link-building
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Nikola Baldikov and the Business of Getting a Yes
A printed T-shirt shop pulled Nikola Baldikov toward marketing. Years later, the founder of SERPsGrowth is still working on the problem: giving people a reason to pay attention.
GoPeak Is Selling the Web’s Oldest Currency: A Good Word
The Yerevan agency’s product is not really a backlink. It is patient, manual persuasion - sold five approvals at a time, measured over years, and newly aimed at the machines that answer before we click.
uSERP Learned the Most Valuable Link Is the One You Can Measure
The Denver agency began with one client, a makeshift website and no outside capital. Its bet was simple: a backlink should behave less like a trophy and more like a line on the income statement.
SERPsGrowth Put a Price Tag on the Internet's Most Awkward Introduction
The backlink business is usually sold as a fog of authority and promises. SERPsGrowth turns it into a menu: pick the kind of introduction, the quality bar and the patience you can afford.
Zoom Wings puts a price tag on getting published
Five guest posts. Five hundred words apiece. A $125 starting package. Zoom Wings turns the messy business of blogger outreach into something you can put in a shopping cart.
Accelerate Agency closed. The retainer lesson lives on.
The Bristol SaaS SEO specialist turned scattered projects into longer client relationships. Its rise and 2025 closure offer a useful lesson in what agencies sell, what clients buy, and what a traffic chart leaves out.
The SEO Factory Behind the Agency Logo
WEB20 Ranker does the technical, local and off-page work that marketing agencies sell under their own names. Its real product is not a backlink or a press release - it is extra fulfillment capacity without the payroll gamble.
Brian Dean
Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko and co-founder of Exploding Topics, two companies he built and sold to Semrush. He invented the Skyscraper Technique, one of SEO's most widely replicated link-building frameworks, and turned a nutrition PhD dropout's basement hustle into a $4M+ exit running a 7-person contractor team. Now based in Berlin, he's a sought-after voice on building media businesses that don't depend on algorithmic luck.
Ross Hudgens
Ross Hudgens is the founder and CEO of Siege Media, a content-led SEO agency he built from a one-person freelance operation in 2012 into a 100-person, Inc. 5000 honoree (six consecutive years) backed by private equity at an eight-figure valuation. A Chapman University marketing graduate, he cut his teeth as the first employee at Single Grain before going solo after Google's Penguin update reshaped the industry. Today he advises brands like Zapier, Casper, and Airbnb on organic growth, co-created the GrowthComet agency training course, angel-invested in SparkToro, and in 2026 published 'Generative Engine Optimization: The Definitive Guide to AI SEO' with Wiley — cementing his position at the forefront of AI-era search strategy.