Newsletter: A telco outranked Apple for "iPhone" in 1 hour


Plus the $90 domain trick local SEOs are using to own 5 suburbs at once.

If having trouble with any links, you can read the online version here

Hey Guys,

A Danish telco was banned from publishing a single word about the new iPhone before Apple's keynote. They ranked number 1 for "iPhone" anyway, above Apple, roughly 60 minutes after the event ended.

The workaround is dumb, repeatable, and sitting in video 10.

But start at the top, because today is stacked with things you can actually build before Friday.


TL;DR

10 videos, 10 systems. Rank and rent SEO with the money math done for you. 7 ad platforms that are cheaper than Meta right now (one of them is a postcard). Facebook is paying for still photos again. A real estate agency model that pulled $704,000 in 90 days. A 5-agent Claude stack that writes LinkedIn posts nobody clocks as AI. The Star Method for owning suburbs with $90 of domains. A $66 billion niche with no incumbent. A 3-slide TikTok carousel doing $24,000 a month for a KDP book. A Claude SEO Council that kills bad keywords before you waste a month on them. And 5 SEO war stories with tactics you can lift today.


➡️ Your Complete Implementation Guide

Not got time to watch the videos? Grab the resources (Summary, Insights & Checklist) for each video from this Google doc

👉 ​Access Your Complete Implementation Guide Here


1. Build a lead site once, and rent it out every month

Tim, the SEO Guru walks the whole rank and rent play, and he does the money math on screen before he touches a domain.

The trick is picking a niche where 2 conversions a month pay your fee. Rhinoplasty in Plano, not plastic surgery.

What you'll discover:

  • The exact funnel estimate he runs: 500 to 1,000 searches, 25% click-through, 250 clicks, 50 browses, 5 calls, 2 converts
  • Why an exact match domain (service plus city) makes ranking dramatically easier, plus CallFire for pay-as-you-go call routing to your renter
  • The 3 pricing models (monthly retainer, per lead, per lead that converts) and why per lead usually pays more

🎥 Watch here


2. 7 ad platforms that cost less than Meta right now

Steve at MyWifeQuitHerJob moved a real chunk of his budget off Facebook this year. Ad costs jumped 20%, and the cost per acquisition is up 38%.

One of his 7 alternatives returned 16.47x. It arrives in the mail.

What you'll discover:

  • AppLovin, which serves ads inside mobile games and went self-serve in June (Cuddle Clones scaled to $80,000 a day there in one week, with under 5% customer overlap with Meta)
  • His own postcard test: 699 cards to lapsed buyers, $482 spent, $7,947 back in about 3 weeks
  • Why Reddit's return went from 2.3x to 4.7x after last September's overhaul, and how Reddit feeds the AI answers that now recommend products

🎥 Watch here


3. Facebook pays for still photos, and almost nobody noticed

Everyone's shouting about Reels. Meanwhile, Facebook's merged content monetization program pays on photos and plain text posts too.

Lucca made over $14,000 last June and shows the whole build, including the setting most people skip.

What you'll discover:

  • The 8-step build: pick 1 topic, validate it in Facebook search, build the page (posts set to public), generate the image, edit it yourself, write the caption, post daily at 7pm, and review insights every Sunday
  • His prompt structure for a scroll-stopping image, built around 1 small human detail (footprints in the snow) that makes the viewer ask a question
  • The 3-line caption formula with zero hashtags and the honest 90-day timeline where month 1 gets you 12 views

🎥 Watch here


4. The agency model that collected $704,000 in a single quarter

Carter Vincentini shows the Stripe screenshot, then pulls apart the model behind it. April 1 to June 30, 2026, cash collected, around 237 active clients.

The difference from a normal ads agency is that he owns the whole chain, not just the top of it.

What you'll discover:

  • The pricing: $9,000 for 6 months or $12,000 for a year, paid up front, split into 2 payments 3 months apart if needed (no monthly retainers)
  • His 11-part end-to-end system, including a full-time calling team that hits leads inside the first minute and makes 4 to 7 calls in week 1
  • Why "stickiness" is the whole business, and how hosting client websites and CRMs makes leaving you more painful than staying

🎥 Watch here


5. The 5-agent Claude stack that writes LinkedIn posts people believe

Harry Long's argument is that AI flops on LinkedIn because people prompt it lazily. His fix is 3 layers of context and 2 agents that never see each other's work.

Idea to finish a post in under 60 seconds once it's built.

What you'll discover:

  • The 3 context pillars: an agent trained on you and your company, a second that reverse-engineers 5 top influencers in your niche, and a third that hunts trending topics every other day across algorithmic channels
  • The "hook lab": 8 to 10 hook variations per post (contrarian, curiosity, stat, question) so you pick instead of settle
  • Why the critic agent has to be a separate Claude, and how to publish straight from chat using a third-party connector

🎥 Watch here


6. Own 5 suburbs for about $90 in domains

Your Google Business Profile is on a leash. Rankings fade every mile you travel from your pin, and no amount of on-page work changes that.

Jesse Cunningham's Star Method plants extra flags outside the fade.

What you'll discover:

  • The structure: your main site is Rome, plus 5 microsites, 1 per suburb, each on its own exact match domain and brand
  • The rule that keeps it clean: the roads between those sites are phone calls, never links (link them and you've built a PBN)
  • How to mine your competitor's Google Business Profile services list for microsite ideas and the difference between this and rank and rent (here you're landlord and tenant)

🎥 Watch here


7. A $66 billion market where the buyer has no advocate

WordsAtScale scored this niche 83 out of 100, one of the highest in his portfolio. It's the wedding industry, viewed from the bridesmaid's side.

The Knot and Zola sell to the couple, so they'll never publish the thing everyone's searching for: how to say no.

What you'll discover:

  • The numbers: 64,000 monthly volume across 10 seed keywords, average CPC near $2, 56% growth, with hundreds of sub-DA-30 keywords sitting open
  • The 4 content angles that rank fast (decline scripts, itemised receipt-level cost breakdowns, budget caps and prevention, vendor price transparency)
  • The 4 ways it pays, including a $7 to $19 script and template pack you can sell as a download

🎥 Watch here


8. 3 slides, no ad spend, $24,000 a month from one KDP book

Danny found a self-published book at a BSR of 1,345, selling 97 to 139 copies a day. The author has 23,600 TikTok followers and runs zero ads.

Every post is the same 3 slides. She's been repeating them since September.

What you'll discover:

  • The format: hook slide, book cover, then an interior page as the answer (one carousel cleared 600,000 views)
  • The 48-hour rule when you set up a fresh TikTok account and how to train your feed before you post anything
  • His posting plan: 3 posts a day for 30 days (90 total), changing hooks while keeping the format locked

🎥 Watch here


9. Get 5 AI agents to argue before you commit to a keyword

Prompt a single AI about a keyword, and it tells you what you want to hear. Tim built a Claude skill that stacks the deck against you on purpose.

He ran "lawyer near Miami" through it. All 5 agents killed it, from 5 different directions.

What you'll discover:

  • The council: intent analyst, SERP competitor analyst, on-page technician, contrarian (assumes failure and hunts the fatal flaw), and a searcher who role-plays the person Googling it
  • The judge that weighs all 5 outputs and returns one decisive verdict with a confidence rating
  • The 2 workflows built into the skill: roast a keyword or audit a live page by URL

🎥 Watch here


10. 5 SEO stories, 5 tactics you can copy today

Edward Sturm pulled the best answers from an SEO subreddit thread. The iPhone one is the headline, but the PS5 story is the one I'd act on first.

Somebody wrote, "What is the best position for the PS5?" and answered it plainly while Sony hedged and took the featured snippet.

What you'll discover:

  • The prearranged media partner play that put a telco above Apple for "iPhone" within an hour of the keynote (the win lasted 3 days)
  • The badge tactic: approve vendors, give them a badge for their site, and watch an entire industry link back to you
  • Why deleting thousands of weak, cannibalising pages made some sites perform better, and why expired domains are optional rather than required

🎥 Watch here


Talk soon,

- Tony

P.S. If you're testing the Facebook photo play, start tonight. Lucca's timeline is 90 posts before things move, so every day you wait pushes your first real numbers back a day. Post number 1 takes about 4 minutes.

Tony Hayes Daily Growth Signals Newsletter

Every day we handpick the top 20 marketing tips, insights, case studies, methods, workflows, and free trials we've spotted on Twitter (X) and YouTube. It's completely free and lands in your inbox 6 days a week. No fluff, just the good stuff that's actually working right now. Creator of NicheBlasta, LeadBlasta, Viral Content Pilot, and many more innovative marketing automation tools. I build and release new tools every week built with no code platforms and run a WhatsApp group and the 'Unshackled' product creation bootcamp.

Read more from Tony Hayes Daily Growth Signals Newsletter

Plus the $2 citation, the £60 Google Business Profile trick, and Claude Code eating WordPress. If having trouble with any links, you can read the online version here Hey Guys, 10 videos today, and 7 of them are circling the same thing without saying it out loud: the page is stopping being the product. The data behind it is. One guy is charging bots per crawl. Another is ripping WordPress out entirely and letting Claude run the site. A third is paying creators 25 bucks a video to get his...

Plus a 6-part prompt framework, PLR done properly, and why iPhone footage beat the £5,000 camera. If having trouble with any links, you can read the online version here Hey Guys, One of today's videos contains a $10,000 lesson that took a guy about 4 weeks to learn. He was spending real money on Facebook ads, his pixel was firing, his leads were coming in, and every single one of them was training the algorithm to find him more time-wasters. He fixed it with one piece of friction in the...

16 steps, 1 hour, and one export button most people never touch. If having trouble with any links, you can read the online version here Hey Guys, There's a page on your site right now that Google already likes. It's ranking, it's getting clicks, and it's quietly matching dozens of queries you never wrote about. You just can't see them because you've never clicked the one button that shows you. This edition starts there, then goes wide: Medium's return as a parasite SEO platform, the scaled AI...