Hello friend 
Ahmad here.
(Founder of Growth Partners Media)
Growth Partners Media launched as a simple marketing collaboration between a few friends at the start of 2020. Fast forward a few months, a managed collaborative system was introduced and dozens of new members took the group to new heights through their contributions.
This collaborative system was a world-first in the SEO space, allowing teams to double the value of their time-consuming outreach campaigns without spending a dime.
Today, Growth Partners is a full-blown productised agency, raising the standards of link-building through creative and strategic solutions to the increasingly complex landscape of SEO. We’re a fully remote team operating across the UK, India and the Philippines. All the services we provide are done in-house. With a quality and price ratio that’s unmatched in our field.
We started off by helping teams collaborate through win-win partnerships, for free. Today, we maintain this mindset of adding value through fair pricing and services that get results.
How it all started
I got into the world of search engine marketing in 2012. The dark ages, as far as SEO is concerned.
A time where you could place your links almost anywhere and rank for high-traffic search terms. I remember promoting this video game backup software and ranking number 1 for “how to backup games” by placing keyword-rich anchor text on a few dozen forums. It was a different world back then.
Fast-forward a few years and I’m working on what would become my foundation for “learning by doing” in the world of digital marketing. I started a blog called Bengu that covered lifestyle business topics from affiliate marketing to passive income and dropshipping:
This is where I honed my craft — learning how to write well. Build an email list. And most importantly, drive traffic through organic search. The world of content marketing, website creation and the digital economy fascinated me from my spotty teenage days. Stumbling into these online worlds of possibility was like discovering a hidden treasure.
Affiliate marketing in particular was mind-blowing to me… you mean I could promote awesome products/services I don’t even own, through the internet — and get paid for it?!
A simple concept in theory, but tough to pull off in reality. Still, the so-called internet guru’s made it look like a walk in the park.
For two long years, I spent most evenings and weekends reading articles and going through paid courses, not really knowing what I was doing and not really making much progress.
But I kept going:
At the start of the Bengu project, I was still quite new to SEO. So I tried to get help and hired an agency…
Safe to say, that went south pretty quick.
I was on a small budget so I couldn’t invest much and this agency ruined the UX of my site by placing keyword-rich drop-down menus on my homepage (I know, they sucked!). It was a complete mess, so I fired them and hired myself. I figured if I was going to master SEO for my small self-funded project, there was no other way.
Cutting through the hogwash took time. So much misinformation — articles touting the “publish and pray” approach, press releases and directories that barely worked.
All these jargon terms too. White hat. Black hat. Grey hat. Why were there so many hats in SEO and which one should I wear?!
I also found that many popular strategies promoted by SEO’s for landing quality links wouldn’t work that well at all. Simply because they’d been thrashed by thousands of marketers copying the same approach. I had to get inventive and come up with my own creative ways of connecting with people to land those precious links.
Eventually, I figured out a few strategies that did work and ranked my site for some great terms, beating out competitors with much larger budgets and more staff members:
Maintained top 3 rankings for terms like “affiliate programs” “best affiliate programs” “top affiliate programs” for over 2 years, pulling in close to 500k pageviews to one article.
Outranking Wikipedia + Investopedia for “passive income” in US search on the first page, one of the highlights!
The reason I managed to get these results?
I went all in on learning SEO. Everything else was a distraction.
Thanks to this approach, I gained deep expertise on the subtle nuances of the craft that helped me get a leg up on my competitors.
I also learned how to do outreach after testing dozens of approaches over the years. A delicate balance between art and science.
At its peak, Bengu was pulling in over 20,000 visitors a month, mainly US and UK. Between March of 2017 and March 2020, the site had pulled in over 750,000 pageviews and referred over $250k in product sales through affiliate marketing:
I did this without hiring external help by doubling down on SEO that worked. Focusing on strategies that moved the needle the most. At the time, this was a combination of outreach and guest-posting combined with PBN’s.
Okay, you got me! I used PBN’s. And they worked extremely well for a long time.
They worked because I took the time to deeply research how to do them properly. Taking no shortcuts, I painstakingly restored dozens of sites and filled them with content I’d written myself from scratch. To tell you the truth, it was an INSANE amount of work — and if I could start again, I wouldn’t have bothered, but it helped my site maintain top rankings for years on end.
People don’t realise that what Google says — and what actually works in search are two completely different things. If you listen to Google, you’ll be publishing content every day on your site and hoping, begging, praying for the best. You’ll be anxious to build links and assume strategies like guest-posting are dead.
Let’s keep it real, Google doesn’t want you to figure out how their algorithm works, they want to keep you in the dark while they sell as many ads as possible to keep their shareholders happy.
Many assume Google is like the all-seeing eye of Sauron. That you’ll always get caught if you venture into the dark side. But through experience, I’ve found this to be untrue. The PBN’s I used only stopped working when human error was introduced — I accidentally allowed the hosting for my PBN sites to lapse. A silly mistake but I had nobody to blame but myself.
Throughout my SEO journey, I’ve learned some harsh lessons, got some pretty good results and had a lot of fun. The relationships I built with website owners over the years forged the foundations for Growth Partners.
Although I’ve used PBN’s in the past for my own personal projects, we don’t get involved with these strategies at Growth Partners. Everything we do for our clients is strictly white-hat all the way.
If you need help with your SEO or you’re looking to collaborate in some shape or form, feel free to drop us a line on hello at growthpartners.online.
Hello friend
Ahmad here.
(Founder of Growth Partners)
Growth Partners Media launched as a simple marketing collaboration between a few friends at the start of 2020. Fast forward a few months, a managed collaborative system was introduced and dozens of new members took the group to new heights through their contributions.
This collaborative system was a world-first in the SEO space, allowing teams to double the value of their time-consuming outreach campaigns without spending a dime.
Today, Growth Partners is a full-blown productised agency, raising the standards of link-building through creative and strategic solutions to the increasingly complex landscape of SEO. We’re a fully remote team operating across the UK, India and the Philippines. All the services we provide are done in-house. With a quality and price ratio that’s unmatched in our field.
We started off by helping teams collaborate through win-win partnerships, for free. Today, we maintain this mindset of adding value through fair pricing and services that get results.
How it all started
I got into the world of search engine marketing in 2012. The dark ages, as far as SEO is concerned.
A time where you could place your links almost anywhere and rank for high-traffic search terms. I remember promoting this video game backup software and ranking number 1 for “how to backup games” by placing keyword-rich anchor text on a few dozen forums. It was a different world back then.
Fast-forward a few years and I’m working on what would become my foundation for “learning by doing” in the world of digital marketing. I started a blog called Bengu that covered lifestyle business topics from affiliate marketing to passive income and dropshipping:
This is where I honed my craft — learning how to write well. Build an email list. And most importantly, drive traffic through organic search. The world of content marketing, website creation and the digital economy fascinated me from my spotty teenage days. Stumbling into these online worlds of possibility was like discovering a hidden treasure.
Affiliate marketing in particular was mind-blowing to me… you mean I could promote awesome products/services I don’t even own, through the internet — and get paid for it?!
A simple concept in theory, but tough to pull off in reality. Still, the so-called internet guru’s made it look like a walk in the park.
For two long years, I spent most evenings and weekends reading articles and going through paid courses, not really knowing what I was doing and not really making much progress.
But I kept going:
At the start of the Bengu project, I was still quite new to SEO. So I tried to get help and hired an agency…
Safe to say, that went south pretty quick.
I was on a small budget so I couldn’t invest much and this agency ruined the UX of my site by placing keyword-rich drop-down menus on my homepage (I know, they sucked!). It was a complete mess, so I fired them and hired myself. I figured if I was going to master SEO for my small self-funded project, there was no other way.
Cutting through the hogwash took time. So much misinformation — articles touting the “publish and pray” approach, press releases and directories that barely worked.
All these jargon terms too. White hat. Black hat. Grey hat. Why were there so many hats in SEO and which one should I wear?!
I also found that many popular strategies promoted by SEO’s for landing quality links wouldn’t work that well at all. Simply because they’d been thrashed by thousands of marketers copying the same approach. I had to get inventive and come up with my own creative ways of connecting with people to land those precious links.
Eventually, I figured out a few strategies that did work and ranked my site for some great terms, beating out competitors with much larger budgets and more staff members:
Maintained top 3 rankings for terms like “affiliate programs” “best affiliate programs” “top affiliate programs” for over 2 years, pulling in close to 500k pageviews to one article.
Outranking Wikipedia + Investopedia for “passive income” in US search on the first page, one of the highlights!
The reason I managed to get these results?
I went all in on learning SEO. Everything else was a distraction.
Thanks to this approach, I gained deep expertise on the subtle nuances of the craft that helped me get a leg up on my competitors.
I also learned how to do outreach after testing dozens of approaches over the years. A delicate balance between art and science.
At its peak, Bengu was pulling in over 20,000 visitors a month, mainly US and UK. Between March of 2017 and March 2020, the site had pulled in over 750,000 pageviews and referred over $250k in product sales through affiliate marketing:
I did this without hiring external help by doubling down on SEO that worked. Focusing on strategies that moved the needle the most. At the time, this was a combination of outreach and guest-posting combined with PBN’s.
Okay, you got me! I used PBN’s. And they worked extremely well for a long time.
They worked because I took the time to deeply research how to do them properly. Taking no shortcuts, I painstakingly restored dozens of sites and filled them with content I’d written myself from scratch. To tell you the truth, it was an INSANE amount of work — and if I could start again, I wouldn’t have bothered, but it helped my site maintain top rankings for years on end.
People don’t realise that what Google says — and what actually works in search are two completely different things. If you listen to Google, you’ll be publishing content every day on your site and hoping, begging, praying for the best. You’ll be anxious to build links and assume strategies like guest-posting are dead.
Let’s keep it real, Google doesn’t want you to figure out how their algorithm works, they want to keep you in the dark while they sell as many ads as possible to keep their shareholders happy.
Many assume Google is like the all-seeing eye of Sauron. That you’ll always get caught if you venture into the dark side. But through experience, I’ve found this to be untrue. The PBN’s I used only stopped working when human error was introduced — I accidentally allowed the hosting for my PBN sites to lapse. A silly mistake but I had nobody to blame but myself.
Throughout my SEO journey, I’ve learned some harsh lessons, got some pretty good results and had a lot of fun. The relationships I built with website owners over the years forged the foundations for Growth Partners.
Although I’ve used PBN’s in the past for my own personal projects, we don’t get involved with these strategies at Growth Partners. Everything we do for our clients is strictly white-hat all the way.
If you need help with your SEO or you’re looking to collaborate in some shape or form, feel free to drop us a line on hello at growthpartners.online.
