James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley (0:00):
So when you then talk about, let’s say, the challenges that you kind of put the kids in, and obviously you keep trying to get them to evolve and improve… Back onto Search Intelligence — you’ve got challenges of competition.
You’re up there, you’re at the forefront, people wanting to copy everything of what you do.
What do you think about competition? Do you embrace competition? Do you like it? Does it annoy you that people are out there trying to copy what you’re doing now?
Or do you love it, and does it make you want that competition to push yourself to keep climbing — even though you’re at the top — to keep innovating?
What’s your thoughts on competition within the digital PR industry?

Fery Kaszoni:
So initially when I see things like, oh somebody copied our website or copied text from our website, or even copied text from our invoices that we sent them previously and they put it on their website… I'm of course upset like anyone.

But after that moment passes, I just want to say thank you for all the competition who is copying us or who’s trying to grab market share — because it’s a business, right? It’s a football field.

And I want to say thank you because that’s what's pushing me to think:
How can we now become a monopoly?
How can we show them that we can be better?
How can we build better systems?
How can we create a service so unique and powerful that even if they copied everything on the forefront, they would never be able to replicate the service?

If we didn’t have that competition, we would not invest money into what we invest in — building everything on the backend that isn’t even visible.
That’s why I’m trying to embrace competition. I love it because they slap me in the face every time somebody does something I don’t like. Maybe it’s not unethical — maybe they’re just undercutting us with prices.

Initially it’s upsetting, but after I'm like: yes, we need this.
We need aggressive competitors because otherwise we’ll become Nokia — we’ll become complacent.

We don’t want to be the wolf relaxing at the top of the mountain.
We want to be the hungry, blood-seeking wolf climbing the mountain all the time. We never want to stop.

James Dooley:
In my opinion, you've revolutionized the digital PR industry. You’ve made digital PR sexy for the SEO community.
How have you managed to do that?
How have you managed to break into all these SEO experts and SEO agencies that were obsessed with do-follow links — and now you've made digital PR an essential part of people’s SEO campaigns?

Fery Kaszoni:
One thing I have to address — it wasn’t us who made digital PR sexy.

I actually got inspired by other agencies. It was Rise at Seven. I would say Rise at Seven and Carrie Rose made digital PR sexy.
It was booming in 2020 and 2021 — that’s when DP became really sexy and everyone wanted it.

I got lots of inspiration from there. Also Reboot Online — Shai and James — they were my inspiration. I admire them.
Even at Search Norwich, I mentioned a Reboot campaign I liked because I admire them.

What we’ve done is:
We didn’t make it sexy.
We made it available to the masses.

Because I’ve been doing link building before.
We simplified it.
We educated people so they could do it themselves.

We made the service available at a lower price, with a different simplified model.
We popularised it by teaching others how to do it step-by-step — sharing our press releases, sharing everything we do granularly so people could replicate it.

We helped thousands of people earn links themselves.

Digital PR is now a hot topic because:
• many people can offer it,
• many people can do it,
• many people are now posting their digital PR wins.

So Rise at Seven made it sexy…
We industrialised it.

That’s how I like to think about it.