22- Exploring Bad Business Choices and SEO Insights with Ash Nallawalla

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
So welcome to this episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks. I'm here with Ash Nalewala, who is based in Melbourne. He's an SEO consultant and a good friend of mine. We've known each other for quite a few years from our exploits on both Webmaster world, where I think you were a moderator, and I used to post quite a lot. And also from Pubcon. We were up in the green room. We were just talking a little bit about our days at Pubcon. So, Ash, welcome to the show.

Jim Banks [00:00:22]:
It's great to have you on.

Ash Nallawalla [00:00:24]:
Oh, thanks for having me. I'd love to tell you about my mistakes and some outtakes and some that were not mistakes, in hindsight, for the.

Jim Banks [00:00:35]:
Benefits of those joining in, who maybe don't know who you are, tell us a little bit about where you're from and how did you end up getting to Melbourne?

Ash Nallawalla [00:00:42]:
Yeah, I was born in Bombay, India, which is now known as Mumbai. And I went to an english medium school, which tends to be how it is for middle class families that are aspiring to get a job, because office jobs in those days were entirely in English. So most people now studied entirely in English. And that's my school background. But I was okay in high school. I wouldn't say I was in the top five in terms of my final results in school. I did well for the people who went into the commerce stream, and that sort of sets a background to making a bad decision. I hung out with the wrong kids.

Ash Nallawalla [00:01:33]:
They were not bad kids. They were simply the wrong kids. They were extremely wealthy, and I was just dazzled by their wealth. So I spent a lot of time in their homes instead of staying in my house and doing my homework. And little by little, I started not doing so well in maths. And the outcome of that was at a certain stage, which in the indian, the Bombay system was called the 8th standard, which is the 8th year of schooling. And I was told, sorry, you can't take higher maths. So I'd never did calculus, trigonometry, whatever else they were doing, which meant I could not do science, whereas I was interested in science.

Ash Nallawalla [00:02:16]:
And later on, one of my hobbies was amateur radio, which involves electronics and physics and all that. So in a way, not doing science also meant I couldn't do medicine. Therefore, my only choice was to do commerce, which practically, for most people, means doing accounting.

Jim Banks [00:02:34]:
Now I can't even balance a checkbook. So about the extent of finance.

Ash Nallawalla [00:02:40]:
One of my other hobbies was writing to famous people. Not too many of them, but at least one of them. A late uncle of mine was the personal photographer of Lord Mountbatten, who many will know, at least in the UK, but he was a member of the royal family, I think, the queen's uncle, I believe, and he was the last viceroy and then governor general of India. So my uncle was his photographer and my uncle died before I was born. And I wrote to him saying, oh, I found these old photos. A lot of them are duplicates, would you like to have them? So he replied and said, oh yes, I'd love them for my archives. And that started an occasional conversation. Once a year, twice a year type of letters.

Ash Nallawalla [00:03:23]:
In those days there was no email.

Jim Banks [00:03:26]:
Yeah, Lord Mountbatten as a pen pal, very cool.

Ash Nallawalla [00:03:31]:
And after I finished my university education, he asked, how did I go? And I said, oh yeah, that was fine, it's all okay, I passed and all that, but I'm really a bit annoyed at the moment because this New Zealand government just rejected my application for a working holiday visa. And the reason for that is I wanted to meet my pen pal, whom I'd become very fond of and I thought maybe we might get married one day or something. Suddenly all my years of corresponding with this girl were just destroyed by one letter. No, this was a girl in New Zealand.

Jim Banks [00:04:08]:
Gotcha.

Ash Nallawalla [00:04:09]:
And to cut a very long story short, because it is quite a story, he wrote to the governor general of New Zealand, chatted about their time together on the Britannia, which was the royal yacht, and with the queen as well. She was around somewhere and chatted about their times on the yacht and said, oh, by the way, can you help this person who's trying to get to New Zealand and has chucked some red tape? And again, jumping several other celebrities in the chain, I got my visa. That's basically how I ended up in New Zealand.

Jim Banks [00:04:43]:
It just goes to show, it's not always like the process. Sometimes it's who you know that can open doors for you.

Ash Nallawalla [00:04:49]:
Yeah. So I'm putting all of this in yet another book. It may not be for the public, but I'm writing a book for my grandchildren called accidental, sorry, fortunate connections. Because most people go through life and their lives take a random turn and it's all because of someone you've met. I know that I've met people at these pubcon conferences and they've helped me shift in a slightly different direction. They've made introductions to me. Not surprisingly, my life has been like that even before my SEO career. So I ended up in New Zealand, met my wife there and we wanted to buy a house in Auckland.

Ash Nallawalla [00:05:34]:
And Auckland is a very expensive city, even compared to Australia, and her parents lived there. And so we thought we'd do what lots of Kiwis have done, which is go to Australia for a few years, save up for a deposit and go back. Now, the only thing that didn't pan out was I couldn't get a job in Australia. I didn't get a single interview for three months, which was absolutely new to me because in New Zealand I had two jobs. In both cases, I literally walked off the street and I walked out with a job. It didn't happen in Australia. What did happen is there was an ad from the Royal Australian Air Force, which we also call the RAF, has an extra a in it. And they gave me a salary, which was four times that of my last New Zealand salary.

Ash Nallawalla [00:06:22]:
So you can't beat a fourfold increase in income. So we just stayed. And then eventually an entire family of six brothers and sisters joined her. And her parents also came to Australia, to other parts of the country, but suddenly home for her had shifted to Australia, so we never went back to New Zealand.

Jim Banks [00:06:39]:
Cool.

Ash Nallawalla [00:06:40]:
Basically, that's when some of my decisions come into play. Like, why did we move to Perth in Australia?

Jim Banks [00:06:49]:
Isn't that the skin care. Isn't Perth the skincare cancer capital of the world? Almost. I think everyone I know lived at some point in time in Perth has ended up with skin cancer.

Ash Nallawalla [00:06:58]:
I don't know why, but it's a very sunny city. It's a beautiful place on the Indian Ocean side of Australia. Now, my parents were in Bombay, Leslie's parents were in Auckland. So I said, on the map, Perth is halfway. Let's go there. And that was a bad choice in the sense that there were fewer jobs in Perth and therefore it took a long time. And there were many reasons why I wasn't getting an interview, one of which was my name, which sounds aboriginal, plus I'm indian, plus the fact that Australia had a white Australia policy till just seven years before that. And one recruiter even suggested I anglicize my name to John Smith or something like that, which obviously I didn't.

Ash Nallawalla [00:07:42]:
But anyway, the RAF was really good for me. I saw the world. Literally, I went around the world. I was only there for eight years, but I developed an interest in computers because anyone who grew up in the sixties, seventies saw the beginning of computers. And I had to build my first z 80 based microbe computer because that's all I could afford. And it only came in the kit. Before that, I was very keen on radio listening. I hadn't quite gone into amateur radio, which I did later on in New Zealand, but that goes back to my wish to do something with electronics.

Ash Nallawalla [00:08:25]:
So I, having built this computer, I started learning about bits and bytes and hexadecimal. And as you can appreciate, some of these concepts are still useful today when you talk. Looking at hex numbers for graphics, for example, we use all kinds of overlapping terminology and units of measurement. So I was quite lucky that I was interested in computers. Now, inside the raft, I tried very hard to get jobs where I could put my hands on a keyboard. And eventually Canberra, which is where our headquarters is, they got fed up of me and they said, look, we have tried to help you with computers as much as we can, because this is still the mid eighties. There weren't that many computers in the workforce, except for mainframes, and PCs had just started appearing on people's desktops, except not mine. And luckily for me, I was posted to a public publishing unit.

Ash Nallawalla [00:09:30]:
And the role of that unit was to maintain the technical manuals of the aircraft. And it was just maintenance, because aircraft were either british or they were american and they came with manuals, but sometimes they had to be modified locally. That's all the unit did. But it was all done with electric typewriters. I was lucky that I could introduce desktop publishing.

Jim Banks [00:09:52]:
It's funny when you talk to children today, and I always remember we used to have what we called it Tip X, like the white stuff that you would put on when you type the wrong letter and you would have to do it. And then on some electric typewriters, it would have like that you could backspace it, it would put the TipX on itself and it really evolved. And again, I think the evolution of that technology, again, has been fascinating. The printing side of things has really been fascinating, the way it's evolved so much.

Ash Nallawalla [00:10:17]:
Yes. I was lucky to be sent to the Royal New Zealand Air Force to study their production methods that were slightly ahead of us, except that they had these twelve inch optical discs. I don't know if they had a name other than optical discs, but that was state of the art for storage. They were bigger than DVD's, and they used some proprietary publishing system, which we didn't get. We just went with the standard Ventura publisher, which was competing with Pagemaker, which were the two big desktop publishing tools of the days. I did well, and the Air force said, I think we need to promote you, send you to staff college, and then send you to the real Air Force up north. And I thought the real Air Force meant no computers. And I told them that I was leaving.

Ash Nallawalla [00:11:10]:
And so I was very lucky that my civilian boss was ex RAF. And he gave me four months to resign because as an officer, I had to give three months notice. But I said, oh, can I ask for four months notice? If so, I can complete a full anniversary. And he said, you're going to get some equipment. Publishing a special publishing workstation called Xivision that was still in the high seas. The whole of Unisys, which is a company that I joined, it's a big computer company now. Maybe it's not so big. It's still around somewhere.

Ash Nallawalla [00:11:49]:
He used this proprietary workstation with eight inch floppy disks. Luckily, I never had to touch one of those floppy disks because they had a fantastic gigantic 500 megabyte hard drive, and it was more than I needed. And we could transmit the files, we would save them on tape, and we chipped the tape to somewhere in Michigan where Unisys had a production facility. So I worked in a software development center which had been created with a five year license on the basis that if we exported anything from there, which was just software, to America or anywhere else, then unisys could import hardware without paying duty, but only for five years. So at the end of five years, they just shut down and let us go. And that's really when I had to really start looking for work. And I found that an earlier bad decision was doing an accounting degree. Joining the Air Force basically meant that I'd given up 14 years of my working life and I was competing with marketers because I wanted to get into marketing.

Ash Nallawalla [00:13:03]:
And I was working competing against people who had been doing marketing for 14 years, like me.

Jim Banks [00:13:10]:
And this is obviously traditional marketing, so traditional marketing, tv, radio, print type of thing.

Ash Nallawalla [00:13:17]:
So I was lucky again within unisys that I got pushed from editing. I was a senior editor there, worked with 14 technical writers, then I became a product manager, and then I became a software release manager. So I wore a few hats. But I was beginning to get the hang of writing in marketing. So my next job with Hayes, the modem people CEO, was the famous Dennis Hayes, who's still one of my Facebook connections. I had met Dennis at a Comdex because I was connected with computer user groups in a big way for over 20 years. As my volunteer duty, I helped the Melbourne PC user group become the biggest in the world. I started their Internet service in my living room, and Dennis Hayes donated, I forget how many, but something like 48 modems.

Ash Nallawalla [00:14:09]:
They were expensive in australian dollars. They were expensive to buy. So that was the huge gift that he gave.

Jim Banks [00:14:15]:
And obviously modems for those of a certain age like you and I, we obviously grew up using modems as our means of access. To get access to the Internet on dial up it cost. You have to pay by the minute for the kind of usage I was regularly running up twelve 1400 pound a quarter phone bills by because the modems were really slow and it took forever to download anything, right. So if you wanted to download an image it would take. You see it coming in one line at a time and it would just take absolutely forever. But at the same time the modem was the traditional means of connecting people to each other in different countries without having to have a really expensive relay mechanism.

Ash Nallawalla [00:14:55]:
Yeah, I started with a first modem of 300 bits per second, also known as 300 boards. This is before I started at hays and I used to work with, not work but play with other people's bulletin boards for a little while. I had my own Fidonet node. I had no users. It was just for my own benefit. But I also had a waffle bbs. Now that software relied on the Unix UUCP protocol which is Unix to Unix copy which is a method of how two Unix machines would talk to each other and swap files or data. And that was the prototype on which I started my club's computer service for members.

Ash Nallawalla [00:15:47]:
And eventually it had 7000 subscribers and they made a ton of money. Today they own a million dollar entire half floor of a commercial building. So they made lots of money. Now they're down to about 2000 members and they're probably still the biggest in the world because hardly anyone joins computer clubs anymore. That's another relic of the past.

Jim Banks [00:16:10]:
So it's funny, like I always remember one of my very early PPC clients. He was like a kind of. He knew computer language, programming languages that was going to be mission critical for when we had the y two k year 2000. So basically the whole world was due to stop at the stroke of midnight on the 31 December 1999 because all the computers had been just set up to go from double digits. So when it went from 99 to zero everything was going to come grinding to a halt. He was basically making an absolute fortune because he was one of the few people who actually knew how to write the code that a lot of these original legacy systems that they used in banking and air traffic control and everything, that's the language that it was all written in. And he was one of the experts in it. And he was literally just sitting around waiting to be called upon.

Jim Banks [00:16:58]:
And when it all clicked to midnight, nothing happened, nothing changed. And all of a sudden it's like, great. So his expertise was not needed, but it was good that he had it and he dined out on it for quite some time.

Ash Nallawalla [00:17:09]:
Yeah. So a few years went by and I had two or three other employees in between. But I joined Macromedia, which anyone in the web industry would know from the early two thousands, as the company that made a lot of software, including. Correct. Yeah, I've forgotten some of the names, but it was known as the MX suite. MX was the. I was very lucky that I didn't have to pay money at staff prices. I could purchase one for $25, the whole thing, which cost maybe $1,500 or something, but I could also play with other software that was in cupboard for giving away as a freebie to customers.

Ash Nallawalla [00:17:59]:
So I took some of those freebies myself, so did all the other staff. And that was really a fun time because as a CRM manager, I had a huge, successful campaign where we hired a call center that could speak five or six languages of Asia. And because my database covered Asia, they started calling all these people in the database. These were people who had downloaded the trial versions of software and tried to upsell them. Now, we collected $8 million worth of leads, and I was on top of the world. I thought, my God, this is amazing. And suddenly we were told, the company is moving to Singapore. We are not taking staff with us.

Ash Nallawalla [00:18:45]:
So goodbye. So from that big high, I was left wondering, now, what can I do? So I built this domain called CRM 911 Dot, which is my email address, nothing else. It was supposed to be a CRM consultancy. This is when I applied my SEO knowledge that I'd been collecting along the way, and I applied it, and I ranked number one for that phrase, CRM consultant for good five to ten years. Can't remember for how long, until Google started becoming unreasonable. They, yeah, it's really rude of them. They started expecting actual content, not just keywords, because I wasn't actually, there was no contact form on that. People who knew that it was my site said, but how can we reach you? You don't have a phone number on it, you don't have a form.

Ash Nallawalla [00:19:41]:
I said, yeah, that's okay, because I've.

Jim Banks [00:19:43]:
Got to tell you, Ash, that sounds like a really bad decision. You could have completely cleaned up in lead generation for basically CRM people that needed cr.

Ash Nallawalla [00:19:52]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:19:52]:
Assistance. Even if you didn't do the work yourself, you could have sold those leads on to other people, without a doubt.

Ash Nallawalla [00:19:57]:
I thought I had the secret of lead generation. I started a book, and I think I wrote about 60 pages. And then SEO just swept me away because I was talking to an American in a product managers group. Can't remember the platform, whether it was LinkedIn or some earlier version of that. But I was just telling him about the story and he said, oh, you do SEO, do you? My client needs someone who knows SEO. It's this new thing. So, yeah, I can help them. So that happened to be a company called RingCentral, which those days was a family owned business started by a Russian and a Ukrainian.

Ash Nallawalla [00:20:33]:
And I think they had five or six people in San Mateo and maybe an unknown number in St. Petersburg. And their software, especially their fax software, was in almost every laptop sold in those days. If you had an HP or a Dell laptop, it came with a DVD of their software. So everyone knew the brand, but their business was 1800 numbers.

Jim Banks [00:21:00]:
It's like the AOL disc that used to appear on every single magazine that kind of went out the shop. Every single. Again, at one point in time, I looked in my front room and I thought I must have about 50 AOL installation disks, because every single computer magazine I bought had an AOL disk on the COVID of it in a plastic bag. And basically they were trying to acquire mass users by providing this offer. I think. I'm sure I read a statistic that there are still millions of people in America that still have dial up. Their ISP is AOL, and they still use their AOL email address, which again, I think is amazing. I mean, AOL used to be synonymous with people with like.

Jim Banks [00:21:39]:
And I want to try and choose my words carefully, but no brains, but lots of money. Because they couldn't work out how to figure out Google, they couldn't work out how to figure out a new isP, so they stuck with AOL and really slow Internet because that's all they needed to occasionally go and make a purchase online. But again, it's just amazing how many people still have it.

Ash Nallawalla [00:21:58]:
Those people were probably on CompuServe. I used to be a sysop for haze in the CompuServe days, which is another system, but that's going off track. So anyway, I did the SEO for Rick Central thinking. That's just a short assignment. And that's when I made a bad decision to get that contract. I said, I work for $25 an hour, which is really low, and they just jumped on it. And they took me on because I did a good job with SEO they said, oh, can you look at our PPC? I said, hang on, I'm a CRM consultant. I helped you out, but I'm not a PPC guy.

Ash Nallawalla [00:22:41]:
He said, oh, here's the login, just take a look. It's easy. And in those days, it wasn't just Google Adwords, as Google Ads used to be known. There were at least five or six others with penny clicks. I can't remember the names of those other systems.

Jim Banks [00:22:55]:
You had Goto find what Goto became. Overture, Findwatt merged. I think they acquired espotting. There was. I'm trying to think what others were. There were look smart. Yeah, yeah, and I think look smart, yeah, and look smart did really well because they'd negotiated a really sweet deal with MSN. So MSN results was the lion's share of Look Smart's traffic.

Jim Banks [00:23:19]:
And here in the UK, it was like Bt. So BT was the kind of the lion share of look smarts traffic here in the UK. And again, it was phenomenal. I think a lot of people really didn't understand the value of how great look smart was, but, yeah.

Ash Nallawalla [00:23:32]:
So the outcome of that was, I was at $25 an hour for three years. I wasn't working full time. I forget how many hours I was working, but I kept thinking about my CRM consultancy. But it was the end of the.com boom and no one was installing new CRM systems. So I thought, hang on, let's just stick to this SEO stuff. At least someone's paying me money. They may not get any CRM customers. So that is why I never worked as a consultant in CRM.

Ash Nallawalla [00:24:06]:
I was getting a little anxious about my income because I had a young family and a mortgage to support. And so when I saw an advertised job for a SEO manager at an agency, I grabbed it. So that was a company called Melbourne it, which is one of the larger registrars in this part of the world. And I completely turned it around. I didn't know at the time that they were going to shut it down, but I gave them a tremendous boost. And I think they're still around under a different name, perhaps, but they've been selling SEO ever since, so I can think around this point, okay, I did the right thing by coming to Australia, so otherwise I wouldn't be in all these companies and met all these people. And who knows? I could have ended up as an accountant. It's a horrible thought.

Ash Nallawalla [00:24:57]:
So I then decided that I wasn't cut out to be a solo operator. When you go from a solo consultancy, to a salary job. And you think, okay, a salary job may not make you rich, but at least it's more or less guaranteed income from day to day. And for most of my career, I've stayed inside companies as an in house person rather than as an agency.

Jim Banks [00:25:27]:
So again, just for the benefits of those people listening in or watching the challenge. So again, I know a lot of people who are amazing at doing SEO, but are absolutely appalling at running a business, right? And they are absolutely the sort of people. I'm not saying that you fit into that category at all, Ashley, but there are a lot of people that they set up their own business, they're good at SEO, lousy at running businesses, so they're lousy at collecting money, lousy administration, lousy at customer service, and they end up either going out of business because they just don't know how to run a business. And they are much, much better suited to working in house for either small businesses or if they have a kind of particular specialism, maybe working for a bigger company, maybe enterprise level sort of SEO. So, yeah, if you are trying to get into the industry, maybe go down that path, not like everyone thinks running your own business is all glamour and glitz and everything else. And it's really not. There's an awful lot of challenges. I always said to somebody that the thing with running your own business is every single day you wake up and you're unemployed.

Jim Banks [00:26:23]:
Every single day you've got to go out and hustle because you've got nothing to fall back on other than your own kind of output, right? You've got nobody else to fall back on, right? So it's just something if you are trying to go career path, career decision, should I go in house or should I go set up my own business? Setting up your own business is a lot harder than maybe you might think it might be at the beginning. Sorry, Ash.

Ash Nallawalla [00:26:43]:
Well, my accountant, who was one of my college classmates who happened to also move to Melbourne, was talking to me about starting my own business. And he said, ash, you will not succeed in business because you are too honest. I've thought about those words many times because I've observed other friends who tried to look for loopholes everywhere, trying to save a buck here and there with taxes or not declaring income and so on. And that wasn't me. In the SEO business, if a customer asks you, can you get me a top ten ranking or number one? You can't say yes to everyone. In fact, at Melbourne, it, I remember rejecting a customer who wanted to rank number one in the whole world for the word cheese. One word cheese. And this is back in the mid two thousands.

Ash Nallawalla [00:27:36]:
And even back then I said, no, that's not possible. I didn't know some of the lingo that I know today, like search intent, that concept didn't exist back then, but people search for a word with some intent behind it. There might be a school kid researching cheese. They may not necessarily want to buy cheese or they may not want to buy your kind of cheese and so on.

Jim Banks [00:27:55]:
One word is the context can be completely different. Again, even if the word is not something as simple as you take a word like pizza.

Ash Nallawalla [00:28:02]:
Right?

Jim Banks [00:28:03]:
Again, the word pizza, depending on somebody's device, they're on the location they're in, the time of the day, of the week, can dictate whether they're looking to make it, whether they're looking to have pictures of it, whether they're looking to get it delivered, whether looking for a restaurant. So many different contexts that can apply to that same term, which is, again, I think that's one of the reasons why things like AI and, and everything is so beneficial. Because Google have the data to be able to say they understand better the context of what that person has done up to the point that they type cheese into the search bar. Right? They've done 25 other searches prior to that search for the word cheese, and they're all looking for recipes. Then they know that when somebody types in cheese, they should be offering up suggestions for recipes rather than for restaurants or for that type of thing.

Ash Nallawalla [00:28:49]:
Exactly. So at the agency at Melbourne, it, which is a domain name register, but I was in a part of it, which was an SEO PPC agency, we had a customer who was a friend of my manager, but his website was entirely flash, and flash websites, for those who don't know, has no HTML in it. It's simply one executable file. There are no pages. You can't turn pages. The whole thing is just one container. So you cannot apply standard SEO techniques to it, like different titles for different pages. You can't do any of that.

Ash Nallawalla [00:29:27]:
I said to my boss, oh, we can't accept this guy because it's a flash site. And he says, no, he's my friend, I promised him that we can help him. So you do whatever you have to do, just help him. So I spoke to my in house developer and she said, oh, the only way to do it is to take some screenshots of the graphics and then write the whole thing up as HTML and then use those graphics. So it looks the same. And that was one of the requirements. It had to look the same as the existing site. So she did it with a lot of complaining.

Ash Nallawalla [00:30:05]:
And when she delivered it, yes, it worked perfectly. She literally stood up, turned around, and just walked out the door. She was never seen again. So it's a decision. I wasn't in a position to make the decision. My boss had made the decision to deliver, so he lost an employee. I guess we were in trouble for a few weeks till we could hire someone quickly to replace her, because there's only one person in house to do all the technical work. So I was a little more brutal with rejecting, especially after that manager left the company.

Ash Nallawalla [00:30:41]:
And then I had a different manager. I had a little more say in whom I was rejecting. And one day one of the salespeople almost punched me for refusing one of his sales. So we ended up in front of our HR. Things cooled down, but he never was the same again. Then I joined the Yellow Pages, which was my large company experience for the first time. They were quite huge in those days, back in the day, and they were like two fat volumes for Melbourne's. And the white pages were also.

Ash Nallawalla [00:31:19]:
It was a pretty fat book as well.

Jim Banks [00:31:22]:
That was always one of my claims to fame. It was always my desire. I wanted to rip yellow pages in half with my hand. And I think the very last yellow pages that ever got delivered to my house before, we just decided that again. I don't know if it was we stopped it or they stopped it. It came through and it was like really thin. And I got these yellow pages and I tore it in half. And I'm like, great, I've tore the other pages in half.

Ash Nallawalla [00:31:45]:
Well, there used to be a trick in those days. I never tried it, but they said if you put it in a very low temperature oven for a day, it dries it out completely and it just crumbles. When you try to rip a fat book about it, you can do it.

Jim Banks [00:31:59]:
That was always my other story. So in the same way that the yellow pages was alphabetical, so you start with the companies beginning with the letter a, so you'd have aaa, whatever it would be, aardvark, this, so on and so on. It was the same thing with, like, directories for SEO, right? So you had the Yahoo directory, the demos directory, you had the categories, and then in the category, everything would be done alphabetical. I remember sitting down with my wife and some friends mulling over what to call the company, and I was explaining, it's got to start with an a. And I ended up, the name of the company was called Web Diversity, which starts with a W. Right. And I'm thinking, what am I doing? And I think that was the decision that I made. At that point, I knew I was never going to be a good SEO.

Jim Banks [00:32:38]:
So at that point in time, I decided that my future really lied in paid media, and I've never really looked back. That's been my kind of my bag ever since.

Ash Nallawalla [00:32:48]:
Yeah, but I learned a lot about agile because it was new at the time. In those days, if you've seen agile environments, you have a daily stand up, but in those days, you were given a ball and you toss the ball to a random person and they gave their update for the day and then they tossed it to someone else. And similarly, the tasks that were written up as cards, index cards, that you've physically stuck on a notice board and you could move them around with magnets or whatever. Today, Jira is entirely electronic. In my last job, until last September, our stand ups were international. We had developers in other countries, and it was all done on Zoom. So things have moved a lot. But that was my first exposure.

Ash Nallawalla [00:33:33]:
And I also encountered this situation where the scrum master one day said, we can't do your SEO job unless you explain in terms of sales dollars whether your request will make more money than this other feature that has been requested. I went to my boss and said, how do you quantify a change in the title tag? How much money is that going to make us? I can't give a number. So you begin to strike these blockages in larger companies, and that's where SEO is different, where you can't assume that your task will be done tomorrow or whether it'll ever get done. There are SEO tasks on backlogs going back two or three years, everywhere I've been. Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:34:16]:
Because commercial viability is almost always going to supersede whatever else matters. Right. So it doesn't matter how much you think it's important. Right. The commercial side of things. And that's always been like one of the challenges. I know. I think when I watched some of your previous videos that you've done on podcasts with other people, like, there was not so much a complaint, but it was like you made a comment about most of the money goes into PPC rather than into SEO.

Jim Banks [00:34:38]:
And I think part of the reason for that is PPC is typically, or again, it used to be. Historically, it was much more quantifiable. So you could say, I spend $1,000, I make $10,000 whereas with SEO you can go, I might spend $1,000 today, I have no idea. I might make $100,000, but it might be 18 months down the line. I think sometimes, again, I think when you look at, certainly with publicly traded companies, that's one of the challenges that I think your alphabets and meta and all the other companies that kind of trade, digital marketing, companies that trade on the stock exchange, their number one objective is to satisfy their shareholders value. So everything else is almost like it's insignificant. They talk about, we want to develop this, we want to develop this. If they don't satisfy the shareholders, those shareholders can put them out of business.

Jim Banks [00:35:21]:
And so many big companies that you talked about back in the day, they're gone now because shareholders basically drove them out of town, basically said, you are no longer a viable business proposition, you are done. And that's the thing that kind of bothers me the most. Like I used to work with Google in the pre IPO days, and they were a fantastic company to work with. They were so cooperative. They listened to people, they would take advice from people, they would invite us to come along and get feedback with engineers and we'd sit and shoot things around a bit and they would come up with some suggestions and they would implement a lot of those suggestions. Whereas now, if you look at the way agencies, people like me who run agencies are treated by meta, by Google, it's appalling the way they treat agency partners. They just, again, they use the word partner, but we are not partners at all. There's no partner relationship whatsoever between the majority of the people who call themselves Google partners or meta partners or whatever.

Jim Banks [00:36:14]:
And there's just no correlation between that particular relationship being a partnership because partnerships involve a bit of two way, and there is absolutely no two way at all. So I'm going to get off my soapbox then.

Ash Nallawalla [00:36:26]:
Yeah. So I'll talk later about my third book where I tackle this specific problem where the C suite doesn't pay enough attention to SEO, whereas they might approve a huge sum of money for PPC. And I've known, I'd say at least 20 founders of startups who have all refused to do any SEO, they said, I will spend it on PPC. And someone told me recently that many venture capitalists, all the clients to whom they've given money to spend it on PPC, that's why some of them reject SEO completely and some just don't have enough faith in it. Now, I'm not going to change any of that because that's how things are, and we have to work around that. Now, I had some successes, major successes in SEO, and they all came because if you do a good job, once, you get referred. So at the yellow pages, I gave them moderate success, like 18% improvement, which was huge when you look at the numbers. But then I was taken by my manager to his next job as a consultant at a very fat rate.

Ash Nallawalla [00:37:41]:
And it was a huge bank, one of our top four banks. And I doubled their organic traffic in eight months. And I wasn't getting them out of a penalty or any problem of any kind, but they were going through a CMS migration, which was an old IBM WCM, which I think was a Web sphere content management system, which was horrible for SEO. So it's just as well. But I happened to be called in at that time, and I eventually almost tripled their traffic in two and a half years because I did some work there for two years and I went elsewhere. Then I came back another six months. By this time that tripled their traffic. So if you listen to your advisors, and it's usually an external person, because in house people are never experts.

Ash Nallawalla [00:38:33]:
Only external people can be experts. So my best success was as a consultant to a large company. So the good decisions, bad decisions are made by your clients in how they treat consultants versus in house people. Now, you said something earlier about in house SEOs who are not necessarily seen by third parties as experts. I don't do a daily podcast, or I don't speak at every conference because I'm working every day. So I get my expertise by just working every day.

Jim Banks [00:39:11]:
So, Ash, I've got to ask you the question. Why are you working at all? Like, why aren't you enjoying your retirement and, like, spending time with your children and your grandchildren instead of working? Why are you still working?

Ash Nallawalla [00:39:21]:
I'm passionate about SEO because I know it works. Having delivered success, especially to the bank, if you listen to people who know what they're on about, it really gives you a lot of revenue. I can't talk about what specific project I did for that bank, but there was a specific product that they were focusing on, and they made a ton of money at the end of that quarter. That's what kept me going for two years with them. But when you're paid a fantastic four digit figure a day, even their money runs out. So I couldn't just keep it going indefinitely, and I had to take a more realistic salary as an in house person at the next place. I started SEO at the age of.

Jim Banks [00:40:07]:
48, which is late, right? That's like really late.

Ash Nallawalla [00:40:11]:
Yeah. People who joined us back in the early two thousands, they were in the twenties, sometimes younger than that. So today they're still in their forties. But I'm 71, and in my mind, I'm still in my forties because I started with them. I hung out with them online. And I have to keep reminding myself that, hey, I tend to go to the doctor more often these days. So my body is beginning to change, and it's not for the better.

Jim Banks [00:40:39]:
Ash, I want to try and wind things forward. So I know that obviously, you, again, very checkered career, loved, again, loved all of the history of where you started, where you are now. I want to try and bring things forward to exactly where you are now. So you've obviously written, you wrote a book. Accidental, is it? Accidental? SEO manager?

Ash Nallawalla [00:40:57]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jim Banks [00:40:58]:
Accidental SEO manager in 2022. And it's the first of a trilogy, right? So there's going to be three books in the series. So what made you, I'm curious to know, one, what made you decide to write a book? And two, what was the process that you used for getting published and everything else? Because, again, I've got a lot of my SEO friends, people like Bill Hunt and so on. They've all written books. And to me, I struggle to read a book. I can't even imagine the effort it must take to write a book. So I'm curious to know, what's your motivation for wanting to do it and also what your process for kind of publishing the book was.

Ash Nallawalla [00:41:31]:
Any book, especially non fiction books today don't sell many copies. I think my first book has sold maybe three or 400 copies. Most of them were online. I can't count the free readers because Amazon has this thing called Kindle Unlimited where you pay a monthly subscription, but you can read as many books as you want for free. I don't see those numbers. I get a few pennies for every page that they read, but I can't get a count of how many times someone's read the entire book. But let's say the print and Kindle versions barely sold 500, and that's trivial. So you never write books for the intrinsic revenue that you get from the books.

Ash Nallawalla [00:42:14]:
You do it to open doors.

Jim Banks [00:42:16]:
William, I don't know what the money side of it looks like, but if you look at the amount of effort that you put in to get to the point where you wrote the end on your first book to 500 copies of the book, however, again, Kindle Unlimited, who knows? But again, and there's nothing to say if it's because I think it's only available in paperback. Certainly when I looked on the Amazon.

Ash Nallawalla [00:42:34]:
The second edition is only in paperback because that's one of the other hazards. My book was pirated and sold on Amazon for more than a year. I just discovered that accidentally.

Jim Banks [00:42:44]:
Who thought, who would have thought that somebody would have done something as dirty as stealing a book for SEO?

Ash Nallawalla [00:42:51]:
They changed the title. That's why I never found it until I decided to search for a phrase in the book. And there it is. They removed the preface, which was personalized, but the rest of the book, the table of contents onwards, is exactly a carbon copy of my book. And Amazon took a long time of back and forth. Eventually they said, sorry, there is no royalties, we can pay you for those, because not a single copy was sold. And I have to accept their explanation for that. But what happens with Kindle? Yes, Kindle, the format for Kindle can be converted to Epub and PDF easily.

Ash Nallawalla [00:43:31]:
And within two days, me offering the book for free, because that was another feature that they have, is you can give it for free for maximum of five days. So I think I opened it for three days and hundreds were downloaded and two people individually uploaded PDF copies to the torrents. So who knows how many readers I lost, because, and it's still there today, I can not just in the torrent, but I found it in a PDF archive somewhere. I don't know where that country that is, but it's there.

Jim Banks [00:44:01]:
So to go back to my original question, what was your motivation for wanting to write a book in the first place?

Ash Nallawalla [00:44:07]:
It was out of frustration that large companies do not recognize the value of SEO. So bury it deep down in the hierarchy. And once they've created a position, they don't want to hear anything about it other than just seeing some numbers in there, reporting that we had more customers through SEO or we had more traffic. But beyond that, they don't want to understand that an SEO cannot operate in a dark room somewhere. If you chuck some bits of paper over the wall. They need to be fully involved with what's happening at high levels. So I saw that too many times. And I worked with managers with no SEO background before.

Ash Nallawalla [00:44:49]:
I wanted my book to be read by one of those managers. I don't care how many, but as long as a few of them picked up, my book actually understood it, and then they worked better with their agencies or with their own stuff. So I'm not even suggesting that it has to be in house. I've written a chapter on how to work with agencies, how to work with consultants, how to select them, and so on, simply because the people who can make a change are not interested in SEO. And it was so bad that initially, all of this was one manuscript. And my first literary agent, whom I approached and who rejected me, saying, this is too niche, it won't sell in big numbers. But I'll give you this advice that it needs to be broken down because someone in the C suite is not going to touch the book if it has SEO on the COVID So I said, okay, I'll put certain topics in book three, some in book two and some in book one. And book three's title doesn't mention the word SEO on the COVID Now, the problem I'm left with today is I've got fragments of books two and three that I'm now trying to sculpt into a complete book in some logical sense, because remember that this was carved out of combined manuscript in some logical order.

Ash Nallawalla [00:46:07]:
That's why it's taken time to get them out. Now, again, I don't know whether they will sell even as well as book one did, but that's the whole point. It opens doors, it allows me to stand up at conferences, and hopefully, when all three are ready, that's when I'll really start promoting them.

Jim Banks [00:46:24]:
Yeah. Because I remember way back in the day. So, again, I've got a lot of friends that have written books, and a friend of mine, Jim Cookrell, he wrote a book, and I remember him telling a story. He basically said he wanted to. He basically wrote this book and he wanted to get, basically become a keynote speaker. And quite often, the keynote speakers at conferences are usually there because they've got books to promote. And usually the deal that they'll do with the event organizer is they will speak on stage without a fee in return for the event organizer buying a thousand copies of the book. So therefore, you've got a thousand sales right out the gates just for turning up and delivering a presentation.

Jim Banks [00:47:01]:
But what he found was there's a lot of people that kind of said he then started to help other people. So he wrote a book, and then he started to help other people to write their books. And what he did was he established that if somebody has a good title for the book and a good thumbnail for the book as an image that goes on the COVID a lot of people will get a keynote on the basis of just that, on a good title and a good image and a good story of what the book's about. Most people have got the ideas of a book in their head, in the same way that I had the idea for this podcast in my head, from having drinks with Rob Snell in Vegas after a pubcon had finished, he planted the seed of bad decisions with Jim Banks because I was telling these stories about all these things that had gone wrong, and he said, you should have your own tv program. And I didn't really think it would be feasible to have a tv program, so I figured a video podcast would be the next best thing. But the reality of it is this person who had just the title of a book and a cover ended up getting two keynote speeches on the back of just that. They'd not written even a single word in the book, nevermind finished the book. And I think that sometimes is the challenge that a lot of people, when they're trying to go through the process of writing a book, they go through so much detail to get it out right.

Jim Banks [00:48:06]:
And again, I think, as you say, the problem with non fiction books is more often than not, by the time you write the end, probably 30% to 50%, depending on what your discipline in digital marketing is. But certainly in PPC. I always recommended that if I wrote a book on PPC, by the time I wrote the end of the book, that at least 50% of the book would be out of date and inaccurate. I dont want to put an inaccurate book in the hands of anyone because theyre going to be making decisions on data that is not correct at the time of now. Really. Thats probably why having a website is going to be more beneficial than having that. I probably went down the route of having a podcast because then that way we can talk about topics that are relevant at the time that the episode is made. People can see, they can see the timestamp of this episode was shot on this date, so the information was relevant at that particular point in time and may well be superseded again.

Jim Banks [00:48:54]:
SEO has moved on a lot, PPC has moved on a lot, PR has moved on, digital PR has moved on a lot, and it will continue to move on. Theres nothing but evolution. Thats the nature of digital marketing as a whole.

Ash Nallawalla [00:49:04]:
Really, Raoul, you made an excellent point there, which, which I should mention that my book does not contain how to do SEO at all. It's all about why do you do SEO? Why is it important? And that's all a manager needs to know. Their staff know how to do it. Or there are other books, like you said, that the how to books change every day. We're seeing Google changing in a big way. This last month, for example, many old techniques have suddenly been swept away, whereas Ive made sure that my book will not compete against any of those how to books. So its really what is SEO and why is it important?

Jim Banks [00:49:47]:
Raoul, the thing is theres going to be a link in the show notes to Ashs book and if you want to go and get a copy and boost the sales numbers, absolutely, go ahead and do that. Thatd be fantastic to reward Ash for giving us his time today. I think the challenge is also the onset of AI. Again, people are writing massive novels just by using AI. Here's the synopsis of what the book's about. Write me a 400 word or 400 page book on this particular topic and they go make a coffee button. How do they come back? The book's written and then they can just go in and make a few tweaks to it themselves. And people like yourself who've put in a huge amount of blood, sweat and tears over a career spanning 20 odd years, in some respects, you haven't got a chance to compete against people are creating the books that have been written by AI because again, it's just, unfortunately, it's almost like the publishing side of it is one aspect, the promotion side is the other.

Jim Banks [00:50:39]:
And again, there's a lot of people that are quite good at promoting things, using Instagram and things like that to actually help promote something. And again, it's been bothering me a lot about how many people are selling information products and they're basically just selling information, and it's not new information. It's not. I think Dixon called me out the other day by basically saying chat GPT is new. And I probably have to accept that. Yes, chat GPT is new. Everything else is the same. It's same as it's always been.

Jim Banks [00:51:05]:
It's the same as it always was. Marketing will always be marketing. The principles of marketing will always be the principles of marketing. The terminology and methodology may change a little bit, but ultimately the fundamentals will not change at all. And unfortunately, so many people are putting a spin on the same information and selling it as an information product. What they're trying to do is they're trying to sell people a dream of. You too can have a lifestyle like me if you implement what I do in this course that I'm selling for $397. And their motivation for selling it is just to make money, whereas your motivation for doing it is to help people who do SEO or don't do SEO, to do it and do it in a better way.

Ash Nallawalla [00:51:39]:
No, that's absolutely correct. Thank you for having me, Ash.

Jim Banks [00:51:45]:
It's been fantastic to have you on the show today again. We probably could and probably would have talked for hours if we carried on, but I know it's quite late where you are, and I'm going to leave you to go and have a good night's sleep. And I really can't thank you enough for coming on as a guest. Appreciate you giving up the time to share your story and where you are now. And as I mentioned, Ash's book will be linked in the show notes. Make sure you go and read about the book. It's got a forward by Bret Tabkey, who's one of our kind of mutual friends, good friend of ours. He was the guy who founded Pubcorn.

Jim Banks [00:52:14]:
He's probably of the guys that if you did a straw poll, hes the one person that everyone in the industry can say thank you to for having the foresight to set up Webmaster world and then Pubcon kind of spinning off from that. And again, ive got so much to thank him for my kind of 25 years in the industry. And im sure youre the same. Youve got a lot to thank Brett, for what hes done. So to get him to be able to write you forward just speaks volumes about you as a person. And, yeah, hopefully at some point in time, Ash will get the opportunity to maybe have a follow up and maybe we'll do it face to face when we're at Pubcon in the future or a live event somewhere. And maybe if you're promoting your three books, we'll have you on to come back and talk to us about what's happened from where you are now to that point. But, yeah, take some time.

Jim Banks [00:52:52]:
Spend some time with your grandkids. Go and enjoy that. And yeah, so we'll see you on the next episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks. Thanks for listening in.

Ash Nallawalla [00:53:00]:
Thanks, Jim. Thanks to the viewers.