When he was young, Romuald Fons (born in Barcelona in 1977) dreamed of being a rock singer and performing in front of crowds. Today, this renowned 43-year-old entrepreneur and YouTuber can't boast of filling stadiums with his music, but he does fill theaters and auditoriums every time he organizes one of his free digital marketing and mentoring events.

The latest event, however, held in a concert hall in Barcelona last week, was not addressed to give advice to people who want to create a business or need inspiration to make a change in their lives, but to launch his first book, Grow and Get Rich. 51 Laws to Attract Success and Money, (available only in Spanish), where the famous YouTuber, whose videos on digital marketing have exceeded 47 million views, reveals the laws that have guided him from poverty to a legacy of personal wealth and business success.

"If I got this far, it was not because of conscious decisions, but because I knew how to take advantage of the opportunities along the way," he explained in a recent interview with AL DÍA News.

Known as "the King of SEO," Fons has written an autobiographical book structured in short, very direct chapters, where he tries to get the reader to focus on "unlearning" everything that society has put into his head, everything that was "bullshit", as he himself often says at his events. Fons boasts of not having studied neither to have companies nor to become a millionaire, but to have learned by doing.

Born into a humble family in a working-class neighborhood of Barcelona, Fons saw his father laid off and was forced to set up his own water treatment business on his own.

"That's when I realized that I didn't want to work for others, or do something I didn't like or feel fulfilled doing," recalled the entrepreneur, who until the age of 23, was helping his father in the family business, cleaning wells or whatever else he could get his hands on.

A lover of creativity, technology and music, Fons decided to study architecture, a career he associated with being creative, but upon discovering that his most likely future as an architect was mainly "working for others," he abandoned his studies in his final year to devote himself to his rock band.

"My father used to tell me that I was a coward, that what was really happening was that I didn't like to work, but what I wanted was to do something creative, to feel fulfilled," he recalled.

In addition to his small gigs, Fons began to explore opportunities in the Internet and technology, his other passion, managing to sell a copy of Tetris for the Mega Drive at an online auction for an astronomical sum. But the success was temporary: after investing in two failed digital projects, Fons went completely broke.

"Going broke sounds very romantic, but when you have a four-month-old baby and you see no money coming into the house, it's not funny. From that moment on, I said to myself: 'Now it's time to make money, and not so much what you like. And what do I know how to do? Make websites.' I must have learned something from two failed startups," he recalled thinking at the time.

His reference became Pat Flynn, a well-known American entrepreneur who, after losing his job as an architect in 2008, opened his own blog, The Smart Passive Income, where he shares with his followers his different experiments and strategies for making money on the Internet and social media.

Imitating Flynn, Fons teamed up with a friend and started creating well-positioned websites with the sole purpose of attracting as much traffic as possible. One example is recipe websites, with a name like Polloalhorno.com (roastedchicken.com). One day, a client surprised by how well positioned his websites were in Google, asked him to do SEO for him. That was the beginning of Bigseo Agency, what is today one of the leading SEO agencies for the Hispanic market, with clients such as Danone, Amazon, Spotify, Glovo, Shopify and Custo Barcelona.

On the other hand, Fons, known as the "King of SEO", has created Bigseo Academy, an online SEO training school. The star course is Crecetube, aimed at anyone who wants to grow their business through YouTube and capitalize on their presence on social media. 

Fons also has his own YouTube channel, dedicated to spreading his knowledge about SEO and demystifying some myths about the business world to save future entrepreneurs from the mistakes that led him to ruin.

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