Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hey, Im Neil. I'm 28 years old. I currently split my time between Toronto, Canada & Dublin Ireland.

I run a digital marketing agency and have an education company that teaches people digital marketing.

We specialize in direct-response video ads on Youtube, TikTok, and Meta. And the people we love working with are internet brands.


Linxdigital.com is the website for more info on it.

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

I went to school for aerospace engineering, but before graduating in 2016 I learned about online advertising and marketing, and started to learn as much as could while still in school.

When I finished school, the aerospace industry in Canada wasn't doing too well, so jobs in that field were tough to come by, I decided to give this online world a fair shot.

I started off doing SEO for my own private affiliate sites. It made a little bit of money ($400/month) and I was hooked. Not to say that was a lot of money or anything, but that first success kind of taught me that making money online was possible and wasn't just a thing that was something theoretical.

I then tried my hand at Dropshipping while it was still very early and new. During the process, I did end up loosing about $2k of my own money which at the time was a lot. But what that process did teach me was how to run facebook ads.

I was lucky that in my network that I had a friend that was looking for someone to help run Facebook ads for one of his clients.

I took the project on and did a decent job with the client. We slowly realized that the ads management service we were providing was valuable to businesses and decided to approach it as a team.

We slowly started getting more clients, and started doing well from it, then got more clients, hired a team, got more projects, hired more people and that's pretty much been the story for the last 6-7 years.

How did you get your first initial customers?

At the very beginning cold outreach was definitely the best way for us to get clients.

In terms of cold outreach, we posted on all of the places that had what we thought had our ideal customers and tried to have genuine conversations with them. We posted in relevant Facebook groups, private Slack channels, conferences and events.

Then once we did a good job, a good portion of new business came from referrals. We also would bid for projects on platforms like Upwork.

One of the reasons for our success is that we were providing a service that was very new and had very little competition in.

Back in 2018-2019, there were very few people doing Youtube ads and this helped us stand out and get those first few clients.

From very early on we also were big proponents of sharing our learnings and successes, we chose to do that on Youtube.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

The main marketing channel for us is our organic Youtube channel.

We use this channel to give tons of information out for completely free.

As a result we have now become the leading authority on Youtube ads and some of the other platforms.

Our job is to be the most valuable resource out there when it comes to our area of expertise.

How does your business make money?

We are basically an agency and we work on a basic agency retainer model, where clients pay us a monthly fee for us to develop and manage ads on their behalf.

If a brand wants to work with us, the cost is $5k/m + a percentage of ad spend.

We also have a stand-alone course ($1497) that teaches people how to run their own youtube ads. We recently also launched a tiktok masterclass that teaches people the basic of running tiktok ads.

The plan is to a have a whole suite of educational courses that tackle several platforms and go more in-depth.

We are currently doing around 6 figures a month, with about 40-50% profit margin

Where can we go to lean more about you and your business?

Here are some links you can go to learn more:

Linx Digital: https://linxdigital.com/case-studies

Instagram: @Neil_Shap

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI-U1q7Q62LYlzVIsltsmuQ