Video - Robert Craven interviews Dixon Jones
VIDEO: 49:08
AUTHOR: Robert Craven and Dixon Jones
In this GYDA Talks, Robert interviews Dixon Jones. Dixon Jones is a multi-award winning entrepreneur who has helped to build the Internet Marketing industry for over 20 years. He is currently an investor and CEO of Inlinks.net which is the first entity SEO toolset built from the ground up around its own Knowledge graphs and NLP algorithms.
He is best known in the industry for building up Majestic, the link intelligence search engine as marketing director from 2009 to 2018. In that time the company became a Deloitte Fast 50 company winning multiple awards including two Queens Awards for Enterprise. Whilst Dixon remains their Global Brand Ambassador, he has also diversified in 2018 to become involved in several new innovative ventures within and beyond the search industry, including Power 2 Me, which aims to bring personal energy harvesting the world.
His involvement in the Internet Marketing space began in earnest in 1999 when he co-founded the UK Search Agency Receptional, which he eventually sold in a management buyout. Even before that, Dixon succeeded in the original .com boom writing and selling Murder Mystery Games online.
Robert and Dixon discuss:
What Dixon is doing right now
Why is Entity SEO so important? Just another trend?
A start-up in the middle of a recession… what is the upside?
How to get traction
Fortune favours those that turn up
As agency ‘poacher’ turned gamekeeper’ are there secrets of success?
What do you need to do to grow an agency?
What separates the successes from the failures?
What would a ‘fit’ agency look like in 12 months?
Marketers can learn from agile developers
Dixon’s recommendations/pearls of wisdom, golden nuggets
Transcription:
Robert Craven 00:51
Hello, and welcome to the GYDA Talks that grow your digital agency talks and today, delighted to have what, who we could describe as a legend in his own lifetime, Dixon Jones. Hello, Dixon.
Dixon Jones 01:05
Hello, you could describe me as a legend of a Euro lifetime. But I think that would be really rather pushy at Robert, but thank you for the compliment.
Robert Craven 01:11
I think we can call you and let people know who you are if they don't know. I mean, for those few people who don't know who Dixon is.
Dixon Jones 01:25
I started in SEO in 1999. I set up I founded an agency in 1999 called Receptionist which I no longer am involved in. But I really started getting known when I became marketing director of a little startup called majestic.com, which has one of the largest indexes of the internet, frankly, and really is primarily a backlink analysis tool. And also there has a social media influencer tool as well. I pulled back from there mostly a few years ago. And my wife wanted me to buy a nice big posh house on the edge of the village, which we haven't yet got. So I had to start another business, went into bed with a French guy called Fred Laurent, who has really worked hard on the Semantic Web. And we've got any links on that is a tool that we've now got out, which really is a SEO technology from which is built from the ground up around semantic SEO or entity SEO. And so I'm working on that SEO of that, and hopefully, we'll have half as much success with that as I've had with anything that's hope.
Robert Craven 02:47
Well, so entity SEO. So I guess the question Is this the universal antidote to all problems SEO? Let's just get some sense of where entity SEO fits into the hierarchy.
Dixon Jones 03:08
Okay, well, I think, firstly, people get scared when they hear a new kind of phrase, and assume that it's just, you know, another SEO spin on a, you know, on an idea, and then people can't, you know, and SEOs are trying to obfuscate for one of a better word, you know, and try and put snake oil out there. And I think that's not true. We can either answer that question by going from the research down and things like Bert and the way in which Google has changed its way of indexing and understanding, and its information retrieval. Or we can go from the way Google, you know, talking about the concept of things, not strings, which is the idea really, of saying that an entity is a topic. So rather than indexing the world's information around webpages, it's easier in the backend for them to start indexing the world around concepts and ideas. So for want of a better word, call that a Wikipedia entry or an encyclopaedia entry, basically. So, you know, a company becomes big enough to be called an entity in its own right, you know, or, but also a concept is an entity so you can have a concept of a book or the concept of reading, you know, so there's different ideas that all entities and there's a lot less entities in the world than there are web pages in the world. So many web pages in the world, that if you want to try and get the answer to the question, how many geese typically fly in a flock, then there's a million different. There's so many different web pages that are out there. But if you've got the concept of geese And then you've got everything about geese then the information in the geese category or entity. So that's the kind of idea that I try and put out there. That's where I try and explain it. And I think people can get it that way, you know, if you think about the Knowledge Graph, or Google is trying to build a graph of ideas and concepts, and the concept is just something that you would see in a, you know, in an old style, Wikipedia encyclopedia, that basically, you're in a pretty good place to try and understand entities. And therefore, once you've started understanding that's the way we're going, that changes the way that you look at SEO or should do because your way of SEO was very different.
Robert Craven 05:40
And if you're thinking that if SEO specialist SEO agencies use your product, they will be able to deliver better SEO to your client, or are you thinking that clients should be talking about entity SEO?
Dixon Jones 05:59
I think, firstly, you don't have to use our product to think in terms of entity SEO, you could work in spreadsheets, you could sit there and say, right, I want to talk about you know, I want to be number one for GIS,I've got a geese on my screensaver over there. So hence the geese analogy, I wasn't pre pre planned. So you know, so you can sit there and say, right, okay, I want to be the number one site for geese, or Canadian geese, they are actually so therefore, what do I need to know about what do I need to write about and think about those topics. And you can then you know, have a look at what the best of breed are writing about and make sure you cover that information, have a look at what you know what's already made Wikipedia, open your old encyclopedia on geese and find some novel stuff that isn't on the internet as well. And you can start working that way. Rather than saying Canadian geese, Canadian geese, Canadian geese, Canadian geese, you know, and just repeating those words. So you don't need a tool like inlinkz. However, inlinks is able to very quickly extract all of those entities out of the corporator data, whether it's your own site, or whether it's any other set of web pages, it can pull that together very, very quickly. And that's, that's really where it starts to be quite useful. Because all of a sudden, you've got this content brief in front of you that says, you want to talk about Canadian geese, well, you better talk about wings, and you better talk about migration, and you better talk about Canada and northern hemisphere, and you know, and all these kinds of things. So it just does a lot of that lifting for you. And then it does some other fancy things like Link, linking all the mentions of Canadian geese, if you've got a whole website about, you know, birds, then you've probably mentioned Canadian geese, you know, in four or five different places. Well, Google doesn't know which one to put forward there. So then you can link everything together. And so right, this is the page man Canadian geese, it can write the underlying schema, and inject it into your web page that says, Mister search engine. In case there's more than one, you know, this page is about the concept of Canadian geese. It also mentions the concept of migration and the concept of the northern hemisphere and stuff. But these are secondary to the concept of geese. And then all the other pages then, when they talk about Canadian keeps link through to the Canadian Geese page, so that if you're a user, you're going through the website, and you're seeing that you were talking about, you know, what kind of bird is this and you got a picture and it's connected to the good ad decent, and the link goes straight to the Canadian news page. So it's good for the user. And it's making it easier for a search engine that is thinking in terms of entities and things to know what page is about what.
Robert Craven 08:37
So if we were as we have been known to be falling out of a bar Brighton SEO or whatever it is, 5 o'clock in the morning.
Dixon Jones 08:49
Yeah, something on a roof garden somewhere in South London.
Robert Craven 08:53
But I'll just have one more before I go into conversation. I would say to you, a startup in the middle of possibly the worst recession. Is that really a clever thing to do? What's the upside? What's the downside?
Dixon Jones 09:11
I've probably set up and run well, more than four but it's four, you know, material businesses that have taken up all my life and my times and stuff over the years. The first one was a murder mystery company straight after manufacturers. Right rise to power and there were three you know, there were 3 million people unemployed or something like that. There was, you know, supposedly a bad time to set up a business. So that was a great time to set up a business. Then recession was 1999 I set that up so the world was doing okay then but Majestic was started pretty much right at the banking crisis. So that was pretty much a bad time as well. So, you know, I think that recessions are the best time to set up a business. And so for two reasons, one, it's usually very for most people, unfortunately, that's done out of circumstance. So you find yourself in a place where you've got to get up off your backside and use your talent but your talents to work. I don't think there's a great reason to set up a business, I think you've got to want to do it. But I do think it's a great time to set up bootstrapped businesses, ones that are able to just think about the bottom line from the start. And in the good times, there seems to be, you know, oh, here's 50 million quid or here's a million quid or here's a lot of money. And for a person that's never run a business before that's so tempting to go and buy the, you know, the bigger computer or the company car, though, whatever. And unless you follow a business plan in the process, you're going to basically run out of money and fall over a cliff. But in a recession, you're sitting there and thinking about it, people are less willing to give you money, probably. Although it's weird in this one, people seem to have money. In fact, they just seem to be making it all around the world, you know, oh, well, I'm getting money. Let's just quantitative easing no problem. You know, I don't know. I'm trying to read the economist to work that one out. Anyway, I think it's a great time to set up a business. I think it's the best time to set up a business.
Robert Craven 11:26
It's the magic monetary that they couldn't find earlier on.
Dixon Jones 11:32
It's incredible, really, isn't it? And you'd expect, you know, everything I was taught that inflation now should go through the roof. But that doesn't seem to be happening. So you know. So people's belief in the concept of money is quite ingrained, isn't it? Oh, we just double the amount of money there. And everyone is cool. Okay. Fine.
Robert Craven 11:52
I mean, it is really bizarre that the whole way people, anyhow, there's just going back to business. So start up, recession bootstrapped. It doesn't sound like anyone's given you 10 million pounds just for startup costs.
Dixon Jones 12:12
No. And I mean, the only one that I've I mean, I was able to put money into this business. So that was great. But the only one that had startup money was majestic. But you know, looking back on it, it wasn't a huge amount of money. And the great thing about a digital world is you don't need a lot of money do you? Do you need a lot of brains? I think the much harder resource, the much harder resource is a developer that knows what they're doing and wants to stick with you. That, for me, is the hardest thing. And even if your agency so when I was running an agency, it was getting those people that okay, they didn't have to programme but they did have to love SEO because after a while it's a if you don't get it you just it doesn't particularly about talking about is that a cliche, clash of cliches. I think you're on mute there, Robert. There we go. So ladies and gents, but there's a two way conversation. It's a very professional presentation actually. Anyway, it's great. What would you say?
Robert Craven 13:28
The cliche clashes? I mean, so we're in this kind of level playing field, we're in a world where you're well ...
Dixon Jones 13:38
It's not that level, I think that education is not yet levelled up. And if we can level up education, then I think it'd be a fairly level playing field. But right now, the people that can set up a WordPress site are already at, you know, a massive way farther forward than then somebody that is a fantastic carpenter and crafts person, but just can't do that bit of opening up the potential of an international market. I think there's also the disadvantage of location as well, if you've got products and things and you happen to be able to deliver them to a rich neighbourhood then you're in a much better place than if you're stuck in, you know, a downtown third world city but it's not a level playing field. But the barrier to entry has gone down. Basically you don't need millions to run a successful business. You do need a little bit of money to get off the ground but that little bit of money is a lot of money for somebody who is only earn, you know, $1 or 2 a day.
Robert Craven 13:40
So what's your route to gaining traction? Because clearly, you need more than 10 or 20, or 50 or 100 users. I mean, you know, we've all seen this stuff on Facebook, follow my nine step process and have a bigger business within 10 days or your money back.In all seriousness, How do you get traction for another SEO idea, I think may well be perceived by the market?
Dixon Jones 15:39
Well, my approach is I mean, I'm a technology business. So it's slightly different to an agency business. Although, you know, I've got experience of both. But the advantage of technology businesses that I can use the freemium model idea and have actually I had started to properly understand the freemium model idea from a presentation many years ago by somebody from the gaming and from the free to play games, multi user game systems where they found that, you know, most people just use the free system, but then you could buy a sword or whatever it is, you start paying for things that way and stuff. And he showed me some incredible graphs. It didn't look good, because it looked like there was a real problem with a very few people spending huge amounts of money on fancy swords and stuff like that. And it was clearly turning into their profits coming from an addictive minority.
Robert Craven 16:42
We just stay with that for a moment, because that's the same Perry Marshalls espresso machine. Why does Starbucks have a $3,000 espresso machine when everyone's paying $3 for a coffee? And the answer is because, you know, one in 100 people will want a $3,000 coffee machine, but the other 99 - I'm just gonna want a $3 coffee. And you're totally missing out on servicing that minority who will be the most profitable people? So Marshall thing is, within the 80/20, there's an 80/20. Within the 80/20, there's an 80/20.
Dixon Jones 17:25
Okay, well, my mind Max is slightly different to 80/20. But it's the same thing. So I have a free product, which 19 out of 20 people will be on the way to early one in 20. That go into the free product will turn into a paid product of those probably only one in 10, one and 20 will then grow within that product. And so I've got a very, I think it's a very sensible model, because the other approach in the technology world is, it's an enterprise level tool, you know, only it's only good for the eBay to this world, you know, it's gonna cost you 1000s of pounds every month. Well, that's fine. But the clever people aren't necessarily at eBay, you know, the clever people are the small people or, you know, certainly in the SEO world, the SEO people have very little influence, if they're an in-house SEO within the larger organisations. So you don't want to start, you want to spread to catch a macro, whether it's espresso machines, and coffee, or whether it's, you know, a freemium product that goes into a paid product, I think, or whether if you're in an agency, you're selling, you know, a template for a report or whatever. So to show your ability and your knowledge within the industry. And then hopefully, people say, Well, I don't want to fill the screen, and off they go. So I think that this process works well. But the leverage that we've put in here, the thing I learned from previous things is that if you can have it so expands on two dimensions, it's a much better system. So yes, I've got a free to paid approach. But then when they're in a paid approach, it's also gradual. So we've got it based around how many pages you're using and analysing things. So it's very tempting. However, it's hopefully it will be eventually I've got to make it attractive enough for people to go up to that thing and say, right, okay, I've done 20 pages for free. Now, I'll have had my 100 pages Oh, yes, I'd see and get some more rankings and and get some more traffic and I can do a lot more. You know, what, why don't we take it up to 1000 that were fair, we've got a million pages, why don't we put a million pages on the site, you know, and there's going to be a point probably where the cost of it becomes incrementally not worth it for the customer. But that's going to be different for different customers in different places and stuff. So the game in 2021 will be taking the customer user base that I've got, I'm not charging him any more but you know, showing them how they can measure whether going up, my tree will give them more money, because that's the idea of a win win. So my methodology is, one, get him into a free account, to forever a free forever account to get them into trying the paid one. Three, get them to grow within this thing and become not customers but ambassadors.
Robert Craven 20:24
So if it's one, roughly one in 20 creates one in 20 create one in 20. I'll do the maths going in that direction. And let's just say that seems to be fairly proven, fairly established by your experience to date. Does that mean that the business can grow according to the number of people you can stuff into the top of the funnel? Because, again, hey, Marshall, for a minute, his argument would be, it could be, you can look at traffic, or you can look at conversion. Or you can look at economics. And if you double the traffic, or you double the conversion rate, or you double the economics, you end up in the same place. So you've got a choice as to where you put your effort.
Dixon Jones 21:15
Yeah, so dynamic, that max is very easy to spot, you know, once I've got somebody in as a free user, then that my maths is pretty easy to see. But it does change, I have found it has changed, I was spending a lot of time at the start trying to get people into the free top of the funnel. But getting somebody into the free bit, it doesn't really help if they're not going to use it, or try it or engage it, you know, so more recently, I've been spending a lot less effort in trying to get people into the free tool, and a lot more effort in trying to get people on a demo. And they can have their first month for free. But they only get the first month for free if they come on the demo. And so. So that then is a function of how many people I asked to come on a demo really and with a genuine request, really, if I reach out, and I spend an hour a day on LinkedIn, then I will probably get, you know, three or four people, you know, my target is four demos a day, if I get four demos a day, I now converting probably half my demos into paying customers. So that's the one that really changed it for me, I was making a mess of it until, in fact, it was you I blame you for this. You basically said if you don't get up and sell, I don't think you specifically ended up with me. But if you don't get off your backside and start selling the you know, then it ain't gonna work. And really annoyingly, after all my willpower of saying, you know, inbound marketing is all well and good and stuff like that you have to engage with people on a real and meaningful basis for them to, you know, to say, Oh, now I see you.
Robert Craven 23:16
I mean, I just clicking around that just because it's just really fascinating as to how, where the work where business comes from, and whether you prequalify and there are arguments about making it easy and making it difficult for people to, you know, get hold of you. And I think it's still, for me, it's still very much a marketing 101 thing. It's not you people make it desperately complicated, you know, fine. If you've got something, if you've got something that is a delight to use, and people want to use it, it is clearly much easier than trying to sell something difficult.
Dixon Jones 23:52
The downside of that is you still have to remember that you've got to scale this thing at some point. So the way that we've done it at the moment is basically it's that's a URL to go and set up a one to one demo, but it has in the future it doesn't have to be me basically, using a URL shortener so I can change where I'd send that person. We've just yesterday taken off, we've just started doing demos in French, I'm not very good at that. But I can send people to the same URL. And then they can say Do they want it in English and French? And we, it's a problem for me. So I think you have to keep an eye on how you're going to scale that at some point and I've got no it's going to be difficult for somebody to tap into my LinkedIn contacts and generate demos. So I appreciate probably getting through all of my contacts first before I start employing somebody else and expecting them to do that.
Robert Craven 24:52
So I mean, really you're an agency, poacher turned gamekeeper or gamekeeper turned poacher I'm not sure which way round. So You've done the agency thing?
Dixon Jones 25:05
And excited about that. Yep.
Robert Craven 25:07
Now your clients, in many ways in our agencies. I'm just wondering for the agency folks listening, What is it you need to grow an agency? What I mean, because everyone says, Oh, we're gonna do it early in the morning, go, Well, you got a website, everyone's pulling strings.
Dixon Jones 25:35
I think knowing where you want to go is pretty much a good place to start. And I said this before, but I think that probably every agency in fact, probably every business says, All you know, when they start up, or most say, Yeah, I want to do this for five years and sell it with no thought about what that means. I think you shouldn't put a time on it, I think you should put a value on it. So right, I want to build this business to a value of this. And then get out if an extra is what you want. You should have an eye on what your goal is in financial terms or in realisable terms and maybe you want to build this until every person on the planet has a COVID vaccine, maybe that's your objective and your mission. It could be all sorts of things. But it shouldn't be, I want to do this for five years, because in five years, we might actually be bankrupt, you might, you might have made your first dollar. And so you're still not worth anything, you may have overshot everything and overreached and start to break things down. And the reason you should do it that way is because you start to build your processes, ready for your own exit route. And I didn't do this with my first business but I found myself getting to around 20 people, and I was unable to cope, my systems were unable to cope. And my own systems were breaking down as well, really, I do think that running a business is incredibly stressful. But it can be a lot less stressful if you understand the difference between what you can influence and what you can't influence and it does help if you've got a little bit of money in the bank. So you know, you're not going to go hungry if it all goes belly up.
Robert Craven 27:35
That's really interesting. So there's two people who work with me, both of whom joined agences are want to I think are 25 staff and one at 30. And they both those people to those agencies to 150. It is one skill during the startup thing, hey, we're making sales. Yeah, another thing, taking the startup and making it into business, hey, we've gone, we're employing people without employing 15 people. And then it's like another thing, being a business person and arriving. And so what this business needs is yada yada, yada and then making and it's kind of like the decisions you make as a professional manager are entirely different from the decisions you make as a techie who's suddenly employing 10 people. And they're also entirely different from the decisions you make if you're a shareholder or an investor in a business to work the way you do. And I think what often happens is because so many businesses start on the kitchen table, dining room, table, garage, industrial unit that MBA mindsets, let's not be pejorative about it, but that business mindset is very, very different from freelance independence, independent businessman.
Dixon Jones 29:02
It is and the research to back it all up is overwhelming, as you and I have talked on many occasions that you know, and I know that my skill set, you know, is a desire to have, you know, reasonable feelings of freedom and autonomy. Autonomy is probably where it's an important driver for me and I think it's an important driver for most founders. I mean, there are exceptions, there's, you know, there's awesome, you know, and fatal exceptions, but for most founders, it's a case of wanting a certain amount of autonomy or and or, or probably amp, autonomy, mastery and purpose basically, it's probably the same for any human being. But for me, autonomy is the ability to control my own decisions and run a business where I can't be fired, or hopefully not fired from the whole thing, unless I do something really bad. Mastery, try and be good at something, try and be good at it. And purpose is why you know why I'm not doing freemium models within the gaming industry is, you know, to try and build something that, you know, is going to help other people in society. And I, maybe SEO is not quite as good as building COVID vaccines. But it's, you know, it's a lot better for me, then a lot of other things I could get involved in.
Robert Craven 30:39
So what do you think separates the successes from failures? Because the conversation we've had before is the successes. So why are you successful? Oh, we had the right strategy, we got the right margin or the right team or the right financial, we were in the right time. And then you go to the graveyard of ambition where businesses have gone bust. And he said, tell us about what your business and they say, we have the right strategy with the right marketing the right teams with the right finance when the right time, right place, and you go, but you know, then over there are now in a high rise office employing 500 people and you won't pop. So History is written by the winners. And I think we have to be really careful not to be suckered into, you know, we've all got these books. And these books kind of post justify why they were successful, but they don't actually, they don't actually explain why people are successful. It's like looking at the clouds.
Dixon Jones 31:39
I think Fortune favours those who turn up. So my very first business was running murder mystery, writing and running murder mystery evening. So the internet wasn't invented at the time, it was 1989. And I come out of university with a third class degree. And I'd been president of the Students Union for a year, because I didn't think I'd get a job. It was easier to become student union president than it was to go and get a job that particularly and then I set up my own business. And I remember those early days were really hard, because I set that up with an $800 loan to add to my student overdraft, you know, and so that really was a tight business. But I felt over the years of running that, that where I got up, it was a very seasonal business. So murder mysteries tended to be heavily sort of Christmas space, past Christmas parties and stuff. And I felt that the guy that got up earliest in January and got on the phone and started, you know, getting the business again, was the one that was going to succeed. And you get, so I was getting really busy up until December, you know, and then maybe apart from New Year's Eve, you know, come the third of January, money in the bank can relax and stuff like that. And no, it's the one that then gets up and does it. There's so many great ideas that are still on the back of cigarette packets, it's a napkins and left in the pub. Getting up and doing it is probably the number one thing that makes people fail. They think that they're doing it's the same as exercise, you know, they'll do it for three days. And then they'll realise that actually, they only saw the, you know, they only saw the result, they didn't realise that you actually had to work to get to those ads.
Robert Craven 33:37
So ust going back to agencies, a lot of people watching and listening are from agencies. You know, we're in this, leave aside the COVID weirdness. We're in a really weird situation where, you know, five years ago, Google the only gig in town. Now, there's 577 platforms you can go to, you know, five years ago, people's mobile phones are still taking video. It was still kind of taking off now though. They are ubiquitous. People like to use as you pointed out earlier on, you know, the barriers to entry are incredibly low. If you're running an agency, you're competing with kids in Bangalore $5 An hour. I prospect, you know, you're it's everything is moving so quickly. And it's so confusing. So yeah, I mean, is it even fair to ask an agency to imagine what it would look like in 12 months time and what my question to you is, you know, how do you become what does the agency look like in 12 months time? Does it specialise in pure SEO or pure PPC or pure content?
Dixon Jones 35:00
I don't think there's a model that's always perfect. But I mean, there are specialists that have brilliant businesses. And then there are generalists that have different brilliant businesses, I guess, at scale, probably they people are becoming more and more generalists at scale, just because they don't want to miss out on this extra money that sort of can come off at the same customer base. But I think agility has to be built into your system. I marketers can learn a lot from agile working methods of developers. And really, the marketers systems should follow on for the same kind of agility that the product has. And so because even if you're an agency, you're going to have a system, you're going to have an audit kind of system, if you're an organic, you're gonna have a way of reporting, you're gonna have a style, a set of rules, and that there's going to be there, if you're on PPC, you're going to have some technologies that you use or some specific platforms that you're going about. And again, you're going to report that back to the customer. But you need to make sure that you are agile in developing your processes and coming out with something new every, every week or every month. So if I was an agency today, and let's say I was doing just, you know, selling Google ads, I would make a point of making sure that next month, we're rolling out our Facebook ads offering and then our tic toc ad offering and make sure that we're have a process of saying our business is developing. And then we can then adapt as we go along. We don't have to choose 12 months ahead, what we're going to be doing, but we do have to build a system that says the cadence of releasing and moving forward has to happen every month, two weeks, three months, whatever suits your style, but you should all be working towards regular improvements in your own business model. The companies that die are the ones that build a system and expect that system to still be working for them 12 months from now. They're the ones that are going to die. You've got to build that agility into the system.
Robert Craven 37:30
And that's my worry. I mean, you just now you've just articulated way better than I've been able to do my wiring, which is, you know, the agencies didn't know how good they have it pre COVID They've been lots of the felt very sorry for themselves being very inward focusing over COVID. How are we going to get around this? How are we going to do with our people? How are you as opposed to what do our clients need? And now they talk about getting back to business as usual or as near or a hybrid model of as near to business as usual. As opposed to saying this was an opportunity to redesign, repurpose, understand what it is that the customer really wants, understand how we can present and deliver to give awesome value to a customer. And not I mean, I'm sweeping generalisations, but I think a lot of people are missing the boat, because not only has the agency world changed, yeah. But the world's customers have changed. You know, the marketing director now works from home, and he now watches his daughter on YouTube and Tiktok and goes, yeah, oh, I never realised how much people use this kind of stuff. watches his wife, I've been very sexist, but you know, he watches his wife cooking. So Google, you know, give me the recipe for ratatouille or whatever it is. And so the perception of a marketing director has changed and perception and the way that everyone's working, you know, the FDA no longer has a chat and a beer and a lunch the FDA just says some of your four KPIs, and I'll deal with it. So the ways of working and moving everywhere. And that is a great opportunity.
Dixon Jones 39:22
And also your cost base has gone down not up with this, you know, Well, mine has anyway I mean, on day one of COVID locked down, I got rid of my office. So I had an office at Cranfield University. I say an office I was in, you know, in a sort of little hobby kind of thing. But it was on a university campus I thought I was great because I could occasionally go to Gould's odd talk and you know, try and keep that as you say MBA mentality. But ultimately, if I'm not going to offer it, I've just dumped it. It's fine. I'll just tidy up this one a bit and, you know, put my book my awards up there and put your book on the shelf for those, you know, it's in there somewhere. It's quite thin. So you might not even, it's definitely there. And get up and run. So your cost base goes down. Yes, you've got to then start thinking if you've got employees, okay, we need to make sure that there's some kind of health and safety in their own workplace. So, you know,if more people, one of the first things I did was make sure that my business partner a better laptop because he was rubbish. And he was sitting there thinking he's got all the code base on that, you know, so. But I think that, you know, you should make sure that your team takes a photograph of their working space. So you can't just sit there and say, I'm sorry, you need a store, you need a proper chair.
Robert Craven 39:22
The ironing boards got to go for your laptop. And I mean, I'm being facetious, but I mean, if you flip it the other way, if you've got 50 staff, and you're paying, you're spending 50 quid a week on feeding each member of staff with beer and crisps and nice lights and ping pong balls, and whatever...
Dixon Jones 41:12
You get 50 pounds of funny money every week, that's, can I come and work for you?
Robert Craven 41:19
The point is that they don't, it's just like, oh, well, we'll give you 50 quid for a desk, and that'll do nothing. So just winding this up. So ah it thinks not strings.
Dixon Jones 41:36
That's the message for me moving forward in that. If you're in terms of entity SEO, you gotta start thinking well, in terms of SEO, you've got to start thinking in terms of ideas, and not in terms of words. So the old school when I started doing SEO in 1999, I was, you know, making sure my keyword was in the title end and end in a meta tags, and then in 42 times on the page, because that's what when position gold told me to do, which was the tool of the time, and a few of my people will remember that. But that hasn't completely gone away yet, but it's going the way of the dodo because, you know, different words mean the same thing. And the same word can mean different things. And so the systems are working on synonyms much more effectively. And they're working on differentiation between a horseshoe in relation to luck and a horseshoe in relation to farms, you know, two different, completely different contexts.
Robert Craven 42:52
I have a very clear memory when we hit 1000 clicks on an article that I've written about growing businesses. And then when we taped back to the search term, people used to find the article it was growing cannabis.
Dixon Jones 43:12
Yes, I remember a well known SEO of the day is still in SEO, Dave Nailer. And he managed to find himself number two for Viagra or maybe found a Matt Cutts article that came number two for Viagra, I can't remember which, but anyway, it was just mentioned in an article and it popped up as you know, as not spam around the concept of Viagra. So, yeah, things can go out of context quite quickly or used to be able to and that's not the case anymore, because natural language processing algorithms are much better at understanding the context of the words on the page and how they relate to each other. Towers and bridges are very different until you put the words next to each other.
Robert Craven 44:00
So final question for you and then we'll have to disappear. What are your pearls of wisdom or your one liners that go out to agency business owners, what golden nuggets?
Dixon Jones 44:22
So I have a personal Trello board which puts a lot of my mantras down in a place and I follow a philosophy. I say philosophy. I read lots of philosophies, but I have generally understood the difference between an emotional reaction and a rational reaction and I'm unable to have an irrational reaction to a lot of things. Because an emotional reaction comes five times faster, or 20 times faster than an irrational one, it just takes you as soon as you say something to me, there's two levels of communication that are going on. And I'm likely to dive into the emotional one first. And so is everybody else. So understanding that which I recommend the programme, a book called The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steven Peters, and mind management, and he's got a couple of others. But same concept, same idea. So what I do on my Trello board is I have what I think I should be doing when I'm in a rational frame of mind. And then what's likely to be going wrong if I'm in an emotional frame of mind in two different columns so I can see what those 2 beasts inside me are trying to do. But then I have another column, which just lists all of the things that I'm happy about in life that I have done that success. So my honeymoon, you know, the days of my both, it was something about the my, both of my kids are on and you know, and it could be you know, the day I climbed Snowden or whatever it may be different things and have success, big successes, little successes, happy day out things I want to remember, I think we're prone to remembering the bad things. And we forget all the good things. So just having all those there. And now there's hundreds and so every now and then I just go on to that, and just remind myself, have the good things in life. And that changes my attitude, it stops me from putting myself down. I've got a friend of mine, Mel Carson, who always got really angry that I put myself down a lot was self deprecating, and I still am, but going back there and seeing what I have done, you know, going to Buckingham Palace, seeing, you know, getting told off by Princess and stuff, you know, these are good things, you know, there are good things to take away in life. And when you go back and look at them, you can just get yourself back into a settled frame of mind, get yourself back to the helicopter view. The hardest thing for a startup is the helicopter view and the coalface view are very different mindsets, and flipping between the two can be very, very stressful. But if you can find mechanisms to help you switch between the two, usually when you're in a stressed state it is because you've spent too much time in one place. And you probably need to go to the other place.
Robert Craven 47:37
Brilliant. Dixon, that's awesome. It's interesting, because you know, I'm not a great fan of hippie dippie. touchy feely bollocks, as I call it. Yeah, but the gratitude thing, it just keeps appearing both in people who I see who are effective, but also in kind of my approach and being briefed of what's going on. So I think that's really lovely. I really liked the idea of the Trello board with rational, emotional.
Dixon Jones 48:11
So simple. It's so simple. And it's just for yourself. I mean, I wouldn't be too embarrassed if somebody else saw it, but they might think why is he happy that, you know, he went to as to you know, to make your day and so, Jethro Tull, why is that in his book of successes, but you know, that's my world.
Robert Craven 48:35
Lovely, thank you, Dixon, thank you so much for being a really great guest. Thank you. Well, thanks for talking about the business and people can check out the links and the website and so on and so forth.
Dixon Jones 48:47
Yeah, Coach Dixon Jones.com. And you'll find out, you know, the sort of the non business side of me as well.
Robert Craven 48:52
Brilliant. Thank you very much indeed. It's great to talk to you. Thank you.
Dixon Jones 48:56
Thanks.