Welcome to Market Movers: Building Brands & Links with Linkifi! Your go-to podcast for transforming your business into an unforgettable brand, where branding meets SEO and link-building. I’m Chris Panteli, Co-Founder and CEO of Linkifi, and I’m joined by my co-host and Co-Founder, Nick Biggs.
In this episode, we’re joined by Besmir Bregasi, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of ZeroRank AI, to explore his journey from affiliate marketing to SaaS, paid acquisition, and AI search. Besmir shares how he made around $17,000 in his first month of affiliate marketing, why he believes huge opportunities still exist in paid lead generation, and how ZeroRank AI is helping brands understand and improve their visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, AI Overviews, and other answer engines.
Key Talking Points
✅ Making $17,000 in His First Month Online. Besmir discovered affiliate marketing at 21 while studying at university. After realizing he could spend roughly $1 on Google Ads and generate $3 or $4 back, his first successful month produced around $17,000.
✅ Why Affiliate Marketing Is Still Thriving. Despite constant predictions that the industry is dying, Besmir says small teams are still spending enormous amounts on paid acquisition and generating serious revenue across Meta and other platforms.
✅ Lead Generation Is a Huge Opportunity. Besmir sees particularly strong opportunities in areas such as finance, home improvement, solar, and other categories where qualified leads can be sold to brokers or directly to service providers.
✅ Look at What Is Working in the U.S. First. Many successful funnels and offers begin in the U.S. before spreading to Europe and Asia. Besmir believes entrepreneurs can often adapt proven models to less competitive markets rather than invent something entirely new.
✅ You Still Need an Edge. AI makes it easier than ever to create landing pages, ads, and funnels, but everyone has access to the same tools. Success still requires better creatives, stronger offers, improved margins, sharper hooks, or some other competitive advantage.
✅ Start With What Is Already Working. Besmir recommends studying successful competitors rather than beginning with a blank page. Tools such as AdPlexity can reveal long-running ads and proven strategies that marketers can then improve upon.
✅ ZeroRank AI Started as an Internal Problem. Besmir noticed more customers saying they had discovered his SaaS businesses through ChatGPT, while existing SEO tools were not accurately showing what was happening inside AI search.
✅ SEO Traffic Fell but Signups Stayed Strong. Some of Besmir’s SaaS businesses saw organic Google traffic drop significantly without a corresponding drop in signups, suggesting that customer discovery was shifting toward AI platforms.
✅ Building ZeroRank Around Real AI Visibility. ZeroRank was designed to track how brands actually appear across LLMs rather than relying only on API-generated responses that may not match what real users see.
✅ From 11% to 45% AI Visibility. Besmir says one of his own SaaS brands increased its visibility score from around 11% to 45% within one or two months after implementing recommendations from ZeroRank.
✅ AI Search Requires More Than Traditional SEO. Besmir believes visibility now depends increasingly on fresh content and signals from platforms such as Reddit, Quora, YouTube, and social channels, alongside websites and backlinks.
✅ The Future Is AI Agents. Besmir expects users to move beyond asking AI which product is best. Agents will increasingly choose tools, connect to services, and complete tasks on the user’s behalf, making brand visibility within AI systems even more valuable.
Notable Quotes & Moments
📌 “On my first month, I think I did like 17,000.”
📌 “This was my first and only job I ever did in my life.”
📌 “The easier it is, the more competition.”
📌 “You need to have an edge.”
📌 “You never start from a blank slate.”
📌 “We were hearing all these people that were finding us through ChatGPT.”
📌 “That somewhere now is the LLMs.”
📌 “I think AI is the future. I think agents are going to be the future.”
About Besmir Bregasi
Besmir Bregasi is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of ZeroRank AI, an AI visibility platform designed to help brands understand and improve how they appear across answer engines and large language models.
He began his career in affiliate marketing at age 21 and has spent nearly two decades building businesses across digital marketing, paid acquisition, conferences, SaaS, and marketing technology. After helping build Affiliate World into a global event attracting thousands of marketers, Besmir moved into new ventures while remaining deeply involved in digital marketing.
Today, ZeroRank AI helps businesses monitor AI visibility, identify opportunities to improve recommendations and citations, and create content designed for the emerging search landscape.
🔗 Besmir Bregasi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/besmirbregasi
🔗 ZeroRank AI: https://zerorank.ai
🚀 Build Your Brand with Real Links
At Linkifi, we help ambitious brands scale organic visibility through digital PR, brand storytelling, and SEO strategy. Book your FREE strategy session today:
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👋 Connect with your hosts:
👉 Chris Panteli on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-panteli/
👉 Nick Biggs on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick--biggs/
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