Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Rand Fishkin, the Co-Founder of SparkToro, a service that helps you find all the proper outlets through which to reach your target demographic. This is his second time being a guest on Growth Everywhere! Check out the first episode with him here!
Tune in to hear Rand talk about why the “Wizard of Moz” decided to leave Moz, how he helped grow the company 50% YoY, how he started his own software company a month later, and why the venture model may not work for every company.
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How do you get smarter?
Simple—you ingest as much information as you can and parse out the information that really resonates with you. Warren Buffett spends over 5 hours reading each day just so he can keep up with the important events happening around him.
People often talk about reading books, listening to audiobooks/podcasts, going to conferences and reading blog posts. How about newsletters?
Although numbers show that e-mail is starting to die, it’s still a highly engaging channel. It’s still one of the best ways to drive revenues online. So engaging in fact, that for every $1 spent on e-mail marketing, the average return is $44.25.
E-mail engagement has been decreasing over the years. Just take a look at this image from Bear and Beam:
The most important thing is getting the right information in front of you since so many e-mail newsletters are just an abundance of promotional spam.
But if you can get it right, the information flowing to you will be an invaluable addition to your content consumption schedule. If one of the richest men in the world can make time to read 5+ hours a day, I’m sure you can block out some time to as well.
I tend to skip a lot of e-mail newsletters, but there are a select few that I hold dear to my heart because I LEARN a lot from them. The newsletters I subscribe to cover the following:
If you’re an entrepreneur (or aspiring entrepreneur), it’ll be beneficial for you to check at least one of these out. Venture capital is always interesting to me because it points to where capital is flowing for ‘the next big thing’.
Without further ado, I’m pleased to share my favorite newsletters (in no particular order):
Investor and Digg founder Kevin Rose curates a monthly newsletter with his latest ramblings. He shares favorite products he likes, how-to’s that he finds useful, his favorite TED talks, interesting topics (e.g. fasting, ice baths, etc.), and more.
You can sign up for it here <==
Tim Ferriss’ weekly newsletter gives you a peek into the world of the best-selling author. He’ll recommend books, something he really enjoyed reading that week, interesting quotes, and a recent purchase.
You can sign up for it here <==
This is by far my most favorite venture capital newsletter for the week. It’s PACKED with information on things that I typically don’t think about (e.g. emerging layers, world diseases, how the world is running out of groundwater, and more).
There are a lot of things in this world that you don’t know you don’t know. But when you start to move things to the territory of ‘know you don’t know’, you can start to take control and go deeper down the rabbit hole on subjects that you’re truly interested in. If you haven’t seen my interview with Social Capital Partner Mamoon Hamid, go listen to it now. You’ll enjoy it!
You can sign up for it here <==
KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg co-founder Hiten Shah is someone I consider to be a mentor figure who’s always consuming and sharing interesting knowledge. Just follow his Twitter or Facebook and you’ll find that to be the case. Luckily, he also curates a weekly digest of his favorite readings which is even more valuable because he’s spent the time to distill what really resonated with him. You can listen to my interview with him here.
You can sign up for it here <==
Echosign (sold to Adobe) co-founder and SaaS godfather Jason Lemkin knows a thing or two when it comes to software-as-a-service (Saas). In fact, he throws one of the best conferences in San Francisco each year called the SaaStr annual.
For people building a software subscription business, this is a must-have. In fact, you should also add his Quora posts to your list of reading material because it’s damn good. So good, in fact, that he has crossed well over 10 million views. If you haven’t checked out my action-packed interview with him, you can listen in right here.
You can sign up for it here <==
The Mattermark Daily is a hand-curated newsletter compiled daily to bring you first-person accounts of entrepreneurship, investment, and insights from the startup ecosystem. I enjoy the weekly digest the most because it features the top 10 posts. You’ll learn about topics such as fundraising, first-time founder lessons, convertible debt, and more.
You can sign up for it here <==
How many of you get confused by the world of finance? I certainly do. What if I told you there was a newsletter that condenses important financial news and makes it understandable to a 5th grader? Well, maybe not that simple, but you get the point that I’m trying to make.
I think it’s important to understand what’s going on in the financial markets but when I don’t have a strong understanding of the vernacular, it makes my eyes just glaze over. Finimize calls itself ‘pocket-sized financial news’ and it’s exactly that. Each tidbit of news is broken down into sections:
You can sign up for it here <==
CBInsights’ digest is another great newsletter that talks about emerging industries, venture capital, and disruptive startups. There’s more of a flair/attitude to this newsletter because they aren’t afraid to speak their mind. If they think something sucks, they’ll tell you upfront.
As with a lot of venture capital newsletter, it’s LOADED with data. In fact, content marketing has consistently been one of their top growth drivers for the past few years. You can listen to my interview with CEO Anand Sanwal on how he gets $1,000+ signups per month using content marketing.
You can sign up for it here <==
Growth Hackers is a marketing community where people share growth strategies and tactics. Top posts are upvoted by the community to make it easier to find the “best of the best” content. Topics on growth hacking include growth case studies, AMA with marketing executives, advertising, SEO, and more.
To get access, simply sign up to be a member of Growth Hackers.
HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah and Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin teamed up a few years ago to create an inbound marketing community. Inbound.org is similar to Growth Hackers in the sense that the best posts are pushed to the top via upvotes from members of the community. Topics you’ll typically see will center around SEO, conversion rate optimization, copywriting, and more. They also have great discussions on the forum itself.
To get access, simply sign up to be a member of Inbound.org.
In today’s age where 2.7 million blog posts are published each day, it’s hard to tell signal from noise. But when you’re able to fine tune your radar and truly hone in on information that matters to you, you’ve struck gold. From there, you’ll be able to quickly parse out the most relevant information and take action that will make an impact on your life.
How many newsletters do you subscribe to? What are some of your favorites?
Today I’m listing out five of my favorite marketing blogs that provide world-class information on SEO, conversion rate optimization, content writing, and Facebook advertising.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Growth Bites and today we will be talking about 5 of my favorite marketing blogs.
So, the first one is Backlinko and Backlinko nowadays, just to preface, it’s really hard to find SEO blogs that makes sense like really good SEO blogs. Moz is a great one but Backlinko, in terms of providing case studies, check lists, just action that I can take away right after reading an article, and stuff that really makes me go wow, Backlinko is probably the winner in the SEO space for me at least. So it’s backlinko.com, backlink with an O.
And then the second one is the Conversion Excel. So, for those readers who are interested in bringing out conversion rates, Conversion Excel has really great content around – conversion rates in general, how you can really survey your audience, tools you’d be using, things like that. It’s really been up and coming in the past few years and so that’s the second one.
And then the third one is Copy Blogger. So, if you’re looking for, first of all, very good headline, Copy Blogger is the spot to go to. And Copy Blogger has great stuff around content marketing in general, how to write great copy. I think copy writing is in general becoming a lost art when you look at marketing nowadays. Well, same thing with maybe martial and SEO because even though SEO is kind of, because Google has made it a lot harder and people aren’t just jumping off to the SEO profession. SEO is kind of been dying but people don’t talk about copy writing in general. You look at Silicon Valley and everyone is all about optimizing very quickly, doubling money to get to pay advertising and just scaling as quickly as possible. That’s the definition of a marketing there. But to be able to understand SEO and be able to understand copy writing, I think it’s still really important. Copy Blogger is a great place to go to when it comes to copy writing type of stuff.
The fourth one is Conversion Rate Expert. So, this was really the conversion rate blog back in the day even before Conversion Excel was out. And they still provide some great studies they do great case studies and they do a lot of great work when it comes to conversion rate stuff. Same thing with Conversion Excel and it’s tough to find people that really know their stuff when it comes to conversion rate optimization.
And the fifth one is John Loomer. So, John Loomer, it’s John L-O-O-M-E-R, he has some exceptional stuff on Facebook advertising and Facebook has been up and coming. A lot more people are using it now and John Loomer really dissects everything. He has great courses as well but his free content is equally good. So, it’s John Loomer.com. Check out his stuff around on Facebook and once you liked his stuff, you’ll see what he’s doing because he’s running Facebook ads directly at you and you get an idea on how he thinks in general.
Those are my five favorite marketing blogs at this point. There’s obviously a ton of different blogs. I’m happy to give you my list if you just feel free to email me. It’s eric@www.levelingup.com but these are the 5 favorite for the time being and they always change for me so hope you enjoy them.
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Today I’m going to tell you some of the things I’ve learned after interviewing 70 entrepreneurs. In the last year and a half, I’ve talked to people who have founded multi-million dollar companies, billion dollar companies, and even people like Ron Klien who invented the magnetic credit card stripe. It’s been really humbling to talk to these people.
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Today I’m going to tell you about five worthwhile books for entrepreneurs to read. These are all books that have really helped shape my career thus far, so I want to share them with you.
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In today’s interview, we’re talking to Brian Dean of Backlinko. In regards to SEO and list building, Brian’s got some really action-packed advice that helps him collect over 200 emails a day, and has an internet marketing blog that’s close to breaking 100,000 visits per month.
Keypoint takeaways: Unable to become an employee for someone else & finding the path to entrepreneurship
After explaining his academic background in nutrition and how he’d planned his life to become an employee working for someone else, Brian tells us how he found himself out of a job and without any prospects during New York state’s public employee hiring freeze during the 2008 economy crash.
With nothing else to do, he found himself hanging out in his parents’ basement reading The 4 Hour Workweek. He’d never considered entrepreneurship before, but this book opened his eyes to a way he could start a niche website to support himself when he didn’t have any other job options.
As he was figuring out how to make his niche site grow, he found his way to legitimate, white hat SEO practices, which has led him to his business now.
How SEO today is like Back to the Future
“I kind of feel like SEO is almost like Back to the Future,” says Brian. “After Penguin hit in April 2012, that’s when Google started to target link spam and wiped out a ton of sites, including my own.”
Before Penguin, Brian and lots of other site owners were engaged in black hat SEO practices because they worked and the ROI was incredible. But when Google figured out how to weed out falsely-earned search rankings, many successful sites took a tumble.
In conversations with long-time SEO experts like Eric Ward, Brian found the strategies used in the early days to get quality traffic were almost exactly like they are today: build a great site, target content around keywords, do email outreach to build links back to the site. And as it turns out, that’s exactly what you should do today despite the short period of time when people found a way to cheat the system via link spamming.
If you’ve got great content, how can a one-man team build traffic to it without doing paid advertising? – The 80/20 rule
“There’s a reason a lot of VC money goes into AdWords,” says Brian. “It’s a quick way to get traffic and SEO is a long game: it’s a marathon… The difference is that with SEO you scale with people, and with Pay Per Click you scale with a budget. And it’s two totally different things.”
“The problem with Pay Per Click budget,” says Brian, “is that you’re throwing it into a fire, and as soon as you stop throwing it in, the fire goes out. With SEO, it pays dividends for years.”
To build volumes of quality traffic to a high quality piece of content, Brian uses a rule of thumb that you should spend 20% of your time writing and creating the content, and 80% of your time promoting it. So, on average, two hours of writing time means 8 hours of promotion time. But for a more competitive keyword, the promotion time can be even longer.
Another thing Brian does—a trick he learned from Neil Patel—is to send at least 250 emails for every post that he publishes: not counting his email list.
He admits that it’s a lot of work but there are some tricks to help you scale the process.
Where to find 250 people to email
Brian suggests a tool called BuzzSumo. It lets you put in a few keywords related to your niche and shows you pieces of content that have done really well with social media shares.
From these pieces of content, he suggests sorting by Twitter shares and exporting the list of people who shared a similar piece of content to the one you want to promote. From that list, hire an assistant to find all the email IDs and send those people a simple email script that reads something like:
“Hey, I noticed you shared [this], I have [this].”
It sounds simple, but the script seems really personalized and it works really well.
How emailing helps with traffic growth
This month, Backlinko turned two years old. Brian’s original goal was to average 30,000 visitors per month to his site, but now he’s averaging 85,000 to 90,000.
Focusing on email list building over the last six months has helped his traffic. Three to four months ago, he was collecting 75 emails per day, but now he’s getting 200.
Along with heavy email outreach for a new piece of content, Brian did a content upgrade on his site that involved creating a bonus piece of content directly related to the blog post it was attached to. If they wanted it, readers could opt in to receive that bonus piece of content for free in exchange for their email address.
His most popular blog post about Google ranking criteria used to have an email conversion rate of 0.4%. After this content upgrade, it went to 5.5%.
Optimizing The Skyscraper Technique & reaping its benefits
“Before I discovered this,” says Brian, “I really struggled with content marketing.”
For him, this technique developed out of necessity and has three steps:
1. Discover content in your niche that’s already performed well
2. Take the base of that content and make it better
3. Promote it by reaching out to the people who shared the content you found in step number one
As an example, Backlinko has a post called Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List. Before writing this post, Brian saw that posts speculating these 200 factors were doing well, but no one ever put together a list of all 200: most were just 120-150. He made the content better by writing out all 200 (even if some were speculative) and reached out to people who shared the lists of 120-150 factors.
Today, Brian speculates that this post has earned around 250 quality back links and it generates about 15,000 unique visits per month just on its own. It’s popularity even earned him a spot as a speaker at a big conference in London.
To Brian, this is the secret to getting quality traffic to your blog quickly. “It doesn’t have to be a grind where you have to publish every Thursday for a year to get traction,” he says. “I think you can completely transform your rankings, your business, and wanting to be perceived as an expert [with one post].”
SEO in the next 12 months
Brian says he honestly doesn’t think SEO will change all that much over the next 12 months. After all, it hardly any changes were made in the last 12 months, and the link spamming era seems to have been mostly a fluke in the grand scheme of things.
The Hummingbird update in September 2013 was not that big of a shift, and the Penguin update was mostly just a refresh of the existing one.
He does think promotion will become more popular, though. “Once you do promotion once,” he says, “you’ll realize what a huge difference that makes.”
The email scripts Brian uses for distribution:
For BuzzSumo outreach:
Hey [NAME],
I noticed that you recently tweeted out [article title] on Twitter today. I also LOVE that post.
Actually, I just published something about [topic], the other day: URL.
Just thought you’d get a kick out of it 🙂
Cheers,
[your name]
For the skyscraper technique:
Hey [NAME],
I was looking for some information about [topic] today when I came across your [page title].
Awesome post!
I noticed that you mentioned [article you found in step #1] on the page. I also LOVE that post. In fact, it inspired me to
create my own version: URL.
It might make a nice addition to your page. Either way, keep up the awesome work with [site name].
Cheers,
[your name]
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Welcome to another edition of Growth Bites. Today we’re talking about what resources and tools I use to help learn and innovate. We’ll discuss how I strategize what to read and learn and how to streamline the process.
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