How RankXL Got Me a Deal with Schwarzenegger’s Team, Plus Business Worth $100,000+

This post is written by Rob Palmer, who I met when he joined my course Authority SEO.

This is the story of how I turned an investment of a few hundred dollars into over $100,000 of consultancy work – and got to work with one of the most famous people in the world as a result.

Before I get into the story, though, let me make it clear that I have no connection to Chris or RankXL except as a satisfied customer.

This is what happened…

It all started on the day that I purchased Chris’s RankXL course last year. It wasn’t a decision I took lightly. After all, I have been in the SEO game for a long time, and many online courses I buy turn out to be pretty much worthless.

But I had been following the RankXL blog for some time, and I liked Chris’s approach. In particular, I liked the idea of a white-hat strategy for building an authority site that Google loves. I could see how this could generate income for years to come, without crashing and burning.

So when the RankXL course opened up for enrolment, I pulled out my credit card and took the plunge. I wasn’t disappointed. The strategies were clearly laid out and carefully explained. I could see that RankXL gave me a solid footprint for building a blog into a sound business.

But there was only one way to find out if the strategies really worked, and that was to try them out on a brand new blog. So I began to plan and execute an SEO strategy based firmly on the RankXL principles.

Building the Blog

I decided to go into the body building niche, because SEMRush told me there were gazillions of keywords to rank for, and apart from the 800-pound gorilla of Bodybuilding.com, the competition wasn’t super strong.

I built the blog, and then started adding content. I wrote the blog posts myself initially, but then decided I needed some extra help. So I tried iWriter, as suggested in RankXL. I tried five different writers, and four of them were awful – my dog could have written better. I scratched them off my list immediately.

But the fifth writer turned out to be a real gem. She writes with a style very similar to my own, and she can write well-researched and easy-to-read articles on any subject I give her. And all of this a ridiculously cheap rate. I still use her for content today, and this has saved me a fortune in content creation fees.

Starting My Link-Building Campaign

Soon the blog was full of great content which cost me next to nothing. I was ready to start generating links, using RankXL strategies. I decided that I didn’t just want to cold pitch people and beg for a link. I thought it would be better to have something to offer them, to build some rapport and create a relationship.

I figured that many bloggers in the bodybuilding niche would be bodybuilders first, and bloggers second. They probably had a lot to say about bodybuilding, but had limited knowledge of how to promote their blog.

So I spent some time writing a detailed guide on ‘How to Drive Traffic to Your Bodybuilding or Fitness Blog.’ I put a lot of effort into it, and made sure it was genuinely useful to fitness bloggers. Then I found someone on Fiverr to convert this into a stylish PDF.

When that was ready, I started contacting bloggers in the bodybuilding niche and offering them a copy of the report for free. Many people responded, and I was able to engage people and start a conversation. Once they had been suitably ‘warmed up,’ I pitched them a guest blog post, or secured a link another way.

This worked great, and I started picking up some good quality links. The traffic on the blog started to grow.

A Whole New World of Opportunity

But then I got an email that changed everything.

It arrived out of the blue from Dan, the owner of DigitalMuscle.com – the new home of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Arnold Classic Webcast. Dan and Arnie have been friends and business associates for decades, and this latest venture was a result of that partnership. DigitalMuscle.com had acquired exclusive rights to webcast the Arnold Classic bodybuilding events as they happened.

Dan had received an email from me via the website, and asked to see a copy of the free report. I sent it to him, and he loved the strategy (all based on RankXL principles, of course). He immediately shot me an email which simply said:

We arranged to chat on Skype later that day. As I live in Bangkok, and Dan is in Florida, this resulted in me having to stay up until 3.00am to make the call. But it was worth it!

On Skype, we spoke at length about SEO and online marketing. DigitalMuscle.com had just launched, and Dan needed to ramp up traffic ahead of the Arnold Classic Webcast, which Schwarzenegger himself would be involved in. After a while, we worked out a consultancy agreement, where I would become Chief Marketing Officer for DigitalMuscle.com, and work on search engine optimization for the site.

We had a deal:

Over the next few months, I spent a lot of time working on the site and on incoming links, and we got great results. As a result, the Arnold Classic Webcast was a huge success, and both Dan and the Governator were delighted with the results.

From here, things started to snowball. The ‘Schwarzenegger connection’ started opening doors for me in the fitness world. Soon I started getting referrals and picking up more SEO contracts. Initially these were with bodybuilding blogs, but this soon widened into the broader market of health and fitness.

As of today, I have multiple 12-month SEO contracts in place. When you add them all up, the total value is over $100,000. Hopefully many of them will be renewed next year, which will increase the total value significantly. And all of this is a direct result of investing just a few hundred dollars in RankXL.

Quite simply, it’s the best investment I have ever made.

This chain of events occurred because RankXL offers a strategy that is easy to understand, simple to follow, and clearly designed to generate quality links. That’s what motivated Dan to hire me to implement this strategy, and also what led to the referrals and recommendations.

So if you are simply interested in building your own blogs, that’s fine – the RankXL strategy will certainly get results. But as I have discovered, there is also an opportunity to implement this strategy for others, and make an excellent consultancy income in the process.

Whichever way you do it, you can be sure an investment in RankXL’s SEO Course is money very well spent.

I’ve been so busy working on these lucrative SEO contracts that I’ve had no time to work on my own bodybuilding blog which started it all. But I intend to return to working on that soon.

As Arnie himself says:

“I’ll be back.”

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Rob Palmer is a full-time blogger, online marketer and SEO consultant. Find out more at Go Freelance.