle and all those things that we, you know, Google+, like all those things came and went and never did earn the adoption that you and I discussed, like you with Reddit, me with Facebook and Twitter, and it never got that success. So it’s weird that they would throw all of their coins, if it were, the SERP results into Reddit.

[00:15:31.870] – Kurt von Ahnen

It just seems like a very strange placement.

[00:15:34.490] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, I— the way that I’ve kind of rationalized that, or like the thread of logic there, like what I think happened on Google’s side— obviously I don’t, I don’t know the senior leadership of Google, so I’m just guessing. Um, but there was a period— this was like, oh, what, 2, 3 years ago, maybe 3 or 4, something like that— there was a period where there was a ton of PR, and all in, in SEO circles this was happening. Um, and just like user and tech circles, this was happening where word got out that Google SERPs and the search results were basically trash, had been for a while, that Google wasn’t really on top of it anymore, and that if you actually wanted to find a good recommendation or the answer to anything, you add Reddit to your Google search, right? And the reason people were doing that, twofold: one, Google started to suck, and then on the other side, uh, the Reddit search function has always sucked. You just can’t use it. Maybe it’s a little better now, but for like 15 years, everybody on Reddit understood you cannot use the Reddit search function. So everybody was using Google to search for Reddit, and then a whole cohort of like tech nerd millennials figured out, hey, the hack— if you actually want to skip the search and, you know, the Google manipulation, you just add Reddit to all your searches and you actually get good results.

[00:16:53.040] – Lars Lofgren

This was back when Reddit would come up when Google but not necessarily all the time. It was more selective. And I think Google was trying to find the noise or the signal through the noise on Reddit, at least attempting to do so. Um, and users were like, well, we can just kind of force this even harder because there’s more gold in Reddit. And we’re— this was circulating within— it was on Twitter, it was on Reddit. Like, people— that was a common recommendation to that era, and I got in the habit doing that all the time too, because I saw it, right? I was in it. I was like, yeah, there is a good— there’s gold on Reddit. The popular, you know, the, the most people, the general public hasn’t figured out Reddit. They don’t understand it. It’s kind of weird, uh, and they don’t know how to like manipulate Google to go focus on just this subset of the web, right? Well, that got traction, and then it started to get— there was a number of major PR or news articles and journalist pieces that came out around that time, and I think it spooked Google.

[00:17:53.140] – Lars Lofgren

And that’s actually the main behavior point that I’ve seen from Google in like the last 5 years is Google’s not really taking the lead. They’re not, they don’t really, they seem to have like lost the initiative and lack vision on what a great SERP should be like, what the validation they need to be doing to find the really great content. They’re not leading the charge anymore. Most of their products.

[00:18:18.430] – Jonathan Denwood

They’ve been pretty active with AI overviews, aren’t they?

[00:18:22.370] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, but even that’s a fucking reflex to OpenAI, right? Like, ChatGPT comes out, Google gets spooked, and then they’re just throwing in an AI answer at the top of every SERP, right? It’s not— that’s not— it’s a fast follow move, and I get it. That’s probably the right move.

[00:18:38.600] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, on reflection, I was only teasing you anyway, but Yeah, you were, you are right. It fits into exactly the pattern before I rudely interrupted that you were pointing out, isn’t it? It supports your position.

[00:18:54.050] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, it’s just reflex. And like most of the changes in the Google SERP for the last few years have been a reflex to negative PR and Reddit, that Reddit kind of, uh, story got popular and that was one of the first big like reflex moves. And I think that’s, that’s probably like 80% of the explanation for why Reddit is everywhere on Google. Google was just freaking out like, oh no, everybody’s on Reddit, we need to have Reddit.

[00:19:23.940] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s, um, it was just, do you think they timed it? Oh, we need to go, let’s move on. I’m going to take over for point 2. Sorry, Kurt, but the reason I’m taking over, Kurt, is that I got the, I got, I put this question, I used AI as well, to be honest, but Um, but I also saw some video interviews, you know, the Edward Show you went on a couple of times. And I’m pretty friendly now with, uh, David Quaid. He’s become a kind of new friend. Um, yeah, he’s a— he’s, he’s really— he’s amazing. He goes off on a— he’s so bright, but he goes out— he goes off on a big track tangent sometimes. But I put this second question that you’ve made. What made you shift SaaS clients’ organic budget from SEO? And I don’t think you really said that. I think you’ve said that you’ve kind of, you’ve moved away partially, but you also, it’s, it’s more of a mixture now. Would that be more fair?

[00:20:34.400] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah. So I think that’s been the biggest shift in my, like, online marketing strategy at the highest level, uh, you know, for a long, long time with multiple, multiple jobs I had leading marketing departments, or, um, you know, for the company that I built, I went and fucking did this. Uh, I always believed in the power laws of online marketing, right? Like, if you, if you spread yourself across too many channels, like, you could get gains and wins, but they would be a fraction to what you could get if you went all in on like one channel. Because all the returns, it’s all the— are very power law driven. If you are number one in Google, you basically get like 90% of the rewards, right, in the category that you’re trying to dominate. And I knew that, I learned that through multiple companies, and we went and built our own affiliate company and proved it, and it worked out fantastically. Um, but, uh, what has changed in the last couple years is the power laws are still there. But especially with Google, with AI now, a lot of these platforms have moved from like a concentrated— where their signals are concentrated on their own individual platform to them spending a lot of time looking at all the other platforms, right?

[00:21:55.890] – Lars Lofgren

So if you go to— if you, if you start a company today, and I do deeply believe this now, if you start a company today and 100% of your marketing efforts are just SEO, like 100%, you are in an extremely vulnerable position. And I’ve been through this multiple times with my own projects. Not to say it can’t be done, but the margin of error is essentially like zero, right? If you make one mistake, you’re fucked. Um, Google especially wants tons of signals, uh, about your entity, about your trustworthiness, about your authority coming from all the other platforms. It’s looking at LinkedIn, It’s looking at Reddit, it’s looking at Twitter, it’s looking at everything else. And if you spread your marketing dollars and efforts to be cross-platform, if you’re on YouTube, like, you come back to Google and things are just easy, right? They’re like, you actually have that margin of error built back into the system, um, so that while the power laws are still there, you can’t go at it directly anymore, in my opinion. You really need a multi-platform strategy from the get-go. And this is coming from someone that prefers to focus on one thing.

[00:23:04.590] – Lars Lofgren

If I— I love SEO, I think I’m really good at it, and if I could just do it 100% of the time, I would, especially for my clients. But I am— I’ve literally had conversations this week with multiple clients. I’m like, look, I know we have more content budget, I know we have more organic marketing budget, that’s great. We should still earmark a portion of that for SEO because we need the right landing pages, we need some blog posts to really build out and round out the whole cluster that really matters. But it’s not this like endless editorial dump that we can do 100 posts a month. You know, there was an era where that worked great. I don’t do that anymore. I’m actively talking out companies of doing that even though they have the size, the category is big enough, they have the budgets. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, let’s do 20. 20 is a good clip for a really big category. But then after that, we need to take that budget and go put it into YouTube. We need to get some LinkedIn ghostwriters. We need to get our branded Reddit going.

[00:24:01.000] – Lars Lofgren

We need that multi-platform entity built up, um, not just for like because there’s leads, although there will be, but on top of that, it actually builds up the entity. And then we’re not gonna have to like— we’re not gonna be looking over our shoulders every day, every time there’s a Google update, wondering whether or not our entire business is going to collapse, because that can happen. Even I I can’t tell you how many SaaS companies I’ve talked to like the last year, last 2 years. It’s a real company, it’s a real service. It’s not just some scammy SEO play. Like there is something real there, but if they’re too concentrated on SEO, they’re extremely vulnerable.

[00:24:39.770] – Jonathan Denwood

So push things just a little too much, the whole thing collapses. So hopefully, Kurt, you’re not naughty enough, are you, Kurt? You’re okay?

[00:24:45.870] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m not logging off.

[00:24:47.060] – Jonathan Denwood

All right. I’m, I’m gonna be totally selfish here. We’ve got about 5 minutes, right? But let’s be totally selfish here, guys. Um, so WP-Tonic, if, if I was coming and we— you were doing some work for WP-Tonic, what you’ve just— you know, we are a hosting, but we’re a bit more. We, we are a hybrid. We are hosting an agency, but we specialize in membership, e-learning, associations, schools, individuals, anybody that wants to build community or e-learning basically. And I came to you and said, what can we do to basically get more leads? What would you, what would be a broad outline of maybe some of the things you would say to me?

[00:25:42.330] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, the first thing— we don’t have to do this on this call, but I’ll just walk you through how the conversation typically goes. Uh, but I’d first ask about your budget, be like, okay, how much do we have to work with? Um, we’d get confirmation on that, and that’ll give me a real— like, most mid-size, or even like, how many employees do you have right now?

[00:26:01.510] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, it’s just me.

[00:26:02.690] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah. Okay.

[00:26:03.450] – Jonathan Denwood

And I have a few, like, uh, kind of a few trusted couple contractors.

[00:26:08.720] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, yeah, okay, so we got to be careful. We can’t waste money and we can’t, we can’t go big. Um, so we got to be really lean. And the— for a smaller business, there are a few moves that I think are pretty reliable for a SaaS company that still work consistently and have margin of error built in. In other words, you don’t have to be a true expert. You don’t have to play at the absolute top of that field. You can just be good and things will still work out. There’s two things I’d probably recommend straight off the bat. Like, if you are not doing a ton of LinkedIn content yourself right now, go hire a ghostwriter. There’s a ton of ghostwriters.

[00:26:44.580] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s a funny platform, isn’t it?

[00:26:46.990] – Lars Lofgren

It is. But holy shit, does it work?

[00:26:49.240] – Jonathan Denwood

Holy shit. He’s got a bigger— he’s got a bigger— I’ve seen people, you know, even finding posts is a I haven’t got the knack of finding the posts that I want to find in LinkedIn.

[00:27:06.530] – Lars Lofgren

I don’t know. Their algo is a pain, but you know, whatever.

[00:27:10.510] – Jonathan Denwood

I’ve been— sorry, I interrupted you.

[00:27:13.150] – Lars Lofgren

No, it’s fine.

[00:27:13.790] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s fine.

[00:27:14.010] – Lars Lofgren

These are all good. Yeah, LinkedIn is its own weird beast. For whatever reason, I click with LinkedIn and it makes sense to me. Yeah, but there are— there’s tons of ghostwriters. They’re all trying to do— basically all the writers that got fired off all the blogs through the last couple of years. And all the blogs are just like collapsing. Well, a lot of them moved into LinkedIn and a lot of them are very good and the rates are very reasonable. So, and the amount of ghostwriting happening on LinkedIn is massive. It’s— I don’t do ghostwriting. All my content’s 100% real. So someone’s got voice and can write consistently, I’d be like, go. Instead of doing— spending your time on essentially a blog like people used to do, just go treat LinkedIn like a blog.

[00:27:52.030] – Jonathan Denwood

Do you think— because I think they’ve got to limit up to 15 minutes. I backed off, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna be producing a lot more video and, and I’m gonna be posting it on LinkedIn. Do you think if you do like 8, 10-minute videos consistently and it’s interesting subject, you, you can build audience using video on LinkedIn?

[00:28:14.330] – Lars Lofgren

I don’t know. I can’t give you a straight answer because I haven’t done a ton of video on LinkedIn. All my content is like, I actually, most of my content, I don’t even do images. Like, it’s just like, it’s just, it’s literally just a short blog post. Um, and, um, so, and I know some people do— I’ve heard weird things about the LinkedIn videos. Uh, like, if you do videos consistently, they might have turned this down a little bit, but you, you can get a crazy number of impressions on the videos. But it’s mainly because LinkedIn is forcing those fucking short-form in front of everybody’s feed. Like, you see him constantly, right? And I’m pretty sure LinkedIn is being fast and loose with how they track impressions, where like if you’re just scrolling by, it counts. So everybody’s— everybody starts posting videos and they’re like, wow, look at all these impressions! And everyone’s like, these are not real impressions, people are just fucking doomscrolling right past it.

[00:29:08.330] – Jonathan Denwood

I’ve interrupted a couple times. Anything else before we go?

[00:29:11.610] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, LinkedIn is good. I I would do that. You can do it at a reasonable rate. The other thing, especially because you’re in, um, a big part of your product is the community side, at least that’s what I heard. Look, Reddit is weird, Reddit is funky, but at the end of the day, it’s just a community. It’s just a forum. It’s just a community. So most companies, especially in hosting— I, I’ve spent a ton of time in the hosting and website SERPs. It’s it’s a category Google I know very well. And look, you’re not going to go head to head with HostGator or Bluehost or DreamHost and any of these SEO programs. Like, it’s just not like— yeah, I have— I beat them.

[00:29:53.830] – Jonathan Denwood

Kurt has to put up with my shenanigans and my ever-changing— he just looks at me there with pity, don’t you, Kurt? But, but I’ve tried to— I’m like, it’s kind of hosting, but I kind of tried to position it so it’s a little bit away.

[00:30:12.480] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, I think that’s smart. And if you have the community—

[00:30:15.820] – Jonathan Denwood

smart, but I haven’t done it very well.

[00:30:17.680] – Lars Lofgren

Well, yeah, well, we always try, we always try, right? So a lot of times it doesn’t work, that’s fine. Um, but if you’re— if community is an expertise of yours, I think you would be— you would have a lot more traction on Reddit than you’d expect, right? The hard part—

[00:30:32.640] – Jonathan Denwood

quite— he’s encouraged me enormously.

[00:30:36.000] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, he runs his own SEO Oh, you mustn’t say that.

[00:30:39.640] – Jonathan Denwood

We mustn’t say that, must we? He doesn’t like that.

[00:30:43.160] – Lars Lofgren

And there’s a lot of SEOs that are running their different subreddits, and they’re— it’s absolutely true. I think most companies, maybe not all, but a lot, I think there’d be— you’d be surprised about how many can and should start their own branded subreddit. It’s transparent, it’s straightforward.

[00:31:03.400] – Jonathan Denwood

Maybe I should do that.

[00:31:04.670] – Lars Lofgren

I think you really should. And the hardest part is seeding the community. That’s that 0 to 1 phase. If you can get a little momentum in that community going and then continue to nurture it over time, like I just started this with a client. I’m not going to reveal numbers because they’re still kind of embarrassing, but I’m still— I am shocked on the results that we’re getting for the time and energy that we put into it. We already have an actual community and we’re like 2 months in. I’m like, the fuck is happening right now? Stuff is spreading. People keep subscribing.

[00:31:36.590] – Jonathan Denwood

My only fear about it is that Google’s such— they’re such assholes, aren’t they? They could pump— I know they’re giving Reddit a ton of money. They’re paying Reddit a ton of money, aren’t they? Um, I think they are. Is it, is it Google or they’re getting money from—

[00:31:51.850] – Lars Lofgren

yeah, Google.

[00:31:52.910] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, but it’s still peanuts, isn’t it, for Google? And Google, Google could change its mind instantaneously, couldn’t they?

[00:32:02.700] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, but that’s the nice thing about Reddit. It’s both the opportunity and then you’re also protected on the downside. So the— one of the reasons we mentioned this a little bit, but the reason all these marketers are just flooding into Reddit is because Reddit, for the first time in my career, one platform actually gives you 3 platforms, right? If you’re in Reddit, you get the Reddit audience, but then you get the Google SERPs, and then you get the LLM mentions, right? That’s— it’s fucking 3 for— like, no other platform gives you that. So, but that also means the flip side, if you think about, okay, what happens if Google goes away? Well, you still have LLMs and you still have the Reddit. So I don’t— if you’re doing this, you can do the manipulation Reddit route. I think we’re going to run out of time. Happy to talk about what that looks like. But you don’t have to. If you go in and you’re like, okay, we’re transparent, we’re building up a branded subreddit, we’re really clear who we are, we’re not manipulating anything, everything’s out in the open, we’re building a real community community here doing it the slow, hard, legit way, then even if Google turns off the Reddit spigot, even if the LLMs actually get their shit together and start actually, like, figuring out who’s manipulating them and who’s not, you will still be left with a real genuine community on a section of Reddit that you control, and you don’t have to worry about a grumpy mod kicking you out.

[00:33:21.220] – Lars Lofgren

That alone is still extremely pop— all you’re doing is building a forum around your brand and you’re just doing it on Reddit. And that, in my opinion, still has value regardless of what happens. And you can get that going for a very reasonable amount of money, especially if you’re doing a lot of it yourself. If you want to get serious, then yeah, you’re looking at $20K a month. But look, you get the right contractors on board, you can get away with $1,000 here, a couple thousand, especially if you’re doing a lot of work or if you really want to do 100% of the work yourself. And not spend a dollar on it. Like, that, that you could do that. Reddit is a— you can cut costs everywhere and just dump in time, and you can get something off the ground. It’ll take a little bit longer, but essentially you’re just building community, and that has value no matter what these platforms do later.

[00:34:09.220] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, and I think it’s time for us to go for our mental break. We— and we need— I’m just going to throw it over to Kirk the half and you can, you can rat it through these questions, right? But the title was Reddit. So I think spending the first half on Reddit was about right, but we’re going for a middle break, folks. And we’ll be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:34:31.290] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:35:08.610] – Lars Lofgren

This podcast episode is brought to you by LifterLMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training-based membership website, or any type of e-learning project, LifterLMS is the most secure, stable, well-supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code PODCAST20. That’s PODCAST20. Enjoy the rest of your show.

[00:35:46.130] – Jonathan Denwood

Wanna point out, I do a newsletter. Why don’t you sign up for it? Um, basically it’s normally— but the topic is a kind of expansion of one of the podcast topics. I do it every week, and then I find other resources that’s come on my Radar to support the topic, but I formulate it all myself. You can find it by going over to wp-tonic.com/newsletter. wp-tonic.com/newsletter. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:36:21.840] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I just listen to things go back and forth and running a smaller agency myself, I’ve always been of this mindset, like to your point, Lars, I look at it like like social media is this giant net, and the net’s job is to gather as many fish as possible and direct them to the website, which is, you know, the boat. I want to get everything in the boat. Um, however, whatever analogy works for you. Um, I’ve always kind of looked at it that way, but then other folks will tell me, well, SEO is the key, or this is the key, or that’s the key. And it’s like, it always seems that somebody has like an easy button key, but it seems like there’s no replacement for the hard work, which is— yeah, it’s hard work no matter what, spreading yourself out on as many channels as possible and bringing that in. Now you mentioned LinkedIn, which is like, you know, my little secret garden, and I think about the things I do there. So like you had mentioned the Shorts and how they promote the Shorts, but when LinkedIn approves you to go live on LinkedIn, they actually send you an email and, and a tutorial that says we promote videos that are more than 15 minutes.

[00:37:20.800] – Kurt von Ahnen

Like they’re looking for long-form content, right? So it’s like So they’re doing it both ways. They’re like, they’re trying to be the Joe Rogan and the Shorts, right? All at the same time. Um, but then I found newsletters, and all of a sudden newsletters and LinkedIn, like, to your point, use it like a blog. Tons of people subscribe and read those things. Like, I had no idea it’d be so, so popular. Um, I sense the way that you talked about Reddit that there’s, there’s these hidden gems, these like little folders in the drawer that you pull out and you go, oh, have you tried this yet? Like, and like unlocks some magic to the Reddit. Is that like these branded subreddits and things you’re talking about? Is that, is that like the newsletter feature?

[00:38:00.140] – Lars Lofgren

Or how would you, how would you liken Reddit to use on other platforms? Yeah, yeah, I think you bring up good points on LinkedIn, and I don’t, I don’t really get into like the LinkedIn, um, all those other content formats. I just play around with the posts, uh, keep it simple. But on Reddit, I wouldn’t really call Reddit like secret drawers. Like, for most people if they’re just doing— and they should do like the white hat, above board, transparent, everything out in the open. Like, all you’re doing is starting your own subreddit, and in order to be transparent, you’re just gonna brand it under your company, right? Then that way there’s no issues later on. There are plenty of other flavors of this. You could create a new subreddit and try, you know, make it about your category and then keep it a little hush-hush about who you actually are. There’s a lot of that happening. Um, you can try to— you can get in the black hat world and start trying to manipulate everybody else’s posts, you know, seed your own posts with a, with an alt account, come in, answer, um, you know, like, oh hey, what should we use in this product or service?

[00:39:04.720] – Lars Lofgren

And like, oh, you should use this. You’re like, you know, and you, you happen to be running all the accounts, but then you got to be sneaky about it. You got to do the VPN, You gotta, you gotta make it really authentic so you’re not getting auto-banned by Reddit. You got to make sure you’re finding Reddits, uh, subreddits that are a little lax by different mods. Some mods are like hyper lockdown a lot or asleep at the wheel. Um, a lot of mods are doing their own manipulation and they’re in on it. Um, so like maybe you cut a deal with some of the mods. Like there’s all these weird fucked up games being played in the background. That’s actually most of of Reddit. It’s like Reddit is rampant with black hat right now. Um, it’s the— if you’re doing things in the open, I think because one of the cultural aspects of Reddit is it’s very, very anti-marketing, right? And more so than any other channel. Like, if you just start popping up in different subreddits and do kind of the marketing thing, you’re gonna get banned so fucking fast, even if you are like transparent about be like, if you, if you promote any content that even whiffs of marketing, boom, you’re out, right?

[00:40:10.690] – Lars Lofgren

So you got to be really, really careful with how you mention your own product and when you actually drop that little marketing lead to get people to go wherever it is you’re hoping to go. Um, you basically have to do like, you know, most platforms, most organic channels, good ratios are like 80 to 90% helpful content, 10 to 20% actually promotional marketing. With most of Reddit, it’s like 99% helpful non-promotional content, like 1% promotional marketing, and you can still run afoul of mods really easily. Um, so if you start your own branded subreddit, you actually have a little bit more control, right? Because— and that’s like the most reliable method to allow you to do what you need to do, build things up in a way, get a community going But then you’re not gonna have to worry about running afoul of the mods because you are a mod, right?

[00:41:04.350] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, yeah. Well, that kind of takes us to the other side of the equation, and that’s, you know, I’m thinking about like Yelp now, so like I’m totally jumping channels, but you can have a great Yelp thing, positive reviews, everything’s great. Tick off one customer and all of a sudden they convince 15 friends to jump in and say that you suck, um, you know, so then your Yelp score goes to the toilet. Well, the same thing would happen in Reddit then, right? Someone gets a whiff that I’m a marketing genius And then they go, well, let’s ban this guy. And then you get banned from 15 channels or whatever. And then how do you overcome like a coordinated attack against your brand or yourself in these spaces?

[00:41:41.530] – Jonathan Denwood

Yes.

[00:41:41.850] – Lars Lofgren

So this is something that’s near and dear to my heart because I’ve done a lot of content around this and I’ve talked to a number of companies that were actively being attacked, even publicly traded companies that were being attacked by competitors on Reddit. Because Reddit is so anonymous and because, um, you know, fundamentally Reddit is not— there isn’t a single algo that you’re playing to. It’s not like Google, it’s not like Facebook. Um, Reddit is a series of fiefdoms, and who’s the king of every fiefdom? The head mod, right? So if that mod or one of the, um, secondary mods wants to start going after you there’s really nothing to stop them, especially if they’re trying to put any effort into covering your tracks. Um, they can completely distort their narrative about you within whatever communities they can control, um, because mods, they, they get full power. They can remove posts at will, they can delete comments at will, they can ban users at will, um, and they can also pop any comment they make, they can just pin it to the top. Right? Yeah. So they can skew narratives. They have so much power on skewing narratives.

[00:42:53.800] – Lars Lofgren

And remember, Reddit feeds to the top of every Google result very easily. Reddit is considered a trustworthy source out of the gate for every AI tool out there, you know, AIOs, ChatGPT, Burblexly, all of them, right? So if you have someone in these more popular communities in your category that’s tilting the scales either in their own favor or also against you. There’s the positive ways to do it, and they can enrich themselves, but then they can also attack all their competitors. You do not have any recourse. You’re fucked, right? Uh, and I have— I’ve worked with companies— not worked with, but I’ve, I’ve, um, I don’t have any relationship with them, um, but I’ve, I’ve broken the story on how this This has happened in different markets, and I have not actual paid consulting, but I’ve done one-off calls with people like, look, this is how it’s working, here’s your moves to kind of combat this. It is happening across more categories than you’d expect. And if you want to play defense, if you want to inoculate yourself towards this nonsense and give yourself a fighting chance, again, I would lean back on that branded subreddit.

[00:44:04.210] – Lars Lofgren

If you can build up a real momentum and a real community, you can— like, you’re— you now have a voice in all the SERPs, right? Like, Reddit is its own separate SEO leaderboard. So what’s a good way to reduce someone else’s influence on the leaderboard? You start taking slots up in that leaderboard that you can control. It reduces the voice of someone else, especially a nefarious actor, and it enhances your own narrative, so it gives you a fighting chance.

[00:44:37.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

Right. Jonathan, back to you. I’ll be right back.

[00:44:39.940] – Jonathan Denwood

All right. Right. So let’s talk about old school link building. Well, this combined the two questions I got on link building. Do you think link building is working again? I don’t think it ever went away. I’m influenced by David here. He’s, you know, he said it’s one, still is one of the strongest signals Google gets is, you know, the link quality to your site basically, and other factors, right? And what can somebody, you know, I, I got like what you said at the beginning of this interview that, um, relying on SEO is really dangerous now, even if you’re getting good results. But if your organic visibility is declining, what can you do? So I’ll kind of— so maybe give us a quick— your quick view on link building, link building tactics. Do you think it’s still really important? And then maybe give some— a larger response to what somebody should do if their organic visibility is declining?

[00:45:58.960] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, this is an excellent question and something I go back and forth on. Um, uh, the short answer is link building is still important, but it’s not the cheat code it used to be, which this is one thing Google has improved. I’ll give them credit here. Uh, so the affiliate company that I had, and we were ranking number one on some extreme extremely competitive, very lucrative. We weren’t just ranking number 1. We had like 3 websites on the first page of the SERPs. We were starting to roll up entire categories and lock them all down in extremely competitive categories. So we were, we were, we were kind of at the top of the charts, right? And how we got there is link building. We had a good foundational site and then we went all in on link building. This was like 2019 to end of 2022. And of course, anything before that, link building also had this impact. So link building was such a massive lever that if you took a foundational site and just did a shitload of really high-quality link building and then didn’t get caught, you could get to the top of whatever you wanted, right?

[00:47:09.900] – Lars Lofgren

That’s what I mean by cheat code. And this isn’t theory. I fucking did it. We did it, right, on multiple sites in extremely competitive category. And what shifted with the HCU and kind of the whole big algo shift that happened started at the end of 2022 and then really started rolling out in 2023 is the impact that links have has been dialed back. I don’t think it’s been dialed— it’s not zero. So like, we’ll still do some link building, but it’s not a cheat code, right? You used to be able to get to wherever you want in Google by just link building. Now you really have to round everything else out. And I can tell you with certainty that if a site is getting hit hard, one of our sites, our biggest, most successful site, was getting absolutely demolished by the HCU during that period, especially in 2023. I spent all of 2023, good chunk of it, going so hard on link building, right? Because link building had been a cheat code for the longest time. I was like, oh, hey, you know, rankings are down a little bit. I think we just— let’s go to the tried and true lever.

[00:48:17.120] – Lars Lofgren

Let’s go do some hardcore link building. And I got crazy links during that year, um, links that would probably outperform a lot of link building agencies. And that— it did not slow the decline of that site at all. That site basically went to zero. Okay, so if you Like if you’re being hit a little bit, then hey, you know, maybe some, you know, background link building or kind of— I almost consider like the approach I like to have with link building now is kind of more like maintenance, right? Like if we’re really building up a property, I am going to allocate a portion of my budget to just like consistent quality link building in the background, but I’m not going to go all in on it, right? I’m going to go do YouTube. I’m going to go do LinkedIn, I’m going to do a bunch of this other stuff, going to do Reddit, um, and I’m not going to worry about like dialing the link building effort way up until like everything’s humming, we are, we are one of the key players in that category and we’re doing the final push to number one. That’s when I’d really dial it up, um, but even then I’d probably fucking be careful about it, um, so anyway Important, but not the end-all be-all Chico that it was for a number— for a very, very long time.

[00:49:37.290] – Jonathan Denwood

So what about the other— well, what about what’s the first thing the brand should fix when organic visibility declines?

[00:49:47.040] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, it’s a really good question.

[00:49:49.390] – Jonathan Denwood

The main thing—

[00:49:50.510] – Lars Lofgren

I hate to give this answer, but it does kind of depend. Like, the first thing I always do is look up the search traffic Ahrefs chart. Like, how bad is the decline? How severe is it? If I get HCU vibes from that thing, like, if the decline is just— fuck, you’re just getting crushed, right? You’re just fucking falling off a cliff. Um, my answer is usually, like, just don’t— like, do a very, very deep purge of the site. Try to go remove, like, 70, 80, 90% of the content. Get as close to 90% as you possibly can, and then go take the majority of your marketing dollars, uh, put like at least 75% of your marketing budget into other channels, assuming this is a business that you’re going to keep working on, right? Um, start rounding things out. Do not expect a turnaround on SEO anytime soon. Like, in fact, expect it never to happen and then be pleasantly surprised that if it does happen, if we’re talking about like the really serious hits. If it’s more of like, hey, we’ve gotten, you know, we’re definitely taking a few steps back, but, you know, we’re not demolished, you know, we’re not, it doesn’t, we’re not getting completely murdered and just dropping out of the index entirely.

[00:51:06.490] – Lars Lofgren

Then it’s like, okay, start working through cleaning everything up, but like, you can invest a little bit more into SEO. You don’t have to consider it like dead, but you still want to diversify sooner rather than later to start rounding things out. That will give you the signals to help support everything again. Move number 1, generally—

[00:51:28.070] – Jonathan Denwood

Can I ask you a quick question? Go for it. Why do you think purging works? What signal do you think that’s giving Google?

[00:51:38.980] – Lars Lofgren

So there’s a few things that I do deeply believe in, in the environment that really matter. You know, it’s almost, you know, for the longest time, Google, like, the quality of links really mattered, right? Like, if you got too aggressive or too sloppy with your link building, then you could burn down a domain. Like, that was, that was most of my career. That was the main risk factor in Google. Now it’s flip-flopped. It’s no longer— I actually worry way less about link quality now. Well, you still should. It’s the overall content quality and how spread thin the site is. If you start reaching into topical areas where Google doesn’t think you belong in at all and that content is thin and Google starts to decide, oh hey, regardless of how this content was written, it might be AI, it might be a bunch of freelancers, it might be whatever. If that content quality overall is low, you start to get that domain low quality, untrustworthy classifier, and it takes forever to weaken that and remove that. And one of the easiest ways to start to, you know, loosen things up again is by going through and finding every shit piece of content on the site, which generally there’s a lot, if we’re all being honest with ourselves, right?

[00:52:57.300] – Lars Lofgren

Like, um, and just 404ing as much of it as you possibly can and redirecting everything else that has, you know, quality links going to it, um, and then rebuilding the kernel that is worth keeping. Like, Google— there are exceptions at like the highest tiers of domains, but the vast, vast, vast majority of us should really stick in our neighborhood. Like, if you are in particular category, you do not want to wander outside of that category at all with your content. Because if you get spread too thin, then Google’s like, oh hey, these folks are just doing SEO. And if it looks like they’re doing SEO, then you get burned. Even though we’re all fucking doing SEO, and it’s like, you know what I mean? But you can’t, can’t look like you’re doing SEO, right?

[00:53:46.200] – Jonathan Denwood

All right, Kirk, do you want to do the last question?

[00:53:49.320] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, yeah, this is kind of our, uh, kind of our branded question, I guess, right? So if you could go back to the beginning of your, uh, career journey, Lars, you know, if you had your own TARDIS, a time machine, go back in time, what advice would you give yourself as you were getting started?

[00:54:05.380] – Lars Lofgren

I don’t know, I think it’s also a tough one.

[00:54:07.540] – Kurt von Ahnen

He’s like, go into construction, learn a trade.

[00:54:11.020] – Lars Lofgren

No, no, absolutely not. I like, I like the remote lifestyle. That’s great. Uh, I think A few things, uh, I would tell my 20-year-old self to probably work a little less. It’s like, I don’t know, get going with some hobbies earlier. Don’t spend your 20s 100% on, on work. But that’s like a personal thing. I’ll give you like an actual marketing thing. So a few of the toughest lessons I’ve learned that I really wish someone would have brought it up earlier, and they really— no one really did. I think the biggest one for me that I’m always very paranoid about is, especially for a marketer, uh, like marketer, you come into a company and what happens? The team is like, more leads, more leads, more leads, more leads. We need more pipeline, more leads in pipeline. And sometimes, some— actually a minority of the times— is the company is truly ready for that, right? They truly have product-market fit, the sales team is clicking. The product team is humming, like you, you’re at that sweet spot and now you just need to throw gas in the fire and the whole thing goes, right? That is, that’s a classic marketer job.

[00:55:18.810] – Lars Lofgren

The problem is there is a minority of companies ready for that. Um, more often what is happening is that product-market fit is sort of there but not really. The offer is kind of there but not really. There is foundational things that have not been figured out, um, and only the CEO, the founders, and the product team can figure that shit out, um, but that friction that’s being felt in the company or their plateau that’s kind of starting to be felt, the instinctual reaction is for leadership to go to marketing and say, hey, we need more leads. If we get more leads, we’ll get more revenue, and then we’ll be okay. But the problem is, if things feel sluggish, that’s a huge signal that word of mouth isn’t really happening. And if word of mouth isn’t happening, for any successful company, the vast majority of customers and leads are word of mouth, right? That’s the channel that beats all channels. And if you don’t have that, uh, I mean, there, there’s always exceptions, but if you don’t have that, the odds of you not having a dialed-in offer and product-market fit are quite high.

[00:56:27.130] – Lars Lofgren

And it doesn’t matter how hard you push on lead gen; it doesn’t matter how much money you throw into marketing; all you’re going to do is delay the plateau. And that is, if I were to synthesize the first stint of my career and the first company where I held the leadership role, um, that is exactly what happened. Uh, I got pushed so hard to drive leads, crazy goals, crazy goals that today I’d be like, if someone gave me that goal, I’d be like, fuck you, man. Fuck off, we’re not doing that. Um, and not only— well, I was young enough not to push back, but then I still pulled off those goals. I still fucking hit them, which is fucking insane. I don’t know how I did that. Probably, to my first point, I should have been working less. Um, and but even then, these companies will get in the habit of like, okay, we hit our crazy lead goals, but stuff still feels creaky, let’s get even more leads. Like, no, no, no, no. You need to back the fuck out. You need to stop worrying about marketing. You need to go to your product and have a really honest conversation about, like, what do we need?

[00:57:28.190] – Lars Lofgren

Where’s the market going? And where do we need to close those gaps? And marketing almost needs to be put on like fucking maintenance mode. Um, and the common dynamic, especially in venture-funded SaaS, is that even if you’ve had product-market fit, you can start to lose it. All the honest gets put on lead gen and also sales. And then sales and marketing start going at each other’s throats, right? It’s a super common dynamic. But the real problem is you don’t have an offer that’s truly clicking with the market, or like sort of clicks, right? Yeah, go solve that fucking problem. Nothing else matters if you don’t have the offer. If you don’t have product-market fit, stop spending money on fucking marketing. Um, that’s the biggest piece of advice: if I was at that company with what I know now, I would walk into the boardroom, which I was- I was part of the board leading the marketing department at one point towards the end of that stint. I would walk into that and basically be like, why the fuck are we talking about marketing here? We don’t have product market fit. Let’s take our heads out of our ass, cut, burn, and go recapture product market fit.

[00:58:32.340] – Lars Lofgren

That is the only thing that fucking matters right now. And you can have a pretty large fucking company and either not have product market fit or lose it. Product-market fit is not just an early-stage startup problem. It’s always in the background and can rear its head later, so you always need to keep an eye on it. So a lot of times it’s not a marketing solution, right? And I have to go tell people that, like, fix the product, then come talk to me, right? Or go, go, then go build a marketing team, go do whatever you need to.

[00:59:02.710] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, that’s super insightful. I do a lot of business consulting in the marine and powersports fields. And to your point, they’re all about sales and getting leads and getting people in the showroom. But in reality, if you do a survey of customers, you’ll find out they don’t respond to the leads, and they don’t have the right products to meet the requirements of what they sold in the lead.

[00:59:23.630] – Jonathan Denwood

Exactly.

[00:59:24.120] – Lars Lofgren

So why the fuck you spend money on marketing and sales, right? Yeah.

[00:59:28.130] – Kurt von Ahnen

Jonathan?

[00:59:29.240] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, gonna finish the podcast part of the show. You got extra 10 minutes or do you gotta be off, Lies?

[00:59:35.990] – Lars Lofgren

I have an extra 10.

[00:59:37.200] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, we’ll do some bonus content. I’ve got a couple other quick questions, but we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. You can watch the podcast and the bonus on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. Go over there and give us a like over there. So, Lars, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:59:58.620] – Lars Lofgren

Yeah, a couple places. One, I pretty much like to eat my own carb food. I am very active on LinkedIn. So if you wanna—if you heard this podcast, if you think I’m even somewhat entertaining, and you want to follow me on LinkedIn, just hit connection request, say, “Hey, I listen to the podcast, would love to connect,” and I’ll automatically accept it. That’s where I do most of my content. I do have a newsletter that I post to almost never, maybe once a year, uh, but it’s on larslofgren.com. That’s my blog. That’s where my high-tier, really crazy content goes when I do post, which, again, is rarely. And, um, if you do sign up for the newsletter, which is right on my homepage, larslofgren.com, then you will definitely get any of the big stuff that I do. Uh, so those are the two places. I’m also on Twitter somewhat, um, on Blue Sky if you want to follow me there.

[01:00:45.330] – Jonathan Denwood

So Kurt, what’s the best place to find out more about you?

[01:00:49.260] – Kurt von Ahnen

Uh, right back to the beginning of the interview— LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt Van Aan in there. I’m easy to find.

[01:00:53.850] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. If you want to support the show, folks, give us a review. If you’re listening on your mobile on Spotify or Apple, it’s easy to leave a review, and it really helps the podcast. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ll see you soon, folks.

[01:01:11.180] – Lars Lofgren

Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group? To keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.

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