Welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast
Shannon Donnelly (SD): Alrighty. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast, a podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you on your business journey. I’m your host, Shannon, Penji’s Partnership Coordinator, and I’m joined here today with a very special guest, Rafael Ramos from Weberus. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Rafael Ramos (RR): Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Appreciate it.
SD: Well, could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, maybe introducing yourself differently than I would and everything that you think would be relevant on your business journey up to this point?
RR: Sure. So I got into this world, the agency world, first by buying some domains where I would basically buy domains and I would try to sell them. And I soon realized that I bought a lot of really bad domains that I’d never be able to sell. And I had to figure out a way to cut my losses, basically. And that’s how I learned about SEO. So I started building super simple websites and then doing some search engine optimization to get them to rank on Google. And then I would put ads. And I would make a little bit of money. And that’s how I saved some of my losses. Through that, I got into SEO and that’s how I basically started in this industry. And Google, I guess, didn’t like that. So all of a sudden, overnight, they de-indexed pretty much everything I had. And I got down to zero. That’s how Webers was born. So after doing SEO for my own websites, essentially, I had a lot of blogs about all sorts of various topics with ads. When that went away, I started offering web design and web development services to other people. And it started slow. A lot of our business originally came through white labeling, where we would work with other agencies and help them out. And then eventually we managed to stand on our own two feet. We started working with some bigger clients. And fast forward to now, twelve, thirteen years later, it kind of came full circle where we were predominantly a design development agency. And then you end up buying and buying and buying, but you’re not reselling. And it stops being cool. So when that happens, you’re like, well, why did I buy that name in the first place? You’re like, well, it could be a cool business. So I thought about starting businesses. In fact, I even built an e-commerce website that was going to start in the outdoor space with tents and things like that. But I never got to it just because it’s difficult. And I find whenever you start a new business, oftentimes it will take some time until you’re able to see profit. And you have to either be doing something else to live from while you’re building the other business, or you need to somehow make ends meet, you know? And at the time, there was just no time. I had to choose either to focus on building websites, so that would pay the bills, or start my other business, which would be the e-commerce site, which really I didn’t have a passion in. It was more about how can I lose the least amount of money after making my mistakes with domains.
SD: Well, that makes a lot of sense. I think that’s very funny, because I do think that, oddly enough, a lot of businesses start with a mistake, quote unquote. And I actually really like to hear that, because I think that some extraordinary things can come out of failure, for lack of phrasing. Not to say that you ethically failed by buying these domains.
RR: Oh, I did. I surely did. And I agree with you. I think that, in fact. It’s something that I truly believe in, even though I don’t actually do it myself, but I believe that the key to success is just trying a lot of things quickly and failing quickly. I tend to be super picky about pretty much everything I do. And so it tends to take you way too long, but sometimes failure is almost as important as success in a way because. And so if you take way too long to test your theory, you could be just wasting a ton of time. And I think that once you miss an opportunity to try something, you have no idea whether it would fail or not. So I think that retroactively, you’re noticing that you could have done that thing and you could have been successful in it, but you would never know.
SD: Exactly, exactly. It’s just so hard. I wish there was a way to kind of mute our feelings and push through and just do it, you know?
RR: It’s hard. It would be a really nice off switch to have every once in a while. The turn off fear switch.
SD: Absolutely. That easy button, the equivalent of that, but for.
RR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
From SEO to Design and Development
SD: Well, wait, so you were experienced in SEO when you started. Did you have to learn design in order to incorporate that? Or was that something that was a skill that you already had that you weren’t utilizing?
RR: No, I actually I sucked design back then. What happened was I built all these websites and I got to a point where I had a big team of writers because SEO back then to this day, a lot of it is about content. And I had this big team of writers that would keep writing new articles and I would keep publishing them in all the right places. And then Google penalized us. And it’s what we call a manual penalty. So it wasn’t algorithmical. We weren’t doing anything black hat or anything like that against the terms. But they just decided that there is no way that this one account is an expert in all these vastly different industries, loans, fashion, diets. We had literally everything. And when that happened, it was literally as if we just took the ground off my feet. It was earth-shattering. And I decided that I never want to hear about SEO again because it’s something that can be taken away no matter what you do. We don’t really have control over what Google will decide to do with our website. We have some control. We can do our, we can put our best foot forward and all that, but ultimately they decide. So when I started my website for Webers, it was just a video. That was it. I did not want any content cause I didn’t even want Google to look at it. I just hated Google. And I started learning how to do basic design, but pretty early on, I decided that I’m just not a designer. I have a very good eye for design and I can tell you what will work. But I cannot actually do it, you know? And I brought in a designer back then who is actually with us to this day, twelve years later. And soon after that, I also brought a developer because I also suck at development as well. I think it didn’t take long for me to figure out that maybe I could learn how to design and I could learn how to develop, but my time would be much better spent in strategizing and directing what the site should ultimately be like rather than actually making it. And that’s still what I do to this day. I’m mainly on the strategy side, but I work obviously hand in hand with designers and developers just to make sure that we put these things together in the way that they should be.
SD: Well, it’s important to know your strengths and weaknesses for sure. I think that a lot of people will try to do it all and do it all poorly because you can’t do everything. There’s definitely people who are very good at picking up things for sure. I am not one of those people. I am a practice makes perfect person. I’m never good at anything immediately. But I can definitely understand Delegation is very important. And I think with agency work, especially starting out, a lot of people have to wear many hats. So it’s nice to be able to delineate different positions that you think are not your strong suit. So it’s admirable to be able to do that so early on.
RR: Yes, it’s difficult, but it’s also important. I find that one of the most difficult things is when you can do something. If you cannot do it, then you just have to hire someone, right? But if you can do it yourself, it’s very difficult to bring on someone else because then everything they do, now you’re thinking, could I have done it better? Could I have done it cheaper without having to pay someone else? So in scaling an agency, that’s always a tricky thing, but that’s another, I think that maybe one of the most important lessons as a business owner is that trying to do everything yourself is almost always a losing battle because you can do it and it will save you dollars, but it’s not going to save you money because ultimately you’re bottlenecking your business. You’ll never be able to do as much and chances are you’re much better at doing one thing over something else. And also, I think there’s a lot to be said about understanding what you enjoy doing. Because a lot of times we’re biased. And if I like doing one thing, but I hate doing something else, immediately that something else becomes something bad. And I oftentimes find myself thinking, who can I get that would be willing to do this horrible task? And over time, I’ve learned that, you know, some people just love doing different things, you know, which is, it’s still hard to swallow. I feel like a lot of times we just see everything through our own eyes and we think that everybody else looks at things the same way, but it is very interesting because a lot of people will view a task to be monotonous or boring or difficult, and then someone else might love it. And that’s the best part about delegation is being able to find people for those tasks that actually enjoy it. Because I think that when you enjoy something that you’re doing, you do it that much better. You can be good at something and hate it. I mean, I’m good at math, but I hate math. I think that you can’t do something as well as someone else can that’s good and also enjoys it and is passionate about it. And that also drives them to do it better, which is so important because I think that you are the best. You can only be the best in your field or best at what you are if you’re constantly striving to be better constantly because it’s always changing and adapting, especially the marketing field is changing every moment. And people constantly have to adjust for that and change and want to adapt and see the bigger picture and want to improve what they’re doing constantly. And I think that if you’re not passionate or you don’t care about the tasks that you’re doing, whether you’re good at it or not, that’s not going to push you to be—
SD: Right, right, right.
RR: Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s I think it could be one of the most important things, right? I mean, you know, there’s the cliché of doing what you love which I think is amazing, but also very, very difficult. I love watching movies but I’m not watching movies. I’m making websites, but I think that there is some truth in that because when you look at anybody’s job, there are aspects of that job that they enjoy more than others. And just like you said, if you enjoy what you’re doing, you’re much more likely to look into it and stay up to date and keep trying to do it better because you’re actually enjoying it. So identifying what that is and trying to focus on that, it can really be a game changer in terms of your trajectory, for sure.
The Impact of AI on SEO and Web Design
SD: So I wanted to go back to something that you said earlier because I thought it was really interesting. The SEO can be taken from you at any time. I thought that that was, one, I think very topical because, and I was wondering if you also considered this in your, like more recently, even though maybe you don’t heavily involve yourself in it as much, is AI kind of taking over the whole SEO thing. Like a lot of people are debating over whether SEO jobs will be replaced by AI within the next whatever amount of time. How do you feel about those kinds of things having experienced the negative effects of advancements in technology because of related to SEO specifically?
RR: I don’t, I mean, it’s just like you said, if you like what you do, then you stay on top of it and you move alongside all this advancement because AI was really an assist for a lot of the things that we do with SEO. But if you’re stuck to the way that you used to do things five years ago or ten years ago or twenty years ago, AI, of course, will take over your job because they can do all the modern things on autopilot. Can they do them as good as an experienced SEO? No. And I think we’ll get there. I actually cannot imagine a world in which AI is not going to be able to perform almost all SEO tasks as good as an SEO expert ten years from now. It will definitely get there. But even once it gets there, somebody will need to manage it. So that could be the new SEO role will be AI SEO manager. You know what I mean? And I think that’s okay. That’s technology. The same could happen with websites too. In fact, I had a conversation with one of my friends, also an agency founder, and he was telling me about how he attempted to build a simple website using AI. It wasn’t that bad. But that’s actually very interesting. So as our company was growing, we started working with bigger clients. And I’m not talking the really, really big clients, even just more established companies. And much like what we were talking about, about doing what you do best, a smart person right now, a capable, smart person that’s technologically inclined is able to build a website. It’s not that difficult, not with AI, just with, with templates and stuff. You know, you can go to Shopify, you can find a Shopify template, install it, and you’ll build a website. It would take you maybe a few days, maybe a few hours if you’re good enough. But if you run a company that is successful and that is growing, number one, is that the best use of your time? And what would it cost you as an amateur DIY web designer to build a website for your business versus how much more would you make if you hired someone and paid them? They’re an expert in that field to build it for you. And I think that’s a huge thing that a lot of people kind of forget. We’ll see this with prospective clients. I’ll see it when I have conversations with other people where they say, well, nowadays, anybody can build a website with SatCPT or with blah, blah, blah, go.ai builder or whatever. And it’s true. You can do that, but how big of a difference would it make if that website made you thirty percent less revenue than the website that we can build for you? If that number is very small because you’re a brand new business, then do it. Start like that. Don’t spend a lot of money on a website. Test your theory out. See if it works. But if you’re making a few million dollars, then all of a sudden a five percent or two percent improvement on your conversion rate or your revenue more than pays for the cost to have an expert build your website so then it becomes a no-brainer. You don’t want to take the risk to do the the free version or the DIY version or the cheaper version even because the cost the the missed opportunity cost way outweighs the actual cost of the product the the service rather.
SD: Yeah, I think that also goes back to the notion not doing something just because you can, because it might not be as good as, you know, giving that task to someone else or hiring someone to do it. Because of course, I definitely agree with you. I think that the average person can, I think maybe not even a smart, capable person. I think can create a baseline website, but will that be good? No, maybe I don’t even know.
RR: Right.
SD: I’ve spoken to agencies where I’ve seen many, many, many, many websites for agencies specifically that make websites and they’re not great websites.
RR: Right, right, right. Absolutely. It’s surprisingly common, but yes, I hear you.
SD: It’s very funny. But I think that those scenarios, I assume at least that that is the tool that they might be using to, and a lot of people would be using that to assist them, like do maybe the menial tasks that are involved in making a website and not actually the whole website. And those people are the smart and capable people that already have those tools to begin with. And I think that they can use AI to make something that much better. Whereas someone who’s just using it with no knowledge or very little knowledge on how to create a website are just going to make something that may be mediocre, maybe a little more than mediocre. And I think that that’s the best taste.
RR: Right. I agree with you for sure. And what I will sometimes say is when you build a website using a template, a lot of times the template that you’re using is made by a world-class team that has amazing designers and amazing developers. I would argue that most best-selling themes are world-class quality websites. However, when you take that and you try to customize it for your business, you take the world-class product and then you put in amateur customization. And when you put the two together, you end up with a pretty, I’m trying to find an appropriate word, not as great website, let’s say. And that’s the problem. The end result almost always will not be great because it’s not a website that’s made for you. It’s a website that’s made for everyone to customize and essentially to take away from what made it great as a theme. That’s what happens when you customize, because you’re not a designer unless you hire a designer or developer. And then the other thing about it is that I find that there are certain tasks that are very black or white. For example, the way we build websites is that we build everything custom. We work with content management systems like Shopify and WordPress, but the design and the code that we build is custom. So we’re building a website for you. We have a conversation about what you’re looking for. Then we design the first mock-up. You look at it. You give us feedback. We revise it as needed. You look at it again. And once you tell us that you love it, that’s when we’re going to code it. The beginning part where we design and we do the back and forth, there is no black or white. Everything is great. I like something. Maybe you don’t like it. Or maybe I like it more like this. You like it more like that. There’s no right or wrong. It’s personal. I think that this is the part that will be the hardest to have replaced by something automated. The part that comes after that, once you have a design and you say, this is my design, now I need to code it, that’s kind of black or white. You either code it right and it works or it doesn’t and it’s broken. I see a lot of that being replaced by AI. And that’s a good chunk of development goes towards this kind of tasks. And I can see that being replaced in the near future for the reason that there’s no question marks. So there’s no gray areas. For the most part, you just have to code it. And it needs to match the design. So that front-end coding part will make sense to automate.
SD: Yes, I definitely agree because I think at this point, AI is not creating anything original. It is just making copies or pulling from certain areas of the internet. Whereas design, I don’t see being replaced by AI unless you want something that isn’t original or not going to stand out. At least as of now.
RR: I feel like it will eventually be replaced. However. I don’t see it being replaced a hundred percent. I feel like somebody will need to hold your hand as you’re going through that process, or you’re going to end up pulling your hair out, you know? It’s not that it cannot create beautiful things. It’s just that you need to give it a lot of information. And then also sometimes you need to know what you need. A lot of clients don’t know what’s best for them. They know what they like. But sometimes what we have to do is we need to take best practices, take what we’ve seen and know that works and package it up in a way that appeals to our client. So that way they get what they like, but also what will work for them. If you just go for something that’s pretty, which AI I’m sure can do already in many cases, it might not be what’s good for your business and you ultimately end up with a subpar product.
SD: Yeah, of course. You can have, as someone who is involved in marketing and also design, you have that perspective of what someone needs rather than asking something that is objective and just making something that you’re asking for. It doesn’t have that in mind. And I think that you can, there’s so many people that come to agencies. I’ve talked to many design agencies where someone comes to them with a logo idea or something else like that and it’s a horrible idea. And you can have AI make you that horrible idea and they won’t tell you that it’s a horrible idea because they’re not a human being that can tell you that something is not going to work for you. And if you have the foresight to ask, maybe they can do some research on that for you and pull it from the Internet.
RR: I have the perfect example. I was actually so I am extremely particular about any kind of articles that I write, so I can never have an AI write me an article for my personal articles. But I oftentimes use AI to help me create an outline. And then basically we have a great outline, and then I will write the article or I will narrate the article or whatever, something like that. That’s my process. And I remember only like a couple of weeks ago, I was inside CPT. I was trying to draft an article. And I was asking you to do all sorts of things, and you were doing it. And then at some point, I’m reading the outline, and I see that something is very clearly repeated and even contradicting itself within that article, within that outline, in a sense. And I wrote, because now I have conversations with it. I said, hey, we’re saying this, but also that. That doesn’t really make sense. And the answer was, yes, you’re right. Let me fix that. I’m like, okay. But why was that there in the first place, you know? I think it will do whatever you tell it to do. It doesn’t mean that it will have a lot of bias or that it will tell you, hey, that’s kind of stupid, you know? It will just.
SD: It’s incorrect often. I do. I think as of now, it’s not perfected, too. So there is so many kinks to be able to work out. And I think that that’s just how it’s just technology developing, of course. But I think that people really need to keep that in mind, because I think that especially when people are a little maybe pressed for money, they might need to rely on it a little more than you maybe should. And that’s completely understandable, but I think that you still need to monitor it and make sure that everything is up to your standard. You can have AI write you an article and it might be average, but you can also, you know, if they can do the majority of the work for you, you can just go through it simply and make it better and tweak it and make it better if that’s what you want. It might not be something that is original at this point in time, but there’s so many people out there that are saying the same things and just in different ways, so it doesn’t always have to be original.
RR: Right. I think it’s very, very difficult to be a hundred percent original. A lot of it comes down to how you essentially present an idea, even if that’s not a new idea. I really think that’s huge. I could not even count the number of times where I saw a TikTok or an Instagram video or a YouTube short where somebody says an idea and I’m just blown away. And then I realized that this is something that’s like nothing new. It’s just that the way that they said it just clicked. I think that’s huge. Some people have a true talent in just communicating ideas and other people don’t. That’s another skill in itself. So I think when it comes to articles, the way that you write and the way that you draw someone in, even if what you’re saying is not necessarily original, can make a huge difference day and night.
SD: I think that is a really great note to end on because we’re a little over time, but I truly do agree with you. And I think that to understand that is really important, especially when doing things like content writing, is to be able to make sure you’re phrasing or creating something in a certain way and presenting it in a certain way that it will appeal to your audience and not just thinking that you can create an original idea because I agree with you that it is. It’s difficult to be original. There are so many people on this earth shouting things into the public. And especially even artistically, I always thought this was very interesting. I took an art class in college way back that explained that you can copy tastefully an art and no one is going to question it because everyone pulls influence from everything and you’re never going to technically create something original that no element of it has been created before but the way in which you create it is unique and I think that that’s something that no one can really take away from you. Even AI can’t take away from you as of now, maybe.
RR: Yeah, exactly. I also just on the same note, maybe like a year ago, we started a marketing campaign, like an outbound marketing campaign with Facebook ads and a funnel and all that to promote our SEO services. But the interesting thing about it is the way we do SEO is very, very different than a traditional SEO company, particularly for e-commerce. And I could get into all the details and all that, but I’ll just say that people can Google and figure that out. But the takeaway was that because what we do is so unique and interesting from a technical perspective and as a general approach to SEO, I thought that people would just love understanding it and just really getting what we do. And I literally created a video, maybe like five, ten minutes, where I gave them the strategy. And I said, if you want to do it yourself, do it yourself. If you want to hire us to do it for you because you don’t have time or because you want to do it at scale, hire us to do it for you. But this is exactly what we do. And when I was doing that, part of me was thinking I’m giving them gold. But another part of me was thinking, this is great because I want them to understand what we’re doing because that sets the right expectations. They get why it works, why it will work. And it will also filter out the good fit clients for us, the ones that don’t really want to do it themselves. If you want to do it yourself, do it yourself. It failed miserably as a campaign because people oftentimes don’t really care to learn how exactly what you do. People don’t care to know how we code websites. All they want to know is that it works. They care about the results rather than the process. So I think whether we’re talking about an article or a website where you’re selling a product, you have to think about your audience and you have to think about what they want out of it, rather than what you think is cool about. I’m so excited about what we do with SEO, because it’s so cool and so interesting. And it just really makes perfect sense of why it would work. And yet, for people, if I’m running a successful business, I see SEO as just another way to bring more money to my business. I don’t need to know the little details of how it works. I just need to know that it works. And if you can make it work, I’ll hire you and just do it for me, you know? So yeah, knowing your audience and speaking to them and to their needs is the number one most important thing.
SD: Well, thank you so much for that advice because I think that that’s something that is very crucial that people should acknowledge when going into this kind of work or being involved in it in general. I think that it’s very easy for people to remove themselves from thinking about their audience sometimes and you think that they’re thinking about it constantly because they’re providing something for a group of people, but I think that when you get so involved in your business sometimes you lose that clarity and I think that’s something that’s important for people to consistently keep in mind, so thank you. Well, thank you so much for joining me today and giving all of this great advice. I think that a lot of people will be able to learn from this. So I really appreciate it. That’s the goal for every podcast. But I appreciate your unique perspective on everything. And again, thank you so much for joining us today.
RR: For sure. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for everyone watching or listening. I hope that you got to learn from this podcast like I get to. And I appreciate you participating as well.
SD: Thank you so much and have a lovely day.
