HubSpot has grown into one of the most credible names in the marketing and sales game in the last few years and we are lucky enough to have Kieran Flanagan, their VP of Marketing on the show today! If you listen to this podcast it is more than likely you know a lot about HubSpot already as we often refer to them, as happy customers of the company and having had a few of their team on the show already. The focus of today’s conversation is Kieran’s work on the freemium project at HubSpot and the impact that this initiative had on the company and their progress going forward. We speak about freemium and who it might work for; Kieran believes it is not a surefire way to success for every kind of company and links its usefulness to HubSpot to their product-led model. We also get some great insight into the company and how they approach tasks and challenges and Kieran breaks down their pod method for creating teams. Tune in to get it all!
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
[00:19] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Leveling Up Podcast!
[01:08] Kieran’s career path, moving from coding to marketing and SaaS.
[01:54] The GrowthTLDR Podcast that Kieran cohosts currently.
[03:18] Kieran’s place at HubSpot and a little of the company’s journey.
[05:04] The freemium offer from HubSpot and Kieran’s experiences on this project.
[09:25] Kieran’s position on freemium offers and who they might serve.
[11:30] Reasons that HubSpot has experienced its particular successes.
[12:28] Kieran’s systems for the marketing team for growth and customer acquisition.
[16:33] The pod structure for integrations with companies and promotion.
[19:04] Who gets selected for each pod and how the process works at HubSpot.
[19:57] Content and playbooks; models for automated cluster building and more.
[23:25] Courses and the academy that are readily available to customers.
[24:51] Kieran’s use of podcasts for learning and improving in the realm of growth.
[25:52] Team-focussed strategies and creating an empowering environment.
[26:04] Kieran’s favorite business book and most-used tool for his job!
Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Matthew Woodward, SEO expert and owner of a successful SEO blog.
Tune in to hear Matthew analyze Google’s algorithm, how his blog gets 60,000 visits a month and how he was able to more than double his click-through rate using his Google search ranking strategy.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate review and subscribe to the Leveling Up Podcast!
[01:35] Have a pen and paper handy for this episode!
[01:51] Right now, Matthew is most well-known for his SEO blog.
[02:05] He has been building websites since he was 12.
[03:15] On one of his blogs, he published an income report every month.
[03:40] For anyone looking to grow a business from the ground up, that blog is a great resource.
[05:45] People digest income reports, but don’t always think of the work that went into creating the income.
[07:40] Matthew’s net worth is such that he no longer has financial concerns.
[08:09] He has an annual income of seven figures.
[08:40] SEO is now about a convergence of skills.
[10:35] If you are building out a site, you must take pride in your creation.
[12:15] As of 2017, he was getting about 60,000 visits per month.
[15:00] Matthew runs experiments to track results, as should everyone.
[16:08] By removing the featured snippet, one person was able to increase his click-through rate.
[16:25] Read Google’s guidelines and make sure you are following the rules. As long as you use it safely, it will contribute to the user experience.
[16:56] Matthew himself has seen his click-through rate go from 3% to 8%.
[17:46] Matthew thinks people who identify as either black or white hat SEO, you are an idiot.
[18:40] Link building is against Google’s guidelines, so anything in the realm is technically black hat.
[20:15] Right now, the guidelines are easy to abuse.
[21:34] Everyone cries about getting penalized, but everyone is also abusing the system.
[22:00] Google is currently winning the voice-assistant game.
[23:17] Matthew encourages people to do out-of-the-box experiments.
[24:10] One new tool that Matthew likes is Surfer SEO.
[25:35] Matthew recommends the book Think and Grow Rich.
[26:28] Matthew likes to absorb information from as many sources as he can.
[27:40] Not every niche and website is the same, so what may work for one, may not work for another. There is no “typical” in SEO.
Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Bill Widmer, an SEO expert and a serial entrepreneur.
Tune in to hear how Bill has turned his casual blog for family and friends into a 6-figure blog site, how his site is able to get 300,000 visits a month and what current SEO trends are working.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[01:20] Bill considers himself lucky in that his business partner is also his life partner.
[01:35] Bill’s first job was selling Cutco knives door-to-door.
[02:08] That job made him realize he liked being his own boss and setting his own hours.
[02:45] He was surprised to find that people were willing to pay for content.
[03:45] His website “The Wandering RV” receives 300,000 visits per month.
[04:45] Bill and his fiancee lived in an RV for months and the site started as a way to keep friends and family updated.
[05:25] They are currently looking to cut back on ads, as they feel there are too many.
[05:41] Per year, the site makes low six figures.
[07:40] If you create a study around a given keyword that is getting a lot of traffic, you can get a lot of really easy PR links and mentions.
[09:15] Bill and his team spend a good deal of time on link building.
[10:21] Bill doesn’t think word counts should be the same for every article you write.
[10:40] He bases his word count on the top three results for that same topic or keyword.
[12:35] Latent Semantic Indexing is a fancy way to say related or synonymous keywords.
[12:50] Go to LSIGraph.com and plug in the keyword for which you would like to rank; LSIGraph will spit out other related keywords you can use.
[13:10] This helps Google figure out what your post is about.
[16:20] Bill doesn’t have a consistent publishing schedule.
[16:38] On average, it can be 2-3 posts a month (though some months Bill’s company doesn’t post at all).
[18:07] Talk to your network to find good writers or find articles in your sphere and figure out who wrote them.
[19:54] Bill’s company got most of their traffic through content creation and link building.
[20:51] A lot of the trends aren’t new: create great content, build links, etc.
[21:25] Matthew Woodward figured out how to get your FAQ to show up with your search results.
[21:46] It takes up more real estate and will force more views and clicks.
[23:35] Two tools that Bill loves are Ahrefs and SEMRush.
[24:42] Bill loves the SEO blogs by Ryan Stewart and Matthew Woodward.
[25:28] Bill recommends the book How Life Works by Andrew Matthews.
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.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[00:58] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[02:11] Rand started Moz as a blog, then it became a consultancy, which then turned into the current iteration we know today.
[02:31] Moz now makes $50 Million annually.
[02:44] Rand left in February of last year and started SparkToro on March 1st.
[03:15] SparkToro did a unique round of Angel Investing, where investors participate in profit sharing.
[03:35] Rand thinks VCs are fine, but there are better ways for 99% of companies out there.
[04:00] Rand recently got involved in a non-profit, Event Safe. Event Safe’s goal is to make events safe for everyone, but women in particular.
[06:05] The Venture model works well when you have a million dollar company.
[07:15] Institutional investors are not great for many start-ups.
[08:50] Even when you are profitable, you can’t take the extra profit for yourself. The more of the company you own, the less you get paid.
[09:35] Founders need to remember they may not be liquid.
[10:02] As CEO, Rand felt more in control of his destiny.
[10:15] It was stressful, but came with a great deal of freedom.
[10:25] When he was CEO of Moz, they grew at least 50% year over year.
[11:40] Rand called himself “The Wizard of Moz”.
[13:15] When Rand stepped down from Moz, the growth rate was already slowing down.
[16:03] Most Angel deals in tech are designed to eventually convert or be successful by virtue of a successful venture round.
[16:40] Investors are looking for companies reaching for hyper-growth.
[17:45] SparkToro wanted to be a lower-risk company.
[18:20] They didn’t want to limit themselves to only making money for investors.
[20:06] To set up SparkToro’s business model, they worked with an innovative attorney who works with start-up’s.
[21:36] Rand and his partner own 78% of SparkToro, so they have great incentive for the company to do well.
[22:08] Once they pay back investors, they can participate in profit sharing, as well.
[22:25] Rand and his partner capped their salaries at the average for a software engineer and cannot raise their salaries until they’ve paid investors back.
[22:52] SparkToro was created because Rand realized that people had trouble targeting their audiences.
[23:33] Social media ads weren’t doing the trick.
[24:30] It’s hard to figure out where your target audience is spending their time online or which podcasts they like.
[24:55] Rand realized that this was silly and there should be software to help people find the right blogs, events, podcasts, etc.
[25:40] You can type “Digital Marketing” into SparkToro and it will find the appropriate outlets to target.
[26:30] SparkToro offers two kinds of pricing: One-time and subscription.
[27:44] Rand found building SparkToro easier to build after his experiences working at Moz.
[28:45] Rand’s book was a labor of love and not financially motivated.
[29:08] He wrote the book because he believes he can help people.
[32:15] Rand works 2-3 events per month on top of everything else.
[32:33] He wants to be where his customers are.
[34:00] 18 Months ago, Rand was at a conference. He met a woman who hung out with conference attendees from another event and one guy attempted to assault her. He was a speaker at the conference and alerted event organizers.
[34:58] Event organizers said they would deal with it, but they invited the guy back to be a keynote speaker the following year.
[35:18] This was one of the many inspirations for Event Safe.
[35:55] It took a direct threat for the event organizers to fire the keynote speaker/attempted rapist.
[36:33] Many women expressed how common something like this is at conferences and events.
[39:10] Event Safe isn’t about profit, it’s about doing the right thing.
[40:15] Rand recommends the books Sprint, Powerful, and Radical Candor.
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with David Henzel, previous owner of MaxCDN, founder of CDN Advisor LLC, and podcast host of Managing Happiness.
Tune in to hear David share about his passion for applying business principles to one’s personal life and relationships, the principles that will help you achieve continual success, how he sold his e-commerce business for $300K just so he could move to the U.S., and how defining the company’s mission statement made growing the business much easier.
01:48 – Dropped out of school at age 16; originally from Germany and always dreamed of moving to America
02:06 – Was unable to get a H1B visa due to lack of formal education; sold his e-commerce business in 2007-2008 which enabled him to move to America
02:23 – Started Max CDN in 2008 and sold it last year
02:35 – His wife being diagnosed with breast cancer prompted Max to pursue his true passion, managing happiness
03:35 – Sold his e-commerce business for around $300,000 in 2008, and sold Max CDN for more than $10 million
04:25 – The origins of Max CDN
04:40 – A good friend of David’s asked him to come onboard as an investor
05:20 – CDN stands for contract delivery network; it takes a copy of a file from a server and puts it on servers around the world
06:24 – A recovering introvert, David was uncomfortable speaking in English
07:31 – Went to conferences to network and get rid of his shyness
07:40 – David’s a-ha moment was realizing that “every decision that you make in life is either out of love or fear”— speaking out of love while giving presentations enables him to do a good job
09:12 – David’s assistant was not doing a good job with company newsletters; David explained to him that if he did his job out of love, his quality would surely improve
11:00 – Check out David’s blog post about leading your life with “Love, Not Fear”
11:44 – David explains his core business philosophy
11:44 – Not having a mission statement in the initial years of Max CDN was a huge mistake
12:25 – Took a while to figure out that CDN was really hard to buy since it was an enterprise product
12:42 – Worked on making CDN more accessible and easier to purchase
13:41 – Takes on Jack Ma’s business philosophy which is to look for ways to make business easier
14:14 – Feels that FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is critical for developing a strong position in the market
14:31 – A vision or mission statement is like the North Star that aligns the business and works as a decision filter
15:42 – David lists Max CDN’s company core values
16:44 – The first core value is, “To make cool shit”
17:07 – The second core value is, “To work and whistle”
17:27 – The third core value is, “To own it, build trust and accountability”
17:58 – The fourth core value is, “Share the love”
18:29 – The fifth core value is. “Don’t stop believing in your growth potential”
19:50 – David offers a “Managing Happiness” course which is about applying business principles to your life
20:08 – Entrepreneurs find it difficult to have a work-life balance as business can easily consume you
21:11 – Business concepts, such as mission or vision statements, regular meetings and goal setting, are meant to align a group of people together and ensure that there is no friction
21:35 – David’s life mission statement: “To be a change agent and transform individuals and organizations and help them reach their full potential”
22:30 – Does not invest in a lot of businesses because it does not align with his life’s mission statement; came up with his life’s vision statement by engaging in a “funeral exercise” where he visualized his own funeral
23:46 – The “Managing Happiness” course is a six-week course: emotional strength, family core values, roles and responsibilities, planning and goal setting, problem solving and finances are the various topics covered in the course
26:33 – Course is priced attractively at $200; Growth Everywhere listeners will get 25% off (see below)
27:25 – David’s wife was resistant to defining roles and responsibilities, but changed her mind after seeing positive results
28:38 – It is always important to have growth everywhere, be it in business, money or relationships
29:09 – Engages in daily habits/rituals that foster gratitude and an “all is well” mindframe
31:06 – As an entrepreneur, it is important to be emotionally strong which can enable you to act in the most difficult situations
31:50 – Has simplified his wardrobe by purchasing five pairs of the same jeans, 15 of the same black T-shirts and three pairs of the same black shoes
32:49 – What’s one new tool that you added in the last year that added a lot of value for you? – Better Proposals
33:42 – What’s one must-read book do you recommend? – Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success, Think and Grow Rich, The Law of Success In Sixteen Lessons by Napoleon Hill, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book), The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
35:33 – Connect with David on Facebook or via email
35:48 – Head back to Growth Everywhere for show notes and additional resources; leave a review and rating and subscribe to the podcast
3 Key Points:
Apply business principles to your relationships to ensure that they are in a continuous phase of GROWTH.
Lead your life with LOVE, not FEAR.
Develop emotional strength which will help you act in the most difficult of situations.
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Vasil Azarov, CEO of the Growth Marketing Conference, a must-attend for startup founders and marketing execs.
Tune is to hear Vasil discuss how the Growth Marketing Conference gets a 30% attendance rate from their 100K community of entrepreneurs and marketers, why events are essential for generating attraction if you already have a product, why he believes that events are the future of marketing and sales, and the best way to build an audience fast.
02:19 – Vasil met his cofounders and joined them at Startup Socials—the company his partners were involved in at that time
02:36 – In 2013, Vasil began with a startup marketing conference and they grew it to The Growth Marketing Conference
02:44 – Their events bring in 2,000 people
02:48 – They host events in 15 cities around the globe
02:58 – This year their large event is in San Francisco
04:10 – How are they different? They connect startups with larger enterprise companies under the umbrella of growth marketing
04:46 – How much does it cost to attend the Growth Marketing Conference?
04:51 – Early bird for $400 – $1,200
04:59 – With a Lexus pass, it’s $700 – $2,000 (includes speaker dinner and workshops)
05:09 – $300 for self-funded partners
05:18 – How many attendees have they had go through their events so far?
05:29 – 100,000 supporters in total, 30% have gone to our events in person (small mixer, workshop or larger conference)
05:50 – Some subscribe to the blog and others to live webinars
06:26 – Vasil started events in 2013, the large conferences took off in 2015
06:45 – They have earned close to $2 million total with their growth booming in the last two years
07:34 – The best way to build an audience is to invest into community building
07:38 – “It’s never about just one single event, it’s always about thinking what is next—how are you going to engage your community after it’s over?”
07:45 – They plan their events a year in advance
07:58 – They have a lot of events leading up to the main events
08:02 – Logistics and experience are important for planning events, but how you engage the audience IN BETWEEN these events is of the utmost importance
08:38 – Vasil lists his core events for the year (inc. New York, San Francisco etc.)
09:11 – How is he building his clientele today? It has been through virtual summits
09:29 – It’s a fast way to build an audience quickly around a very specific topic
09:37 – It’s an advantageous way to build relevant content, as well
09:53 – Word of mouth—create an unforgettable experience
10:12 – We send speakers gifts—wine that has the Growth Marketing logo
10:40 – When you give a good gift, they remember you
10:55 – Be very thoughtful about the gifts and swag you give your speakers
09:50 – Eric refers to the book Giftology and highly recommends it to everybody
11:54 – How does he structure the main events?
12:07 – The art is putting the guests/content together, so that the whole day really makes sense
12:17 – Vasil uses his conference from 2015 as an example – the conference went from user acquisition to conversion to customer retention
12:50 – They include actionable workshops and work really well
13:01 – They put everyone in one room for these workshops, so that attendees can build intimacy with speakers
13:46 – Should you aim to break even or plan to make a profit?
14:20 – It depends on the goal of your conference
15:07 – When you’re starting out, breaking even is totally fine
15:23 – Vasil advises people new to business of event planning should commit to doing this type of business for a couple years to see growth
15:30 – What kind of people should those new to event planning hire?
15:45 – Vasil just held a conference called Event Marketing School
15:58 – Vasil recommends discovering the business by yourself
16:22 – If your long-term goal is to make high quality events, hire a consultant to help you, not some event planner to do the work for you
17:13 – What’s one big struggle he’s facing right now? – Vasil needs to build an infrastructure to plan and organize the events so that he can scale his business
18:21 – What’s one big change he’s made in the past year that has impacted him or his business in a big way? – We heavily rely on email when it comes to ticket sales
18:45 – They created a very clear process on data scrubbing so that they could clear their bounced emails in a short amount of time
19:03 – They want the bounce rate to be fixed within a 2-day timeframe
19:33 – This has helped them keep their list clean and convert the email list into attendees
19:46 – He also puts all his tasks into Google calendar
20:13 – He has 10 main goals that he wants to accomplish at the start of the week, check in on those goals mid-week, then track his progress at the end of the week and use this as the basis for his next week
20:56 – One tool he’s added in the last year that’s added a lot of value? ZenProspect—they’ve tried Salesloft, Persist IQ, but ZenProspect is their #1 choice
If you don’t have passion in what you’re doing, you won’t make it.
It’s never about just the one event, it’s about having that next step or level of engagement with your following.
The key to a successful event? Make sure your event structure and progression of topics make sense AND plan for high-level engagement/actionable workshops.
Hey everyone, in today’s episode, I share the mic with Sol Orwell, the founder of Examine.com.
Listen as Sol shares how going from fat to fit led him to create a 7-figure nutrition business, how he built that business off of his Reddit followers, how Examine.com generates 100% of their revenue with just 3 products and why his quest for independence is the guiding principle to how he runs his companies.
01:20 – Sol is an immigrant who was born in Pakistan and has lived in Saudi Arabia, Japan, and USA—he is currently residing in Canada
01:49 – While in high school, Sol stumbled into virtual currency and MMO sales because of online gaming
02:14 – Sol also gained experience in domain names and local searches
02:53 – Examine.com was created because Sol gained weight and he wanted to analyze nutritional supplements
03:20 – Sol wants to make an impact on the world and share what he knows
04:03 – Examine.com’s focus today is how to generate consistent revenue and build their brand
04:20 – They are planning to have a product out this year
04:35 – Examine.com has been featured on many different media outlets
05:16 – The domain name is an asset and spending on it is a worthwhile risk
05:26 – When the site reached 10,000 visitors a day, Sol asked customers what they wanted and he responded
06:06 – Sol was able to build a subscription service and he connected with organizations that specialized in fitness and exercise
06:23 – Sol met his co-founders at Reddit and realized that people were always asking questions, but were not using the search function
07:04 – People were getting tired of answering the same questions and this is what caused Sol to build Examine.com
07:24 – Sol’s co-founder was 2013 Moderator of the Year
07:55 – Sol and his team announced in Reddit that they were building a site and people started linking to it
08:08 – Since they were already part of the Reddit community for a long time, people knew who they were and trusted them
09:37 – Content generation should NOT be the focus—it should be updating your own content and networking and building relationships
10:17 – It was easier to get people to link to them because of their strong community
10:57 – They are always pre-promoting
11:18 – What’s one big struggle you had in growing Examine.com? – People were cynical of who they were so they had to prove they were an authority
12:18 – Sol and his partner didn’t want the site to be about them, so they went with a generic brand
12:54 – Examine.com has researchers, editors/reviewers, copy editors and those who send the e-mails
13:26 – They do not work on rigid time schedules
14:03 – Examine.com also has doctors that they can consult
14:32 – How did you go about finding contractors? – Look for other people who are already doing the work, but who are unknown to others
15:13 – Sol looked for people who already have a site or a blog and are doing the research, but who may not necessarily have an audience
15:22 – Since they have already built their brand, people want to be associated with them
16:00 – Why the decision to start to move away from Examine.com? – I got into Examine.com because I needed to lose weight, but I am not the expert
16:57 – It has always been about finding the best people and providing them an opportunity
17:08 – Sol was able to move on from the projects because he has found people who are better than him
17:32 – When they were starting Sol’s partner, Kurtis, focused on the research while Sol did everything else
18:04 – Kamal is running Examine.com and he only met Sol after two years working on the site
18:38 – Sol pays others more than he pays himself and they become the face of the company
19:02 – Kamal is the face of the company and gets exposure everywhere
19:41 – Sol is currently working on speaking engagements, writing, and finding out ways to make an impact
20:12 – Sol wants to intercept social enterprise with entrepreneurship
21:19 – Sol wants to make a big impact and share the value of giving rather than the “me” approach
21:35 – For his speaking engagements, Sol talks about entrepreneurship
22:11 – In Mastermind Talks, you know who you are meeting with and the conversation is always about getting value
22:45 – There are also private invite-only events where you get to spend days with interesting people
23:31 – Doors open when you are more focused on meeting people rather than thinking about monetizing
24:15 – Eric got connected with Sol because of a conference that was recommended by Noah
24:40 – What’s one big change you made in the last year that’s impacted you or the business in a big way? – Sol uses a productivity journal and this helps him know what needs to be done the following week
Hey everyone, in today’s episode, I share the mic with André Siqueira, co-founder of RD Station, a digital marketing software company based in Brazil.
Listen as André discusses how they were able to secure significant investments (the largest amount in Latin America) despite the political state of Brazil, their struggle with customer retention and their bold decision to do event marketing—something that is not very common in Brazil—and the fact that their biggest competitors in Brazil are businesses who don’t understand inbound marketing.
01:27 – André is the head of marketing at RD Station
01:31 – RD is now the leading marketing automation platform, in Latin America, with almost 7,000 customers and 400 employees
01:58 – They have just raised $19M last year in funding from TPG
02:22 – The $19M funds RD Station raised is one of the largest amounts raised in Latin America, last year
02:43 – Despite the political issues happening in Brazil, RD Station was still able to secure investor funds
03:13 – All RD Station’s metrics performed well which helped them secure the funds
03:41 – The company has 7,000 customers
03:48 – Customers pay an average of $150 per month
04:20 – RD Station’s counterpart in the US is HubSpot or Infusionsoft with much lower pricing
05:22 – RD Station had less than 300 employees last year and now, they have roughly about 400
05:52 – It’s harder to find employees in Brazil than in the US
06:33 – The company’s growth rate has been doubling for the past couple of years
07:02 – Unlike HubSpot and Infusionsoft, RD Station has no CRM and CMS
07:40 – RD Station’s templates are less than their competitors’
08:19 – André talks about acquiring their first 1000 customers
08:31 – They offered consulting services
09:03 – They started a blog and put up resources to create an audience
09:14 – When their software was ready to launch, they already compiled about 20,000 emails
09:43 – They did more of the inbound marketing which helped them acquire more customers
10:23 – They did events as well
10:38 – RD Station’s main blog now publishes 40 posts per month
10:56 – They tested the frequency of posts last year and they found out 1 post per day is their saturation point
11:29 – RD Station also started other kinds of blogs about agencies
12:16 – Event marketing with RD Station
12:26 – With 400 customers, RD Station decided to create an event to get to know their market better
12:49 – The summits/events are not really popular in Brazil
13:24 – It was RD Station’s advantage to host the event
13:57 – The summit became the beginning of a huge community they now have in their country
14:08 – RD on the Road is their program where they get to know their clients around Brazil
15:00 – Their relationship with customers plays a big part in customer retention
15:22 – Their biggest competitors in Brazil are businesses who don’t understand inbound marketing
16:01 – The first RD Summit had 300 attendees
16:16 – “Starting small is important”
17:08 – Their attendees are their followers
17:46 – The summit also became famous in Brazil
18:01 – Apart from emailing leads, RD Station used Facebook to promote their summit
18:37 – RD Station’s event sponsors also promote the event
18:56 – They also hire a PR Firm to get media coverage
19:36 – The first and second summits cost around $20,000
20:00 – They usually break even from the ticket sales and profits from actual sales
20:25 – What’s one big struggle you faced while growing RD Station? – “It would be customer retention”
22:13 – Investing in customer retention was really hard with RD Station at the start
22:30 – Understand your customer portfolio
23:38 – What’s one piece of advice you’d give to your 20-year old self? – “Focus on what you’re good at”
24:49 – What’s one big change you’ve made in the past year that has impacted you or your business in a big way? – “Understanding my role and the things I’m good at”
26:00 – What’s one must-read book do you recommend? – Traction
26:59 – Connect with André on LinkedIn, Twitter, or on his email
3 Key Points:
Providing value to your audience can be the gateway to acquiring customers.
You don’t have to do BIG the first time you try – start small.
Do not go after every person – know the kind of customers that you’d like to target.
This post originally appeared onSingle Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition. Consider this: every 30 seconds, online businesses make just over $1.2 million: It’s a small reminder that there’s a massive amount of money to be made on the Internet. If you’re already receiving even a small piece of that 30-second money, congratulations. But once you start making money, something’s going to happen: you’ll start thinking about where your money is coming from and how you can get more of it. Then you begin calculating your ROI and you realize something: you don’t know exactly where your money is coming from. The truth of the matter is that ROI is a lot more complicated than most people make it out to be. That’s not to say that the average person can’t understand the basics of Google Analytics, but measuring marketing ROI is a lot more complicated. It’s determined by all the unique channels that drive traffic to what you’re selling. So how do you track your website’s revenue accurately? By asking better questions. Yes, you’re accruing money from your website, but why? (And if you’re not curious enough to ask “why?” then you’re not thinking like an entrepreneur.) Which part of your website is drawing the most attention? What part are people skipping over? Can you place a dollar amount on any random visitor who happens to come across your site? Once you start to ask these questions, your business will grow and you can start looking at your online presence through a more objective lens, which will allow you to:
Figure out where your leads and revenue are coming from
Discover which aspects of your website are seeing the most traffic
Understand what’s accounting for your highest ROI
Track the popularity of a certain trend or theme of your blog posts
Streamline systems by getting rid of inefficient pages and blog themes
In this post, we’ll go over the different methods for tracking your website’s revenue with Google Analytics.
1) Track Revenue from E-commerce Transactions
If you’re selling a product (whether physical or digital), you’ll want to track it and the best way to do that is through the use of custom code embedded in your shopping cart. This type of tracking will allow you to determine a few things:
Which pages on your site are leading to the most conversions
How people arrive at these “money” pages
Which products represent the highest value in your store
In essence, you’ll discover which parts of your website are most effective for your sales funnel – and which ones aren’t doing you much good. You might find, for instance, that one of your landing pages is leading to a 20% conversion rate while another is underperforming at 5%, in which case you might want to reconsider how you built that landing page. Knowing the proper steps to building – and testing – a dynamite landing page can be transformational for your conversion rates. Learn more: 5 Important Landing Page Elements You Should Be A/B Testing But before you can play with the data, you’ll first need to enable e-commerce analytics by logging into Google Analytics and switching the “E-Commerce set-up” radio button in the Main Website Profile Information from “Off” to “On.” The next step is a little more complicated. You’ll need to add a customized tracking code to your shopping cart system that reports when and how purchases occurred. Depending on your hosting and shopping cart providers, this may be done through a server-side inclusion, a separate module through your content system, or through hand-coded HTML. For more details on how to finish this integration, check out Google’s E-commerce Tracking documentation.
2) Track Revenue from Non-E-commerce Sites
Now, suppose you don’t sell any products on your site, but instead use your page to generate leads for an offline business. In this case, every visitor to your site has a monetary value, although this isn’t determined by the number of sales that result from a traditional shopping cart system. Ideally, the revenue generated from the time and effort you invest into promoting your website should increase over time. To track whether or not this is the case, you’ll want to make use of “Goals” within Google Analytics. To do so, log into your Analytics account and navigate to “Conversions” > “Goals” where you’ll have the option of setting up new Goals. Although you have several different Goal types you can play around with, Event Goals (goals that aren’t tied to arrival on a specific site URL) make the most sense for tracking revenue from non-e-commerce sites, as they allow you to set a custom event value for each circumstance you define. On a basic level, your Goals will evaluate every visitor that comes to your site by using a simple equation. Take the amount of money you’ve made and divide it by how many new (unique) visitors have come to your site. That will tell you how much each new visitor is worth. But that’s just scratching the surface. If you want to truly understand your sales funnel, Goals can help you track much more specific data. For example, say you generate leads using a free white paper on your site. You’ve already determined that the average value of a visitor who contacts your company in this manner is worth $20. Now, you can set up an Event Goal accordingly. This lets you track how potential leads move through your site so you can optimize your site structure for maximum conversions.
3) Integrate Analytics with AdWords
Tying your Google Analytics account to your AdWords accounts can give you some very valuable information about the efficacy of your PPC campaigns, including which keywords result in conversions, what AdWords visitors do once they land on your site, and much more. Read more: 13 Quick Tricks to Increase Conversion Rates that You Can Do Right Now The best part is that setting up this integration is incredibly simple. If you use the same e-mail address to log into both your Analytics and AdWords accounts, all you have to do is open up your AdWords account, navigate to the “Reporting” tab, and click on “Google Analytics.” Select “I already have a Google Analytics account,” then choose the correct account profile from the list. In the next section, you’ll have the opportunity to select and deselect a number of checkboxes – including one that gives you the option of turning off auto-tagging. For most beginners, we recommend leaving auto-tagging on. This is an easy way to tie your keywords to your campaign links (otherwise you have to manually add tracking variables to every link in your account). You’ll also want to take the time to import your cost data from AdWords, as this will allow you to analyze the ROI of all conversions and sales on a per-keyword basis. To do this, follow these steps, as laid out by Google Support:
As with the Google AdWords/Google Analytics integration described above, pairing Google’s website statistics manager with your AdSense account can result in several types of useful data, including the ability to view earnings based on user visits (rather than just page impressions). For instance, if you’re blogging (and you should be), this is a fantastic way to analyze the trends in your blogs to see what’s working for you. You can view:
Which topics are getting the most attention, so that you can create similar posts in the future.
Whether the length of your blog determines how well it converts.
Which posts are bringing in a higher CPM (if you’re selling ads), or if one of your pages is a prime candidate on which to put an additional ad.
Finding out this information allows you to open up channels for additional revenue or see what is actually helping your website to convert. And those are just some of the things you can discover. You’ll also be able to view click data based on user location, browser type, and referral source – all of which can help you refine your content-based ad monetization strategy. It can even help you discover which areas require growth. If, for example, you see that the majority of your web traffic comes from New York but the majority of your sales come from Los Angeles, you can rethink your strategy to compensate for a specific region. To connect your Analytics and AdSense accounts, look for a link inviting you to do so in the Overview or Advanced Reports pages of your AdSense account. If you aren’t yet eligible, keep checking back to take advantage of this feature in the future.
5) Use Google Analytics to Measure the ROI of Different Traffic Types
One final way you can use Google Analytics to track website ROI is to break out revenue stream by traffic type. Most webmasters advertise their sites in a number of different ways, including PPC ads, content marketing, social networking, forum marketing, etc. However, since it’s likely that not all of these activities result in the same ROI, it’s a good idea to break them apart to see which traffic source results in the most income. This will help you determine how to best allocate future promotional efforts. To do this, you’ll need to set up Advanced Traffic segments, which allow you to break out visitors based on referral sites to see which types of traffic are converting best for you. Start by clicking on the “Advanced Segments” tab under the “Standard Reporting” tab of your Google Dashboard. You’ll see that some default segments have been included, but you can also use the button in the lower right-hand corner to create your own segments based on specific sites or types of sites. A few potential traffic segments you could create include:
Traffic from Facebook versus Twitter (use the “Source” criterion to set up this option)
Visitors from blogs you comment on
Traffic from forums on which you participate
Once these segments are set up, filter your Goal conversions by segment to compare which traffic streams are most profitable for your site.
Transforming Your Revenue Streams
If this is your first time attempting to track your revenue through Google Analytics, it might seem daunting. Whenever you feel overwhelmed, just remember that these techniques can and will contribute to your bottom line:
Understanding which of your blog topics people are following can help you shape your brand into a more influential entity.
Being able to see where your visitors are coming from can help you tweak (or even transform) your buyer personas and target new markets.
Cross-referencing that information with the success of your previous white paper can make all the difference in deciding what you should write your next one on.
Even if you aren’t actively tracking your website ROI, keep in mind that your competition sure as heck is. These tools are helping them acquire new clients that you could be getting! That’s why knowing how to properly measure revenue and conversion rates can help you stay ahead of the curve. Remember: online businesses make $1.2 million per 30 seconds, or about $3.5 billion per day. How much of that are you taking home? Need help tracking your revenue with Google Analytics? While other agencies love to talk about “ad spend,” at Single Grain we’re all about the ROI. [sg_alert type=”success”]Get a free consultation right now to see how we can help grow your business![/sg_alert]
This post originally appeared onSingle Grain, a growth marketing agency focused on scaling customer acquisition.
Visitors. Traffic. Sessions.
It’s all the same, isn’t it? As long as potential customers visit your site, it hardly matters how you refer to them, right?
But here’s the catch: no two web visitors are alike.
Your traffic consists of people with different needs and knowledge levels of your brand or products. Heck, some of them might not even realize they have a problem that your product solves. Yet.
Therefore, to get the biggest bang for your advertising dollar, you need to launch campaigns that target all key traffic types: cold, warm, and hot traffic.
Instead of aiming just to sell, you should build relationships with people that are relevant to their stage of the buying cycle:
Introduce your business to those at the early stages.
Convert those who are deeper in the process into leads.
And, finally, monetize those who are ready to buy.
Luckily, it’s not that hard to achieve.
And in this post, I’ll show you how to split your paid traffic between cold, warm, and hot visitors to achieve the greatest success.
But first …
Why You Should Not Go Straight for the Sale
You know, I think heading straight for the sale is the most common advertising mistake.
In my career in marketing so far, I have seen all kinds of businesses—from hotel chains to e-commerce stores and countless others in between—making this mistake.
They consider every visitor a potential sale, without any regard for the visitor’s current situation and need for information. Many of these companies don’t even optimize campaigns for any objective other than the sale.
But in reality, to build a solid strategy you need to target campaigns to different customers and their needs. You should use ads to slowly build relationships with them until they’re finally ready to buy. And to achieve this, you first need to learn about what types of audiences you need to target and how.
In marketing, we recognize three web traffic types:
Cold
Warm
Hot
Each of them has its distinct characteristics and offers different opportunities for converting into customers.
Note: if you work in sales, you might find these three traffic types similar to lead types that salespeople recognize: cold, warm, and hot leads. That is no coincidence. Both traffic and leads share similar characteristics and offer similar opportunities for conversion.
So let’s go through them in turn.
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1. Cold Traffic
Fact: not everyone clicking on your ads has heard of your brand before.
Many users click on your ads purely on the promise that you’ve made in the copy. Most likely they’ve searched for generic head or body keywords and are interested in learning more about the problem rather than available solutions.
Their decision to visit your site, therefore, wasn’t rooted in any prior knowledge or experience with your brand.
That’s cold traffic.
Cold traffic consists of people who have never heard of your business.
Think of them as casual browsers who are researching potential solutions or looking for information online. These people might have the problem your product or service aims to overcome, but since they know nothing about you, it’s highly unlikely that they would buy from you. As a result, they are the least likely to be susceptible to any sales message.
However, that doesn’t mean that you have no opportunities to convert them at a later date.
Marketing to these users gives you the ability to connect with them and start building a business relationship that might result in a sale at some point in the future.
You should target cold traffic to:
Introduce your brand or products
Begin building a relationship with them in an effort to turn them into warm / hot traffic
Learn as much as possible about them by monitoring their behavior on the site
Use conversion tracking pixel to monitor their behavior and then target more relevant ads to convert them to warm and hot traffic
What content should you drive cold traffic to?
Since your goal is to establish a connection and introduce the brand, driving these visitors to a sales or landing page might only scare them away.
No worries, though, because there are plenty of other content types to which you could attract cold traffic, such as:
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t “warm them up” (i.e. convert) to become customers later.
The most effective way to warm up cold traffic is to attract those visitors to a page offering a lead magnet or any other free resource they perceive as valuable enough to submit their personal details in return for it.
Once you’ve got their e-mail address, send them relevant information, either as a drip campaign or traditional newsletter to offer value, build trust, and confirm your authority. This will allow you to nurture the person until they’re ready to become a client.
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2. Warm Traffic
Warm traffic consists of people who already know about you, your brand, products or services.
They may have visited your site before. They’ve read your content. They’ve followed you on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media platform.
Perhaps they’ve even signed up for your mailing list, downloaded a lead magnet or engaged with you in some other way.
But so far, they have indicated no interest in buying from you.
In spite of the fact that they like your content, site or offer, so far they haven’t purchased whatever it is that you’ve offered them.
Your goal, therefore, is to run ads that will encourage warm traffic to make a purchase.
To what content should you drive warm traffic?
As your goal is to convert someone who already knows who you are, you need to drive them to pages or assets that deliver value but also remind them of their interest in your product or services.
For example, someone signing up for a product demo or a free trial immediately indicates their interest in your product. Similarly, when someone downloads a highly technical white paper that deals with an advanced aspect of a problem that your product targets, this signals their desire to overcome it.
So you should drive warm traffic to such content types as:
Lead magnets (e-books, white papers, etc.)
Product demos
Webinars
Free tools
Free trial signup pages
Events
Offers
For example, Infusionsoft runs AdWords ads to promote product demo videos that users can watch in order to learn how to generate leads with the company’s product:
Veeam Software promotes a highly technical webinar:
Jason O’Neil offers a free class for anyone wishing to learn how to sell products on Amazon:
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3. Hot Traffic
Finally, hot traffic is made up of people who have already bought something from you or trusted you with their business (and didn’t ask for their money back).
In other words, they know you, your products or services quite well. And there’s a good chance that they’ll buy more—they could purchase additional products, upgrade their service or send more projects your way.
And you can use PPC ads to follow up with them to see if they’re interested in doing more business with you.
Therefore, your goals for targeting hot traffic should be:
To upsell – You should try to get them to buy from you again (and, ideally, to purchase a more expensive item or service than before).
To re-engage with you – You should also aim to reactivate customers who haven’t bought from you for a long time and get them to do business with you again.
To what content should you drive hot traffic?
Remember, these people know you and most likely have bought from you already. Your goal, therefore, isn’t to convince them of your worth but rather remind them about your brand or products so they keep buying from you again.
Hot traffic is all about sales.
So when setting up PPC ads for this traffic, send them to:
When planning advertising campaigns to reactivate hot traffic, consider using retargeting to remind them of their previous interest in your brand.
For example, you could send retargeting traffic to pages that are relevant to the person’s prior interest in your products. If they viewed a specific product, send them to that page. If they added products to the cart, send them to the cart with their order, and so on.
Conclusion
Not all digital marketers understand the difference between cold, warm, and hot traffic and how to best target each group. If you’re unclear on this and sending traffic to the wrong landing page, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities to build successful customer relationships!
So remember, your traffic consists of people with different needs and knowledge levels of your brand or products, and to really make use of your advertising dollar, you must warm up your potential customers for better conversions.
What tips have you learned when it comes to marketing to cold, warm, and hot traffic? Share what you’ve learned in the comments below!
Consider this: every 30 seconds, online businesses make just over $1.2 million: 
It’s a small reminder that there’s a massive amount of money to be made on the Internet. If you’re already receiving even a small piece of that 30-second money, congratulations. But once you start making money, something’s going to happen: you’ll start thinking about where your money is coming from and how you can get more of it. Then you begin calculating your ROI and you realize something: you don’t know exactly where your money is coming from. The truth of the matter is that ROI is a lot more complicated than most people make it out to be. That’s not to say that the average person can’t understand the basics of Google Analytics, but measuring marketing ROI is a lot more complicated. It’s determined by all the unique channels that drive traffic to what you’re selling. So how do you track your website’s revenue accurately? By asking better questions. Yes, you’re accruing money from your website, but why? (And if you’re not curious enough to ask “why?” then you’re not thinking like an entrepreneur.) Which part of your website is drawing the most attention? What part are people skipping over? Can you place a dollar amount on any random visitor who happens to come across your site? Once you start to ask these questions, your business will grow and you can start looking at your online presence through a more objective lens, which will allow you to:
The next step is a little more complicated. You’ll need to add a customized tracking code to your shopping cart system that reports when and how purchases occurred. Depending on your hosting and shopping cart providers, this may be done through a server-side inclusion, a separate module through your content system, or through hand-coded HTML. For more details on how to finish this integration, check out Google’s E-commerce Tracking documentation.
Although you have several different Goal types you can play around with, Event Goals (goals that aren’t tied to arrival on a specific site URL) make the most sense for tracking revenue from non-e-commerce sites, as they allow you to set a custom event value for each circumstance you define. On a basic level, your Goals will evaluate every visitor that comes to your site by using a simple equation. Take the amount of money you’ve made and divide it by how many new (unique) visitors have come to your site. That will tell you how much each new visitor is worth. But that’s just scratching the surface. If you want to truly understand your sales funnel, Goals can help you track much more specific data. For example, say you generate leads using a free white paper on your site. You’ve already determined that the average value of a visitor who contacts your company in this manner is worth $20. Now, you can set up an Event Goal accordingly. This lets you track how potential leads move through your site so you can optimize your site structure for maximum conversions.
Read more: 13 Quick Tricks to Increase Conversion Rates that You Can Do Right Now The best part is that setting up this integration is incredibly simple. If you use the same e-mail address to log into both your Analytics and AdWords accounts, all you have to do is open up your AdWords account, navigate to the “Reporting” tab, and click on “Google Analytics.” Select “I already have a Google Analytics account,” then choose the correct account profile from the list. In the next section, you’ll have the opportunity to select and deselect a number of checkboxes – including one that gives you the option of turning off auto-tagging. For most beginners, we recommend leaving auto-tagging on. This is an easy way to tie your keywords to your campaign links (otherwise you have to manually add tracking variables to every link in your account). You’ll also want to take the time to import your cost data from AdWords, as this will allow you to analyze the ROI of all conversions and sales on a per-keyword basis. To do this, follow these steps, as laid out by Google Support:
To connect your Analytics and AdSense accounts, look for a link inviting you to do so in the Overview or Advanced Reports pages of your AdSense account. If you aren’t yet eligible, keep checking back to take advantage of this feature in the future.
A few potential traffic segments you could create include:
Visitors. Traffic. Sessions.
